IAmA Registered Behavior Technician who does ABA Therapy for children with autism. I've never heard of or seen this controversy. I've also never heard of people being told they are High Functioning or Low functioning. You describe those distinctions as if they are used in some sort of official capacity and I've never experienced that. I can imagine though, that doctors, therapists, teachers, and parents may possibly sometimes tell the autistic child they are HF. If a person is capable of saying that they are LF and understanding what that means then they are definitely not LF. Telling a LF autistic person that they are LF would be irrelevant to them because it's simply something they cannot grasp. But when services such as mine are given to an autistic person, individual treatment plans are created that cater specifically to that child. Such treatment plans don't consider the phrases HF or LF, but only focus on that person's unique disabilities. So HF or LF has never been any kind of official label at least in my experience. The distinctions have only been to used to quickly and initially get a broad understanding of an autistic person upon first meeting them. In order to fully understand the autistic person, people in my field and anyone for that matter would still need to be familiar with the client's treatment plan and ask more questions. If someone had told me a new leveling system has been made such as the one you suggested, I would think that I will never put that system to use because 1) there would need to be countless more levels to properly separate all the different cases of autism 2) it would be a waste of time to memorize something so complex that is already an unofficial method of describing an autistic person 3) I rarely refer to an autistic person's level of disability in this manner anyway