NeuroQueer: A Neurodivergent Guide to Love, Sex, and Everything in Between

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When I found the term neuroqueer it seemed as though I had finally found a way of accessing that part of myself that wanted to call forth the notions of my own gender and sexuality. Large organizations and institutions have a lot of inertia, so we're not seeing the influence of the neurodiversity paradigm on policy and practice on any large scale yet. I've seen exciting developments on a smaller scale, though, at a more grassroots level of praxis—for example, individual psychotherapists and other professionals, or small organizations, making the shift to the neurodiversity paradigm. And again, there 's that appropriation issue; neurodiversity is a popular buzzword in the tech industry these days, but it usually just means, “How can we more effectively exploit the labor of the autistics who are good at software development?” There's this brilliant sci-fi novel called Hoshi and the Red City Circuit 20 that explores where that sort of thing can lead.

Dr. Walker: Whatever else it might look like, any future society that has embraced and been transformed by the neurodiversity paradigm would be distinguished by two fundamental qualities: it would be neurocosmopolitan and it would be neuroqueer. 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.Egner, J. E. (2019). “The Disability Rights Community was Never Mine”: Neuroqueer Disidentification. Gender & Society, 33(1), 123-147. Well, I found the link by myself while discussing with a terf about the fact that the autistic experience and the (in this case) trans experience have more that one point in common. Arguments didn’t matter to her much, I must add, yet it mattered to me realising how, if we simplify this a bit, it has to do with wearing a mask and being someone who you are not, but who is convincingly similar to them, and the baffling experience of that impersonation being preferred rather than your real self just because the sake of normality. And I’d said, let’s try to diversify normality instead of normalise or make diversity normal.

Cosmopolitanism is the open-minded embracing of human diversity. The cosmopolitan individual—or the cosmopolitan society—is comfortable with the vast spectrum of cultural and ethnic differences among people and appreciates and welcomes those differences as sources of aesthetic, intellectual, cultural, and creative enrichment. The cosmopolitan individual engages with diversity in a spirit of humility, respect, curiosity, and continual openness to learning, growth, uncertainty, complexity, and new experience. And, as I increasingly find myself in the position of reviewing other people’s writing on neurodiversity – grading student papers, reviewing book submissions or submissions to journals, consulting on various projects, or even just deciding which pieces of writing I’m willing to recommend to people – I’m getting tired of running into the same basic errors over and over. The term bodymind points toward an understanding that mind is an embodied phenomenon, and that mind and embodiment are inseparably entwined. The embodied nature of the mind is a fundamental premise of somatic psychology, a field in which I’ve long been involved as a student, practitioner, and educator. A lot of people hear neuro and they think, brain. But the prefix neuro doesn't mean brain, it means nerve. The neuro in neurodiversity is most usefully understood as a convenient shorthand for the functionality of the whole bodymind and the way the nervous system weaves together cognition and embodiment. So neurodiversity refers to the diversity among minds, or among bodyminds. The correct word here would be neurodivergence, rather than neurodiversity. An individual, by definition, cannot be “diverse” or “have diversity.”Truman, S.E., Shannon, D., Yusoff, K. (2023) ' Cosmic Beavers: Queer counter-mythologies through speculative songwriting.' Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 28(6) pp. 84-96.

I'm not saying that it's not useful for people to recognize themselves as autistic or dyslexic or whatever. When not pathologized or stigmatized, such categories can be enormously valuable. It's certainly been useful to me to understand myself as autistic. I'm saying that our conception of neurodiversity shouldn't be limited by such categories, just like our conception of gender and sexuality shouldn't be limited by the categories of male, female, gay, and straight. Shannon, D.B. (2021) ' What do ‘propositions’ do for research-creation? Truth and modality in Whitehead and Wittgenstein.' Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research, 2(2) 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. So one crucial first step is for all of us to engage our creativity and awaken our sense of the possible, and start generating individual and collective visions of neurocosmopolitan futures that inspire us. I heard the term neuroqueer for the first time during one of my internet deep dives. You know the ones: you have a seemingly-simple inquiry that you decide to look into and then BAM It’s 4 am and you’ve successfully hyperfocused your way down the spiraling timeline of the JonBenet Ramsey case, convinced you’ve figured out whodunnit.The two paradigms—the pathology paradigm and the neurodiversity paradigm—are as fundamentally incompatible as, say, homophobia and the gay rights movement, or misogyny and feminism. In terms of discourse, research, and policy, the pathology paradigm asks, “What do we do about the problem of these people not being normal,” whereas the neurodiversity paradigm asks, “What do we do about the problem of these people being oppressed, marginalized, and/or poorly served and poorly accommodated by the prevailing culture?” First, need to be absolutely clear—in our own minds and in our written and spoken discourse—that the pathology paradigm is nothing more than institutionalized bigotry masquerading as science, and that it's illegitimate and harmful in the same ways as racism, misogyny, and other forms of bigotry that have also historically masqueraded as science.