One of my early childhood memories is of a child psychologist’s office. I believe I was about three or four. I don’t remember the size or shape of the room, the psychologist’s face or voice, or any of the questions he asked me. I don’t even remember how many times I went to see him, except that it was probably more than once. What I remember is the dollhouse. Among the handful of toys that occupied the psychologist’s office, it was that cross-section of domesticity in miniature – the people, their tiny furniture and ordinary household objects – that completely absorbed me.
While I would not be diagnosed as autistic until roughly the age of thirteen, there were already things about me that my parents had identified as atypical. Concurrently with this, I had no concept of normative gender performance for a boy: I would bat my eyelashes demurely at people; my mom’s makeup and accessories filled me with a hushed fascination; after baths, I would ask my dad to wrap the towel around me like a skirt I could swish around. A couple years later, at school, I was genuinely perplexed and astonished by my peers’ consternation when I declared that pink was my favourite colour. All of these things converge in my memory of the dollhouse in the child psychologist’s office.
The confluence of neurodivergence and gender/sexual deviance, such as that contained in this childhood memory, is what some scholars have come to describe as ‘neuroqueer’. Nick Walker, one of the originators of the term alongside Remi Yergeau, conceives of neuroqueer ‘as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously’ (2021). Simply put, just as heteronormativity encodes and enforces ‘correct’ ways of doing gender and sexuality through repetition, and these norms can be subverted and disrupted through queer acts, neuroqueering draws our attention to society’s privileging of particular modes of thought, cognition, and communication, and how those of us who deviate from them can wield that difference subversively.
As Yergeau has outlined, there’s considerable reason to approach neurodivergence, particularly autism, and queerness simultaneously beyond this potential symmetry. As they put it, ‘[a]utistics are often clinically conceived as queer, both in the identitarian sense and the “this is abnormal and defies all logic and theory” sense’ (Yergeau 2018: 209). Not only do autistic people show a higher proportion of LGBTQ+ identification than the general population; autistic people are also queered by normative society and the medical establishment because the movements and orientations of our minds and bodies break from established social codes. Many autistic people are subjected to ‘corrective’ therapies such as applied behavioural analysis (ABA), which resemble gay conversion practices not just in general contours but in shared histories and even practices. Yergeau highlights how, in the early days of psychiatry, neurodivergent conditions were thought to be caused by sexually deviant behaviour; in the present, behavioural therapies still often entail enforcing normative gender performance in children.
Given this history, extending the methods of queer theory to describe neurodivergent experiences seems not just appropriate but necessary, offering an alternative to pathologizing narratives that see neurodivergence as something to be curtailed and corrected. Yergeau’s Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (2018), arguably the most influential scholarly work on neuroqueerness, is at its most powerful and exciting as a corrective to clinical misapprehensions of autism, which are mired in eugenicist, homophobic, and transphobic histories and assumptions about how one should move through the world. In the UK, for instance, the considerable overlap between autistic people and trans identification has been weaponized by anti-trans ‘gender critical’ activists, in collaboration with far-right religious organizations, as ostensible proof that trans people do not know their own minds and must be ‘rescued’ from ‘trans ideology’. Through engaging and often playful prose that cuts through the frequent heaviness of their subject matter, Yergeau persuasively argues for autistic people as producers of knowledge, most importantly knowledge about ourselves, even when that knowledge isn’t legible from a normative lens. Counter to dominant narratives that figure autism as a lack of rhetoric, Yergeau calls for ‘a rhetoric that tics, a rhetoric that stims, a rhetoric that faux pas, a rhetoric that averts eye contact, a rhetoric that lobs theories about ToM [theory of mind] against a wall’ (2018: 31).
As the memory that opened this post attests, many of my own experiences chime with the modes of life that neuroqueer theory describes. I first encountered the term ‘neuroqueer’ at an activist workshop in 2016, shortly after I had just come out as gay. At the time, it felt powerful to be able to marshal these two parts of myself as a dissident identity at odds with dominant society, and to see them as mutually illuminating and mutually constitutive of one another. Neuroqueer theory has also begun to find purchase in the field of fantasy studies; Jes Battis’s Thinking Queerly (2021) argues that wizards in medievalist fantasy fiction outline neuroqueer ways of thinking and being. This post grew out of research I am doing for a chapter in my current writing project on Laurie J. Marks’s Elemental Logic series (2002-2019), whose magic system metaphorizes diverging orientations to knowledge via the four classical elements of fire, earth, water, and air. And yet, as generative as I’ve often found neuroqueer theory, the more I read and experience the more reservations and criticisms I’ve begun to have of its applications in practice. In José Esteban Muñoz’s parlance, I disidentify with neuroqueer: it has limited utility in helping me articulate some parts of myself, but fails to encompass the whole.
I say this with some trepidation, knowing that neuroqueer has given many people a vocabulary for staking a claim to self-determination and resisting dominant narratives of autism and other forms of neurodivergence as primarily destructive forces. Those narratives are currently gaining political ground, with major figures like RFK, Jr., peddling eugenicist rhetoric that positions autism as the enemy of a healthy society. With this in mind, I offer my thoughts here not as an opponent of neuroqueer theory, but as a fellow-traveller who sometimes finds my experience diverging from its broad tendencies.
Of course, there are virtually as many autisms as there are autistic people. I am sure that, to some, my criticisms will seem to be merely that I have different things in my Jeep than Walker, Yergeau, et al. have in their Jeeps, and I’m prepared to accept that they might be onto something. Nevertheless, I’m fascinated by the extent to which I do and don’t recognize myself in a school of thought that purports to speak to and for me. In queer theory and disability studies at large it’s discouraged to speak in sweeping generalizations. All knowledge is partial and contingent; ideally one speaks in the first person, saying, ‘This is how it’s been for me.’
So, this is how it’s been for me. My autism diagnosis allowed me to access accommodations without which my high school experience would have been infinitely more difficult. But on a personal level, it was more disorienting than clarifying. Despite my having met the diagnostic criteria, the clean lines that my parents, doctors, and teachers often drew between what they saw of my outward behaviour and abstract lists of symptoms often made me feel like they were describing a person I didn’t recognize. To complicate this, I was beginning to develop a sense of profound dissonance with the evangelical Christian environment in which I was raised, but unable to name the sources of that dissonance. The limited and imperfect ways I struggled to articulate this were often reduced to yet more symptoms by the adults in my life. I was told, time and again, to shift my focus, to get outside my own perspective. One psychologist I regularly saw would ask me how I thought God felt about my clashes with my parents. This was maddening.
It’s on this front that I resonate most strongly with Yergeau’s recollection that ‘[w]hat autism provided was a discursive framework, a lens through which others could story my life. […] My very being became a story, a text in dire need of professional analysis’ (2018: 1). One of the most radical possibilities that approaching neurodivergence through a queer lens poses is that of de-essentializing the stories clinicians and caregivers tell about neurodivergence, and even neurodivergence itself. As medical research on autism begins to catch up to autistic people’s knowledge about ourselves, ‘autism’ appears less as a coherent category that objectively exists ‘out there’ somewhere and more as a loose constellation of multiple tendencies and ways of perceiving and inhabiting the world. To some extent, this is how all diagnoses work: diagnostic categories are fictive constructions indelibly shaped by the cultural, historical, and social contexts in which they emerge. But it is particularly potent to deconstruct ‘autism’ in this way because of the powerful sway it holds over the collective cultural imagination. Put another way, ‘autism’s essence is its considered lack of essence’ (ibid.: 200).
Yet here, neuroqueer theory is backed into a strange corner, because its oppositional logic demands that it continue to affirm diagnostic misrecognitions and overdetermined generalizations as sites of reclamation. Nowhere is this more apparent than in neuroqueer theory’s treatment of the phenomenon of ‘masking’, or ‘hiding’ autistic traits. As Walker frames it, ‘[t]he dominant culture […] pushes neurodivergent people to prioritize passing for “normal” at the expense of their own well-being, mirroring the way that queer people have traditionally been pressured to stay closeted’ (2021). Under this rubric, to modify one’s ‘innate’ or ‘natural’ neurodivergent impulses for any reason is to suppress a ‘true’ neurodivergent self via performance of neurotypicality. For evidence of this, Walker gestures toward scholarship on how ‘the suppression of non-normative embodiments for the sake of compliance with standards of neuronormative performance […] does profound psychological harm toward neurodivergent people and is strongly correlated with depression and suicidality’ (2021). I do not doubt the reality of these experiences. All I can say, especially having (mercifully!) never been subjected to anything like ABA, is that they have not been mine.
This is how it’s been for me. As a teenager I did not want to be alone, as the common understanding of autism insisted was my natural inclination. I longed to bond with people on a deep level, but even as I learned to adapt I struggled to connect beyond surface interactions. When I moved away for college, I was determined to make a fresh start and learn to communicate better. Not that the process was at all straightforward or linear. It was hard, and involved a lot of trial and error, not to mention pain and heartbreak. But connecting with others was enough of a priority for me, and the people I connected with were important enough to me, to continue to make the effort.
I resonate with many of the disparate strategies autistic people use to engage socially, and their wearing effects, that tend to get grouped together under the terminology of ‘masking’. I just think that masking is a bad metaphor for them. Navigating social situations comes with many hidden costs of mental and emotional energy for autistic people, it’s true; sometimes we are more up to the task than others, and sometimes the reasons for expending that energy are better than others. And, of course, some modes of interaction are simply unavailable to some people. I am very far from proclaiming that we should all just keep our heads down and ‘act normal’. What I am trying to gently suggest instead is that we not write off as impossible things that we merely find challenging. Trying to maintain a constant performance of ‘normalcy’ may be doomed to fail, but it also probably won’t kill me to make small talk with the cab driver, or make sure that I exercise brevity and ask an actual question at a Q&A panel, or perform any of the other myriad small social niceties for the sake of others that are the bedrock of any functioning community.
I am very fortunate in adulthood to have a very queer social circle that mostly comprises people who are neurodivergent in various ways. One result of this is that I’ve become a lot more comfortable letting my guard down; I am less afraid to talk about my tendencies and needs, check in about an ambiguous interaction, apologize for a lapse in communication or awareness, or ask for clarification or reassurance, and I hope that others feel comfortable doing the same with me. At the same time, many of the norms of social interaction I practiced in my teens and twenties have come to be more intuitive to me. I’m able to read tone and subtext more readily and can keep a conversation flowing by asking questions without much conscious thought. The effects of this have not been entirely positive; one lingering after-effect has been a kind of hyper-vigilant anxiety left over from when communicating took more active effort. (‘It’s like you have body dysmorphia but for your personality,’ one friend recently quipped.)
Still, I have to ask: if I have genuinely learned many of the communication skills that have taken me longer to pick up than others, as I feel I have, am I still masking? And what would ‘unmasking’ even entail in this context? Given that I am happy to freely disclose my autism in casual conversation, even while adapting my communication to the social context, could we say that what is happening here is something other than performance of ‘neurotypicality’? Could at least some of the things we call ‘masking’ not be better described as social adaptation – the little adjustments that we are all, autistic and nonautistic alike, constantly making, in order to meet each other halfway?
It’s been in moments when I’ve challenged myself to push past initial discomfort that I’ve discovered things about myself that most profoundly clash with pathologizing orthodoxies about autistic people: that, given the chance, I will usually choose to leave the house and stay out whereas my undiagnosed husband relishes a night in; that more often than not I enjoy physical touch – sexual, romantic, platonic; that, despite my difficulties and anxieties around social interaction, I am most at home when surrounded by other people.
Nonautistic ‘other people’ figure most prominently in Yergeau’s study as misunderstanding or hostile witnesses to neuroqueer rhetorics, who then go on to misnarrate the autistic behaviour they have just observed. As in much of Yergeau’s analysis, there is a lot of truth here: I don’t doubt their vivid accounts of infuriating conversations with nonautistic parents of autistic children, nor their descriptions of the friction of living in a society not designed for autistic flourishing, nor the numerous clinical reports they cite as damning evidence of clinicians’ failures and refusals to take autistic people seriously as subjects on their own terms. Again, I can recognize a lot from my own experience in what they describe. But it isn’t the whole truth, and the overwhelmingly oppositional narrative that emerges from this partial view accounts for my biggest frustration with the limits of neuroqueer as a concept: its uncharitable view of people.
Despite the considerable interventions Yergeau makes toward challenging pathologizing clinical constructions of autism, they remain infuriatingly boxed in by those same constructions when it comes to outlining an actual method for approaching neuroqueer rhetoric. It especially troubles me that they take clinical mischaracterizations of autistic people’s antisocial nature at face value. As they narrate, ‘[a]utistics are not only actively antisocial, defying the bounds of multiple social fabrics, but we are the ultimate asocial beings, forwarding self over others, humanizing objects and objectifying humans, rigid in our gaze and our gait and our affect’ (Yergeau 2018: 27).
Yergeau is here partly drawing on Lee Edelman’s No Future (2004), which analyses how straight culture figures queer people as threats to the dominant familial order and its future, embodied in the construct of the child. Edelman argues that to straight culture, homosexuality is ‘sinthomosexuality’ (2004: 35), as it is a symptom (sinthome in French) of the drive to end the dominant heterosexual order and deny its future. Connecting this analysis to neurodivergence is, admittedly, appealing in a society in which autism is popularly figured as a scourge on the family and the denial of the child’s imagined neurotypical future. Edelman’s argument, and the antisocial or antirelational turn in queer theory it represents, has also been criticized by Muñoz, who points out that the dominant heterosexual sociality that Edelman rightly criticizes is not the only possible sociality, and that ‘all children are not the privileged white babies to whom contemporary society caters’ (2019: 94).
Yergeau interprets Muñoz’s critique of Edelman as a call toward intersectionality, a reminder that we should be attentive to how multiple layers of oppression and privilege fundamentally shape and compound experiences of queerness and neurodivergence. While this is part of what he’s getting at, Muñoz starts from this observation to make a more pressing point: the sociality that Edelman so roundly repudiates does not uniformly consist of white (cis, able-bodied, etc.) gay men’s oppressors, nor can queer people who are not white (cis, able-bodied, etc.) gay men – or even many of us who are! – simply opt out of that social order or its effects. This has profound implications when extended to neuroqueerness that neither Yergeau nor Walker fully take on board.
What good, to give an example from my own life, does ‘a rhetoric that averts eye contact’ do either party when I’m speaking with a deaf friend who sometimes relies on lip-reading? (I say this as someone who once had another autistic friend describe the first time we met in person as ‘two people failing to make eye contact’.) Yergeau is quick to acknowledge the neurodiversity movement’s intellectual debts to deaf activism, pointing out the symmetry of the struggles and stating that ‘autistic culture has come to figure itself as a kind of child of the deaf-queer’ (2018: 209). And yet this briefly sketched intellectual and activist history still can’t account for the silent realization that confronted me in my friend’s living room on a morning in early autumn, after about the third time he gently asked me to repeat something I’d said. The dynamic here was not the oppositional fantasy of the misunderstood neuroqueer individual against a world of uncaring neurotypicals, but an example of two differently disabled people trying to meet somewhere in the middle. We live, as the saying goes, in a society. My needs and feelings and default modes of communicating are not the only ones that matter.
Most autistic people are willing to accept this notion when a powerful man brandishes an autism diagnosis in response to claims of sexual harassment or assault. It’s somehow harder to face when you’re the one in the hot seat for something less insidious. Someone signals that a topic you’ve brought up in a group setting is inappropriate, or that you’re dominating the conversation, or that your voice is too loud in a public place. Someone pulls you aside after a night out and says that something you said or did hurt their feelings. Someone – maybe even another autistic person – experiences your demeanour in a professional context as brusque or needlessly combative. These examples, all drawn from my actual experiences, are ones where I have not always occupied the same position. I’ve been both the one to divert the topic of conversation and the one brought up on an ill-judged statement; I’ve been the one to raise the professional complaint and the one to consciously modify how I come across. What I am trying to express here is something of the complexities facing actual neuroqueer subjects navigating ordinary life, and ordinary life frequently refuses to obey the logic of a manifesto.
Walker’s treatment of neuroqueerness is considerably more open to other people, if only insofar as they can be made to be more like us. To his credit, Walker dispenses with essentializing definitions of neurotypicality, observing that ‘neurotypical people aren’t born naturally compliant with the rules of normative performance; they’re just people who’ve deeply internalized those rules and are capable of maintaining that performance and experiencing it as natural’ (2021). Yet, because Walker’s argument about masking requires him to frame autistic impulses as ‘natural’ and ‘innate’, this reinforces an unfortunate binary between authentic neuroqueer subjects on one hand, and on the other, ‘neurotypicals’ who are always performing.
Walker doubles down on this formulation via a quasi-mystical account of autistic stimming, stating that
‘[a]ll babies and toddlers stim. The people we describe as neurotypical tend to lose touch with the capacity for spontaneous stimmy movement as it becomes buried beneath the socially instilled and internalized performance of normative embodiment. Many autistic or otherwise innately neurodivergent people, on the other hand, tend to remain connected to that capacity to whatever extent they manage to resist being shamed and/or brutalized and/or abusively therapized out of their attunement to it. Either way, though, a unique and beautiful version of the spontaneous organismic dance of stimming abides within each and every human being, no matter how deeply repressed it might be in some cases. With sufficient commitment, a proper spirit of open-minded exploration, and a willingness to let go of normal, anyone can learn to reconnect with that dance and embody it—and that process of reconnection can start with something as simple as experimenting with using one’s hands to stim more.’ (2021)
I am nearly constantly stimming with my hands or other parts of my body. It is a semi-regular occurrence, during a conference panel or collaborative working session, for a friend or colleague to shove a fidget toy or lump of Silly Putty into my hands with a knowing and affectionate smirk. Having said this, I am not at all sure that I need to reimagine my stimming as part of a ‘spontaneous organismic dance’, a retained link to my infant curiosity or privileged knowledge of my body that those unfortunate ‘neurotypicals’ lack, in order to affirm it as part of how I live. Mostly, it’s a nervous habit that gets me through the day.
Walker cites Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990) as informing his account of neurotypical performance, arguing that neurotypical social norms are enforced by a similar process to binary gender, and can likewise be disrupted. But the observation underpinning Butler’s entire argument is that there is no ‘pure’ mode of being that is not mediated by the social in some way, no ‘authentic’ self to recover, although there are obviously people who find the gender they were arbitrarily assigned at birth more liveable than others. One cannot ‘unmask’ gender; the methods Butler uses to disrupt it involve working within its codes in ambivalent and often parodic ways to scramble them, creating new masks by splitting and recombining the ones prescribed – this, for instance, is what Butler argues is happening in a drag performance.
Walker’s anti-essentialism, in advocating for an expansive vision of neuroqueer in which anyone can participate regardless of diagnosis or lack thereof, is in some sense admirable, but it is an anti-essentialism that only moves in one direction. The end point of his account of neuroqueering is one in which ‘those whom we call neurotypicals are just potential mutant neuroqueer comrades who haven’t yet woken up and figured out how to unzip their normal-person suits’ (2021). I do not find this as affirming as Walker evidently means it to be; it trades Yergeau’s pessimistic view of the impossibility of connection between neuroqueer subjects and ‘neurotypicals’ for one in which connection is possible because everyone turns out to be just like me. Both of these options are depressing prospects, indicative of a desire to make neuroqueerness a privileged site of grievance, knowledge, and resistance the same way some second-wave feminists aimed to do with womanhood. It’s an alluring and dangerous desire for any marginalized group, one whose end results are TERFism and Zionism and any number of other oppressive ideologies that trade in the language of the oppressed. As Björk – something of a neuroqueer icon in her own right – once sang, ‘Are these not just excuses to not connect?’
This post has been, in part, an exercise in what Yergeau and other neurodiversity scholars term ‘autistethnography’, the exercise of telling autistic stories from our own perspective. Yergeau posits that ‘[t]he overshare—the autistethnographic impulse—functions as one means through which autists ground themselves and inter/relate with others’ (2018: 212). I can appreciate this, and also recognize that if I leave an interaction and can’t remember a single question I asked another person about themselves, we might have a problem. I’m turned off by the prospect of a critical stance that demands that the entire world bend to my impulses, that aims, in Stephen Ira’s words, to ‘pave the world in leather instead of making sure everyone has a pair of shoes’ (2021). Even beyond any theoretical objections, it just isn’t how I want to be. The other people in my life aren’t inanimate figures I can arrange just so like tiny furniture in a dollhouse, and thank God for that. If for a brief period in my twenties I was excited by the possibilities of wielding autism and neuroqueerness as political identities, in my thirties this has softened considerably into a kind of boring pragmatism. These days, when someone asks me whether they should pursue a formal diagnosis of autism, my response is usually, ‘I don’t know. What do you hope to gain from it?’
As neuroqueer theory matures, it could stand to benefit from the pragmatic perspective of a discipline like trans studies, which has often found it necessary to temper queer theory’s utopian visions and subversive posturing in order to chart liveable trans lives in the here and now. Grace E. Lavery notes that within a trans studies framework, ‘attempts to improve the lives of women and queers’ are ‘accredited on the basis of their efficacy, not their elegance, and certainly not on their conformity to macro-epistemic schemes of knowledge’ (2023: xix). Trans studies’ engagement with complex practical and political questions of passing and stealth, how one narrates oneself to obtain the desired result in a clinical setting, and how the answers to these questions may change depending on any number of shifting contextual and circumstantial factors, may be able to lend neuroqueer theory more nuanced vocabularies for the ways neurodivergent people navigate everyday life beyond ‘masking’ and ‘unmasking’. J. Logan Smilges (2023) has already admirably begun this work in tracing the symmetries between ‘nonbinary’ and ‘neurodivergent’ as points of identification, and the resources they may offer one another in responding to the practical demands of communal living.
To name the limits of neuroqueer does not make the insights it brings to bear on the intersections of neurodivergence, gender, and sexuality any less pressing, in the same way that acknowledging the limits of second-wave feminism does not necessitate dismissing its criticisms of patriarchy. I want a rhetoric that has room for the reality that it may need to adapt, even in a room full of other autistic people; a rhetoric that can acknowledge that we can’t theorize our way out of the fact that living alongside other people is hard and painful and yet, potentially, still worth it. The fact that the stakes are high makes it more important, not less, that we be able to differentiate between systemic power imbalances and interpersonal insecurities; that we find ways to communicate across difference; that we reject separatism as the forces of capitalism strive to keep us alienated; that we keep giving ground where we can and making room for each other. We are in this life together, so come in. Sit down. And let me ask you, how has it been for you?
Works cited
Battis, Jes. Thinking Queerly: Medievalism, Wizardry, and Neurodiversity in Young Adult Texts (Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2021).
Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, NY and London: Routledge, 2007).
Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004).
Ira, Stephen. ‘In Defense of Paranoia, part 1’, Better Yet, 11 August 2021. <https://stephenira.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-paranoia-part-1> [accessed 23 September 2026].
Lavery, Grace E. Pleasure and Efficacy: Of Pen Names, Cover Versions, and Other Trans Techniques (Princeton, NJ and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2023).
Muñoz, José Esteban. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 10th Anniversary Edition (New York, NY and London: New York University Press, 2019).
—. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics (Minneapolis, MN and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999).
Smilges, J. Logan. ‘Seasons of Nonbinary and Neurodivergence; or, So What If We’re All X?’, Women’s Studies Quarterly 51.3 (2023), 29-43.
Walker, Nick. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (Fort Worth, TX: Autonomous Press, 2021). <https://public.ebookcentral.proquest.com/choice/publicfullrecord.aspx?p=6870963> [accessed 15 September 2026].
Yergeau, Remi. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2018).
