Why I Don't Say "Neurodivergent"

on the radical power of vision and queer illegibility

I'm not refusing to ever say the word again. I've used it plenty in the past. But if you hear me say it, know for certain that I am doing so with air quotes. Because…

Neurotypical Doesn't Exist

Coined by Kassiane Asasumasu, the term "neurodivergent" originated as a self-descriptor, one the Hapa and Asian-American autistic activist uses to describe people "whose neurocognitive functioning diverges from dominant societal norms in multiple ways" or in other words, people who cannot, for one reason or another, comfortably perform neurotypicality.

In an essay posted to Instagram titled, "Not Your Neurodivergent," Swazi and Zulu Indigenous ancestral and traditional healer Thokoza Ndondlo writes:

I resent anyone placing a Global North label (created to oppose the colonial pathology paradigm white people created) on me. I am an initiated healer. I am not your neurodivergent. I do not diverge from your norms — from any norms set by the white colonial world.

For months now, since I started reading Dr. Devon Price's book Unmasking Autism, I have been on a bit of a tear about the word "neurotypical" and have been shouting from the proverbial rooftops that, "there is no such thing as a neurotypical person." 

As Dr. Price describes it, Australian sociologist Judy Singer — who originally coined the term neurodiversity — was adamant in her belief that neurotypicality should be regarded similarly to heteronormativity: as a form of violent oppression applied via a set of ideals and norms to which no one can fully conform all of the time.

As Singer saw it, every human person alive experiences neurodivergent states of being at some point during their time here on earth. These include diagnostic labels like autism and ADHD, medical conditions like traumatic brain injury, and life experiences like grief that change how we interact with the world around us.

Some of us experience these states more frequently than others. Some of us embrace these states, and others avoid them. Some of us are better at avoiding them than others. But are any of us ever fully the people that empire tells us we must be?

For Arié Moyal, a disabled, Jewish Amazigh and Arab activist, acceptance of the social order represented by the concept of "neurodivergence" is capitulation to the settler colonial project that severs us from the land and from each other.

In the US, there is no federal standard for bereavement leave. The average — for a close family death, such as the death of a child — is 3 to 5 days. One week. 

If your child is shot and killed at school, you will be lucky to be allowed one week off from work before your job is in jeopardy. And if you grieve a lost loved one for longer than a year, you have a mental illness. These are the standards we are allowing to define "divergence" from the normal.

Neuroqueering the Neuronormative

I have been taking a class these last several weeks called Neuroqueering Your Creative Practice with KR Moorehead, Marta Rose, and Meg Max, rooted in an understanding of neurodiversity as presented by Dr. Nick Walker in her work on neuroqueerness. It was through Dr. Walker's work that I have been able to give voice to the ways that words like "neurodivergent" and "nonbinary" have made me feel so uncomfortable.

Dr. Walker defines neuroqueer through an active verb: "neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously."

Both the concepts of "neurodivergence" and "nonbinary" as they are commonly used today begin from an implicit acceptance of settler colonial standards. Do we "diverge" from the utterly unattainable ideal of neuroconformity, and from the sex-gender binary? Or do neuronormativity and cisnormativity diverge from actual, embodied physical reality?

Tyson Yunkaporta writes about this particular problem, the struggle of having to use words that invoke the very thing from which they are trying to differentiate, about the way that the word “nonlinear” prompts us to imagine the line. In Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World, Yunkaporta writes:

We don’t have a word for nonlinear in our languages because nobody would consider traveling, thinking, or talking in a straight line in the first place. The winding path is just how a path is, and therefore it needs no name.

Multiplicity and diversity, in gender and neurology, is just how the world is. If there is no true neurotypicality, if there is no true gender binary, if we can acknowledge that these things are lies constructed through and for settler colonial violence, what value do their names have? What does a word like "nonbinary" illuminate and what does it obfuscate?

Genderqueer as an identity is so important to me, because like neuroqueer, it reminds me that having an identity which opposes settler colonial norms is a constant act of rebellion, and one that doesn't just happen. It’s one that I need to live out loud on purpose every day.

Neuroqueer as a Vision for the Future

In a recent session of Neuroqueering class with Marta, on the subject of mise en place, we contemplated momentarily the concept of vision. In A Native American Perspective on Liberation, Vine Deloria Jr. wrote:

An old Indian saying captures the radical difference between Indians and Western peoples quite adequately. The white man, Indians maintain, has ideas; Indians have visions. Ideas have a single dimension and require a chain of connected ideas to make sense.... The vision, on the other hand, presents a whole picture of experience and has central meaning that stands on its own feet as an independent revelation.

The class has discussed several characteristics commonly associated with the kinds of people who are labeled or self-identify as "neurodivergent" and the ones that have stood out the most for me are this propensity for vision, our social motivation, and a spiral, orbital experience of our own movement through time.

I find these pathologized traits fascinating, because from my perspective, they are all perfectly natural, evolutionarily-beneficial ways that most humans have historically understood the world we live in.

In his article, "Being Socially Motivated is Not a Disorder," Dr. Price writes:

People with ADHD are highly socially motivated, but they live in a world where independence is prioritized.

It’s odd that having a strong social motivation is considered a pathology at all, when we consider that nearly all of us are social animals. The majority of humans throughout history have lived, worked, cooked, cleaned, gathered resources, and played together, feeding off of one another’s energy and encouragement, the natural movements of their lives lending structure to each other’s days.

Being observed makes all human beings more productive, and collaborating on a task improves focus, motivation, and performance for nearly everyone. When people feel that they are a valued member of a team, they do more and actually enjoy their efforts, plus they’re just happier in general, because of the company; when we toil alone, we often feel work is meaningless. And since our lives as humans center around our relationships, a life of nothing but isolated work is a meaningless one in a very real way.

And yet a life of nothing but isolated, meaningless work is exactly the world that powerful people want us living.

Who does it benefit to convince us that being motivated by social connection is some kind of pathology? Who wins when we punish vision and enforce a strictly linear understanding of time? (Hint: it's not you.)

And this brings me to a question I have been asking myself since fully embracing descriptors like neuroqueer instead of neurodivergent, or genderqueer instead of nonbinary: who am I being me for?

Visibility, Legibility, Inclusion: who belongs?

It's tempting to say that I am living my truth just for me, that being genderqueer and neuroqueer and loud and proud about it is an act of individual identity politics. I'm no more immune to the propaganda of the rugged individualist than you are. On the other hand, I'm sure many bigots would accuse me of "attention seeking" because I choose these words.

If we are social animals, motivated by the meaning-making that exists between us... who isn't attention seeking? And if you aren't... why not? Yeah, actually. I am seeking attention.

But whose attention? Where am I choosing to be more visible to systems of oppression and where am I seeking to be seen by people who are also living their lives as an act of queering the world?

I want colonialism to choke on my queerness.

Lately I've been contemplating my visibility as a queer trans person, as I have been coming to terms with the fact that I will maybe never be able to legally change my name and gender marker on my ID. I've been thinking about X gender markers and "diversity, equity, and inclusion" projects and the ways that we collectively keep seeking to be seen by systems made explicitly to exclude people like us. 

There is a sense of safety that I think could come from having a legal name and gender that doesn't immediately “out” me as nonconforming to anyone who sees it.

Similarly, there is a sense of support that I think could come from having an official autism diagnosis to go along with my official ADHD stamp. (My therapist tells me, "I spoke with a diagnostic specialist, and they don't think they will be able to tell the difference between you being autistic and you being a gringo." And I laugh, and laugh, and laugh.)

I am quite confident that there are areas of my life that would be easier if I had the limited acceptance and legitimacy the state could provide. And, also, I don't want my gender (or my neurotype) to be legible to white supremacist settler colonialism. I have a vision for my queer existence in a queer world and it is not one where I somehow manage to keep surviving under the boot.

"Please do not perceive me" memes get a laugh out of me. There are absolutely days when I just want to disappear. But ultimately, I don't want my queerness to be unperceived. I want colonialism to fucking choke on just how incomprehensibly queer I am.

Can You See the Future?

Visions are fucking dangerous to settler colonialism. Ideas? I don't know. There is a reason that people call Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower "visionary" and claim for her the gift of prophecy. She didn't just have ideas about the world and what was happening in it. She had vision. Sometimes, the identities I embody in opposition to white supremacy feel like a vision of a world that could be.

I often think and journal about how much I love the visioning part of a project. I absolutely adore that moment where a big picture reveals itself all at once and all sorts of smaller parts click into place. Visioning has always come to me with quite a bit of ease. Making vision reality, communicating vision is my hardest work. 

And I think it has been so hard because vision requires somatic embodiment to be made real. To bring vision to life requires a grounded, supported body that exists in relationship with the land it lives on. Without this, I have experienced vision as incredibly destabilizing.

You can't lay a vision out in a straight line of clearly connected ideas. Vision spirals like the trunks and branches of trees, like the striation of bones, growing through time, gravity pushing and pulling us as the earth rotates on its axis and orbits the sun. How can we make sense of the connected planets and constellations of vision if they have nowhere to rest inside a felt presence?

They say that autistic people are especially good at pattern recognition. They say we were shamans once. I'm not sure there's a point in quibbling over the difference. The word you're looking for here is vision. Vision is where prophecy and pattern recognition meet inside a living, breathing, eating, shitting, fucking animal body.

The revolution needs visionaries. Not just people who can experience the vision, but those who have the ability — or at least the will — to bring vision alive in the manifest world. 

So I will not be working to make myself more legible to cishet whiteness, more understandable to settler colonialism. I will be reveling and keening in the vastness that is queer, and doing everything I can to bring visions of that embodied queerness to life.

Will you join me?

CORRECTION: An earlier version of this article misattributed the word "neurodivergent" to Singer.