Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on a Comprehensive Guide
Executive Summary
This comprehensive guide introduces the neurodiversity paradigm—a fundamental reconceptualization of autism and neurological difference as natural human variation rather than pathology. The author systematically dismantles the pathology paradigm, demonstrating how it functions as institutionalized bigotry that has caused measurable harm to autistic people for decades. The text establishes autism as a distinctive neurological variant characterized by more intense and chaotic subjective experience due to higher synaptic connectivity, with social difficulties stemming from systematic rejection and trauma rather than inherent deficits. Beyond mere acceptance, the author advances neuroqueer theory—the practice of liberating both individuals and collectives from compulsory normativity through creative embodiment, unmasking suppressed natural expression, and transforming institutions to genuinely include neurodivergent voices in design and leadership. The work provides practical strategies for autistic people, parents, professionals, and anyone willing to question neuronormative constraints, offering a vision of neurocosmopolitanism where neurological diversity is cultivated as creative resource rather than merely accommodated within neurotypical-designed structures.
The Neurodiversity Paradigm: Reframing Neurological Difference
The neurodiversity paradigm rests on three core principles: neurodiversity is a natural and healthy form of human diversity with no single “right” style of human mind; the diversity of neurocognitive styles mirrors other forms of human diversity like race, gender, and sexual orientation—all natural and valuable; social dynamics around neurodiversity mirror dynamics of privilege, oppression, and creative potential found with all human diversity. This framework stands in direct opposition to the pathology paradigm, which assumes one “correct” way for brains to function and frames deviation from neurotypical norms as disease, disorder, or defect.
The pathology paradigm has a disturbing history of weaponization—similar to how homosexuality was classified as mental illness until 1973 and how enslaved people’s desire to escape was diagnosed as “drapetomania.” This paradigm has been used historically against women, indigenous peoples, people of color, and queer people. In autism discourse specifically, its dominance creates devastating consequences: professional and institutional practice focuses on “curing” or “fixing” autistic people rather than accepting them, accommodating needs, or supporting authentic thriving. Since autistic people cannot be made non-autistic, this approach generates pseudoscience, quackery, and horrifying abuse.
The language used in each paradigm reveals fundamentally different ways of conceptualizing the same neurological realities. The pathology paradigm uses terms like “disorder,” “symptom,” and “treatment”—language that encodes oppressive assumptions and reinforces pathologizing frameworks. The same neurological facts (atypical sensory processing, different communication styles) mean something entirely different when viewed through the neurodiversity paradigm lens. What the pathology model calls “symptoms to eliminate,” the neurodiversity paradigm recognizes as distinctive ways of processing information, moving through the world, and engaging with others—potentially containing exceptional talents and insights. Understanding autism as natural variation rather than deficit changes what questions professionals ask, what solutions they pursue, and what futures they imagine for autistic people.
Language As Institutional Power: Person-First Language and Autistiphobia
Language is not neutral—the words used to describe neurodivergence actively shape consciousness, professional practice, institutional policy, and cultural treatment of autistic people. The distinction between person-first language (“people with autism,” “individual with autism”) and identity-first language (“autistic person,” “I am autistic”) represents far more than stylistic preference. Rather, the distinction encodes fundamentally different beliefs about what autism is and whether it can or should be separated from personhood.
Person-first language originated from autistiphobic parents who believed autism was a pathological shell hiding their “real” (non-autistic) children—a fantasy that autism could be removed while the person remained. This language perpetuates the false belief that autism is separable from identity and that being autistic is incompatible with being fully human. The biased nature becomes obvious when applied to other marginalized identities: “person with Blackness,” “individual experiencing femaleness,” or “adult living with homosexuality” sound absurdly pathologizing, immediately revealing the language’s roots in bigotry. The author observes a 100% correlation over two decades between insistence on person-first language and demonstrable autistiphobic bigotry.
Those most resistant to the simple statement “You are autistic” often display visible distress—squirming, avoidance, anger, or tears—revealing deep psychological investment in the pathologizing fantasy. Person-first language fuels multi-billion-dollar industries built on the “recovery” fantasy, including harmful “behavioral therapies” like ABA, fraudulent cure industries, and dehumanizing charity organizations that pathologize autistic existence itself. Identity-first language (“autistic person,” “I am autistic”) treats autism as an identity comparable to ethnicity or sexuality, creating conceptual tools to describe lived reality without implicitly pathologizing. The terminology “neurodivergent” and “neurotypical” enables discussion of neurotypical privilege without reinforcing neurotypical superiority by calling them “normal.”
Autism as Neurological Difference with Distinctive Processing and Potential
Autism is a genetically-based neurological variant characterized by high levels of synaptic connectivity and responsiveness, resulting in more intense and chaotic subjective experience compared to neurotypical processing. The autistic brain registers more information, with each bit of information having stronger, less predictable impact on attention and consciousness. This neurological difference affects sensorimotor and cognitive processing, creating distinctive ways of thinking, moving, perceiving, and interacting with the world. An estimated 1-2% of the population is autistic, with enormous variation among autistic individuals—some highly verbal, some non-speaking, some with exceptional cognitive talents in specific domains, all deserving recognition and respect.
The social difficulties autistic people experience are not intrinsic “social deficits” but rather predictable consequences of intensive sensory and cognitive processing combined with systematic social rejection by a neurotypical-designed society. The intensive sensory and cognitive processing leaves less attentional capacity for the subtle social cues that neurotypical people unconsciously track. Simultaneously, autistic people from early childhood receive relentless messaging that how they naturally think, feel, move, and communicate is “wrong”—creating a painful recursive trauma cycle: early rejection leads to social anxiety, which impairs already-different social performance, leading to further negative experiences and trauma reinforcement. Critically, because this suffering stems from trauma rather than autism itself, trauma can be healed and anxiety reduced without requiring autistic people to become non-autistic.
The author emphasizes that autistic people can have good lives full of joy, love, meaningful connection, and creative fulfillment. Many autistic individuals exhibit exceptional cognitive talents, and thriving is possible—but requires accepting and supporting autistic children and adults as they are rather than attempting to force compliance with neurotypical performance standards. Non-autistic parents and professionals lack insider knowledge of autistic experience and typically misguide children toward impossible and harmful “normalization.” Autistic adults provide crucial models of what thriving autistic adulthood actually looks like, offering perspective entirely missing from pathology-based “expert” discourse.
The Social Model of Disability: Disablement Is Environmental, Not Intrinsic
The medical model of disability locates disability within the individual as defect; the social model of disability understands disability as resulting from societal failure to accommodate diverse needs and systematic exclusion. This distinction is crucial: a mobility impairment doesn’t disable someone equally across all contexts—wheelchair accessibility or lack thereof determines actual functioning. Dyslexia wasn’t disabling in pre-literate societies and may cease to be as technology evolves. Similarly and critically, autism itself is not a disability, but autistic people are disabled by neurotypical-dominant society that fails to accommodate or accept their needs.
A highly capable autistic person with exceptional abilities faces disablement through social rejection, discrimination, and environmental hostility—not from any inherent deficit but from societal intolerance and accommodation failures. Disablement is contingent on environmental context and social response, not fixed within the person. The solution is enablement through accommodations and acceptance, not elimination of autism itself. This paradigm shift redirects responsibility from “fixing autistic people” to transforming society and institutions to accommodate diverse neurologies. When autistic people are in accepting environments with appropriate accommodations (sensory regulation strategies, communication access, acceptance of natural embodiment), they experience substantially less disablement and greater capacity to thrive.
Stimming as Essential Autistic Practice, Not Pathological Symptom
Stimming comprises repetitive physical movements or actions providing specific sensory stimulation. Rather than being symptoms to pathologize and eliminate, stims are vital to autistic consciousness and serve multiple interconnected functions. Autistic people neurodevelopmentally engage in lifelong sensory integration work comparable to what infants do in Piaget’s sensorimotor stage. This sensory integration work is not a deficiency but an ongoing neurological reality—stims (rocking, hand-flapping, pacing, touching textures, spinning, visual gazing, listening to specific sounds, sniffing, verbal repetition, or combinations thereof) are essential for regulation and integration of sensory input that otherwise becomes overwhelming.
Beyond regulatory functions, stimming accesses flow states, profound experiences of ego transcendence, and exceptional human capacities for consciousness exploration. Stims facilitate embodied exploration and relationship with the sensory world and constitute intuitive sensorimotor practices of sophisticated complexity. While neurotypical people engage in similar behaviors (pacing while thinking, finger-drumming, enjoying music, doodling), these fall within neuronormative performance standards and are therefore not pathologized. Stimming is defined as actions falling outside neuronormative performance boundaries while providing sensory stimulation to facilitate cognitive or sensorimotor processes or access to specific states of consciousness.
The pathology paradigm frames stimming only as compensation for deficits; the neurodiversity paradigm recognizes it as accessing authentic human capacities unique to autistic neurology. Suppressing stimming through behavioral interventions—particularly through ABA, which forces autistic children to suppress visible autism signs through compliance-based training—violates cognitive liberty: the right to sovereignty over one’s own brain and cognitive processes. Suppressing stimming causes measurable psychological harm and is correlated with depression and suicidality. The author emphasizes that this suppression is “deeply and profoundly transformative” harm that generates chronic muscular tension (what Wilhelm Reich termed “character armor”) that persists into adulthood, blocking not only specific movements but also access to associated feelings, yearnings, impulses, and psychological capacities.
Internalized Oppression: “Outposts in Your Head”
Autistic people internalize pathologizing messages from culture, creating internal barriers to their own liberation. This internalized oppression—having “outposts” of the oppressive system established in one’s own consciousness—is fundamental to understanding autistic disempowerment. Many autistic people believe their autism is shameful, that they “have a disorder,” and that they should hide their natural embodiment and neurodivergent expression. These internalized beliefs persist even in accepting environments and represent structural obstacles to thriving comparable to external discrimination.
Liberating oneself from internalized oppression requires dismantling pathology paradigm assumptions within one’s own consciousness before external systemic change can be effectively challenged or experienced as liberation. This connects personal psychological work with collective social transformation—individual consciousness-shifting is a necessary prerequisite for but is insufficient without systemic change. Somatically-oriented psychotherapists, once embracing the neurodiversity paradigm, are uniquely positioned to help autistic clients recognize and release the somatic manifestations of internalized oppression (habitual unconscious tensions and character armor) and recover capacity for full expression of unique potentials. The author notes that many autistic people subjected to coerced physical conformity carry severe unconscious tensions throughout their bodies, representing somatized internalized oppression requiring somatic therapeutic work to release.
Trauma As Separate from Neurodivergence: Healing Without Erasure
Much of the depression, social anxiety, and suffering affecting many autistic people stems from trauma inflicted by family members, professionals, and society’s rejection—not from autism itself. Autistic children routinely experience abuse disguised as “treatment” (ABA and similar behavioral interventions), chronic messaging that their natural embodiment is wrong, peer rejection, and familial disappointment. This creates genuine psychological trauma separate and distinct from the neurodivergence itself. Crucially, trauma can be healed and anxiety reduced without requiring autistic people to become non-autistic.
MDMA-assisted psychotherapy research demonstrated that autistic adults could achieve lasting reductions in social anxiety through trauma processing without pathologizing autism itself. This reveals that autistic people’s psychological suffering is addressable through genuinely supportive therapeutic work rather than through “curing” autism. The path to thriving involves accepting oneself as autistic while healing the trauma inflicted by rejection and coercive conformity pressures. This distinction—that social anxiety results from trauma, not autism—offers profound hope: healing is possible through therapeutic work, acceptance, and environmental change rather than through forced neurological transformation.
Neurocosmopolitanism: Valuing Neurodiversity as Creative Resource
Neurocosmopolitanism extends beyond merely accepting neurodiversity to actively engaging with and celebrating neurological differences as sources of learning, growth, and creative potential—paralleling how cosmopolitanism engages with cultural diversity. True neurocosmopolitanism requires that neurodivergent people have authentic voice and agency to shape institutions and systems, not merely be “accommodated” within neurotypical-designed structures. Including neurodivergent people in decision-making while maintaining neurotypical-dominated systems and norms does not achieve genuine inclusion or unlock neurodiversity’s creative potential.
The neurocosmopolitan vision asks fundamental questions: What would education look like if shaped collaboratively by diverse minds with no single style privileged? What organizational structures would emerge if leadership included multiply diverse neurocognitive styles? What innovations might emerge from genuine collaboration across neurological differences? This vision moves beyond the neurodiversity paradigm’s baseline of acceptance to imagine societies where neurodiversity is cultivated as creative resource, where mutual accommodation is normalized across all members, and where difference enriches rather than threatens collective work. True inclusion means collaboratively redesigning institutions from inception rather than retrofitting accommodations into neurotypical-designed structures. This represents a long-term vision worth pursuing even if distant—a fundamental reimagining of human systems organized around neurodiversity rather than neurotypical dominance.
Practical Strategies & Techniques
Recognizing and Rejecting the Pathology Paradigm in All Manifestations
The first practical step toward liberation is learning to identify pathology paradigm framing in all its manifestations and systematically rejecting it as you would racism or homophobia. Nearly all autism-related professional and academic discourse from the past 90 years requires critical examination and rejection. When encountering autism-related material, ask: Does this assume autism is defect or natural variation? Does this use pathologizing language? Is the goal “normalizing” autistic people or supporting autistic thriving? Does this center autistic voices or only non-autistic “expert” perspectives?
For parents of autistic children, this means seeking information from autistic adults (particularly those not socialized into pathology paradigm assumptions), questioning standard professional “expert” recommendations, focusing on supporting your child’s thriving as an autistic person rather than attempting impossible “normalization,” modeling acceptance of your child’s natural embodiment and neurocognitive style, creating safe spaces where your child can express natural autistic embodiment without shame or correction, and learning from autistic adults what thriving autistic adulthood looks like.
Unmasking and Reclaiming Suppressed Embodiment Through Neuroqueering
Unmasking—reclaiming suppressed embodiments and natural neurodivergent expression—is a vital form of neuroqueer practice that reconnects people with previously inaccessible inner stirrings and capacities. Masking causes profound psychological harm and is strongly correlated with depression and suicidality. The process of unmasking involves noticing habitual suppression (becoming aware of where and when you automatically suppress natural movements, expressions, or ways of being), releasing character armor (recognizing the chronic muscular tension that maintains repression), experimenting with reclamation (in safe spaces, intentionally engaging in movements, expressions, or embodiments you’ve been trained to suppress), processing emotions (as you release physical suppression, emotions, memories, and previously inaccessible capacities may emerge), and gradual expansion (expanding neuroqueering practices into more contexts as comfort grows).
The author describes this process as “deeply and profoundly transformative”—a doorway to cultivating self-attunement and embodied expression that expands consciousness and creative capacity.
Transforming Professional Practice Through Neurodiversity-Grounded Training
For mental health professionals, educators, and others working with autistic or neurodivergent people, the author offers seven essential guiding principles for practice grounded in genuine neurodiversity paradigm commitment: reject false “balance” between paradigms (pathology paradigm is not a legitimate perspective but institutionalized bigotry); ensure instructors are autistic (instructors must have deep participation in autistic culture, community, and resistance movements); center autistic voices (80%+ of course materials should be by autistic authors); model accommodation of neurodivergence (explicitly declare classroom free from discrimination and compulsory neuronormativity); model embodied neurodivergent expression (move like an autistic person, permit students freedom to express natural neurodivergent embodiment); engage in neuroqueer practice (invite liberation from culturally-ingrained neuronormative performance habits); and prioritize truth over conventional sources (truth about neurodiversity is found where it is—often in internet sources, independent publishers, and emerging academic fields).
Creating Neuroqueer Spaces: Individual and Collective Liberation
Neuroqueer practice operates on two interconnected levels enabling “collective liberation from compulsory normativity.” At the individual level, this involves creative bodily enactments that materialize unrealized neuroqueer potentials: refusing to suppress stimming, experimenting with non-normative embodiment, exploring unconventional communication styles, engaging in somatically-aware movement exploration, artistic expression from neuroqueer perspective, and scholarship and writing from neuroqueer position. At the collective level, this involves co-creating social environments supporting neuroqueer participation and exploration: establishing spaces explicitly permitting non-normative embodiment, normalizing diverse communication styles and sensory needs, collaboratively designing systems accommodating multiple neurotypes, creating art, literature, and cultural artifacts foregrounding neuroqueer experiences, and producing critical examination of neuroqueer representation in culture.
The interplay between individual neuroqueering and cultural transformation creates recursive amplification: individuals reclaiming suppressed embodiments inspire others, gradually shifting family and community norms; changing norms make individual expression safer and more supported; safer expression enables deeper exploration; deeper exploration generates new cultural expressions and understandings.
Supporting Neurotypical People in Self-Neuroqueering
An important insight the author shares: neurotypical people are not born naturally compliant with normative performance—they’ve simply internalized normative rules so deeply that performance feels natural. All babies and toddlers engage in stimming naturally; neurotypical people lose this capacity as socialization progressively buries it. Anyone with sufficient commitment and willingness to release normalcy can reconnect with the “spontaneous organismic dance of stimming.” Neurotypical people who intentionally diverge from compulsory neuronormativity—reclaiming suppressed stimming impulses, exploring non-normative embodiment, releasing performance habits—report expanded consciousness, changes in cognitive processes, and restored joy and creativity. This demonstrates that neuroqueer liberation is not exclusively autistic work but offers transformation potential for anyone willing to question and subvert neuronormative constraints.
Counterintuitive Insights & Nuanced Perspectives
Common Misconception: Neurodiversity Is About “Balance” or “Trade-offs”
Common belief holds that autism involves trade-offs—exceptional abilities in some areas offset by deficits in others; people should accept both positive and negative aspects as inherent. The book reveals that autism is not inherently a trade-off but rather a distinctive form of neurocognitive processing. Many difficulties attributed to “inherent autism traits” actually result from social trauma, environmental hostility, and lack of accommodation. When autistic people are in accepting, accommodating environments, many “deficits” disappear or become substantially less disabling. The focus on trade-offs serves to normalize societal failure to accommodate rather than recognizing disablement as socially produced.
Common Misconception: “High-Functioning” and “Low-Functioning” Labels Are Clinically Meaningful
Common belief holds that these labels meaningfully describe autistic people’s abilities and needs, with “high-functioning” autistic people being more capable and “low-functioning” indicating greater support needs. The book reveals that these terms are meaningless once “normal” is rejected as oppressive concept. They merely measure proximity to neurotypical performance standards, not actual functioning or capability. The author presents them as “absurd”—a non-speaking autistic person using assistive communication technology might be “low-functioning” by this metric yet possess exceptional cognitive abilities and capacity for meaningful connection and contribution. “High-functioning” often masks immense suffering and masking costs; many autistic people labeled “high-functioning” experience depression, social anxiety, and suicidality despite external appearance of success.
Common Misconception: Social Difficulties Are Intrinsic to Autism
Common belief holds that autistic people inherently have “social deficits”; difficulties in social interaction are core features of autism itself. The book reveals that communication difficulties run both ways—between autistic and non-autistic people. Yet these are attributed solely to autistic “deficits,” revealing bias rather than objective description. Autistic social anxiety results from social trauma and rejection, not from autism itself. The double empathy problem (recognized in recent research) shows that neurotypical people struggle equally to understand autistic communication and perspective. Autistic people in communities with other autistic people often report no “social deficits”—they communicate fluently with others who share their neurology. Social difficulty is a mismatch between neurotypes, not a unilateral autistic deficit.
Common Misconception: Pathology Paradigm Is “Scientific” While Neurodiversity Is “Activist”
Common belief holds that medical/pathology approach represents objective science; neurodiversity perspective is political activism without scientific grounding. The book reveals that the pathology paradigm is itself deeply political—it has historically been weaponized to justify oppression of women, indigenous peoples, people of color, and queer people. The fact that pathology assumptions have been normalized in institutions doesn’t make them scientific; it makes them institutionalized bigotry masquerading as science. Homosexuality’s classification as mental illness until 1973 was “scientific consensus” yet proved to be oppressive pseudoscience. Similar pathologizing of neurodiversity remains normalized despite causing measurable harm. Neurodiversity paradigm framework is both scientifically grounded (understanding neurodiversity as natural human variation mirrors biological understanding of human diversity in other domains) and based on social justice principles challenging oppression.