Quoted in an Atlantic article about Asperger’s and the new DSM:
“Just like that, Asperger’s was gone,” [Robison] wrote in an essay on New York magazine’s Web site. “You can do things like that when you publish the rules. Like corrupt referees at a rigged college football game, the APA removed Asperger’s from the field of play and banished the term to the locker room of psychiatric oblivion.”
Now try it again without the adjectives: “Like referees at a college football game…” How is what Robison is doing any different from what he over-vehemently denounces?
Isn’t the analogy false? The referees don’t publish the rules but are there to ensure the rules are adhered to. And Asperger’s, only Asperger, can be likened to a player. Sometimes the rules require changing, as with other historical cases such as Hysteria (among many others), or have I missed the point? (Is ‘college,’ in this context, not derogatorily hyperbolic, too?)
I agree: it’s a bad and crude analogy that doesn’t show much respect for the reader’s ability to parse situations.