The Community Guide to Neurodiversity Justice
The Community Guide to Neurodiversity Justice
A Publication of Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism
Author: Bridgette Hamstead, MS
Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism
New Orleans, Louisiana
www.fishinatreenola.org
© 2025 Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism.
All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form without prior written permission from the publisher, except for brief quotations used in scholarly, educational, or critical contexts with attribution.
About Fish in a Tree
Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism is a neurodivergent-led, justice-oriented organization headquartered in New Orleans with national and global reach. We advance systemic change through education, consulting, and public programming grounded in the social model of disability, neurodiversity justice, and intersectional disability activism.
Our flagship initiatives include:
The Neurodiversity Justice Bookshelf – a year-long global book club and live conversation series amplifying justice-centered work by neurodivergent authors.
NeuroStage – a global speaker and performance series for neurodivergent scholars, artists, and activists.
The Neurodiversity Pride Parade – New Orleans – the first U.S. parade dedicated to neurodiversity pride and cultural inclusion.
Neurodiversity Consulting and Education – a national network supporting systemic reform across education, employment, healthcare, and public policy.
Our work builds neurodiversity justice infrastructure, sustainable, community-led systems that honor difference, promote autonomy, and redistribute power.
About This Guide
The Community Guide to Neurodiversity Justice provides the philosophical and historical foundation for the Community Guide to Neurodiversity Inclusion and Accessibility. Where the Inclusion and Accessibility guide offers practical frameworks for designing equitable spaces and policies, the Justice guide explores the deeper structural and cultural change that makes inclusion meaningful.
It examines how ableism, capitalism, colonialism, and the medical model of disability intersect to produce systemic exclusion, and how movements led by neurodivergent people have resisted, reimagined, and rebuilt in response. It traces the evolution from “awareness” to “acceptance,” from “diversity” to justice, and from individual accommodation to collective liberation.
This document is not intended for checkbox audits or branding exercises. It is a resource for communities ready to confront power, engage history, and realign systems with the values of interdependence, autonomy, and access intimacy. It invites readers, educators, employers, policymakers, artists, and organizers, to view neurodiversity not as a clinical fact but as a civil rights, cultural, and ecological movement.
The guide draws from interdisciplinary research, global disability justice frameworks, and the lived expertise of neurodivergent leaders. It is part theory, part invitation: a call to reimagine what it means to build systems in which all nervous systems can thrive.
Suggested Citation
Hamstead, B. (2025). The Community Guide to Neurodiversity Justice.
New Orleans: Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism.
Usage and Distribution
This publication is part of Fish in a Tree’s Public Education Series. It is distributed for educational and noncommercial use with attribution. Readers are welcome to share, teach, and adapt material with acknowledgment of the author and organization, provided that the content remains aligned with the principles of neurodiversity justice, the social model of disability, and identity-first language.
For permissions, media, or consulting inquiries, contact:
📧 bridgette@fishinatreeglobal.org
🌐 www.fishinatreeglobal.org
Author’s Preface
(Bridgette Hamstead, MS – Founding Director, Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism)
This guide was written for those who have already sensed that inclusion, as we usually practice it, is not enough.
For decades, institutions have pursued “awareness” and “accommodation,” yet neurodivergent people continue to face structural barriers to healthcare, education, employment, and safety. We are still punished for sensory needs, pathologized for communication differences, and marginalized by systems that equate worth with productivity. These are not individual failures; they are the logical outcomes of systems designed without us.
The Community Guide to Neurodiversity Justice begins where accessibility ends. It asks: what does it mean to build not just inclusive spaces, but just ones? What would it look like to redesign institutions through the lens of lived experience, rather than fitting lived experience into existing institutions?
The framework of neurodiversity justice is rooted in disability justice, queer liberation, feminist thought, and the social model of disability. It recognizes that ableism is intertwined with racism, sexism, capitalism, and colonialism, and that neurodivergence cannot be disentangled from these power structures. It demands a shift from charity to equity, from awareness campaigns to structural transformation.
Justice requires us to look backward as well as forward, to trace how diagnostic systems, educational hierarchies, and economic models have been used to regulate minds deemed “noncompliant.” It asks us to name this history not to dwell in pain, but to understand that liberation is not a metaphor; it is design work.
This guide is structured around that design. It begins with history and lineage, connecting the neurodiversity movement to its roots in disability rights and self-advocacy. It then maps how systems of harm, medical, economic, educational, continue to shape our lives. From there, it moves into frameworks of intersectionality, peer leadership, and collective care, concluding with strategies for community accountability and justice infrastructure.
The intention is not to prescribe, but to provoke. The reflection questions woven throughout are invitations to self-examination, intended for teams, classrooms, councils, and collectives. They are meant to disrupt comfort, to encourage slow thinking, and to replace defensiveness with curiosity.
Together with the Community Guide to Neurodiversity Inclusion and Accessibility, this document forms a complete framework for cultural redesign. One addresses how to build inclusive systems; the other asks why and for whom. They are twin pillars of the same movement: to transform awareness into action, and accommodation into belonging.
If you are reading this, you are part of that movement. You are part of the slow, vital work of remaking the world so that no one has to apologize for existing as themselves. That is neurodiversity justice.
1. What Is Neurodiversity Justice?
Neurodiversity justice is not a new idea dressed in modern language. It is the continuation of centuries of collective resistance by disabled, mad, autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, dyspraxic, and otherwise neurodivergent people who refused to let their minds be defined by pathology. It is both a framework and a movement: a way of understanding power, designing culture, and redistributing access so that every nervous system can exist without suppression.
At its core, neurodiversity justice begins from the premise that neurological variation is an ordinary and necessary part of human biodiversity. There has never been a singular “normal” brain; there have only been dominant social groups with the authority to name their own cognitive style as the standard. The problem, therefore, is not difference, it is hierarchy.
From Pathology to Power
For much of modern history, behavioral and cognitive difference has been treated as disorder. The rise of industrial capitalism in the 19th and 20th centuries made efficiency, conformity, and productivity moral imperatives. Schools, workplaces, and psychiatric institutions were built to shape people into predictable, obedient laborers. Those who could not conform, those who thought tangentially, processed slowly, fixated deeply, or resisted authority, were labeled defective. The invention of diagnostic categories like “attention deficit” and “autism spectrum disorder” did not merely describe difference; it codified a hierarchy of minds that served economic and political ends.
Neurodiversity justice exposes that hierarchy. It asserts that diagnostic language, behavioral expectations, and educational norms are cultural artifacts, not objective truths. To be “regulated,” “appropriate,” or “on task” are standards defined by those whose bodies and brains already fit the system. Justice asks not how we can make divergent people more manageable, but why we continue to design systems that depend on manageability in the first place.
The Collective Origin of a Movement
The language of neurodiversity did not spring from academia, it rose from the margins. It was forged through autistic self-advocacy groups in the 1980s and 1990s, the psychiatric-survivor and mad-pride movements, disability-justice collectives led by queer and BIPOC activists, and the cross-pollination of feminist, anti-racist, and decolonial thought. Autistic and ADHD activists online began reframing neurology as culture and identity, not illness. Disabled scholars of color linked cognitive difference to broader struggles against colonial psychiatry and eugenics. Queer theory contributed the radical understanding that identity and embodiment are social constructs shaped by power, not by biology alone.
In that lineage, the term neurodiversity belongs to the collective. It is public domain in the deepest sense: a word carried forward by thousands of people reclaiming the language of diagnosis to build community and resistance.
From Inclusion to Justice
Inclusion, as it is commonly practiced, seeks to make space for neurodivergent people within systems that remain unchanged. Justice seeks to transform those systems entirely. Inclusion often begins with compliance, legal accessibility, workplace initiatives, awareness campaigns, but without structural change, these gestures can easily become tokenism. Neurodiversity justice refuses to stop at representation. It asks who has power, who defines value, and who controls resources.
This framework is explicitly intersectional. It understands that ableism does not exist in isolation but is intertwined with white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism. The same logic that pathologized autistic people as “inflexible” also feminized women as “hysterical,” racialized Black resistance as “aggression,” and medicalized queer desire as “deviance.” Justice recognizes these as variations of the same control mechanism, a cultural obsession with conformity masquerading as science.
Reclaiming Expertise and Language
Within neurodiversity justice, lived experience is recognized as legitimate expertise. The authority to define neurodivergent life belongs to neurodivergent people. This challenges a long history of epistemic injustice in which clinicians, educators, and policymakers spoke for us while erasing our own narratives. Justice requires a redistribution of epistemic power: research must be participatory, policy must be co-authored, and language must reflect community consensus rather than clinical terminology.
Identity-first language is one outcome of that reclamation. Autistic, ADHD, and other neurodivergent communities overwhelmingly prefer to name difference as intrinsic, autistic person, not person with autism, because it rejects the idea that our neurology is separable from our selves. This is not semantics; it is sovereignty.
Diagnostics, Gatekeeping, and Economic Design
Justice also demands that we confront the economics of diagnosis. Access to identification remains stratified by race, class, gender, and geography. Studies show that Black and Latine children are still far less likely to receive an autism or ADHD diagnosis, and when they do, it comes later and with more stigma (Mandell et al., 2020; Broder-Fingert et al., 2019). Adults, especially women and gender-diverse people, often remain undiagnosed until burnout or crisis. The gatekeeping of care through cost, bias, and bureaucracy is a form of systemic violence. Neurodiversity justice insists that self-identification and community recognition are valid pathways to belonging and support. No one should have to prove their neurodivergence to deserve dignity.
Beyond Survival: Toward Ecological Flourishing
At its deepest level, neurodiversity justice is ecological. It views human minds as part of a living ecosystem of cognitive and sensory variation. When we privilege one kind of mind, we impoverish the whole system. Monocultures are fragile, whether in agriculture or in society. Diversity creates resilience. In a world facing interconnected crises, climate change, technological acceleration, political polarization, the capacity for divergent thinking, pattern recognition, and deep focus is not a liability; it is survival intelligence.
Justice therefore reimagines not only how we treat neurodivergent people, but how we understand intelligence itself. It moves away from measuring worth by output or adaptability and toward valuing curiosity, empathy, systems perception, and creativity. It replaces “high-functioning” and “low-functioning” hierarchies with an awareness that functioning is relational: everyone’s capacity rises and falls with context, support, and safety.
The Sensory Politics of Freedom
Finally, neurodiversity justice insists that freedom is sensory. Liberation cannot exist in environments that assault the body. The ability to regulate one’s nervous system, to rest, move, stim, pause, and choose, is a civil right. Sensory autonomy is as fundamental as speech or mobility. The right to exist without suppression is not negotiable; it is the ground from which all other rights emerge.
To build a neurodiversity-just world is to build one in which no one must apologize for the way their mind or body processes reality. It is to replace systems of compliance with cultures of consent, to see care not as charity but as mutual design, and to measure justice not by productivity but by peace.
Reflection:
Who has the power to define what counts as a “normal” mind? What cultural and economic systems depend on that definition? What would our communities look like if neurodivergent people authored the rules of belonging?
2. The Roots – History, Movements, and Lineage
To understand neurodiversity justice, we have to remember that it did not emerge in a vacuum. It is part of a long continuum of disability and liberation movements that have, again and again, demanded that the world expand its understanding of humanity. Neurodiversity justice inherits its DNA from these lineages: disability rights, psychiatric survivor movements, mad pride, feminist and queer liberation, Black and Indigenous abolitionist struggles, and the community-led revolutions of those who refused to be “fixed.”
The neurodiversity movement did not begin in laboratories or universities, it began in living rooms, online message boards, and collective gatherings where neurodivergent people told the truth about our lives. It was born from exhaustion with pathologizing systems and from a deep human desire to belong without erasure. The people who shaped this movement were often those denied authority by every institutional standard, autistic adults excluded from autism research, ADHD activists dismissed as unreliable narrators of their own minds, multiply disabled people surviving intersections of racism, classism, and misogyny. Neurodiversity justice was born from resistance: a refusal to disappear.
From Disability Rights to Disability Justice
The disability rights movement of the 1960s and 1970s laid the groundwork for every subsequent struggle for access and inclusion. Activists with physical and sensory disabilities, many of them veterans, students, and institutional survivors, fought for legal recognition of accessibility as a civil right. Their work culminated in the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 and the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, both monumental in scope. These laws outlawed discrimination but did not dismantle the ideology of ableism itself. They guaranteed ramps and elevators but did not guarantee belonging.
By the early 2000s, disabled people, especially queer, trans, and BIPOC organizers, began naming what was missing. Legal inclusion without cultural transformation still left the most marginalized disabled people behind. Disability justice, as articulated by activists like Patty Berne, Mia Mingus, Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, and others, rejected the idea that liberation could be achieved through access alone. It called for an intersectional analysis, one that understood that racism, sexism, colonialism, and capitalism are not separate from ableism but intertwined with it. Disability justice reframed access as relational, collective, and creative. It said: “We move together, not alone.”
Neurodiversity justice arises directly from that lineage. It shares disability justice’s commitment to intersectionality and interdependence but applies those principles specifically to cognitive, communicative, and sensory experience. It recognizes that neurodivergent people are not merely asking to be accommodated within ableist systems, we are questioning why those systems exist at all.
Mad Pride and the Psychiatric Survivor Movement
Another root lies in the psychiatric survivor movement, which began in the mid-20th century as institutionalized and formerly institutionalized people began to organize against coercive treatment, forced medication, and systemic abuse in mental health systems. These activists, many of them survivors of psychiatric hospitals, electroshock therapy, and involuntary confinement, insisted that “madness” was not solely a symptom but also a response to oppression, isolation, and trauma. They demanded the right to define their own experiences and to reject medical narratives that pathologized pain and dissent.
The mad pride movement introduced radical ideas that resonate deeply with neurodiversity justice: that diagnosis can be both a source of community and a tool of control; that emotional and cognitive variation are cultural phenomena as much as biological ones; that “treatment” often functions as social discipline. These ideas laid the groundwork for neurodivergent people to see ourselves not as broken, but as politically positioned, caught in the crosshairs of medicine, morality, and capital.
Autistic and Neurodivergent Self-Advocacy
In the 1990s and early 2000s, autistic self-advocates began organizing in digital spaces, developing language to describe our lives outside the pathologizing frameworks of clinicians and parent-led organizations. Online forums and early blogs became incubators of collective consciousness. Terms like stimming, masking, and shutdownemerged as community-sourced language for embodied experiences that medical literature either ignored or distorted.
Groups like the Autistic Self Advocacy Network (ASAN) and grassroots collectives worldwide emphasized the principle of “Nothing About Us Without Us,” rejecting the paternalism of organizations that spoke for autistic people without including us. These early communities connected autistic experience to broader systems of oppression, drawing from queer theory, critical disability studies, and feminist epistemology to articulate new ways of knowing. Out of that cross-pollination came the recognition that neurodivergence was not a solitary identity but a shared cultural formation—a broad coalition of people whose brains and bodies have been pathologized for not adhering to social and sensory norms.
Queer, Feminist, and Decolonial Currents
Queer and feminist movements have profoundly shaped neurodiversity justice by challenging binary thinking and hierarchies of normality. Queer theory’s insistence that identity is socially constructed and fluid offered a model for understanding neurological diversity as similarly contextual. Feminist movements, particularly those led by women and gender-diverse people of color, provided the analysis of care work, emotional labor, and the body as political terrain.
Neurodivergent feminists have long noted how gender bias shapes diagnosis, how autistic and ADHD women are socialized to mask, how girls are punished for “daydreaming” or “talking too much,” how the traits of autistic men are pathologized while the same traits in women are invisibilized. Trans and nonbinary neurodivergent people have deepened this critique, showing how psychiatry has historically been used to police both gender and cognition. Their work exposes that the line between “mental disorder” and “gender deviance” has always been porous and political.
Decolonial thinkers have further expanded the framework by linking ableism to the logics of empire. Colonialism imposed a narrow definition of intelligence, rooted in literacy, punctuality, productivity, and obedience to authority, all traits associated with the European industrial ideal. Indigenous epistemologies that valued intuition, cyclicality, dream states, and relational knowing were pathologized or destroyed. Neurodiversity justice, in dialogue with decolonial theory, calls for the restoration of plural epistemologies and the recognition that cognitive sovereignty is a decolonial act.
Digital Activism and Collective Knowledge
The internet made neurodiversity justice global. Online spaces allowed neurodivergent people to find one another across geography, disability, and identity lines. Hashtags like #ActuallyAutistic, #Neurodiversity, and #ADHDAwareness became transnational networks of lived expertise. The digital commons became a form of collective authorship, a decentralized research project in which neurodivergent people mapped our own nervous systems, emotions, and social dynamics.
These digital spaces democratized theory-making. They made it possible for people without academic credentials to shape the frameworks that now guide research, education, and policy. The same platforms that have been dismissed as unprofessional or chaotic by gatekeeping institutions have produced some of the most profound, community-driven scholarship of our time.
A Movement of Movements
Neurodiversity justice, then, is not a siloed cause. It is a movement of movements, a convergence point for disability rights, mad pride, decolonization, and queer liberation. It is part of a global lineage of people reclaiming embodiment, reimagining education, and redefining what counts as intelligence, connection, and care.
Every generation has its version of this rebellion. The refusal of “normalcy” is as old as humanity itself. What distinguishes this moment is that the language, science, and global networks finally exist to name and link these struggles together. The rise of neurodiversity justice signals a collective maturation of disability culture: from surviving within hostile systems to redesigning them entirely.
To understand its roots is to see that this movement was never just about diagnosis, it was, and is, about liberation.
Reflection:
Which movements have we learned from, and which have we failed to include? Whose labor built the language and frameworks we now use? How does forgetting our lineage weaken our movement, and how does remembering it make us stronger?
3. Systems of Harm – How Pathology and Power Intersect
Every society decides, in both subtle and overt ways, which minds are valuable and which are expendable. These decisions are not medical, they are moral and political. The concept of pathology, from its origins, has functioned less as a neutral description of biological difference and more as a justification for control. To understand neurodiversity justice, we must trace how systems of harm, psychiatry, education, medicine, capitalism, and colonialism, have converged to produce and maintain the category of the “disordered” mind.
Pathology as a Technology of Power
Modern psychiatry emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries alongside industrialization and the rise of the modern nation-state. Factories required workers who could perform repetitive tasks on schedule, schools required students who could sit still and comply, and militaries required subjects who could follow orders without hesitation. In this context, medicine began to define sanity, intelligence, and discipline not as neutral traits, but as civic duties. Deviance from these norms, whether through daydreaming, defiance, or dissociation, was reclassified as disorder.
Michel Foucault described this transformation as the birth of “biopower,” the use of medical and bureaucratic systems to manage populations by defining which bodies and minds are healthy, productive, and lawful. The invention of psychiatric categories like “moral insanity,” “idiocy,” and later “hyperkinesis” or “autism” were not scientific breakthroughs; they were mechanisms for sorting human difference into hierarchies of worth. Those hierarchies persist today, repackaged as “functioning levels,” “behavioral supports,” or “compliance goals.”
Neurodiversity justice exposes the politics within this history. Pathology is not simply a label applied to suffering; it is a tool used to police social order. By calling certain people disordered, society legitimizes their surveillance, control, and exclusion. The diagnostic manual is not a mirror of nature, it is a map of power.
Capitalism and the Myth of Productivity
No system has reinforced these hierarchies more efficiently than capitalism. The capitalist economy equates human value with labor output and treats time as a commodity. Neurotypicality, the ability to conform to schedules, suppress bodily impulses, and maintain consistent performance, became the gold standard of employability. Those who could not meet these demands were labeled “lazy,” “incompetent,” or “disruptive.” The language of disorder became the moral vocabulary of productivity.
ADHD, for instance, is pathologized not because it is inherently harmful, but because it conflicts with capitalist expectations of linear focus and continuous output. Autistic intensity and monotropic attention, forms of deep focus that resist multitasking, are similarly punished in systems designed for speed over depth. As disability scholar Sami Schalk writes, capitalism and ableism are symbiotic: both depend on defining some bodies as “less efficient” so that exploitation can be justified elsewhere.
This system extends beyond employment. In schools, productivity is measured by compliance and uniformity. In healthcare, worth is measured by recovery and self-sufficiency. Even rest is commodified, sold back to us as self-care, contingent upon first meeting productivity quotas. Under capitalism, neurodivergent modes of being, rest cycles, nonlinear thinking, deep focus, sensory seeking, are treated as inefficiencies to be corrected, rather than ecological variations to be respected.
Colonialism and the Globalization of Normalcy
The story of pathology cannot be separated from colonialism. European colonial powers exported not only their armies and religions but their psychiatric frameworks. They imposed Western categories of sanity, intelligence, and development onto colonized peoples, declaring Indigenous cosmologies, healing practices, and communication forms “primitive” or “irrational.” This epistemic violence transformed colonization into a moral mission: the “civilizing” of minds deemed less evolved.
Colonial psychiatry’s racial hierarchies persist in modern medicine. Studies show that Black and brown people are more likely to be misdiagnosed with behavioral or psychotic disorders, less likely to receive autism or ADHD diagnoses, and more likely to be subjected to coercive treatment (Barnett et al., 2019; Mandell et al., 2020). Diagnostic bias becomes a continuation of colonial logic: whiteness remains the standard of rationality, composure, and self-control, while racialized expressions of distress are reframed as danger.
Neurodiversity justice confronts this legacy by aligning itself with decolonial thought. It asserts that mental diversity existed in every culture long before Western psychiatry invented the term “disorder.” Indigenous frameworks, for example, often regarded sensory attunement, visionary states, or nonlinear communication as spiritual gifts. To recover these epistemologies is not nostalgia, it is resistance. It reclaims the multiplicity of human minds that colonialism sought to erase.
Gender, Compliance, and the Policing of Emotion
The intersection of ableism and patriarchy has long shaped how neurodivergence is perceived. Historically, women who resisted subservience or who displayed emotional volatility were institutionalized as “hysterical.” Autistic and ADHD traits in women, such as sensitivity, intensity, or boundary-setting, were dismissed as neurosis or moral failure. The same behaviors celebrated as leadership or genius in men were pathologized as instability in women.
For trans and nonbinary people, the stakes are even higher. Psychiatry has been used to invalidate gender diversity, labeling it a symptom of disorder or immaturity. Many trans neurodivergent people have faced forced “treatment,” sterilization, or denial of gender-affirming care under the guise of protecting mental health. This is not accidental overlap; it reflects a shared structure of control. Both gender variance and neurodivergence threaten systems built on binary, disciplined order.
In both cases, pathology functions as social punishment for deviation. The “emotionally regulated” person, calm, deferential, consistent, is a gendered and neurotypical ideal. Justice demands we ask why composure is considered virtuous, and whose safety that performance of calmness actually serves.
Education as Conditioning
Education systems often operate as early laboratories of normalization. Children learn that compliance is rewarded and difference is disciplined. Classrooms that punish movement, noise, or solitude train students to internalize that their natural rhythms are wrong. Students who stim, fidget, or question authority are labeled “disruptive.” Those who withdraw are called “unmotivated.” These judgments are not assessments of character, they are enforcement of conformity.
Special education systems, while intended to support, often replicate control structures through segregation and behaviorism. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), for example, remains a dominant intervention model despite decades of critique for its coercive and traumatizing methods. ABA’s emphasis on eye contact, sitting still, and suppressing stims teaches children that their bodies are acceptable only when they perform neurotypicality. Countless autistic adults describe surviving these programs with symptoms consistent with complex trauma (Kupferstein, 2018).
Neurodiversity justice rejects any educational approach that prioritizes compliance over autonomy. It calls for trauma-informed, consent-based, sensory-safe learning environments where regulation, curiosity, and self-direction replace discipline and reward. The goal of education should not be to normalize but to nurture.
Medicine and the Politics of Legitimacy
Medical systems remain among the most powerful arbiters of legitimacy. A diagnosis can open doors to support, but it can also close them. It can validate or discredit, liberate or confine. Medicine decides whose pain is credible, whose symptoms are believed, and whose difference is considered worthy of study. Yet the criteria for these judgments are steeped in cultural bias.
Research shows that women and BIPOC individuals are less likely to be taken seriously by clinicians, leading to misdiagnosis, underdiagnosis, and denial of care (Crenshaw, 2019; Botha & Frost, 2020). The result is a two-tiered system: neurotypical, white, cisgender, middle-class individuals receive empathy and treatment, while marginalized neurodivergent people are subjected to suspicion and control. The clinical gaze, claiming objectivity, becomes a mirror reflecting society’s deepest prejudices.
The Carceral Logic of “Care”
Across systems, care and control are often indistinguishable. Schools, hospitals, and workplaces all deploy surveillance, attendance logs, productivity trackers, behavioral monitoring, in the name of safety and accountability. This carceral logic mirrors the function of the prison: to regulate bodies through observation and punishment. For neurodivergent people, this can mean being physically restrained, chemically sedated, or fired for “performance issues.” The message is clear: belonging is conditional on conformity.
Neurodiversity justice rejects the notion that coercion is therapeutic. It insists that safety must never require self-erasure. It calls for restorative systems built on consent, communication, and community accountability rather than punishment and pathologization.
Toward Repair and Liberation
To understand these systems of harm is not merely to critique them, it is to recognize their design and to imagine their dismantling. Neurodiversity justice is not an abstract philosophy; it is a blueprint for repair. It invites us to see that what has been labeled disorder is often a survival strategy in a disordered world. It asks: what if our so-called symptoms are actually wisdom, forms of knowing that industrial modernity tried to silence?
The work ahead is both structural and intimate. We must change policies, yes, but also relationships, classrooms, and language. Liberation is not achieved through tolerance, it is achieved through redesign.
Reflection:
Which systems in your life define what it means to be “regulated,” “productive,” or “healthy”? How have those definitions shaped your understanding of worth? What would it mean to build institutions that measure success by safety, connection, and curiosity instead?
4. Intersectionality and Collective Liberation
Neurodiversity justice cannot be understood apart from intersectionality. It does not exist as a discrete issue that can be solved with better therapies or policies. It is woven into the same historical fabric that structures race, gender, class, sexuality, and power. To fight for neurodivergent liberation without addressing these interlocking systems is to reproduce the very exclusions we claim to dismantle. Intersectionality is not a buzzword, it is the architecture of justice.
The term itself, introduced by Kimberlé Crenshaw (1989) in the context of Black feminist legal theory, described how Black women experienced discrimination that could not be reduced to either racism or sexism alone. Their oppression existed at the intersection of both. The same analysis applies to neurodivergent life. Autistic, ADHD, dyslexic, and otherwise neurodivergent people do not experience ableism in isolation; we experience it through and alongside our other identities. A Black autistic child’s interaction with the education system, a trans ADHD adult’s access to healthcare, an Indigenous dyslexic scholar’s experience in academia, each is mediated by the compounding effects of racism, transphobia, colonialism, and class.
The Racial Politics of Diagnosis
Research continues to demonstrate that diagnostic access and credibility are profoundly racialized. In the United States, white children are diagnosed with autism at significantly higher rates and earlier ages than Black, Latine, and Indigenous children (Mandell et al., 2020). When children of color are recognized as neurodivergent, it often follows years of being labeled “defiant,” “emotionally disturbed,” or “learning disabled.” In other words, they are punished before they are supported. Black and brown children are more likely to be disciplined or criminalized for behaviors that would be medicalized in white peers.
This racial bias extends into adulthood. Black autistic adults report higher rates of misdiagnosis and medical mistrust, a direct legacy of systemic racism in healthcare (DaWalt et al., 2021). Psychiatric profiling has historically been used to pathologize resistance, what Jonathan Metzl termed “The Protest Psychosis,” describing how schizophrenia diagnoses were disproportionately assigned to Black men during the Civil Rights Movement as a means of criminalizing dissent. The same cultural logic now appears in workplaces and schools, where assertive communication by racialized neurodivergent people is labeled aggression or insubordination.
Gender and the Politics of Masking
Gender profoundly shapes how neurodivergence is perceived, diagnosed, and policed. For decades, autism research focused almost exclusively on cisgender boys, creating diagnostic criteria based on male-presenting traits. Autistic and ADHD women, girls, and gender-diverse people learned to camouflage early, mimicking social scripts, performing empathy through learned cues, suppressing stims, and overcompensating through hyper-achievement. This survival strategy, known as masking, may enable temporary access to social safety but often leads to burnout, identity confusion, and trauma (Hull et al., 2020).
Feminist analyses reveal that masking is not a failure of authenticity but a rational response to gendered expectations of emotional labor and compliance. Society trains girls to make others comfortable, to smile, to accommodate, to soothe. When neurodivergent women fail to do so, we are called cold or rude; when we succeed, we disappear under the mask. Gender bias in diagnosis reflects a deeper truth: our culture values women for their ability to regulate others’ emotions while denying them the right to their own.
For trans and nonbinary neurodivergent people, the stakes multiply. Psychiatry has long functioned as an instrument of gatekeeping against gender-affirming care. The same institutions that diagnose neurodivergence often weaponize those labels to delay or deny gender transition, arguing that autistic people, for example, are “too confused” to understand their identities. Yet empirical research contradicts this bias, showing that autistic and ADHD individuals are significantly more likely to identify as transgender or gender-diverse (Warrier et al., 2020; Strang et al., 2018). This overlap is not pathology; it reflects shared experiences of bodily autonomy, authenticity, and resistance to imposed norms. Neurodiversity justice therefore demands gender justice.
Class, Poverty, and Access to Support
Class stratification shapes every dimension of neurodivergent experience. Diagnostic evaluation, therapy, and workplace accommodation often require financial resources, flexible time, and bureaucratic literacy, privileges unequally distributed. Wealthier neurodivergent people can purchase recognition and support; poorer neurodivergent people are criminalized or erased. Studies show that children from low-income families are less likely to receive developmental evaluations and more likely to be funneled into disciplinary systems (Bailey et al., 2022).
Economic precarity also determines the conditions of adult life. Neurodivergent people are disproportionately unemployed, underemployed, or trapped in contingent labor (Scott et al., 2019). Yet these statistics often obscure the underlying mechanisms: inaccessible hiring processes, sensory-hostile workplaces, and burnout caused by masking. Poverty and neurodivergence reinforce one another in a vicious cycle. Justice requires not charity but structural redistribution, living wages, universal healthcare, and housing security as forms of cognitive access.
Colonialism and Epistemic Violence
Colonialism imposed not only political domination but epistemic violence, the suppression of entire systems of knowing. Indigenous, African, and Asian epistemologies often recognized diverse states of consciousness, intuition, and spiritual perception as part of communal balance. Colonial psychiatry recoded these states as madness or savagery, enforcing Western norms of rationality as markers of civilization. The diagnostic frameworks that now define “neurotypicality” are the inheritors of this epistemological colonialism.
Decolonial neurodiversity justice therefore involves more than integrating Indigenous perspectives into Western models; it means dismantling the assumption that Western models are universal. It honors local and ancestral ways of understanding mind, relation, and rhythm. It insists that healing and regulation do not belong exclusively to clinical settings but to land, ritual, story, and community.
Queer Liberation and the Refusal of Normalcy
The queer and neurodivergent experiences are deeply intertwined. Both confront a world obsessed with conformity, categorization, and control. Both have been subjected to “conversion therapies” aimed at erasing difference. And both have resisted through culture-making, art, storytelling, chosen family, and joy.
Queer theory’s challenge to binaries, male/female, sane/insane, natural/unnatural, opened philosophical ground for neurodiversity justice. It taught us that normativity is not truth but governance, and that liberation lies in refusing to be “normalized.” The overlap between queer and neurodivergent communities is not coincidence: both attract those who live at the edges of sanctioned behavior, who sense the fragility of “normal” from personal experience.
In practice, queer neurodivergent people often build the most accessible communities precisely because we know what exclusion feels like. Queer neurodivergent culture, whether in art, zines, mutual aid, or collective housing, models the interdependence mainstream systems resist. It is in these spaces that belonging becomes possible without translation.
Why Intersectionality Is Structural, Not Additive
Too often, institutions treat intersectionality as additive, layering categories of identity like data points rather than understanding them as interdependent forces. This leads to tokenistic gestures: hiring one neurodivergent employee, one trans speaker, one Black consultant. True intersectional practice recognizes that oppression operates through systems, not arithmetic. Ableism produces capitalism’s idea of efficiency; capitalism reinforces racism’s labor hierarchies; patriarchy disciplines bodies and emotions to maintain both. You cannot dismantle one without challenging the others.
Collective Liberation as Method
Collective liberation is not metaphor, it is method. It means designing systems that work for the people most marginalized, knowing that such systems will work better for everyone. It means redistributing resources and decision-making power to those historically silenced. It means acknowledging that access is not a zero-sum game. As Mia Mingus writes, “There is no justice without access, and there is no access without justice.”
In practical terms, collective liberation requires coalitional work. Neurodivergent people must stand with and within other movements, racial justice, trans liberation, workers’ rights, climate justice, not as allies but as co-architects. Our liberation depends on theirs, and theirs on ours. We are fighting the same system wearing different masks.
Neurodiversity justice, then, is intersectionality in action. It is the ongoing, collective project of building a world that honors complexity, where difference is not danger but data, and where survival is not the ceiling but the floor for flourishing.
Reflection:
Whose liberation is missing from our neurodiversity work? How do race, gender, class, and colonialism shape who gets to be seen as “neurodivergent”? What would it mean to build coalitions that center the most multiply marginalized among us?
5. Community Power and Peer Leadership
Neurodiversity justice begins and ends with the redistribution of power. For decades, power over neurodivergent lives has rested in the hands of professionals, clinicians, educators, employers, policymakers, who claimed to know what was best for us. They built programs, treatments, and institutions in our name, often without our participation. This paternalism, masked as benevolence, has produced generations of harm. Justice demands we reverse that hierarchy. We cannot dismantle systems of oppression while reproducing their power structures in our own movements.
Community power means shifting from a model of “service delivery” to one of co-creation. Peer leadership means that neurodivergent people lead, design, and define the systems that affect us, not as tokens, but as authorities. It means we stop treating lived experience as anecdotal and start recognizing it as essential expertise. This shift is not symbolic; it is structural. It changes who decides what research gets funded, how policy is written, and how “help” is defined.
From Charity to Solidarity
Much of what is still called “support” for neurodivergent people remains steeped in charity models. Charity positions disabled and neurodivergent people as recipients of benevolence rather than agents of change. It reinforces a hierarchy between giver and receiver, expert and patient, helper and helped. These dynamics may appear compassionate on the surface, but they preserve the same imbalance that justice seeks to undo.
Solidarity, by contrast, is horizontal. It understands that liberation is mutual and that systems that harm neurodivergent people also harm everyone else through rigidity, dehumanization, and the myth of self-sufficiency. Solidarity asks us to see interdependence not as weakness but as the foundation of community. In a solidarity model, we design structures of care that are reciprocal, not transactional. Neurodivergent people are not “served,” we are participants in collective thriving.
This paradigm shift echoes across movements. Disability justice teaches that access is not a favor, it is a shared responsibility. Mad pride insists that survival is political. Queer liberation reminds us that chosen family is a form of infrastructure. Each of these models points toward the same principle: we are safest when we build with, not for.
Peer Leadership as Praxis
Peer leadership is the antidote to professionalized gatekeeping. When neurodivergent people lead programs, design curriculum, or direct policy initiatives, the outcomes are more ethical, effective, and humane. Peer-led mental health programs, for example, consistently demonstrate higher satisfaction and reduced hospitalization rates compared to clinician-only models (Davidson et al., 2012; Gillard et al., 2015). But beyond outcomes, peer leadership represents an epistemic revolution, it challenges who is allowed to produce knowledge.
The professionalization of care has long been a tool of control. Degrees, credentials, and institutional affiliations act as gatekeepers of legitimacy. They determine whose voice counts, whose observations are considered data, whose emotions are dismissed as bias. Neurodivergent people have been excluded not because we lack insight, but because our ways of knowing disrupt institutional authority. Our knowledge is embodied, relational, and nonlinear. It resists reduction to diagnostic codes or research metrics. Peer leadership reclaims that knowledge as a form of scholarship in its own right.
This does not mean rejecting collaboration with non-neurodivergent professionals. It means reframing relationships of expertise. A neurodivergent researcher, teacher, or advocate brings knowledge that cannot be learned in a classroom, the knowledge of living inside systems not built for one’s sensory, cognitive, or communicative rhythms. When paired with technical or institutional expertise, this lived knowledge becomes transformative. The key is reciprocity: co-leadership, shared credit, shared pay, shared decision-making.
The Economics of Expertise
Lived experience must not only be recognized, it must be compensated. Too often, neurodivergent people are invited to “share their stories” for free while organizations build paid careers from those stories. This exploitation is framed as inclusion but functions as extraction. Justice demands economic accountability. If neurodivergent expertise is valuable enough to inform policy or training, it is valuable enough to pay for.
Funding models must also evolve. Grant systems that prioritize academic institutions over grassroots initiatives reproduce inequity. Community-led projects are often denied funding because they lack nonprofit status, administrative staff, or grant-writing capacity. Yet these are the very conditions created by systemic exclusion. Foundations and agencies committed to equity must therefore simplify application processes, eliminate matching-fund requirements, and prioritize funding for neurodivergent-led organizations. Redistribution is not optional; it is the mechanism of repair.
Trust as Infrastructure
Peer leadership cannot function without trust. Many neurodivergent people enter advocacy spaces carrying the trauma of being studied, corrected, or silenced. Institutions seeking to collaborate must first build relational safety. This means transparency in decision-making, accessible communication, flexible timelines, and the acknowledgment of past harm. It means asking, not assuming, what support looks like.
Trust also requires relinquishing control. When neurodivergent people are invited into decision-making processes, we must have the authority to say “no.” Advisory boards without veto power are symbolic; inclusion without redistribution of power is performance. Real partnership means that neurodivergent people have the capacity to stop harmful practices, redirect priorities, and co-author strategies.
Peer Support as Collective Care
Peer support is one of the most powerful expressions of community power. It is the opposite of medicalized “intervention.” Peer spaces, whether in mutual aid networks, online communities, or grassroots collectives, operate on principles of empathy, consent, and reciprocity. They reject the idea that distress or difference must be fixed. Instead, they offer presence, understanding, and co-regulation.
Neuroscientific research supports what peer communities have long known intuitively: safety is relational. The nervous system co-regulates through trust, not authority. Peer-led support groups, crisis lines, and community spaces can therefore succeed where institutional systems fail, because they replace coercion with connection. They embody what scholar-activist Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha calls “collective access”: care that is built by and for the people who need it most, using creativity rather than compliance as its foundation.
Peer leadership also resists the isolation that capitalism breeds. When people are encouraged to compete for access, funding, or credibility, solidarity fractures. Community care rebuilds that solidarity. It recognizes that neurodivergent people do not need to “fix” each other, we need to be resourced together.
From Representation to Redistribution
Representation has limits. Seeing neurodivergent people in leadership roles can be inspiring, but justice demands more than visibility. It demands redistribution: of funding, authority, authorship, and platform. Representation without redistribution risks tokenism, creating the illusion of progress while maintaining the same power imbalance. The question is not “Are neurodivergent people at the table?” but “Do neurodivergent people own the table, set the agenda, and decide what is served?”
Redistribution also applies internally. Neurodivergent movements themselves must confront disparities of privilege within our ranks, between white and BIPOC advocates, between those with formal diagnoses and those without, between those who can access professional networks and those organizing from the margins. Justice requires reflexivity: who is being centered, who is being erased, and how can leadership be shared more equitably?
Sustainability and Rest
Community power cannot thrive without sustainability. Many neurodivergent leaders operate in chronic burnout, juggling activism, self-advocacy, employment, and survival. Movements that replicate ableist expectations of constant productivity end up consuming the people they depend on. Peer leadership must therefore model the culture it seeks to build, one that values rest, mutual aid, and continuity over heroism.
Sustainable leadership is collective leadership. It disperses responsibility across many shoulders so that no single person becomes the system. It embraces slowness, transparency, and the inevitability of imperfection. It recognizes that change is ecological, not linear. Justice work, like healing, happens in seasons.
Toward Autonomy and Interdependence
The goal of community power is not separatism but sovereignty. Neurodivergent communities do not exist to retreat from the world but to reshape it. Autonomy and interdependence are not opposites, they are twin conditions of justice. Autonomy ensures that neurodivergent people can define our own lives; interdependence ensures that we are not left to navigate those lives alone.
Neurodiversity justice envisions a world where power is distributed through relationship, not hierarchy. Where leadership is a shared practice, not a title. Where care is organized horizontally, not dispensed from above. And where expertise is recognized in the body, the story, and the collective, not just in the institution.
Reflection:
Who currently holds the power to define and deliver “support” in your community or workplace? How can that power be redistributed or shared with those most affected?
What would it look like to build systems of care that are peer-led, sustainable, and rooted in trust rather than control?
6. Education, Employment, and Health as Sites of Justice Work
Neurodiversity justice is not achieved through policy statements or public awareness alone, it is realized through the redesign of everyday systems. The most powerful and harmful structures in most people’s lives are schools, workplaces, and healthcare systems. These are the sites where norms are taught, enforced, and internalized. They are also the sites where transformation must begin. Each system has long functioned as a gatekeeper of legitimacy: education determines intelligence, employment determines worth, and healthcare determines sanity. Justice means dismantling the hierarchies embedded in all three.
Education: The First Laboratory of Normalcy
Schools are often the first institutions to inform a child whether they are “normal.” This judgment is not neutral. It shapes identity, self-concept, and life trajectory. From the first day of kindergarten, children learn what behaviors earn praise, what forms of communication are “appropriate,” and what learning styles fit within the system’s design. Sitting still, completing tasks on time, staying quiet unless called upon, these are not moral values, but industrial expectations. They privilege certain nervous systems over others.
The modern education system was designed in the image of the factory. It sorts, standardizes, and measures. Its schedules mirror industrial work shifts; its grading systems reward consistency over creativity. This structure inherently disadvantages neurodivergent students whose attention, sensory processing, and social communication differ from the norm. When these students struggle, they are labeled “disruptive,” “defiant,” or “lazy,” labels that follow them across years, damaging self-esteem and limiting opportunity.
Curriculum as Cultural Encoding
Beyond behavior, the curriculum itself encodes values that marginalize neurodivergent ways of knowing. Linear thinking, memorization, and linguistic fluency are treated as evidence of intelligence, while visual, kinesthetic, or associative cognition is sidelined. The system rewards fast processing over deep thinking, speech over silence, conformity over curiosity. This bias is not accidental; it reflects the historical purpose of schooling as social conditioning for capitalist labor.
To transform education, we must shift from compliance to curiosity. A neurodiversity-affirming classroom recognizes regulation as a prerequisite for learning, not a reward. It embraces sensory variation, allows movement, permits fidgeting, and values alternative communication. It prioritizes understanding over performance. In such environments, silence, repetition, and deep focus are not punished, they are respected as legitimate learning states.
Trauma-Informed and Consent-Based Education
Many neurodivergent adults carry educational trauma: memories of restraint, exclusion, ridicule, or chronic failure. Practices like Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and punitive discipline teach compliance through fear, often under the guise of therapy. Trauma-informed education begins with consent, it rejects coercion, punishment, and forced participation. It replaces control with collaboration. Teachers become co-regulators rather than enforcers, and emotional safety becomes as central as academic progress.
Empirical studies affirm what lived experience already knows: safety is the foundation of learning. When students feel seen and accepted, executive function, working memory, and creativity all improve (Immordino-Yang et al., 2019). This is the neuroscience of belonging: learning is impossible under threat. Justice-based education, therefore, is not a special program, it is a structural reorientation toward trust.
Decolonizing the Classroom
A neurodiversity justice framework also demands decolonization of education. Western schooling systems have long imposed monocultural norms of thought and communication, erasing Indigenous, Black, and multilingual epistemologies. For neurodivergent students of color, this produces a double exclusion: punished for both cultural expression and cognitive difference. Restorative and culturally responsive pedagogies, rooted in storytelling, relational learning, and collective care, offer pathways to repair. These approaches affirm that intelligence is plural, and that there are as many ways to know as there are ways to be.
Employment: The Marketplace of Worth
Workplaces are the adult equivalent of school. They define whose labor is valued, whose behavior is deemed professional, and whose bodies can be present without penalty. Under capitalism, employment is framed not only as an economic necessity but as a moral identity. “Work ethic” becomes shorthand for virtue. Those unable or unwilling to conform are branded unmotivated, unstable, or unemployable.
This ideology is particularly damaging to neurodivergent people, whose cognitive rhythms and sensory needs rarely align with industrial work structures. The 9-to-5 schedule, fluorescent lighting, open-plan offices, performance reviews, and constant digital communication all reproduce ableist norms of consistency, availability, and emotional composure. The problem is not that neurodivergent people cannot work, it is that the modern workplace was designed to exclude us.
The Myth of Professionalism
Professionalism is often weaponized as a euphemism for neurotypical behavior. It privileges speech patterns, facial expressions, eye contact, and social timing that reflect dominant cultural norms. It rewards those who can self-regulate in environments that are inherently dysregulating. It erases emotion, punishes directness, and elevates conformity. In this context, “soft skills” become the gatekeepers of access, skills often defined against neurodivergent communication styles.
Justice requires redefining professionalism as integrity, not performance. Reliability should mean honesty, not mimicry. Collaboration should mean mutual respect, not social choreography. Leadership should mean accountability, not charisma.
Redesigning Work for Cognitive Diversity
Accessible employment is not about token hiring, it is about redesigning how labor itself is organized. This includes flexible scheduling, remote work options, quiet environments, written communication, asynchronous collaboration, and sensory-safe spaces. It also includes reevaluating productivity metrics. Instead of measuring output by time or multitasking, workplaces can measure outcomes by creativity, precision, and innovation. Studies consistently show that neurodivergent employees in supportive environments exhibit higher problem-solving capacity and lower turnover (Austin & Pisano, 2017). Inclusion is not a liability, it is a competitive advantage.
Economic justice also demands fair pay and stability. Many neurodivergent people are funneled into precarious gig work or unpaid advocacy under the illusion of flexibility. True accessibility requires financial security, not just accommodations. Livable wages, predictable hours, and access to healthcare are as essential as sensory-friendly spaces.
The Cost of Masking
Masking, suppressing neurodivergent traits to appear neurotypical, is endemic in workplaces. While it may temporarily facilitate acceptance, it extracts immense cognitive and emotional energy. Over time, masking leads to burnout, anxiety, and identity fragmentation (Bradley et al., 2021). Employers often mistake masking for success, praising “adaptability” while ignoring the harm beneath the performance. Justice requires environments where authenticity is sustainable, where no one has to choose between livelihood and selfhood.
Healthcare: The Gatekeeping of Sanity
Healthcare systems, while ostensibly designed to alleviate suffering, often reproduce ableism and epistemic injustice. Neurodivergent people routinely face disbelief, misdiagnosis, and coercion. Doctors dismiss symptoms as anxiety, teachers medicalize curiosity, and therapists interpret distress through the lens of pathology rather than oppression.
The medical model positions neurodivergent people as objects of treatment rather than agents of their own health. Diagnostic manuals describe deficits without context; insurance systems require pathologization for coverage; “treatment goals” often aim to reduce visible difference rather than increase well-being. Even well-meaning practitioners may conflate support with normalization, equating health with conformity.
Bias and Exclusion in Care
Marginalized neurodivergent people face additional barriers. Black, Indigenous, and Latine individuals experience higher rates of psychiatric misdiagnosis and lower access to trauma-informed care (Barnett et al., 2019). Women and trans people are routinely gaslit by clinicians who frame their symptoms as emotional instability. For many, healthcare is not healing, it is retraumatization.
Neurodivergent-Centered Care
A justice-oriented healthcare system begins with epistemic humility. Clinicians must recognize that neurodivergent people are the primary experts on our own sensory, emotional, and cognitive states. In practice, this means shifting from “treatment plans” to collaborative care plans, from compliance to consent, and from normalization to regulation. It means training providers in communication accessibility, sensory sensitivity, and the cultural history of neurodivergent harm.
Healthcare institutions can also apply the principles of universal design, offering quiet waiting areas, flexible appointment formats, written summaries, and extended visit times. These changes, while small, transform clinical interactions from adversarial to collaborative.
Health as Collective Infrastructure
Health is not the absence of impairment, it is the presence of support. A neurodiversity justice lens expands health beyond the medical setting to include housing, food security, community, and rest. Chronic stress from masking, sensory overload, or systemic exclusion contributes to elevated rates of physical illness among neurodivergent people (Botha & Frost, 2020). Addressing these inequities requires social as well as clinical intervention. Public health must therefore be redefined as environmental justice: clean air, quiet spaces, access to nature, and communities where our nervous systems can breathe.
Education, Employment, and Health as Ecosystems of Redesign
These three systems, education, employment, and healthcare, form a feedback loop that shapes every neurodivergent life. Each one polices legitimacy; each one can be reimagined as a site of liberation. Justice work means transforming them from gatekeepers into ecosystems of belonging.
Schools can become laboratories of curiosity. Workplaces can become collectives of creativity. Healthcare can become partnership. When these systems are redesigned around the nervous system rather than against it, the benefits ripple outward, to everyone. The same structures that sustain neurodivergent well-being also foster collective well-being: slower pace, mutual care, autonomy, and rest.
The question is not whether inclusion is possible, it is whether we are willing to reimagine what these systems are for. Education should cultivate wonder, not compliance. Employment should sustain life, not extract it. Healthcare should restore connection, not enforce control. These are not radical demands. They are what a society built on consent, care, and diversity would naturally do.
Reflection:
How do schools, workplaces, and healthcare systems define “success,” and who benefits from those definitions? What would these systems look like if designed around regulation, relationship, and rest? Where do you see opportunities to shift power from gatekeeping to partnership in your own sphere of influence?
7. Building Neurodiversity Justice Infrastructure
Justice cannot live in theory alone. It must be built into the physical, relational, and digital structures that shape daily life. Neurodiversity justice infrastructure refers to the systems, spaces, and networks that sustain neurodivergent flourishing over time. It is the scaffolding of liberation, the material and cultural framework that turns values into function. Without infrastructure, inclusion remains symbolic; without culture, infrastructure becomes sterile. Justice lives in the interplay between design and meaning.
Infrastructure, in this sense, is not only roads and buildings. It includes the architecture of policy, the flow of information, the structure of funding, and the rituals of care. When those structures are neurotypical by default, demanding speed, consistency, and emotional uniformity, they silently exclude neurodivergent participation. To build neurodiversity justice infrastructure is to re-engineer those systems from the ground up so that all nervous systems can belong, contribute, and rest.
Defining Infrastructure Beyond Access
Accessibility is often discussed in terms of physical or digital features, ramps, captions, alt text, quiet rooms. These are essential, but justice infrastructure goes further. It asks: Who decides what access means? Who maintains it when funding runs out?Who has to ask for it in the first place?
Justice-based infrastructure is proactive, not reactive. It does not retrofit inclusion; it builds it into the foundation. This means designing processes, budgets, and leadership models that assume diversity as the norm. A neuro-inclusive building might include sensory zoning, variable lighting, and quiet spaces, but a neurodiversity-just organization goes further, it trains staff in relational access, offers flexible scheduling, compensates cognitive labor equitably, and includes neurodivergent people in decision-making about design itself.
Infrastructure also exists in policy. When policies are rigid, requiring attendance, rapid response, or in-person presence, they exclude by design. Flexible, consent-based policy is access infrastructure. Similarly, documentation and communication systems should respect neurodivergent cognition: clear instructions, predictable timelines, asynchronous collaboration. Each of these practices rebalances power by reducing the hidden labor of translation neurodivergent people perform daily.
Community Infrastructure: From Isolation to Interdependence
For many neurodivergent people, the absence of infrastructure shows up as isolation. We spend years masking, self-advocating, or self-teaching in systems that neither recognize nor sustain us. Community infrastructure transforms isolation into interdependence. It is the network of relationships, peer spaces, and cultural institutions that allow us to thrive without assimilation.
This includes neurodivergent-led centers, mutual aid collectives, online support communities, arts venues, and public programs like NeuroStage or the Neurodiversity Pride Parade. These spaces do more than provide support, they build belonging. They create cultural memory and political momentum. They normalize rest, stim, and difference. They make visible the joy and brilliance that deficit models erased.
A justice-oriented approach to community design prioritizes ecology over hierarchy. Each initiative, whether local or global, functions as part of an interconnected ecosystem rather than a competitive market of nonprofits. Collaboration replaces branding. Shared resources replace silos. In this model, infrastructure grows like mycelium: decentralized, adaptive, and relational.
Economic Infrastructure: Redistributing Resources
Justice cannot survive on volunteer labor. Neurodivergent-led projects are often expected to operate on passion while neurotypical institutions receive funding to study or replicate them. This economic inequity undermines sustainability and perpetuates dependency.
Redistributing resources is not an act of charity, it is a correction. Funders, universities, and governments must prioritize neurodivergent ownership: pay neurodivergent consultants equitably; fund community-based participatory research; compensate advisory work; and include neurodivergent people in budget authority. Employment, too, is infrastructure. When neurodivergent people occupy stable, paid leadership roles, justice work becomes durable rather than precarious.
Economic infrastructure also includes time. Time is currency in an ableist society that demands constant urgency. Neurodiversity justice requires slow funding, slow policy, slow meetings, processes paced for regulation rather than extraction. Flexibility and predictability are not luxuries; they are accessibility features of time itself.
Cultural Infrastructure: Storytelling and Representation
Culture is the nervous system of a movement. It carries memory, meaning, and connection. Without cultural infrastructure, art, writing, performance, ritual, movements lose coherence. Neurodiversity justice depends on storytelling that reframes how society imagines difference. Representation is not about visibility alone; it is about narrative power.
Media and education systems often depict neurodivergent people as inspirational objects or tragic burdens. Cultural infrastructure replaces these tropes with complexity. It funds neurodivergent filmmakers, writers, educators, and performers to tell our own stories. It ensures that schools, festivals, and libraries feature neurodivergent voices not as token guests but as cultural authorities.
Projects like the Neurodiversity Justice Bookshelf and NeuroStage serve as examples of this approach. They create pipelines for neurodivergent authors, scholars, and artists to reach public audiences while retaining ownership of their narratives. This work matters because culture drives policy. Before a law changes, a story changes. Before a structure reforms, a collective imagination shifts.
Relational Infrastructure: Trust, Consent, and Repair
No system, however well-designed, can guarantee justice without trust. Relational infrastructure refers to the ethical habits and agreements that hold communities together. It is built through consent, transparency, and repair.
Consent means no one is coerced into participation or disclosure. It means meetings, collaborations, and care arrangements are voluntary, flexible, and reversible. Transparency means sharing decision-making openly, how resources are distributed, who holds authority, how feedback is incorporated. Repair means treating harm as an inevitable part of relationship, not as an end to it. When missteps occur, and they will, justice-oriented systems respond with accountability, not punishment.
These practices humanize infrastructure. They make systems responsive rather than rigid, compassionate rather than defensive. In relational terms, justice feels like predictability without control, intimacy without intrusion, and safety without surveillance.
Digital Infrastructure: The Commons of Connection
The internet remains one of the most transformative infrastructures for neurodivergent liberation. Online spaces have allowed neurodivergent people to find each other, exchange knowledge, and co-create language outside institutional barriers. But digital access is uneven. Algorithms amplify some voices and erase others; platforms profit from the emotional labor of community building without reinvestment.
Digital justice requires treating online communities as public commons. This means funding moderation, protecting privacy, and designing accessible interfaces that accommodate diverse communication and sensory needs. It also means resisting the commodification of advocacy. Neurodivergent knowledge should not be mined for content; it should circulate as collective resource.
When designed ethically, digital infrastructure becomes a form of global peer leadership. It connects isolated individuals into networks of solidarity, allowing local actions, policy change, art, mutual aid, to ripple worldwide.
Governance Infrastructure: Accountability Without Bureaucracy
Traditional governance structures, boards, hierarchies, committees, often replicate the rigidity of the systems they aim to challenge. Neurodiversity justice infrastructure requires governance that mirrors neurodivergent cognition: flexible, distributed, transparent, and emergent.
This can include rotating leadership, consensus-based decision-making, and distributed responsibility. It may involve collective charters that outline values and boundaries instead of rigid bylaws. It can also involve creating Community Accountability Circles, groups empowered to address harm, redistribute power, and guide ethical reflection. These circles embody restorative rather than punitive approaches to leadership.
Governance must also include feedback loops. Neurodivergent systems thinkers know that adaptation is life. Organizations should regularly pause to ask: what is no longer working? Who is being excluded? What new needs have emerged? Iteration is a form of care.
Infrastructure as Imagination
Ultimately, building neurodiversity justice infrastructure is an act of imagination. It asks us to dream systems that regulate rather than exhaust, that expand rather than compress, that honor both solitude and community. It asks us to build worlds where accessibility is aesthetic, where care is built into architecture, where policy moves at the speed of nervous system safety.
Every act of justice work, every mutual aid network, quiet room, fair-pay policy, or sensory-aware festival, is infrastructure. Each becomes part of a collective nervous system for humanity, connecting nodes of care across geography and difference.
The work is not to build utopia, but to build continuity, to ensure that when one leader rests, another can step in without losing the thread. Infrastructure holds that thread. It keeps the story alive long after slogans fade.
Reflection:
What infrastructures in your life reproduce exhaustion, exclusion, or urgency? What small systems could you redesign, at work, in community, online, to center regulation and consent? How can we measure the strength of our movements not by output, but by how well they sustain each other over time?
8. Accountability, Repair, and Cultural Change
Accountability is the moral and emotional core of neurodiversity justice. It is what distinguishes a movement from a message, a culture from a campaign. Without accountability, inclusion becomes branding, and justice becomes theory. Accountability ensures that our commitments, to access, to dignity, to care, are not rhetorical but embodied. It is the practice of returning, again and again, to the question: How do our actions align with our values?
Yet accountability is often misunderstood. In neurotypical, capitalist, and punitive cultures, it is equated with blame, punishment, or institutional discipline. In neurodiversity justice, accountability means the opposite. It is not retribution, it is relationship. It is the willingness to stay in dialogue, to repair harm, to adapt, and to grow. It is not a demand for perfection but for presence.
Justice-centered accountability asks communities, organizations, and individuals to build the capacity for repair. Because harm is inevitable. Miscommunication happens. Burnout happens. Power drifts toward consolidation. Access needs shift. What matters is not whether harm occurs, but whether we have the courage and structure to respond with integrity when it does.
The Difference Between Guilt and Responsibility
Guilt is emotional. Responsibility is structural. Guilt centers the self; responsibility centers the system. When institutions frame accountability as guilt, they individualize harm, focusing on bad apples rather than bad barrels. Neurodiversity justice reframes accountability as a collective task. The goal is not to identify villains but to understand mechanisms: how a policy, process, or habit perpetuates exclusion.
This distinction matters because guilt often paralyzes. People and organizations become so afraid of getting it wrong that they stop trying. Responsibility liberates. It says, We are all in this system together. We all have the ability to change it.
Responsibility is also restorative. It is grounded in care, not compliance. It invites honesty without humiliation. It recognizes that repair is not possible without transparency and trust, and that trust cannot be coerced.
Repair as an Act of Love
Repair is the living practice of justice. It transforms harm from rupture into renewal. In neurodivergent communities, where many carry trauma from institutional betrayal, repair must be sensory, relational, and explicit. It cannot be reduced to a statement or a training. It must be embodied through changed behavior, reallocated resources, and sustained listening.
Repair begins with acknowledgment: naming what happened and who was harmed without defensiveness. It continues with responsibility: understanding not only the immediate mistake but the structural conditions that made it possible. And it culminates in reparation: tangible action to redistribute power, restore safety, or return autonomy.
Sometimes repair means apologizing and stepping back. Sometimes it means staying close and rebuilding trust over time. Sometimes it means transforming an entire policy. Always, it requires humility. As adrienne maree brown writes, “We are fractal, the small reflects the whole.” Repairing one relationship models the culture we are trying to build at scale.
Cultural Change as Nervous System Work
Cultural transformation is not achieved through information alone, it happens through regulation. This is why even the most progressive organizations can remain oppressive: they have not yet re-patterned their nervous systems. Culture is the body language of a collective. It is how power, attention, and emotion move through a system.
In ableist culture, power moves through speed, urgency, and control. Mistakes trigger defensiveness. Feedback becomes threat. Neurodiversity justice requires slowing down that reflex. It invites us to regulate collectively, to breathe, to pause, to listen. When people feel safe enough to be honest, feedback becomes connection instead of conflict. This is what researcher and activist Dr. Monique Botha calls psychological safety: the baseline condition for any authentic inclusion.
Cultural change also requires sensory and emotional attunement. Spaces that claim to be inclusive but are hostile to stimming, movement, or emotion are physiologically unsafe. Justice cannot exist where the body must remain tense. To sustain change, organizations must become co-regulatory systems, where difference in rhythm, tone, and tempo are not disruptions but data.
The Politics of Apology and the Practice of Repair
Apologies are cultural performance when divorced from structural change. Statements of solidarity after harm, unaccompanied by material repair, are emotional laundering. A neurodiversity justice lens distinguishes between performative remorse and transformative repair.
Transformative repair is concrete. It involves compensating those harmed, reallocating decision-making power, revising harmful policies, and making amends publicly when appropriate. It involves staying present during discomfort, not outsourcing it to communications departments. And it involves learning from neurodivergent ways of repair, where directness, pacing, and embodied sincerity matter more than polished language.
Many neurodivergent people communicate repair through consistent behavior rather than words. The nervous system, not the intellect, perceives sincerity. Justice work, therefore, must accommodate multiple languages of repair, spoken, written, sensory, symbolic.
Accountability Structures That Work
Justice-based accountability requires infrastructure: clear processes, mutual agreements, and dedicated space for reflection. Community Accountability Circles, a model that can be adapted to workplaces, collectives, or neighborhoods, offer one example. These circles are composed of diverse participants who serve as guardians of community ethics. Their purpose is not to punish but to mediate, educate, and restore.
A circle might convene when harm occurs or annually as part of reflective practice. Members listen to all sides, assess systemic patterns, and recommend concrete steps for repair, policy changes, resource redistribution, facilitated dialogue. They track follow-through, not for punishment but for continuity. The process itself models care: slow, transparent, non-adversarial.
Other accountability tools include:
Access Audits that are participatory, led by neurodivergent experts, and iterative rather than one-off evaluations.
Community Feedback Agreements, where feedback is invited regularly through multiple modalities, anonymous surveys, discussion spaces, and sensory mapping.
Restorative Policy Frameworks, embedding repair pathways into institutional processes (for example, replacing disciplinary procedures with restorative dialogues).
In all cases, the goal is not perfection but practice: to make accountability a rhythm, not a reaction.
Institutional vs. Community Accountability
Institutions often mistake internal diversity initiatives for accountability. Real accountability is external and reciprocal. It means being answerable to the communities one claims to serve. For organizations, this could mean forming advisory councils with actual power, publishing transparent reports, or surrendering control of specific programs to community partners. For governments, it means participatory budgeting, policy co-authorship, and neurodivergent representation at every level of decision-making.
At the community level, accountability also flows inward. Neurodivergent movements must confront their own inequities: Who is centered in our discourse? Who is excluded by our language, our pacing, our aesthetics? How do we practice accessibility with each other, not only demand it from systems? Justice begins at home.
The Emotional Labor of Change
Cultural change is emotional work. It demands self-reflection, discomfort, and unlearning. For neurotypical allies, it means relinquishing the comfort of authority. For neurodivergent leaders, it means navigating the exhaustion of constant education. Both require boundaries and rest. Accountability is not sustainable without compassion, for self and others.
In trauma-informed systems, accountability and care are inseparable. Boundaries are not barriers but safety mechanisms. Rest is not avoidance but repair. Emotional literacy, the ability to recognize one’s own regulation state, is leadership infrastructure. It determines whether a system responds to feedback with openness or with fight-flight-freeze.
Toward a Culture of Ongoing Repair
Ultimately, neurodiversity justice calls for cultures that expect imperfection and plan for repair. A just community is not one that never harms, but one that always returns. Accountability becomes a cycle of rupture and restoration, tension and transformation. Over time, this rhythm builds resilience: people learn that truth will not destroy them, that difference will not dissolve them, and that care can coexist with critique.
When accountability is normalized, trust becomes habitual. Feedback becomes a shared act of love. Communities can rest because safety is built into the structure. That is what justice feels like, not the absence of harm, but the presence of repair.
Reflection:
How does your community currently respond when harm occurs? Who gets to define what repair looks like? What would it take to build systems where accountability feels like care rather than punishment?
9. The Future of Neurodiversity Justice – Cultural Evolution, Collective Imagination, and Hope
The future of neurodiversity justice is not a destination but a direction, a collective movement toward a world that treats difference as data, not defect. It is the slow evolution of culture from hierarchy to ecosystem, from surveillance to trust, from survival to flourishing. This future will not arrive through legislation alone, or through academic consensus, or through representation in media. It will emerge through millions of daily acts of imagination and care, through how we teach, build, love, rest, and design for each other.
If the 20th century was the century of diagnosis, the 21st must become the century of redesign. We now know that human minds exist on vast spectrums of attention, sensitivity, and rhythm. We know that our nervous systems are ecological, interacting constantly with light, sound, texture, community, and culture. The question is no longer whether this diversity exists, but what we will build from that knowledge. Will we continue to force all minds into the same mold, or will we design societies flexible enough to hold us all?
From Awareness to Wisdom
Awareness was a beginning. It taught people that neurodivergent lives exist. Acceptance was a next step, it invited tolerance. But justice moves beyond both. Awareness names existence; justice redistributes power. Acceptance allows difference; justice redesigns systems so that difference is indispensable.
The next cultural evolution must move us from awareness to wisdom: a collective capacity to interpret difference not as threat but as guidance. Neurodivergent cognition offers critical insight into what humanity needs most, pattern recognition, sensitivity to injustice, deep focus, resistance to pretense, and the refusal to adapt to systems that harm. These traits are not deficits; they are warnings. They tell us that the environments we have built are unsustainable. Neurodivergence is, in many ways, the nervous system’s protest against a world moving too fast.
If we listen, these signals could guide us toward more humane futures. They remind us that speed is not progress, that uniformity is not safety, that endless productivity is not purpose. Justice begins when we let difference lead.
Cultural Evolution as Ecological Shift
Neurodiversity justice invites us to see culture as an ecosystem. In ecology, diversity is not an ethical ideal, it is a survival requirement. Monocultures collapse because they lack adaptability. The same principle applies to societies. Systems that privilege only one kind of intelligence or emotional expression become brittle. They cannot respond to crisis because they have eliminated the very minds best suited to perceive complexity.
Autistic pattern recognition, ADHD innovation, dyslexic spatial reasoning, Tourette creative motor expression, dyspraxic resilience, these are forms of intelligence the world desperately needs. In an era of climate crisis, political extremism, and technological acceleration, humanity’s survival depends on minds that can sense nuance, hold contradiction, and imagine alternatives.
Neurodiversity justice therefore reframes inclusion as ecological restoration. It heals a planet of thought that has been stripped of diversity. It asks us to cultivate habitats of safety and imagination, schools that nurture curiosity instead of compliance, workplaces that pace themselves to human bodies, and communities that understand care as infrastructure.
Collective Imagination as Resistance
The imagination is a political organ. Every system of oppression depends on limiting what people can imagine as possible. Neurodivergent people have always lived beyond that boundary, often involuntarily. Our cognition resists containment. We find patterns others cannot see, follow tangents others ignore, and sense undercurrents others overlook. This capacity, the neurodivergent imagination, is revolutionary because it reveals alternatives.
In oppressive systems, imagination becomes survival. Many autistic and ADHD children, isolated or bullied, retreat into rich inner worlds. What others call fantasy is often our first architecture of freedom. Justice demands that we carry this imagination outward, that we use it to redesign the physical and social worlds we inhabit. The systems we build will always reflect the imaginations we permit. When our imaginations are liberated, our institutions can finally follow.
Art, storytelling, and play are therefore central to the future of neurodiversity justice. They allow us to practice freedom before it exists materially. Every poem, film, painting, song, or game created by neurodivergent artists expands the cultural nervous system. It helps the world rehearse new ways of feeling and knowing. Culture is the blueprint of tomorrow’s policy.
Rest, Time, and the Slow Revolution
Neurodiversity justice is a slow revolution. It moves at the pace of nervous system repair. It refuses the capitalist demand for urgency because urgency is the enemy of depth. Justice must be built in alignment with the bodies it seeks to liberate. This means integrating cycles of rest, reflection, and iteration into our activism.
Rest is not retreat. It is strategy. It interrupts systems that equate worth with exhaustion. It models the world we are trying to build, one where sustainability replaces sacrifice. As disability justice activist Stacy Milbern reminded us, “Care is political warfare.” Rest is one form of that care: the refusal to be consumed by the same ableist tempo we resist.
Justice requires both pace and patience. The structures that oppress us were not built overnight; neither will the ones that free us. Cultural change unfolds through generations. What matters is continuity, the ability to hand forward tools, language, and hope. Our movements are rivers, not moments.
Hope as Practice
Hope, in neurodiversity justice, is not naïveté, it is endurance. It is the radical insistence that despite centuries of pathologization, our minds remain intact, creative, and capable of love. Hope is the capacity to imagine belonging in a world that still doubts our existence. It is, as Rebecca Solnit writes, “an axe you break down doors with.”
For neurodivergent people, hope is often a sensory experience. It feels like regulation after chaos, like stimming freely, like finding a rhythm that fits. It is the moment when your nervous system stops bracing and starts trusting. That feeling, safety, recognition, alignment, is the texture of justice itself.
Collective hope grows from witnessing each other’s survival. Every peer-led group, every inclusive classroom, every sensory map or quiet zone or community festival adds to the archive of possibility. We are not waiting for the future, we are building it in the present tense, one accessible interaction at a time.
Neurodiversity Justice as a Legacy
Our work today is ancestral. The systems we dismantle and the cultures we build will shape generations of neurodivergent children who will never know what it felt like to apologize for their existence. They will inherit language, policy, and design that affirm their humanity from birth. They will have elders, role models, and rituals of belonging. They will see neurodiversity not as a movement but as reality.
To build that legacy, we must anchor our movements in continuity. Create archives, fund fellowships, mentor youth, record oral histories, translate texts, build coalitions. The legacy of oppression is sustained by forgetting; the legacy of justice is sustained by remembering. Documentation is resistance.
The Long Arc of Transformation
The future of neurodiversity justice will be measured not by inclusion rates or policy wins, but by collective well-being. It will be visible in quieter nervous systems, longer breaths, and communities that no longer equate silence with absence or difference with danger. It will be a world where a child’s sensory needs are met without question, where an adult’s burnout is met with care, and where being human is no longer a test one must pass.
This vision is not utopian, it is entirely possible. Pieces of it already exist wherever neurodivergent people gather, rest, create, and lead. Each act of justice, each accessible event, rewritten policy, or reclaimed narrative, is a piece of the future made tangible.
We do not have to imagine the entire structure to begin building it. We only have to build the next right thing: one conversation, one design, one act of care at a time. The rest will connect itself.
The arc of neurodiversity justice is long, but it bends toward belonging.
Reflection:
What does hope look like in your body, not just in your mind? How can you contribute to continuity, passing forward knowledge, access, and care? What future could unfold if our movements measured success not by visibility, but by peace?
Author’s Note and Acknowledgments
(Bridgette Hamstead, MS – Founding Director, Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism)
This guide was never meant to be a static document. It is a living text, shaped by conversation, community, and change. It was written across late nights, quiet mornings, Zoom calls, community gatherings, and endless exchanges with neurodivergent people around the world, people who have carried the work of justice in their bodies long before the world had language for it.
I wrote this not as an expert above the movement, but as one life inside it. Every sentence carries the fingerprints of collective authorship, the autistic and ADHD elders who first named what the world could not see; the mad and disabled activists who risked everything to fight institutional violence; the queer, trans, and BIPOC visionaries who built frameworks of intersectionality and care that this work rests upon. This is their text as much as mine.
To the late-diagnosed, the burnt-out, the misread, the ones who built entire languages of belonging online when none existed in their physical lives: your survival is theory. Your regulation is research. Your stories are infrastructure. This guide stands on the knowledge you have generated through living. You have made it possible for this movement to have lineage, language, and life.
I also owe this work to the communities that continue to build justice at the edge of exhaustion. The educators creating trauma-informed classrooms despite bureaucratic resistance. The organizers designing accessible festivals, mutual aid collectives, and sensory-safe spaces without funding or recognition. The healthcare workers and therapists trying to unlearn their own training. The parents and caregivers listening differently. The employers and policymakers willing to slow down and rebuild from within. Each of you is building justice in real time.
At Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism, we often say that neurodiversity justice is “systems change led by sensory truth.” That phrase has guided this writing. It means that everything we build, every policy, every class, every partnership, must be measured not by how it looks on paper, but by how it feels in the body. Does the nervous system rest? Does the space breathe? Does the work make more room for difference, or does it tighten the circle? These are the questions that continue to shape my own leadership, and they are the questions that I hope follow you beyond this book.
This guide exists because of countless collaborators, co-conspirators, and kindred thinkers. To my colleagues and co-leaders at Fish in a Tree and the Neurodiversity Coalition of America, thank you for building the scaffolding of this work with intellect and heart. To our interns and students, whose curiosity and integrity push this field forward, thank you for asking hard questions and demanding real answers. To every participant in our NeuroStage, Bookshelf, and Community Circle programs, whose insights are woven throughout these pages, thank you for trusting me with your stories.
To the global neurodiversity community: thank you for refusing disappearance. Your refusal is revolutionary. Every act of self-definition, every moment of mutual aid, every instance of saying “no” to a system that harms, these are not small things. They are the quiet mechanics of social change.
And to the reader, especially the neurodivergent reader, thank you for being here. If this text has given you language for what your body has always known, or reminded you that you were never alone, then it has done its job. My hope is that you use this guide as a living document: annotate it, challenge it, expand it. Bring it into meetings, classrooms, town halls, and bedrooms. Let it travel. Let it evolve.
Justice is not a static goal. It is a practice of continual reorientation toward dignity. It is a way of living in alignment with what our nervous systems already know: that we are not broken, that we belong to one another, and that a world built for all of us will be a calmer, kinder, more intelligent place.
With love, gratitude, and solidarity,
Bridgette Hamstead, MS
Founding Director, Fish in a Tree: Center for Neurodiversity Education, Advocacy, and Activism
Chairperson of the Board, Neurodiversity Coalition of America
New Orleans, Louisiana – 2025