The Neurodiversity Movement is a social justice movement that seeks civil rights, equality, respect, and full societal inclusion for the neurodivergent. What It Doesn’t Mean: It’s also possible to be neurodivergent without being a member of a neurominority group. Examples include people with acquired traumatic brain injuries, and people who have altered their own neurocognitive functioning through extensive use of psychedelic drugs.

Neurotypical, often abbreviated as NT, means having a style of neurocognitive functioning that falls within the dominant societal standards of “normal.” The primary deficit of autism includes difficulties interpreting and understanding social constructions. This means that we have a disability that inherently makes understanding gender part of our disability. There is no such thing as a “neurodiverse individual.” The correct term is “ neurodivergent individual.” An individual can diverge, but an individual cannot be diverse.On one hand, I really want to leave this book a raving review because I feel so strongly about the message given! I've been keen to find a book that, from an autistic perspective, describes what it is to be autistic, the right language to use, accommodations that can be made and the social model of disability. This book does all of this, which I love! Neurodiversity is a biological fact. It’s not a perspective, an approach, a belief, a political position, or a paradigm. That’s the neurodiversity paradigm (see below), not neurodiversity itself.

Bradotti, Rosi. 2011. Nomadic Theory: The Portable Rosi Braidotti. New York: Columbia University Press. In other words, are there really more gay/trans/queer/ace autistic people, or do they just figure it out/come out of the closet more readily than non-autistic people? Unfortunately, a lot of people interpret this as meaning that people think “autism” is their gender, which results in a lot of rage-filled posts on social media about how your gender cannot be a disability. Because, of course, it can’t. Autism is a neurotype, not a gender.

Neuroqueer: An introduction to theory

It depends very much on who the people are, and where they’re at in their own particular journeys when they encounter the book. My hope is that each reader will find some message that’s life-changing in a positive way, but that’s going to be a different message for some readers than for others, depending on who they are and the present conditions in their lives. I’m omnivorous in my scholarly interests, and transdisciplinary in my approach. My fields of study include somatic psychology, depth psychology, transformative learning, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, transpersonal psychology, transformative somatic practices, possibility studies, queer and neuroqueer theory, queer and neuroqueer literature, neurodiversity studies, gender studies, human sexuality, creative writing, narrative inquiry, arts-based inquiry, autoethnography, speculative fiction, comics studies, and ethics in research and professional practice. The day before I wrote this piece, I was at California Institute of Integral Studies teaching a new course on neurodiversity. I was introducing my students to basic neurodiversity-related terminology like neurotypical and neurodivergent, when a young undergraduate excitedly asked me, “Have you ever heard of the term neuroqueer?”) Neurodiversity is not a political or social activist movement. That’s the Neurodiversity Movement (see below), not neurodiversity itself.

Chapman, Robert. 2021. “ Negotiating the Neurodiversity Concept”. Psychology Today, 18 August. Accessed: 30 Jun 2023. As an autistic adult, I found this book frustrating in a somewhat enjoyable way. The book may have its myriad of faults, but beyond them are some important truths. It irked me how bad the actual writing was at times. Many of the technical or academic sections, defining terms or laying the groundwork for understanding concepts, were written for an intellectual, and to risk being blunt, intelligent audience. Other parts are terribly casual, hand waving away opposing viewpoints by offering no criticism other than them being "disgusting" or "abhorrent" without justifying why. Spoon Knife is the first anthology series that’s specifically devoted to neuroqueer literature. It’s multi-genre (or genre-queering), so it includes neuroqueer speculative fiction but also other neuroqueer fiction in other genres like magical realism (for instance, the story “Only Strawberries Don’t Have Fathers,” contributed to Spoon Knife 3 by legendary poet Judy Grahn, or Craig Laurance Gidney’s “Coalrose,” which appears in Spoon Knife 5).I coined the term neuroqueer in a paper I wrote for a grad school class in the Spring of 2008. Over the next several years, I played with it in further grad school papers, in private conversations, and in the ongoing development of my own thoughts and practices. The concept of neuroqueer, or of neuroqueering (I’ve always seen it as a verb first and an adjective second), increasingly came to inform my thinking, my embodiment, and my approach to life. So there you have it, from the people who brought you the term. This definition is, again, not an authoritative “last word” on the subject, because that would be a silly thing to attempt. Rather, I hope this will be taken as a “first word” – a broad “working definition” from which further theory, practice, and play will proceed. A group of people is neurodiverse if one or more members of the group differ substantially from other members, in terms of their neurocognitive functioning. It is the same with the misuse of the term neurodiverse to mean “non-neurotypical.” To describe an Autistic, dyslexic, or otherwise neurodivergent person as a “neurodiverse individual” is not merely an incorrect usage of the word “diverse”––it also serves to reinforce an ableist mindset in which neurotypical people are seen as intrinsically separate from the rest of humanity, rather than as just another part of the spectrum of human neurodiversity.

New paradigms often require a bit of new language, and this is certainly the case with the neurodiversity paradigm. I see many people – scholars, journalists, bloggers, internet commenters, and even people who identify as neurodiversity activists – get confused about the terminology around neurodiversity. Their misunderstanding and incorrect usage of certain terms often results in poor and clumsy communication of their message, and propagation of further confusion (including other confused people imitating their errors). At the very least, incorrect use of terminology can make a writer or speaker appear ignorant, or an unreliable source of information, in the eyes of those who do understand the meanings of the terms.Queer,” in any case, does not designate a class of already objectified pathologies or perversions; rather, it describes a horizon of possibility whose precise extent and heterogeneous scope cannot in principle be delimited in advance.