The Problem With Calling Everything “Neurodiversity”
Friday, December 12, 2025.
Neurodiversity has become one of those words that sounds like it’s doing work even when nothing else is. I use it way too much. Sorry.
It floats. It reassures. It allows everyone in the room to feel progressive without having to move a chair, dim a light, or rethink a deadline.
It is the verbal equivalent of applauding accessibility from a standing desk no one else can use.
Autism, by contrast, remains stubbornly physical. Loud. Exhausting. Inconvenient.
It still requires things—particularly when differences in sensory processing reliably affect pain thresholds, attention, and fatigue in everyday environments, as documented in adult autistic populations by Crane, Goddard, and Pring in Autism.
This difference matters.
As I said in my last post, Neurodiversity is a framework. Autism is a diagnosis. Treating them as interchangeable flatters institutions and strains bodies.
When Language Replaces Infrastructure
Institutions reliably prefer solutions that cost nothing to implement.
“Neurodiversity” is ideal in this regard.
It converts material needs into moral narratives. If autism is framed as a difference rather than a disability, then distress becomes subjective. If it is a perspective, then overload becomes a mindset issue. If everyone is simply wired differently, then the environment is conveniently off the hook.
Yet participatory design research with autistic adults consistently shows the opposite: access failures are not attitudinal problems but design problems—predictable outcomes of spaces built without sensory diversity in mind, as outlined by Righi, Tierney, and Nelson in the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders.
Language steps in. Infrastructure quietly steps out.
This is not cruelty. It is accounting.
The Polite Disappearance of Accommodation
Here is the part that is rarely said plainly: accommodation is kinda awkward.
It slows meetings. It complicates schedules. It requires specificity. It forces managers, educators, and clinicians to admit that the default setting was never neurally neutral to begin with.
Neurodiversity discourse often allows organizations to bypass this reckoning. Instead of redesigning systems, they reframe experience. Instead of adjusting norms, they celebrate difference. Instead of changing conditions, they change tone.
Autistic self-advocates have named this gap for decades.
For example, the throughline in Loud Hands, published by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, is not opposition to inclusion—but frustration with inclusion that arrives without logistics.
The outcome is that everyone feels affirmed, but nobody feels better either.
Autism Is Not an Aesthetic Category
Online, autism is increasingly presented as a style of being: candid, insightful, refreshingly blunt.
This version photographs well. It writes well. It performs self-knowledge fluently for a non-autistic audience eager to understand. It’s amusing to watch on screenplays.
But autism is not evenly distributed across eloquence, energy, or self-advocacy.
Research on autistic intersubjectivity shows that shared understanding is often built differently—not deficiently—between autistic people, relying less on rapid verbal signaling and more on deliberate, context-bound coordination, as described by Heasman and Gillespie in Autism.
Some autistic people can translate this labor into language. But many cannot.
A framework that privileges the most articulate autistic voices while sidelining those with higher support needs does not democratize visibility. It filters it.
Visibility is not the same as care.
The Double Empathy Problem Is Not a Hall Pass
The double empathy problem was introduced to correct a one-sided deficit model, arguing that misunderstandings between autistic and non-autistic people are mutual rather than unilateral—a point articulated by Damian Milton in Disability & Society.
This was meant to rebalance responsibility.
Instead, it has sometimes been diluted into a cultural shrug.
If everyone misunderstands everyone, then no one has to adapt more than anyone else.
Power differentials dissolve rhetorically. Institutions are absolved structurally. The burden of translation returns—quietly—to the person with less leverage.
Mutual misunderstanding only matters if mutual adjustment follows. Otherwise it is symmetry theater.
Why Real Support Feels So Unfashionable
Actual accommodation is boring and concrete AF, which is its greatest flaw.
It looks like specific written instructions instead of “we’ll figure it out.” It looks like predictable schedules instead of “flexibility.”
It looks like quiet rooms, fewer meetings, and tolerance for people who do not perform ease on command.
When autistic children and adults describe where they feel safest—online or offline—they consistently emphasize environments that reduce unpredictability and sensory assault, not spaces that merely affirm identity. This was shown in qualitative research on “safe zones” by Ringland and colleagues in the Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
None of this trends. None of this performs virtue.
It just works.
Which is precisely why it is a pain in the ass to implement.
Precision Is the Only Way Out
This is not an argument against neurodiversity. It is an argument against using it as an all-purpose social solvent.
Autism is a diagnosis because certain neurological patterns reliably produce difficulty in environments not designed for them.
Neurodiversity is a framework because those patterns deserve dignity rather than shame.
Collapsing the two does not reduce stigma. It redistributes the social burden.
We can hold both—but only if we stop pretending they do the same kind of job.
Final Thoughts
When language becomes more sophisticated, while the environment remains unchanged, pay attention, that’s late-stage capitalism talking.
Gentle readers, that is usually the tell.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Bascom, J. (2019). Loud hands: Autistic people, speaking. Autistic Self Advocacy Network.
Crane, L., Goddard, L., & Pring, L. (2009). Sensory processing in adults with autism spectrum disorders. Autism, 13(3), 215–228. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361309103794
Heasman, B., & Gillespie, A. (2018). Neurodivergent intersubjectivity: Distinctive features of how autistic people create shared understanding. Autism, 23(4), 910–921. https://doi.org/10.1177/1362361318785172
Milton, D. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The “double empathy problem.” Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
Price, D. (2022). Unmasking autism: Discovering the new faces of neurodiversity. Harmony Books.
Ringland, K. E., Wolf, C. T., Faucett, H., & Hayes, G. R. (2017). “Making safe zones on the internet”: Parents’ and children’s perspectives on social media and ASD. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (pp. 6566–6579). Association for Computing Machinery. https://doi.org/10.1145/3025453.3025910
Righi, G., Tierney, A. L., & Nelson, C. A. (2023). Sensory preferences and design accessibility for autistic users: Recommendations from participatory design. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 53(3), 1012–1027. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-022-05520-w
Strickland, D. (2012). Autism and the media: The neurodivergent gaze and alternative forms of engagement. Disability Studies Quarterly, 32(4). https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v32i4.1754