The Violence of Inclusion: When Access Requires Disappearance

Bridgette Hamstead

Inclusion, as it is commonly understood and implemented in institutional contexts, is often framed as a moral good, a progressive ideal, or a sign of social evolution. Schools boast inclusive classrooms, corporations publish inclusive hiring reports, nonprofits promote inclusive programming. But inclusion, when unexamined, can function as a quiet form of violence, particularly for neurodivergent people. The violence of inclusion lies in its demand that we disappear ourselves in order to be welcomed. It cloaks assimilation in the language of access. It offers conditional belonging, belonging that is contingent on how well we can suppress our natural rhythms, camouflage our needs, and approximate the behaviors of the dominant culture. It tells us we are welcome, but only if we can make others comfortable.

For neurodivergent people, inclusion often means being asked to enter spaces that were never designed for us and then praised for how well we manage to survive inside them. We are told we are “included” in classrooms that punish our stimming, “included” in workplaces that reward burnout, “included” in conversations that expect us to communicate in ways that erase our natural language. Inclusion becomes a metric of our adaptability, not of the institution’s willingness to change. It is not uncommon to hear organizations celebrate inclusion while offering nothing more than performative gestures, an autism awareness month post, a training on neurodiversity that centers managerial comfort, a token hire with no meaningful restructuring of culture. When inclusion is framed as a gift granted by the powerful to the marginalized, it fails to interrogate the systems that create exclusion in the first place. It assumes that the problem lies in our absence, not in the hostile design of the space itself.

The reality is that most institutional spaces are structured around neurotypical norms of communication, productivity, behavior, and presence. These norms are so deeply embedded that they are treated as natural and inevitable. Eye contact is read as honesty. Verbal fluency is mistaken for competence. Sitting still is equated with attention. Prioritizing tasks quickly is framed as professionalism. Emotional regulation on someone else’s terms is seen as maturity. These expectations are not neutral, they are culturally specific, historically constructed, and deeply ableist. When neurodivergent people are asked to meet these expectations in order to be “included,” we are being asked to perform wellness, competence, and worth in ways that are fundamentally at odds with our embodied reality. We are not being included; we are being conditioned.

Masking is one of the clearest examples of this conditioning. Autistic and ADHD people often learn, through years of subtle and overt social punishment, that our natural expressions, hand flapping, rocking, verbal repetition, pausing, interrupting, going off-script, redirecting attention, must be hidden in order to be taken seriously. We contort our bodies, mimic speech patterns, rehearse social scripts, suppress sensory needs, and silence our reactions. We do this not because we are ashamed, but because we are told implicitly and explicitly that to be ourselves is to be unprofessional, disruptive, or inappropriate. Inclusion demands that we leave parts of ourselves at the door. It rewards those who can disappear the best. And then it wonders why we burn out.

This form of inclusion is not neutral, it is violent. It trades authenticity for acceptability. It measures our worth by our ability to assimilate. It treats our distress as a failure of resilience rather than a signal of misalignment. It extracts labor from us, emotional labor, sensory labor, translation labor, without naming it or compensating it. And it does so while claiming to center us. When we speak about our needs, we are told to be more flexible. When we ask for structural change, we are offered individual accommodations. When we challenge the norms themselves, we are framed as unreasonable or angry. The message is clear: inclusion is available, but transformation is off the table.

True inclusion is not about making room for people at the table without changing the table itself. It is about interrogating who built the table, whose bodies it was designed around, who has always been expected to serve, and who has been consistently left standing. For neurodiversity justice to take root, inclusion must be redefined, not as integration into dominant norms, but as the radical reshaping of environments, expectations, and power relations. It means designing spaces where neurodivergent communication styles are not just tolerated but understood and valued. It means creating workplaces where productivity is measured in ways that honor nonlinear thinking, deep focus, sensory needs, and rest. It means rejecting the idea that professionalism requires self-erasure. It means building classrooms where regulation is not measured by quietness and success is not reduced to standardization.

To achieve this, institutions must move beyond compliance checklists and performative gestures. They must be willing to redistribute power, redesign infrastructure, and engage in ongoing, accountable relationships with the communities they claim to include. This requires humility, a willingness to listen without defensiveness, and a commitment to letting go of practices that feel familiar but are fundamentally exclusionary. It requires understanding that neurodivergent people are not demanding special treatment, we are demanding equitable access to full personhood, without having to disappear ourselves in the process.

The violence of inclusion is subtle, but it is everywhere. It exists in well-meaning conversations, progressive mission statements, and unexamined organizational habits. And it will continue to do harm until inclusion is no longer something done to us, but something built with us, on our terms, in our language, and in alignment with our truths. Because anything less is not inclusion. It is assimilation, rebranded. And we deserve better.