The History of Neurodiversity Justice

Bridgette Hamstead

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:

-In our own organizations and practices, 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?

-What does it change for you to know that neurodiversity justice comes from a long lineage of disabled, mad, queer, feminist, Black, Indigenous, and survivor-led movements rather than from clinical research or policy?

-Where do you see your own story reflected in these lineages, and where do you feel the movement has not yet made space for your experience?

-What assumptions about “normal” or “healthy” were you taught by schools, workplaces, or medical systems, and how have those ideas shaped the way you see yourself now?

-Which movements or thinkers have shaped your understanding of liberation, care, and power, and which voices do you want to learn from more deeply?

-How has masking, compliance, or performing a certain version of yourself interrupted your ability to see your own history as part of something larger?

-When you think about the movements that came before us, what forms of labor or courage stand out as foundational to the work we do today?

-What parts of this lineage have been overlooked, erased, or under-acknowledged, and why do you think those gaps exist?

-How do you feel when you imagine neurodiversity justice not just as an identity conversation, but as a liberation movement with political roots and global implications?

-Which systems in your own life still carry the imprint of ableism, colonialism, or psychiatric control, and how have those systems shaped your understanding of yourself?

-What would it mean for you personally to claim cognitive sovereignty, and what would claiming that sovereignty look like in practice?

-When you imagine the future of neurodiversity justice, what do you hope we build next that our predecessors could not?

-What responsibilities do we carry toward the people who began this work long before neurodiversity was a widely recognized concept?

-If you could rewrite one story you were taught about your mind, your body, or your worth, what would you change and why?

-How do you want your own contributions to this lineage to be remembered in ten or twenty years?