Rethinking Neurodiversity Language, Colonial Frameworks, and the Trouble with Naming Anything at All
By Bridgette Hamstead
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about language, specifically, the language we use in the neurodiversity movement to talk about ourselves and each other. I don’t mean just the obvious stuff, like the fight between identity-first and person-first language (though that’s part of it), or the tired debates about functioning labels. I mean something deeper. I mean the architecture underneath those choices. The way our naming systems, “neurodivergent,” “neurotypical,” “normal,” “atypical,” “support needs," carry hidden assumptions about who gets to be the default, who gets to be defined in contrast, and what makes one kind of brain more worthy of accommodation, attention, or legitimacy than another.
What prompted all this reflection was actually a conversation I had on LinkedIn, not even about neurodiversity, at first, but about racial justice. I was talking with someone in the Black community who was explaining why they preferred terms like “historically excluded” instead of “marginalized,” and why they no longer use “BIPOC.” They explained how so much of the language available to describe nonwhite people in America is language that centers whiteness as the norm, language rooted in colonial logics of domination, othering, and comparison. Even terms that seem progressive, like “minority” or “marginalized,” still define people by their relationship to power structures they didn’t ask to be measured against. That conversation cracked something open for me. It made me wonder: If those same dynamics are at play in how race is talked about in the U.S., what might that mean for the way we talk about neurodivergence?
Because when you stop to think about it, so much of the language in our movement does exactly that, measures us against something we didn’t choose to be compared to. Neurodivergent only exists as a term because we’ve accepted neurotypical as a norm. It defines our entire category by deviation. The same goes for phrases like “atypical development,” “behavioral disorder,” “nonverbal,” “special needs,” or even “invisible disability.” There’s always a built-in assumption of a baseline that we are not meeting. A standard we are diverging from. An ideal we are failing to live up to.
To be clear: I’m not saying these terms aren’t useful. I’ve used them. I still use them. Sometimes they’re the only available shorthand we have to connect with each other, or to demand recognition in systems that won’t accommodate what they don’t already name. But I’m beginning to ask different questions. Not just “What do these words mean?” but “Where do these words come from?” and “Whose power do they serve?” and “What happens to us when we keep describing ourselves in relation to a norm that was never designed to include us?”
Around the same time, I was approached by someone organizing around a “Neurodiversity Pride” concept that used the word WILD, an acronym of sorts based on ideas like “too loud, too much, too weird,” reclaimed as a kind of banner of pride. Like how the LGBTQIA+ community reclaimed the word “Queer,” this group was reclaiming “Wild” to flip the script on stigma. I understood what they were trying to do. I understood the impulse. But it didn’t sit right with me.
Because personally, I don’t identify with that language. I have never thought of myself as wild. Not once. I have never felt too loud or too much or too weird. I’ve felt misunderstood, yes. I’ve felt boxed in, erased, underestimated, punished for being nonlinear or intense or deeply feeling. But I’ve never felt like too anything. I have always felt like myself. And I don’t want to build a new identity around reclaiming other people’s projections. I don’t want my pride to begin in someone else’s insult. I don’t want to define myself in terms of a backlash. I want to define myself on my own terms.
That doesn’t mean I think people who do identify with “wild” are wrong. Not at all. Reclamation can be powerful, healing, and transformative. I’ve seen what it’s done for other movements, how words that were once weapons have become tools of solidarity and resistance. But I also think we need space to interrogate which words we reclaim, and why. Not every term that was used against us needs to be salvaged. Not every label has to be made beautiful. Sometimes we need to ask: What kind of world are we building if we take the language of harm and wear it like a crown? And more importantly, is that the only kind of power we think we’re allowed to have?
I don’t have the answers to these questions. That’s important to say upfront. This essay isn’t a manifesto. It’s not a takedown. It’s not a polished roadmap to the One True Language of Neurodivergence. I don’t believe there is one. Language is always contextual, always changing, always shaped by culture, history, and power. What I do know is that I’ve been sitting with all of this, and I’m not the only one. More and more people in the neurodivergent community are starting to ask: What does it mean to describe ourselves in language that centers the “typical”? What do we lose when we build movements around terms that originated in pathology, diagnostics, and deficit? And what would it look like to speak about ourselves without positioning ourselves as the deviation from someone else’s center?
These are not easy questions. They reach back into the roots of psychology, psychiatry, education, social work, and medicine, fields shaped, explicitly and implicitly, by white supremacy, colonialism, eugenics, and capitalism. The very idea of “normalcy” as a concept is a historical invention. As disability studies scholar Lennard Davis explains, the word “normal” only emerged in the 19th century, alongside the rise of statistics and industrialization, when humans began to be measured against standardized norms for efficiency, productivity, and control. Before that, there was no concept of a standard body or mind. You were just a person, shaped by circumstance, fate, or the will of the gods. “Normal” is not neutral. It is a product of power.
So when we call someone “neurotypical,” what are we actually saying? That their brain conforms to some ideal of linearity, predictability, and social ease? That they are what the systems were built for? That they are the default against which we are compared? And when we call ourselves “neurodivergent,” are we not then locking ourselves into an identity defined by contrast?
I’m not sure what the alternative is. But I think it’s worth asking. Some people have suggested moving away from binaries like neurotypical/neurodivergent and instead embracing frameworks of neurological pluralism, neuro-relationality, or cognitive diversity. Others prefer to name their specific identities, autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, without wrapping them in the larger umbrella of divergence. Still others are experimenting with wholly new terms, community-specific words, or poetic reframings that center experience over categorization. There’s no consensus yet. Maybe there never will be. But maybe that’s the point.
The lack of consensus isn’t a flaw in the movement; it’s a reflection of its richness. Neurodivergent people are not a monolith, and we do not experience the world, or our own identities, in the same way. Some of us find power in shared umbrella terms like “neurodivergent” because they offer solidarity, a way to connect across diagnostic boundaries and rally around common access needs. Others find those same terms flattening, a way of erasing difference in the name of unity. Both perspectives are valid. The challenge is how to hold space for all of them, how to build a movement where no one has to give up their specificity, and no one gets left behind.
There are also real material stakes to this conversation. Language is not just how we talk about ourselves to each other; it’s how we talk to systems that hold power over our lives. It’s how we advocate for policy change, write grant proposals, navigate medical appointments, apply for accommodations, explain ourselves to teachers, employers, therapists, and sometimes even to our own families. We need language that is recognizable enough to be legible in those spaces, but also radical enough to challenge those spaces themselves. That’s a hard line to walk.
Take, for example, the term “invisible disability.” It’s a phrase many of us have used to describe the way our needs are overlooked because we don’t use mobility aids, don’t have obvious speech differences, or are skilled at masking. But the term itself raises questions: invisible to whom? And why does visibility become the metric for legitimacy? Framing our experience as invisible often re-centers the observer, the non-disabled, neurotypical person who cannot “see” our disability, as the one whose perception matters. It also risks reinforcing a binary between “visible” and “invisible” disability that collapses under closer scrutiny, especially for those of us whose experiences are fluid, context-dependent, or hybrid.
Or consider how often we hear terms like “behavioral challenges” in school settings or “noncompliant” in clinical ones. These are not neutral descriptors. They are judgments, usually made by people in positions of authority about people they don’t understand. They pathologize responses that are often reasonable reactions to distress, sensory overload, miscommunication, or unmet needs. But because the language is so normalized, so embedded in institutional discourse, it becomes hard to challenge without being accused of being oppositional or difficult.
Even “support needs," a term that has replaced the older and far more harmful “low-functioning” and “high-functioning” labels, still operates within a deficit framework, depending on how it's used. It can help communicate what accommodations someone might require, but it can also flatten the complex ways that someone might be highly capable in one area while deeply struggling in another. And again, it defines people by what they need in order to participate in a world that wasn't designed for them, rather than asking why the world itself is so inaccessible in the first place.
That’s the problem with so many of our terms: they are descriptive on the surface, but diagnostic underneath. They organize people into categories that can be useful in some moments, but limiting in others. And often, they smuggle in assumptions about normalcy, independence, value, and productivity that we didn’t consent to.
So what do we do? How do we talk about ourselves, especially in a world that demands we describe, define, and defend ourselves constantly, without reinforcing the very systems we are trying to change?
I don’t have a neat answer. But I do have some thoughts, and some things I’ve heard from others that have helped me stretch my own thinking.
Some people are advocating for language that centers relationality over typology. Instead of talking about “types” of minds, they talk about ways of relating to the world, to time, to each other, to systems. This shift reframes disability and difference not as static traits, but as relational dynamics that emerge in context. For example, instead of saying “she has high support needs,” we might say, “she experiences frequent access mismatches in environments that don’t accommodate her communication style or sensory processing.” It’s more cumbersome, yes, but it’s also more accurate. It shifts the focus from the individual as problem to the system as site of responsibility.
Others have begun to use terms like neuroexpansive, neurovariant, or cognitive liberation as alternatives or supplements to neurodivergent. These are not yet widely adopted, but they reflect a desire to move beyond the “divergence-from-typical” framing and toward something more generative. I’ve also seen some community members use terms like neurokin, neuroqueer, or neurorelational, each with its own lineage and politics, to signal identity, alignment, or shared politic.
Of course, not every word is right for every person. Language is lived. Some people want clarity. Others want poetry. Some want diagnostic specificity; others want to burn the DSM to the ground. Some want terms that signal belonging in a legal or institutional framework (especially for purposes of accessing care or protections), while others want to be completely illegible to those systems. These are not abstract philosophical dilemmas. They are daily negotiations of power, identity, and survival.
And that’s why I’m writing this. Not because I know what we should all say, but because I think we need to be in conversation about how we say anything at all. We’ve inherited a lexicon from systems that never saw us as fully human. We’ve built movements using terms that were first used to control, categorize, and exclude us. And we’ve done that because often, there was no other choice. But now, we are in a moment of possibility. We are dreaming bigger. We are imagining freer futures. And those futures deserve language that doesn't begin in pathology and end in compliance.
Part of what I’m learning is that this conversation about language isn’t just about words. It’s about worldview. When we talk about “neurodiversity,” we’re not just naming difference, we’re naming a philosophy. A movement. A way of understanding human variation that resists the categorization of minds into the binary of “healthy” and “disordered,” “normal” and “abnormal,” “productive” and “deficient.” But if we’re not vigilant, even the language of neurodiversity itself can become co-opted, sanitized, and diluted, used by institutions that want the appearance of inclusion without the deep structural change inclusion actually requires.
We’ve seen this happen in other movements. “Diversity” in corporate contexts has often been reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet, stripped of any connection to power analysis or justice. “Equity” becomes a checkbox. “Inclusion” becomes an excuse to assimilate people into existing systems, rather than transforming the systems themselves. The same is starting to happen with “neurodiversity.” It’s being used in hiring brochures and DEI trainings and nonprofit language, sometimes with little regard for its roots in disability rights, mad pride, and autistic self-advocacy. The term becomes aesthetic, nice to say, easier to fund, without any reckoning with the systems of oppression that still shape whose minds are seen as valuable, and whose are not.
And here again, language becomes the battlefield. When a company says they are “neurodiversity inclusive,” but their application processes penalize nontraditional communication, or their workplace structures require constant multitasking and sensory overwhelm, what does “inclusive” actually mean? When a school says it supports “neurodivergent learners,” but still punishes “disruptive behavior,” what counts as support? If the words are there but the worldview hasn’t changed, have we really gotten anywhere?
This is why reclaiming the philosophical core of our language matters. The neurodiversity paradigm was never meant to be just a set of labels, it was a challenge to the very foundation of how Western societies define intelligence, behavior, and value. It asks: What if the problem is not the person, but the environment? What if our differences are not deficits, but forms of human diversity? What if the goal is not to normalize, but to liberate?
But even as we hold that paradigm, we have to keep asking: Which words still serve us? Which ones are holding us back? Which terms are helping us organize and advocate, and which ones are slowly reinscribing the same logics we were trying to escape?
And then there’s the question of who gets to decide what language we use. This is perhaps the most critical layer of all. The neurodiversity movement is, at its core, a community-led movement. It emerged from the work of autistic self-advocates, mad pride organizers, disabled feminists, and neurodivergent thinkers who insisted on speaking for ourselves after centuries of being spoken about. But increasingly, language decisions, especially in educational, clinical, or corporate contexts, are being made by people outside the community. Professionals. Academics. Funders. Allies. People who mean well, but who do not live the realities they are trying to describe.
This has real consequences. When researchers insist on using terms like “ASD” (Autism Spectrum Disorder) because it’s the clinical term, they reinforce medicalized framings even when those terms are rejected by the autistic people they’re studying. When nonprofits use euphemisms like “differently abled” or “special needs,” they obscure the reality of ableism and the fight for disability rights. When companies promote “neuroinclusion” without addressing ableist hiring practices or leadership imbalances, they use our language to mask their inaction.
The words we use are not just descriptors. They are sites of struggle. They determine funding streams, diagnostic access, workplace accommodations, public perception, and self-concept. And they shape whose voices get heard, and whose get ignored.
That’s why I keep returning to this idea: we must be able to hold complexity without shutting down the conversation. There is no single correct vocabulary that will make all of this neat. We will not arrive at a perfect term that satisfies everyone. But we can cultivate a practice of critical naming, a way of speaking that is intentional, flexible, and grounded in the realities of power and history. We can ask ourselves:
Where did this word come from?
Who benefits from its use?
Who does it leave out?
What worldview does it reflect?
Does it name the experience, or the judgment of the experience?
Does it center the system or the person?
Does it make space for liberation?
And we can keep asking those questions, over and over again, as our communities grow, as our language evolves, as our needs shift. Because the goal isn’t linguistic purity, it’s collective liberation. And liberation will always require more than one dialect.
I don’t know what we should call ourselves now. But I know I want us to ask together.
In fact, I think the act of asking, publicly, imperfectly, and in community, is more powerful than any definitive answer could ever be. The very act of interrogating our language means that we are still alive to the truth that the systems we move through were never neutral. That the words handed down to us by schools, clinicians, policy makers, and even early advocates were shaped by specific agendas, many of them white, Western, medicalized, and steeped in colonial logics. Language is never separate from history. And so any language we use to describe ourselves now carries traces of those histories in its DNA.
That doesn’t mean we need to abandon the terms we’ve built our movements on. It means we need to treat those terms as living things, capable of growth, of critique, of contradiction. “Neurodivergent” may be rooted in contrast to a norm, but it has also created unprecedented connection, solidarity, and organizing power across communities who might otherwise be siloed by diagnosis. It’s given us language to name what we knew in our bones: that our brains weren’t broken, and that we were never alone.
At the same time, I wonder what it might look like to name ourselves not in relation to someone else’s norm, but from the inside of our own lived experience. What would that sound like? What language would emerge if we began not with the question “How are we different from them?” but “What do we know about ourselves that they’ve never understood?”
Maybe it wouldn’t be a single word at all. Maybe it would be an ecology of terms, personal, political, poetic. Maybe we need metaphors as much as metrics. Maybe the language of medicine will never get us free. Maybe we need the language of art, of culture, of kinship. Maybe we need new grammars entirely.
I think often of how disability justice leaders like Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha have taught us that access is not just a checklist, it’s an invitation to relationship. That disability is not just an identity, it’s a site of generative friction, where systems and bodies collide. And that liberation is not just about visibility or inclusion, but about radically reimagining what we owe each other. Language, in that frame, is not just a tool, it’s a relational act. The words we use should help us find one another. They should help us build structures that can hold us. They should make space for more than one truth at a time.
This means we also have to leave room for discomfort. For not knowing. For the inevitable frictions that arise when people have different attachments to the same word. Some autistic people are deeply affirmed by the label. Others reject it entirely, calling themselves “noncompliant” or “unspeakable” or “undefinable.” Some ADHDers love the term neurodivergent. Others find it too vague, too politicized, too far removed from the very real struggles they face with executive function, impulse control, or time blindness. And some people feel forced to use clinical terms just to get access to care, even when those terms feel alien to their own self-concept.
These differences matter. They are not problems to be solved. They are invitations to deepen our listening. When someone tells you they don’t like the word you’ve chosen for yourself, or for them, that doesn’t mean you’ve failed. It means you’ve encountered the edge of a shared vocabulary, and you’re being invited to pause, ask, clarify. Not everything has to collapse into consensus. Movements can hold contradiction if they are strong enough.
And to be clear: many people, especially those most historically excluded, Black, Indigenous, multiply marginalized, non-speaking, nonsymbolic, chronically institutionalized, or criminalized neurodivergent people, have been raising these questions about language for a long time. What’s changing now, I think, is that more people are finally ready to listen. More people are seeing that our words carry not just meaning, but memory. That language can be a door or a wall. That what we call ourselves matters, not because the right label will save us, but because naming is part of the work of reclaiming our humanity.
So where does that leave us? For me, it leaves me with more questions than answers. But also with a deep commitment to staying in the conversation. To listening across difference. To resisting purity politics, and also resisting the pull to depoliticize our language just to make it easier for institutions to swallow.
I want to be in a movement where we don’t have to erase history to move forward. Where we can use “neurodivergent” and also critique it. Where we can say “wild” and also say “I don’t identify with that.” Where we can hold space for people who want to reclaim slurs and people who want to build entirely new vocabularies. Where our words don’t have to be perfect to be powerful.
And I want us to keep asking: What does our language make possible? What does it shut down? Who does it include, and who does it leave out? Where did it come from, and where might it take us next? Because we deserve language that does more than describe us. We deserve language that believes in us.
We deserve language that believes in us, and that’s not a metaphor. It’s a political and cultural necessity. So many of us have lived entire lifetimes being described in ways that felt alien, inaccurate, dehumanizing, or simply wrong. For those of us who were late-diagnosed, or misdiagnosed, or never diagnosed at all, the absence of language shaped our lives just as much as the presence of it. We knew we were different. But we didn’t know how to say it. And when we did find the words, when someone finally said “autistic” or “ADHD” or “sensory integration” or “neurodivergent," the relief was seismic. It wasn’t just a label. It was a name for the truth we had been carrying in silence. A signal flare. A map. A mirror.
And yet, over time, even those hard-won words can start to feel like clothes that don’t quite fit. Or that used to fit, but don’t anymore. Or that still fit, but you’re tired of explaining them to people who only know how to read diagnostic criteria. I think that’s part of the moment we’re in now. We’re not losing the language of neurodiversity, we’re metabolizing it. We’re turning it over in our hands, testing its weight, asking: is this still mine? Is this still ours?
Some people want more specificity. Others want more poetry. Some want language that can enter the halls of policy. Others want language that can live in poems, in artwork, in the privacy of community care. Some want to reclaim the terms that have been used against them. Others want to bury those terms and never speak them again. Some need words that make sense to their therapists, or their children’s teachers, or their HR departments. Others want words that could never be co-opted by any institution. Some want the freedom to say “disabled” with pride. Others want to be completely free from the binary of abled and disabled altogether.
All of this is part of the story. And all of it belongs.
I keep thinking about something Adrienne Maree Brown said about movement work: “We are creating a world we have never seen before.” That means, inevitably, we are going to need language we have never heard before. Or old words used in new ways. Or no words at all, when none suffice. There will be growing pains. There will be conflict. But there will also be emergence, new concepts, new frameworks, new forms of understanding that come not from institutions but from the ground up, from the people living at the sharp edge of these conversations.
We may not all land in the same place. But we can keep moving together, if we let ourselves stay open.
For myself, I still use the term “neurodivergent.” I still find it useful, especially when I’m trying to connect across diagnoses or advocate for structural change. But I also try to be honest about what that word carries. I know it’s a word born from contrast, from “divergence” from an ideal that never deserved to be the default. I know it’s a word that’s been stretched thin, used in ways that sometimes erase nuance or complexity. I know it’s a word that some people have never felt at home in. So I use it provisionally. I use it with awareness. I use it alongside other words, other truths. I try to stay humble about its limits, and generous about its possibilities.
And I want us all to have that kind of flexibility. To be able to say: This is what I call myself now. It might change. Or it might not. But either way, I know that naming is a powerful act, and I want to do it with care.
That’s why I’m writing this, not to settle the question of what we “should” say, but to open it up. To start a conversation, or continue one that’s already happening in so many corners of our community. A conversation that honors history but doesn’t get stuck in it. That asks hard questions without demanding hard answers. That makes room for many truths, many tongues, many ways of being.
Because if there’s one thing the neurodiversity movement has taught me, it’s that no single narrative can hold us all, and no single label should try to.
The neurodiversity movement, at its best, has always been about making space for multiplicity, not just of minds, but of meaning. That’s why I’m wary of any effort to flatten our language into something too neat, too marketable, too easily consumed. Language that demands unity at the cost of truth. Language that makes us legible to systems of power by erasing the very edges that make us who we are.
Because when we talk about language, we’re also talking about survival. About dignity. About how we recognize ourselves in the mirror, and how we ask others to see us. The words we use are not just semantics; they shape policy, perception, pedagogy, and personhood. They shape who gets believed, who gets care, who gets punished, who gets pathologized. They shape which children are protected and which are surveilled. Which adults are included and which are institutionalized. Which experiences are validated and which are erased.
That’s why we must be brave enough to question even the terms that once felt like salvation. “Neurodivergent” may have given us a collective identity, but it also risks reducing our wildly different experiences into a single category that sometimes obscures as much as it reveals. For instance, the needs of an autistic nonspeaking person with a history of institutional trauma are not the same as those of a late-diagnosed ADHD professional navigating executive dysfunction in a white-collar workplace. Yet both may be described as “neurodivergent,” in the same breath, by the same institutions, with the same toolkit of supports, often designed by neither.
This doesn’t mean we abandon shared terms. It means we approach them critically. We ask who they serve. We ask what they erase. And we insist that shared language cannot come at the expense of specificity, sovereignty, or lived truth.
It also means we need to resist the urge to make ourselves more palatable in order to be understood. To perform acceptability in order to secure resources. To conform our language to what makes neurotypical, able-bodied people feel comfortable. We must refuse the pressure to use “softer” terms, or euphemisms that gloss over real harm. “Special needs” instead of disability. “Differently wired” instead of neurodivergent. “Behavioral challenge” instead of trauma response. These linguistic detours do not serve us. They serve the systems that want our needs to be abstract, unserious, or temporary.
At the same time, we must also hold space for those who are still learning the language, or still finding their voice. Not everyone comes into this movement with a background in disability studies or social justice frameworks. Some people are just trying to survive. Some are navigating late diagnosis, medical gaslighting, or internalized ableism. Some are using the only words they’ve been given. That doesn’t make them less “real,” or less legitimate. It makes them part of the conversation. And it’s our job to meet them where they are, not to police their language, but to expand the possibilities available to them.
I think about that a lot when I reflect on my own journey. The words I use now are not the ones I started with. I have called myself many things over the years, diagnoses, descriptors, self-claims, rejections, jokes, metaphors. I have used the words of the DSM. I have used the words of my community. I have used no words at all, in moments when nothing seemed to fit. And in every season, the language has evolved, not because I was confused, but because I was growing.
And I want that for all of us. I want us to be allowed to outgrow our old frameworks without shame. To find new ones. To make our own. I want us to hold our terms lightly and our people tightly. To remember that language is a tool, not a weapon, not a cage, not a brand. A tool we can sharpen, adapt, or discard as needed. A tool that should serve us—not the other way around.
This is especially true as our movement grows. As more people learn about neurodiversity, there will be more tension over who gets to define it, and how. There will be marketing campaigns and training modules and LinkedIn articles and HR policies and TikTok trends. Some of them will uplift us. Some of them will distort us. We need to be ready. We need to protect the heart of this work, not by gatekeeping, but by staying rooted in values, relationships, and histories that cannot be commodified.
Because the truth is, our movement is not about semantics. It’s about liberation. And liberation is never tidy. It doesn’t always come with clean terminology or perfect consensus. It comes with mess. With conflict. With repair. With a deep, stubborn refusal to be reduced to something that makes others more comfortable.
So no, I don’t know what the “right” language is. I probably never will. But I know this: I want us to keep asking. I want us to keep listening. I want us to keep expanding the possibilities of who we can be together.
And perhaps that’s what makes this moment so powerful, not that we’ve arrived at some fixed, final set of terms, but that we’re collectively refusing to accept what we’ve been handed. We’re challenging the epistemology of pathologization. We’re questioning the architecture of “normal.” We’re asking why so many of our words come from systems that have harmed us, and we’re daring to imagine what it might feel like to speak outside of that logic altogether.
That act of imagination is not just symbolic, it is revolutionary. It is, in fact, one of the most urgent forms of resistance we have. Because when we name ourselves on our own terms, we reclaim the right to be the authors of our own story. When we reject language that defines us only in contrast to power, we’re refusing to accept that power’s supremacy. And when we expand the space for plural truths, when we say that there’s room for “neurodivergent” and “neuroexpansive,” for “disabled” and “noncompliant,” for “wild” and “quiet,” for diagnostic terms and spiritual metaphors, we create a movement that can hold all of us. Not just the most eloquent. Not just the most understood. All of us.
This work doesn’t require us to agree. It requires us to stay in the room. To ask better questions. To name our terms and share where they come from. To say, “This is what I mean when I say this,” and to ask, “What does that word mean to you?” We don’t need to collapse every difference. We need to build a culture that can hold difference with care.
So if you’re someone who doesn’t like the word “neurodivergent,” I hear you. If you love it, I hear you too. If you’re still figuring it out, if you only just found the language, or if you’re starting to feel like none of the words fit anymore, I see you. I’m right there with you.
This isn’t an article that resolves anything. It’s not a list of preferred terms or a manifesto for rebranding the movement. It’s an offering. A window into a conversation that I hope more of us will start to have. A call to examine the foundations of the words we use, not to discard them, but to understand them more deeply. And to remind ourselves that language is a tool of liberation only when we wield it with intention, with care, and with humility.
We do not owe anyone a tidy narrative. We do not have to make ourselves more palatable to be more valid. We are not required to define ourselves only in contrast to someone else’s “normal.” And we are not obligated to keep using the language we inherited if that language no longer serves us.
We can write new lexicons. We can build new grammars. We can create space for words that are messy, unfinished, emergent, just like us. And maybe the most neurodivergent thing we can do, the most radical, most honest, most community-rooted thing, is to refuse the pressure to make it make sense too soon. Let us stay in the complexity. Let us keep asking better questions. Let us call ourselves what feels truest today, and let that truth be allowed to shift. Because we are not deviations. We are not disorder. We are not defined by how far we stray from a manufactured norm. We are here. Together. In language that is always becoming. And that is enough.
Reflection Questions: Language, Power, and Neurodivergence
What words have you historically used to describe your neurodivergence? Where did those words come from, diagnostic reports, community spaces, personal insights, cultural frameworks? How do you feel about them now?
Who taught you what it meant to be “normal,” and how has that shaped your view of yourself? How did institutions (school, family, religion, medicine, media) influence your sense of what counted as acceptable or “good” behavior, communication, or emotion?
When have you experienced language as liberating? Was there a moment when a word or term helped you feel seen, validated, or empowered? What made that moment possible?
When has language felt limiting, extractive, or imposed upon you? Were there terms others used to describe you that felt wrong or harmful? Did you have space to challenge them?
Do you identify with the term “neurodivergent”? Why or why not? What does that word mean to you, and what does it leave out? Do you use other language alongside or instead of it?
What would it look like to describe yourself outside of contrast to “neurotypicality”? Can you speak about your cognition, communication, perception, or regulation without defining it against a norm? What might that sound like?
How does your cultural, racial, or linguistic background impact your relationship to neurodiversity language? Are there terms or frameworks from your community that feel more resonant or accurate than the dominant (often white, Western, clinical) language?
What role does language play in your access to care, services, or community? Have you ever had to use language that didn’t feel right just to get support? How do you navigate the trade-offs between being legible to systems and being true to yourself?
What terms do you find yourself avoiding or hesitating to use? Why? Is it because they feel harmful, outdated, overused, misunderstood, or because they’ve been co-opted?
How do you respond when someone in your community uses language you disagree with? Do you correct, inquire, withdraw, collaborate? How might we hold multiple truths without silencing each other?
If you could invent new words to describe your neurodivergence, what might they be? They don’t have to be “correct," they just have to feel true.
What does “language that believes in you” mean to you? How would it feel to be described in terms that assume your dignity, intelligence, and worth from the outset?
How can we make space for people who are still figuring out the language they need? How can we welcome newcomers to the conversation without gatekeeping, while still honoring the movement’s roots in disability and justice?
What happens to our movements when we stop being curious about the language we use? Where might curiosity take us instead?
What might become possible, for you, for your communities, for your children, if we spoke about ourselves in language we authored, not inherited?