From Advocacy to Activism: Galvanizing a Neurodiversity Justice Movement
Presented at Cultural Autism Studies at Yale
Hello and welcome all. My name is Bridgette Hamstead. I am an AuDHD educator, writer, and organizer. I am the Founding Director of Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism, and I serve as Chairperson of the Board of the Neurodiversity Coalition of America. Much of my work lives at the intersection of lived experience, cultural theory, community organizing, and public scholarship. I write and teach about the ways neurodivergent people survive systems that were never designed with us in mind, and the ways we are now rebuilding those systems together.
This session comes out of years of listening to neurodivergent adults, working alongside community organizers, and examining the cultural and structural forces that shape our lives. It also comes from the work we are building at Fish in a Tree and the Neurodiversity Coalition of America, where we are developing a national ecosystem for neurodiversity justice: a framework, a community, and a movement that centers neurodivergent leadership, redesigns systems from within, and expands what inclusion, accessibility, and liberation can look like.
Throughout this hour, I want to trace three threads. The first is the framework of neurodiversity justice itself, what it means, where it comes from, and why it requires far more than traditional advocacy. The second is what inclusion becomes when we stop treating it as a checklist and start treating it as cultural transformation and structural redesign. And the third is the work that Fish in a Tree and the Neurodiversity Coalition of America are doing to build the actual infrastructure this movement requires, from cultural programming to policy vision to public education and community-led systems change.
My hope is that you’ll leave this hour not only with a deeper understanding of neurodiversity justice, but also with a sense of possibility: that systems can change, that culture can change, and that we, collectively, can build environments where neurodivergent people do not have to mask, contort, or fragment ourselves to belong. This work is practical and structural, but it is also emotional and relational. It asks us to rethink what we value, how we define normalcy, and what it means to share space with one another.
What Is Neurodiversity Justice
To understand neurodiversity justice, we have to begin by recognizing that neurodivergent existence is not a problem to be solved but a form of human variation that has always existed. The diversity of human minds is as natural as the diversity of bodies, languages, or cultures. Yet the systems we live inside were built around a narrow template of what a mind should be: how it should focus, how it should feel, how it should learn, how it should communicate, how it should move through the world. When a society builds everything around one version of “normal,” every other kind of mind becomes framed as disorder, deficit, or deviation. Neurodiversity justice confronts that framing directly. It names the difference between biological diversity and cultural intolerance. It recognizes that the suffering neurodivergent people experience is not inherent to our neurotype, but to the barriers and biases embedded in the systems surrounding us.
Traditional advocacy tends to work inside this status quo. It aims to help neurodivergent people survive systems that remain unchanged, to navigate environments that were not built for us, to ask for small adjustments so we can function in structures designed around someone else’s comfort. Advocacy often reinforces the very norms it claims to challenge. It frames support as something granted by gatekeepers, something individuals must request, justify, or earn. It treats access as an exception, not a right. Neurodiversity justice is a departure from that logic. It shifts the focus from helping people adapt to oppressive structures toward transforming those structures themselves. It asks us to look at the roots of exclusion, not just its symptoms. It names the systemic pressures that push neurodivergent people to mask, to hide, to fragment ourselves in order to be seen as competent, employable, or acceptable. And it refuses to call that survival strategy success.
At its core, neurodiversity justice is a movement about power. It asks who gets to define what is normal, whose comfort is prioritized, whose communication is respected, whose sensory experience is treated as legitimate, and whose needs are dismissed as inconvenient. It recognizes that the idea of “normal” is not neutral, but historically constructed, tied to the rise of industrialization, capitalism, colonialism, and the medical systems that sought to categorize and discipline human behavior. Neurodivergent traits became labeled as disorders not because they are inherently harmful, but because they disrupt norms designed to benefit institutions rather than people. A justice framework forces us to ask whether the problem is the individual or the system that pathologizes difference to preserve its own efficiency and control.
Neurodiversity justice also recognizes neurodivergent people as a cultural minority, not a clinical population. We share communication patterns, sensory realities, relational instincts, and lived experiences that form a coherent cultural identity, even when we come from different backgrounds. This shared culture includes the ways we connect, the ways we process information, the ways we create meaning, and the ways we show up in community. Our distress is often produced not by our neurotype but by the misinterpretations, expectations, and punishments imposed on us. Justice begins when we stop seeing neurodivergent people as broken versions of neurotypicality and start seeing us as members of a marginalized cultural group whose ways of being have been systematically misunderstood and devalued.
When we frame neurodiversity as a justice issue, we are also naming that neurodivergent people deserve not only access but dignity, agency, autonomy, and safety. We deserve environments where we can show up unmasked, where our sensory needs are not treated as burdens, where our communication styles are recognized as legitimate, where our pacing, timing, and rhythms are not penalized. Justice means dismantling the conditions that force neurodivergent people into chronic burnout, trauma, and exclusion. It means building systems that do not require us to constantly translate ourselves or justify our existence. It means creating environments where our nervous systems can rest.
Ultimately, neurodiversity justice is not a niche conversation about diagnoses. It is a cultural, structural, and political shift. It is a liberation movement, one that aligns with disability justice, queer liberation, mad pride, and every movement that challenges the hierarchies of who counts, who matters, and who is allowed to take up space. It is the belief that neurodivergent people are not here to be rehabilitated into normalcy, but to reshape the world in ways that honor the full range of human minds. Justice asks us to imagine a future where neurodivergent people do not have to advocate to be understood, because the culture itself has changed. A future where we do not need accommodations because the environment was never hostile to begin with. A future where belonging is not conditional, but inevitable.
That is the vision at the heart of neurodiversity justice, and it is the foundation for everything we will explore today.
What if neurodivergent people were never expected to adapt to systems that were not built for us?
What becomes possible when we treat neurodivergence as a marginalized culture rather than a medical problem?
Lineage, History, and Systems of Harm
To understand neurodiversity justice as a movement, we have to understand the historical and political forces that shaped the world neurodivergent people now navigate. Neurodivergence is not new, but the systems that interpret, diagnose, control, and discipline it are. The categories we now call autism, ADHD, dyslexia, OCD, Tourette, dyspraxia, and cognitive disability were shaped by cultural forces that long predate modern neuroscience. These categories were not discovered in nature; they were constructed in response to shifting social, economic, and political agendas. When we talk about harm, we are talking about the long shadow of these systems.
Industrialization played a defining role. As the twentieth century took shape, Western societies reorganized themselves around productivity, efficiency, punctuality, obedience, and linear task performance. These values did not arise organically; they were engineered to serve industrial and economic goals. People whose minds operated outside these narrow expectations were labeled as deficient, lazy, oppositional, undisciplined, or unfit. What we now call executive dysfunction was framed as moral failure. What we now call sensory overwhelm was framed as misbehavior. What we now call monotropism, or deep focus, was framed as rigidity. These interpretations were not scientific; they were cultural judgments dressed in scientific language.
At the same time, psychiatry and psychology began building classification systems that sorted human behavior into normal and abnormal. These systems positioned neurodivergent traits as symptoms of disorder rather than as forms of cognitive diversity. They treated difference as pathology, and in doing so, they established an institutional pathway for control. Autistic children were institutionalized, experimented on, or forced into compliance-based therapies focused on normalizing behavior. ADHD children were punished for restlessness, impulsivity, or divergent pacing. Each of these responses was rooted in the belief that social order, not human diversity, was the priority.
Education became another site of harm. Modern schooling was designed around conformity, group pacing, standardized tasks, and behavioral control. Neurodivergent children were either tracked into segregated classrooms or forced to suppress their natural ways of thinking, communicating, and learning. Many of us learned early that safety came from masking, from hiding the parts of ourselves that irritated or confused teachers, parents, or peers. These early lessons often follow neurodivergent people into adulthood, shaping our relationship with work, relationships, and public life.
We also cannot separate the history of neurodivergence from the history of eugenics, colonialism, and white supremacy. The very concept of “normal intelligence,” “normal behavior,” or “normal function” was developed within systems designed to measure, rank, and control human difference. Colonial powers pathologized the behaviors of colonized peoples. Eugenicists used early psychological testing to justify institutionalization, sterilization, and segregation. The idea that some minds were inherently superior and others inherently inferior was embedded into educational policies, employment practices, immigration laws, and medical systems. These legacies still shape how neurodivergent people are treated today.
When we talk about neurodiversity justice, we are naming that harm is not random. It is systemic. It is built into the structures that define what it means to be competent, productive, reliable, professional, or emotionally regulated. The pressure to mask is not merely interpersonal; it is institutional. The burnout so many neurodivergent adults experience is not an individual failure; it is the predictable result of chronically navigating systems hostile to our ways of being. The loneliness, shame, or self-doubt many neurodivergent people carry are not inherent to who we are; they were taught to us by cultures invested in sameness.
Yet neurodivergent people have always resisted. Long before the term neurodiversity existed, autistic and otherwise neurodivergent people built underground communities, created languages for experiences no one else recognized, and forged relationships that honored depth, honesty, sensory truth, and pattern-based connection. The neurodiversity movement did not emerge from academia or clinical practice; it emerged from disabled and neurodivergent people refusing to be defined by systems that harmed us. It emerged from autistic self-advocates, mad pride organizers, disability justice leaders, queer theorists, abolitionists, and community builders who understood that liberation does not come from being integrated into oppressive systems but from transforming them.
This lineage matters because neurodiversity justice is not a trend. It is not a workplace initiative. It is not a training module. It is a continuation of generations of disabled and neurodivergent people fighting for autonomy, dignity, safety, belonging, and power. When we speak of shifting from advocacy to activism, we are acknowledging that the work of survival has never been enough. We deserve more than survival. We deserve systems that learn from our ways of thinking, that adapt to our sensory realities, that honor our communication patterns, and that treat our presence as essential to the fabric of human community.
Understanding these histories is not an academic exercise. It is the foundation for why this movement is necessary, why change must be structural, and why justice requires us to build something entirely new.
What assumptions about “normal” have I inherited without questioning where they came from?
How do the histories of industrialization, psychiatry, and eugenics still shape the environments I participate in today?
Inclusion vs Integration
One of the most important distinctions we can make in this work is the difference between inclusion and integration. These two words are often used interchangeably in institutional settings, but they describe entirely different realities. Integration is what happens when a system stays exactly the same, and a neurodivergent person is expected to enter it as-is. The structure, expectations, sensory environment, communication norms, and cultural values remain untouched. The burden falls on the neurodivergent person to adapt, endure, translate, and survive. Integration functions as a form of conditional acceptance. You can be here, but only if you behave in ways the system already understands. You can be here, but only if your presence does not inconvenience the people in power. You can be here, but only if you learn to mask.
Inclusion, in contrast, requires transformation. It asks the system to change, not the person. True inclusion is not about placing neurodivergent people in existing structures; it is about questioning why those structures were built the way they were in the first place. It means examining the unwritten rules of communication, the sensory assumptions built into physical spaces, the cultural expectations around timeliness, professionalism, comportment, productivity, emotional expression, and participation. It asks who benefits from these norms, who is harmed by them, and who was excluded from their creation. Inclusion is not a matter of access to a space. It is a matter of whether the space can hold you without demanding that you shrink.
Most organizations believe they are practicing inclusion when they are actually practicing integration. A classroom might “include” an autistic student by placing them in the room, but if the pace, sensory environment, expectations, and disciplinary structures remain unchanged, the student is not truly included; they are simply exposed. A workplace might hire neurodivergent employees as part of a diversity initiative, but if the communication culture punishes directness, if the schedule ignores sensory needs, if the evaluation metrics prioritize social performance over actual work, then the workplace has not included anyone. It has assimilated them into a system hostile to their nervous system. The harm is rebranded as opportunity.
Inclusion demands a different set of questions. Instead of asking how neurodivergent people can better fit into environments, inclusion asks how environments can better reflect the reality of neurodivergent bodies and minds. It asks what norms are truly necessary and what norms exist simply because they were never questioned. It challenges the idea that there is one correct way to communicate, one correct way to organize time, one correct path to success, or one acceptable way to move through a room. Inclusion asks us to dismantle the myth of the “neutral environment,” because no environment is neutral. Every environment is built around someone’s comfort. Inclusion shifts that comfort from the majority to the collective.
This distinction matters because integration still maintains the hierarchy of normalcy. It reinforces the idea that some bodies and minds set the standard while others must catch up. Inclusion rejects that hierarchy altogether. It does not seek to make neurodivergent people more palatable to the majority; it seeks to rewrite the conditions that made palatability a requirement in the first place. It honors neurodivergent embodiment as a legitimate way of being. It centers safety over conformity, belonging over performance, connection over compliance.
This is why the shift from integration to inclusion is such a radical departure from traditional disability frameworks. Integration is often presented as a kindness. Inclusion reveals that kindness is insufficient when the structure itself is unjust. Neurodiversity justice pushes even further, beyond inclusion, toward liberation. It insists that systems do not get to decide whether we belong. We belong because we exist. Systems must reorganize around that truth.
When people say they want inclusion, many of them mean integration. They want diversity without discomfort, change without disruption, representation without redistribution of power. But inclusion, when taken seriously, demands that we interrogate everything: how we build classrooms, how we structure workplaces, how we host events, how we communicate, how we define success, how we measure competence, how we design public life. Inclusion is not an invitation to sit at the table. It is an invitation to ask why the table is shaped the way it is, who built it, who was left out, and whether it should be rebuilt entirely.
True inclusion requires humility, flexibility, and a willingness to unlearn deeply held assumptions about what is “normal.” It requires listening to neurodivergent people and believing what we say about our needs, our bodies, and our experiences. It requires distributing comfort equitably rather than concentrating it in the hands of those who already hold power. Most of all, inclusion requires imagination: the ability to envision systems that were never designed for us and then redesign them anyway.
Inclusion is not about letting neurodivergent people in. It is about building a world where we never had to fight for the right to be here in the first place.
Where in my own environment have I mistaken integration for inclusion?
What assumptions about “normal behavior” or ”professionalism” need to be dismantled for true inclusion to be possible?
Language, Communication, and Culture
Language is one of the most powerful tools a society has for shaping reality. It is never just descriptive; it is formative. It tells us who belongs, whose experiences are credible, and which ways of being are seen as legitimate. When we talk about neurodivergence, the language we use carries generations of history, bias, and control. For decades, neurodivergent people have been described through a vocabulary that centers pathology and deficit, as though our minds are problems to be managed rather than identities to be understood. Neurodiversity justice requires us to rethink this entirely. It asks us to choose language that reflects lived truth rather than institutional convenience. It asks us to center the words neurodivergent people use for ourselves, because self-definition is a form of autonomy.
Identity-first language is central to this shift because it affirms that neurodivergence is not an appendage or an affliction, but an integral part of who a person is. When I call myself autistic or ADHD, I am naming a cultural identity, a sensory reality, a cognitive style, and a way of existing in the world that is inseparable from everything I perceive and create. This is not semantics. It is a rejection of the medicalized idea that autism is something external that happens to a person, something that can be separated from the self. Person-first constructions emerged from professional discomfort, from a desire to maintain distance from what was labeled as disorder. But for neurodivergent people, those constructions often erase the very thing that shapes our experiences most. Inclusion begins with honoring the language communities choose for themselves.
Communication is another place where culture and power collide. Neurotypical communication norms are treated as universal even though they represent only one style among many. Eye contact, quick conversational turn-taking, reading subtext, modulating tone, performing warmth, and processing information rapidly are not markers of intelligence or relational skill; they are cultural preferences. Autistic communication, for example, is often direct, precise, deeply honest, and grounded in shared focus. ADHD communication might be nonlinear, associative, exploratory, and insight-driven. These ways of speaking are neither inferior nor accidental. They are expressions of how our brains organize meaning. When neurotypical norms are treated as universal, every other communication style is misread as deficit, rudeness, detachment, or incompetence. Neurodiversity justice demands a wider understanding of communication, one that sees difference as variation rather than deviation.
True inclusion means expanding the definition of communication to encompass written language, typing, visual expression, scripts, echolalia, stimming, parallel presence, silence, and asynchronous exchange. Many neurodivergent people think best when speaking is optional and time is flexible. Many of us express ourselves most clearly in writing. Many of us connect through shared interests, pattern recognition, or parallel activity rather than constant verbal engagement. And many of us regulate through movement, repetition, or sensory grounding. These forms of communication are every bit as real, expressive, and relational as neurotypical conversation. The problem is not that neurodivergent communication is unclear. The problem is that institutions are not designed to understand us.
This is why the double empathy framework is so important to the neurodiversity movement. It shows that communication difficulties between neurodivergent and neurotypical people are reciprocal, not one-sided. The gap lies not in the autistic or ADHD person but in the mismatch between two different social languages. In autistic-autistic communication, understanding is often easier, deeper, and more fluid. In ADHD-ADHD conversations, associative leaps make intuitive sense. The idea that neurodivergent people are inherently poor communicators crumbles when we speak to each other. What we see instead is a profound clarity. The disconnect arises when neurotypical norms are treated as the only valid language.
Language also shapes how we relate to ourselves. Many neurodivergent people grow up hearing that we are too much, too literal, too sensitive, too intense, too scattered, too emotional, too blunt, too quiet, too loud, too honest, too inconsistent. These judgments become internalized long before we understand our neurotype. They shape the stories we tell ourselves about our worth, our intelligence, our competence, and our humanity. Reclaiming language is therefore an act of liberation, not just communication. It allows us to replace narratives of defect with narratives of identity, community, and pride.
Culture is built from shared meanings, and neurodivergent people have a culture. It is found in our humor, our sensory worlds, our relationships to truth-telling, our stimming and flapping and fidgeting, our deep dives into interests, our ways of connecting around specificity and pattern, our preference for depth over small talk, our parallel presence, our honesty, our creativity, and our refusal to pretend. When we name this culture, we honor it. When we design systems around it, we create belonging. But when institutions ignore it, misinterpret it, or punish it, we create harm.
The work of neurodiversity justice insists that communication equity is not about teaching neurodivergent people to meet neurotypical expectations. It is about expanding what counts as communication so people are not forced to distort themselves in order to be heard. It is about creating environments where no one needs to translate their interior world into someone else’s language just to participate. It is about recognizing that communication is not merely verbal exchange but shared regulation, shared presence, and shared humanity.
At its core, this work asks one simple question: whose language shapes the culture? If it is always the language of the majority, then inclusion is impossible. But when neurodivergent ways of speaking, moving, and expressing are recognized as equal, the culture itself becomes more honest, more accessible, and more human.
Whose communication style sets the standard in the spaces I move through?
What forms of communication do I overlook because they do not match neurotypical norms?
Sensory, Policy, and Public Life: Designing for Nervous Systems
If language is the architecture of belonging, then the sensory world is the architecture of survival. Every space carries a sensory atmosphere, a texture of light and sound and movement that shapes how people feel before a single word is spoken. For neurodivergent people, this atmosphere determines not only comfort but possibility. A space that overwhelms the senses can make participation impossible, no matter how welcoming the intent. A space that respects sensory reality can create safety, clarity, and regulation. Yet most environments, from workplaces and classrooms to festivals and city streets, are designed around the sensory thresholds of the neurotypical majority. They assume that bright lights, constant noise, overlapping voices, strong scents, and unpredictable movement are tolerable or benign. For neurodivergent nervous systems, those conditions can be disorienting, painful, or destabilizing.
Designing with sensory awareness is not about making spaces quieter or softer for the sake of accommodation. It is about recognizing that sensory experience is a dimension of human diversity, just as real as language or culture. It is about acknowledging that sensory needs are not preferences; they are physiological truths that shape cognition, regulation, and connection. When we talk about sensory accessibility, we are talking about designing environments that allow people to stay present in their own bodies. That means lighting that does not flicker or overwhelm. That means sound that is managed intentionally rather than allowed to accumulate chaotically. That means spatial layouts that allow for orientation, pathways that reduce crowding, and rest zones where the nervous system can reset without judgment. It means acknowledging that stimming, movement, and fidgeting are regulation strategies, not disruptions.
But sensory design is only one part of this larger picture. Policy is another place where access and exclusion take shape. Policies are not neutral; they carry assumptions about how a person should behave, how they should learn, how they should communicate, how fast they should produce, how consistently they should function, and how they should present themselves. Attendance requirements, meeting structures, performance evaluations, communication expectations, disciplinary procedures—these are all mechanisms that encode neurotypical norms into everyday life. They reward people who can maintain steady energy, rapid processing, emotional performance, quiet endurance, and effortless social fluency. They punish people whose nervous systems operate differently.
Most policies assume that regulation is an individual responsibility rather than a collective one. They assume that focus, stamina, and emotional control are signs of character rather than expressions of environmental fit. They assume that success depends on compliance with established norms rather than on equitable access to participation. When neurodivergent people struggle under these policies, the system frames the problem as a deficit in the person rather than as a mismatch between the person and the environment. Neurodiversity justice reframes these failures as systemic, not individual. It challenges institutions to rewrite policies in ways that reflect the diversity of bodies and minds they claim to serve. Policies should not require neurodivergent people to justify their needs or disclose their identities to receive basic dignity. They should anticipate variation as a natural part of any community.
Public life is often where these dynamics become most visible. Festivals, parades, concerts, markets, conferences, and community gatherings reveal a culture’s sensory and relational values. Too often, these events are designed in ways that make participation inaccessible for neurodivergent people, not because we do not desire community or celebration, but because the sensory and social conditions are unbearable. Crowds, sudden noises, flashing lights, unstructured interaction, and constant stimulation make many public spaces places of risk rather than connection. When neurodivergent people avoid these environments, society often interprets this as withdrawal or disinterest, rather than as evidence of environments built without us in mind.
But public life can be reimagined. Fish in a Tree’s work with sensory design, festival accessibility, and community events like the Neurodiversity Pride Parade demonstrates that public joy can be accessible when designed intentionally. Celebrations do not have to be loud to be meaningful. They do not have to be chaotic to be vibrant. They do not have to rely on sensory overload to feel alive. When events include quiet zones, predictable schedules, sensory maps, clear signage, communication supports, and neurodivergent-led planning, they become places where more people can participate fully. Public life becomes not an endurance test but a site of shared regulation, creativity, and belonging.
Designing for nervous systems is ultimately an act of cultural care. It asks us to imagine what environments would look like if they were built around comfort rather than conformity, regulation rather than performance, connection rather than control. It requires us to see every choice, lighting, sound, layout, pacing, policy, protocol, not as logistical details but as moral decisions. Every environment communicates who is welcome and who is an afterthought. Neurodiversity justice insists that no one should have to choose between their body and their community. When we redesign spaces to honor sensory truth, when we rewrite policies to honor neurological variation, when we reshape public life to honor diverse expressions of joy, we move closer to a world where neurodivergent people can participate without harm.
This is what it means to design with and for nervous systems. It is not an accommodation. It is a new definition of community.
What messages do the sensory, policy, and cultural environments I move through send about who they were built for?
How would this space look different if it were designed around regulation, not endurance?
Fish in a Tree and the Neurodiversity Coalition of America: Movement Infrastructure
Everything I’ve shared so far, the framework of neurodiversity justice, the difference between inclusion and integration, the role of language, communication, sensory design, policy, and public life, comes down to one essential truth: movements need infrastructure. Ideas, no matter how transformative, cannot create systemic change on their own. Cultural shifts require institutions, leadership, public scholarship, community networks, and sustained collective effort. In the neurodiversity justice movement, that infrastructure has historically been missing. Neurodivergent people have long had passion, brilliance, and vision, but we have not had the institutional homes that other justice movements rely on to coordinate strategy, develop leaders, educate the public, produce scholarship, and build power. Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism and the Neurodiversity Coalition of America were created to fill that gap.
Fish in a Tree is not a service provider. It is not a clinic, a therapy center, or a resource hub in the conventional sense. It is a neurodivergent-led cultural and educational institution. It is a place where ideas are developed, movement frameworks are built, public scholarship is produced, leadership is cultivated, and systems are challenged. Through our Public Education Series, including the Community Guide to Neurodiversity Justice and the Community Guide to Neurodiversity Inclusion and Accessibility, we are building the intellectual backbone of the movement, a set of living documents that articulate both the moral framework and the practical blueprint for systemic redesign. These guides circulate nationally and globally, shaping conversations in education, healthcare, employment, policy, and public culture. They are not technical manuals; they are cultural interventions, written from inside the community and grounded in lived experience.
Fish in a Tree also builds cultural and narrative infrastructure through public programming. The Neurodiversity Justice Bookshelf, our global book club and author series, amplifies the work of neurodivergent writers who are expanding the cultural imagination of what neurodivergence can be. NeuroStage, our speaker and performance series, brings neurodivergent art, scholarship, storytelling, and public thought into the spotlight, creating visibility and representation that shift societal narratives. These programs are not entertainment or education alone; they are mechanisms of cultural power. They help define what neurodiversity means in public consciousness. They create space for neurodivergent people to speak in our own voices rather than being interpreted through clinical or institutional lenses. They build a shared cultural identity that strengthens the movement.
Additionally, Fish in a Tree is laying the groundwork for the future and sustainability of the neurodiversity justice movement by working to establish the first board certified Neurodiversity Consulting Professional Credential for neurodivergent professionals who want to make a living doing this work in a occupational capacity, and working to establish the first Neurodiversity Studies Graduate Degree Program in the US for neurodivergent students who plan to engage in academic scholarship in the field. We are currently working with many organizational, professional, and academic partners to make these initiatives a reality in the coming years.
Another pillar of our work is systems redesign. Fish in a Tree partners with institutions, schools, universities, workplaces, nonprofits, healthcare settings, etc., to help them move beyond accommodation culture toward genuine inclusion rooted in justice. We do not approach this as training or consultation in the traditional sense. We approach it as collaboration. We bring neurodivergent-led frameworks into systems that have historically excluded us, and we guide those systems in rethinking their norms, policies, environments, and cultures. Our work spans sensory redesign, communication audits, policy reform, leadership training, and public programming, all of which center neurodivergent expertise. This is not about helping systems manage neurodivergent people; it is about teaching systems how to transform themselves.
Even with all of this work, a national movement cannot be built by one organization alone. That is where the Neurodiversity Coalition of America comes in. The Coalition is the national governance, coordination, and advocacy arm of this movement. It is led by neurodivergent people and exists to build collective power, unify disparate efforts across the country, and develop a consistent framework for neurodiversity justice across sectors. While Fish in a Tree builds cultural and educational infrastructure, the Coalition builds political and structural infrastructure. It connects local and national partners, aligns policy visions, creates accountability structures, and amplifies community-led efforts that often operate in isolation. It is a vessel for collective mobilization.
Together, Fish in a Tree and the Neurodiversity Coalition of America form an ecosystem: one rooted in culture, education, policy, creativity, and public life. One that builds leaders, shapes narratives, and offers institutions the tools they need to transform. One that connects neurodivergent people not only to each other but to a movement larger than any one of us. In a landscape where neurodiversity is often co-opted, diluted, or depoliticized, these institutions anchor the work in justice, lived expertise, and community power.
This is what neurodiversity justice looks like in practice: not a scattered collection of efforts, but a coherent movement with cultural homes, intellectual frameworks, public platforms, and national coordination. A movement with places to learn, to gather, to build, to celebrate, to rest, and to lead. A movement that belongs to neurodivergent people and is shaped by our wisdom, our bodies, our histories, our sensory truths, and our dreams for the future.
This is the infrastructure we are building. This is the work that makes everything else possible.
What forms of movement-building require infrastructure rather than individual effort?
How might my own community or institution contribute to the ecosystem of neurodiversity justice?
Moving From Advocacy to Activism
To understand where we are heading as a movement, we have to be honest about where advocacy has taken us and where it has not. Advocacy has helped many neurodivergent people survive systems that were never designed for us. It has opened the door for accommodations, created avenues for legal protection, and given some people the language to recognize their own neurodivergence. But advocacy, at least in the way it has been practiced inside traditional institutions, has also kept us trapped inside the frameworks that harm us. It has focused on integration rather than transformation. It has asked neurodivergent people to become better navigators of inaccessible systems rather than demanding that those systems be rebuilt. Advocacy, as it is most often practiced, has reinforced the idea that inclusion is something the powerful grant rather than something the community claims.
Activism begins where advocacy reaches its limits. Activism names what advocacy often cannot: that the systems we are asked to function inside are fundamentally misaligned with neurodivergent existence. Activism refuses to treat survival strategies as solutions. It refuses to interpret burnout, masking, sensory overwhelm, workplace trauma, or exclusion as individual failings. Activism looks at these patterns across millions of neurodivergent lives and sees not personal struggle but structural design. It recognizes that a society built around conformity will always frame difference as dysfunction. And it refuses to accept that as the baseline.
Moving from advocacy to activism means shifting from a mindset of helping individuals adapt to a mindset of redesigning environments, policies, and cultural norms. It means asking not how a neurodivergent person can succeed in a system but whether the system itself is ethical, humane, or sustainable. It means acknowledging that harm is not an accident but a consequence of design, and that justice requires redesign. Activism is what happens when neurodivergent people stop waiting for permission to belong and begin building the structures we need for ourselves. It is what happens when we stop asking systems to understand us and start teaching systems how to transform.
This shift is unfolding now through the collective work of neurodivergent adults who are organizing, writing, teaching, creating, and leading in ways that challenge the old narratives of disorder and deficit. It is unfolding through cultural work, through public scholarship, through sensory redesign, through policy change, through community building, through art, through storytelling, through the refusal to mask in the presence of one another. It is unfolding through organizations like Fish in a Tree and the Neurodiversity Coalition of America that do not simply describe the world but reshape it. Activism is the moment when the movement becomes its own infrastructure.
There is a profound difference between being included in a system and being able to change it. Advocacy often stops at the first. Activism insists on the second. Activism is not louder than advocacy; it is deeper. It does not ask for adjustments; it asks for justice. It does not request access; it asserts agency. It does not frame neurodivergent people as recipients of support; it recognizes us as cultural leaders, theorists, builders, and agents of systemic change. Activism demands that neurodiversity be understood not as a clinical category but as a political identity shaped by histories of exclusion and ongoing resistance.
When we talk about moving from advocacy to activism, we are talking about shifting the center of gravity. Instead of asking neurodivergent people to conform to institutions, we ask institutions to learn from neurodivergent wisdom. Instead of designing around the comfort of the majority, we design around the safety and dignity of those most impacted by exclusion. Instead of addressing only individual needs, we address structural conditions. Instead of adding neurodivergent people into existing environments, we rewrite the environments themselves.
This shift is not symbolic. It is material. It affects how classrooms are built, how workplaces are structured, how policies are written, how events are organized, how research is conducted, how leadership is cultivated, and how culture is imagined. Activism transforms the world in ways that make life possible for neurodivergent people without demanding that we hide who we are. And when neurodivergent people no longer have to mask to survive, the entire culture becomes healthier, more honest, and more humane.
Moving from advocacy to activism is not only the future of the neurodiversity movement; it is the only path toward liberation. It is the shift from surviving to living. It is the shift from being tolerated to being valued. It is the shift from waiting to building. And it is the work we are doing together, right now.
Where in my life or institution am I still relying on advocacy when activism is required?
What would it mean to redesign, rather than repair, the systems around me?
Closing & Invitation
As we come to the end of this hour, I want to return to something simple and human: the way it feels to be a neurodivergent person in the world. So much of what we have discussed today, systems, structures, history, policy, sensory design, cultural narratives, comes down to the day-to-day experience of carrying a nervous system that was never considered in the building of the environments we move through. Neurodiversity justice is not an abstract theory. It is a response to that lived reality. It is a recognition that the exhaustion we feel is not imaginary, that the pressure to mask is not accidental, that the burnout so many of us experience is not personal failure, that the isolation we carry is not inevitable. It is a recognition that the problem was never our minds. It was the systems that were not built with our minds in mind.
The work ahead of us is not small. It asks us to reshape cultural norms, transform institutions, rethink policies, redesign environments, and reimagine what belonging feels like. But it is also deeply intimate. It begins with the question of whether our nervous systems are allowed to rest, whether our communication is allowed to be understood, whether our bodies are allowed to take up space without apology, whether we can move through the world without constantly calculating how to appear acceptable. Justice is not only structural; it is sensory. It is emotional. It is relational. It is the feeling of being able to take a breath without bracing.
What I hope you leave with today is a sense that this movement is not only possible, but already underway. Neurodivergent people across the country and across the world are organizing, creating, writing, building, and leading. We are developing the frameworks, the culture, the public scholarship, and the infrastructure that have been missing for far too long. Fish in a Tree and the Neurodiversity Coalition of America are part of that work, but they are not the whole of it. This movement belongs to all of us—every neurodivergent person who has ever been told to tone it down, speed it up, try harder, be quieter, act normal, or pretend to be someone we are not. It belongs to every neurodivergent person who has ever wondered if they were the only one who felt this way. You are not. This movement is the proof.
So I want to leave you with a question, one that sits at the heart of neurodiversity justice: What would your work, your classroom, your research, your practice, your community look like if no one had to mask to survive? What would change if safety, not conformity, was the foundation? What would become possible if the nervous system, not the norm, was the starting point?
These are not rhetorical questions. They are invitations to rethink your field. Invitations to redesign your environments. Invitations to listen differently. Invitations to build alongside us. Invitations to be part of a movement that is still being shaped and reshaped by the very people it seeks to liberate.
Thank you for being here, for listening, for bringing your own nervous system into this space with honesty and curiosity. Thank you for being part of a conversation that is larger than any one talk, any one institution, or any one moment. This movement grows through connection, collaboration, and community. My invitation to you is simple: join us. Learn with us. Build with us. Imagine with us. And help create a world where neurodivergent people do not have to choose between belonging and being ourselves.
To learn more about the movement and to get involved, please reach out to me and my organizations.