Benjamin Kaupp - "Neurodivergence"

A Note on "Neurodivergence"

Because words matter, but people matter considerably more.

Most of us are weird in at least one direction. Some of us just get a fancy label for it.

I use the word neurodivergent because it gives me a way to talk about human difference without immediately dragging everyone into the dusty basement of deficit language. It recognizes that there's more than one way for a brain and nervous system to work.

That should not be revolutionary, but here we are.

I also like the word because it leaves room for complexity. Neurodivergence isn't a superpower sticker, a tragedy pamphlet, or a polite replacement for the word disabled. It's a way of naming difference while leaving room for identity, pride, disability, frustration, support, accommodations, and the occasional full-system reboot in a parking lot because the grocery store lighting was designed in 1967 to make fruit more orange.

The point isn't that everything is easy.

The point is that difficulty isn't proof of lesser humanity.

A Brief Vocabulary Detour

Before getting too far into this, a few distinctions. Neurodiversity, neurodivergent, and neurodiverse are related terms, but they aren't interchangeable.

Neurodiversity describes the variation in how human brains and nervous systems work. It's a characteristic of humanity, not a diagnosis or a special category of people. A group that includes different kinds of minds is neurodiverse.

Neurodivergent describes someone whose neurological functioning diverges from what a particular society considers typical. Autism and ADHD are familiar examples, but the term is broader than either diagnosis. It's also not a medical diagnosis in itself.

Neurodiverse describes a group containing different neurological profiles. Following Nick Walker's terminology, I use neurodivergent for individuals and neurodiverse for groups. One person isn't a diversity, however interesting that person might be.

The history behind these terms is also more complicated than it sometimes gets credit for.

Judy Singer is frequently credited with originating the concept of neurodiversity, and Harvey Blume helped introduce the language to wider audiences in the 1990s. But more recent scholarship, particularly Botha and colleagues (2024), establishes that the underlying ideas developed collectively within autistic communities.

Kassiane Asasumasu subsequently coined neurodivergent and neurodivergence, intentionally creating language broad enough to include people beyond a narrow set of diagnoses.

I think that history matters. Movements rarely arrive fully formed from one person's forehead. They emerge from communities, arguments, lived experience, and people finally deciding that perhaps they aren't the only ones who need to change.

Different Is Not Defective

I don't particularly love language that talks about human beings primarily as disorders, deficits, or compliance projects.

To be clear, medical language has its place. Diagnoses matter. They can provide access to services, accommodations, legal protections, medication, treatment, and greater self-understanding. I'm not anti-diagnosis.

I'm anti-turning-diagnosis-into-destiny.

The problem comes when medical terminology becomes the only way we understand a person, because it tends to smuggle in a much bigger assumption: the individual is the problem, and the environment is neutral.

Consider a student who struggles to follow a rapid stream of verbal instructions. In one classroom, they're labeled inattentive or noncompliant. In another, where the instructions are clearly written and accessible, they're perfectly capable of completing the work.

A student who avoids eye contact might be considered rude by one instructor and attentive by another. Someone who asks direct questions might be treated as argumentative when they're actually trying to understand the rules everyone else seems to have downloaded at birth.

The student hasn't changed. The interpretation has.

That doesn't mean every difficulty can be eliminated by rearranging the furniture or writing better instructions. Disabilities are real. Support needs are real. Some challenges remain significant regardless of how accommodating the environment becomes.

But the environment isn't innocent wallpaper, either.

The useful question isn't whether everything is society's fault or everything is an individual's deficit. It's how people and environments interact, and what we can reasonably change to make that relationship work better.

A person can need considerable support without being treated as a broken appliance.

Access Is Not Belonging

This is the part I care about most.

Belonging isn't simply being allowed into the room.

It's being in the room without having to constantly prove that you deserve to stay there.

It means being recognized as competent even if your communication style is different. Being allowed to process information slowly without being treated as unintelligent. Being direct without being treated as hostile. Needing support without being treated as a burden.

And, importantly, it means not having to perform "normal" so convincingly that there's no energy left to learn, work, connect, or simply exist.

Access matters. Accommodations matter. Legal rights matter.

But access without belonging can feel like being invited to dinner and then handed a folding chair in the hallway.

Research on belonging has long established its importance to human motivation and well-being. Work on neurodiversity-inclusive college campuses extends that conversation beyond individual accommodations to include campus climate, social connection, communication, and institutional culture (Baumeister & Leary, 1995; Dwyer et al., 2023).

Neurodivergent students are often doing two jobs at once.

The first is the actual work: learning the material, completing assignments, navigating campus, managing time, building relationships, and figuring out adulthood.

The second is the invisible translation work: trying to appear engaged enough, calm enough, social enough, organized enough, professional enough, grateful enough, and normal enough.

That second job can be exhausting.

And too often, institutions treat that exhaustion as a personal weakness instead of asking why we've made students pay an entrance fee in self-erasure.

Language, Identity & Respect

I don't think there's one perfect language rule that solves everything. Language isn't a magic spell. It's a tool, and like most tools, people can use it carefully or swing it around like they found it in a garage and got overconfident.

Consider the debate over identity-first and person-first language.

Some people prefer autistic person. Others prefer person with autism. Research by Kenny and colleagues (2016) found substantial differences in terminology preferences among autistic adults, parents, and professionals. Autistic adults were generally more likely than professionals to endorse identity-first language.

That difference is worth noticing.

It's also worth considering whose preferences have historically been treated as authoritative. As Botha and colleagues (2023) argue, language choices are connected to autonomy, identity, and stigma. They're not merely cosmetic decisions.

My general rules are pretty simple:

Be specific.
Avoid euphemisms that make disability sound like something shameful.
Follow individual preferences when you know them.
Pay attention to how communities describe themselves.
Don't correct someone's self-description because you read a better pamphlet.

If I mean autistic, I say autistic. If I mean disabled, I say disabled. If I mean neurodivergent, I say neurodivergent.

Those terms overlap, but they don't mean precisely the same thing.

I also recognize that not everyone identifies with the same language or framework, and that the terminology will continue to evolve.

The point isn't to win the vocabulary Olympics. It's to describe people accurately and respectfully while remembering that the people we're describing should have a meaningful voice in the conversation.

What This Means in Practice

All of this is interesting to discuss, but I spend most of my time working in education, where ideas eventually have to survive contact with actual students.

For me, a neurodiversity-informed approach has some fairly practical implications.

Make the invisible visible. Schools and workplaces are full of unwritten rules. Rather than expecting students to figure everything out through trial, error, and embarrassment, we can explain expectations, clarify instructions, and make the hidden curriculum a little less hidden.

Maintain expectations without demanding conformity. Students deserve meaningful challenges and the opportunity to develop real skills. But there's a difference between expecting someone to learn something and insisting they demonstrate that learning in one particular way simply because it's familiar to us.

Treat support as a tool, not a moral judgment. Using an accommodation, asking for clarification, or relying on assistive technology doesn't make someone less capable. We use tools constantly. For some reason, certain tools are considered evidence of ingenuity while others are treated as evidence of inadequacy.

Build agency rather than dependence. Support should help people make decisions, solve problems, communicate their needs, and participate more fully in their own lives. The goal isn't to make every decision for someone, nor is it to abandon them in the name of independence.

Listen to the people affected. An intervention can be beautifully documented, meticulously implemented, and enthusiastically endorsed by professionals while still being thoroughly unpleasant for the person experiencing it. Their perspective isn't optional data.

And perhaps most importantly, we need to be willing to question our own assumptions.

If a student struggles, we should certainly consider what skills or supports they might need. But we should also examine the assignment, the classroom, the policies, and the expectations we've created.

Sometimes the student needs to learn a new strategy.

Sometimes the institution needs to write a better email.

Frequently, both things are true.

Why I Use the Word

Ultimately, I use neurodivergent because it lets me say several things that are true at the same time.

I can talk about disability without reducing people to deficiency.

I can talk about identity without pretending every experience is easy.

I can talk about support without implying that support is charity.

And I can talk about education, work, relationships, and community without pretending the individual is the only thing that needs to change.

That last part is the big one.

A lot of institutions love the language of inclusion right up until inclusion asks them to do something inconvenient. Then we're back to rewarding masking, pathologizing directness, treating accommodations like favors, and acting shocked when people burn out after years of being asked to sand down every interesting edge of themselves.

That isn't inclusion.

That's assimilation with better marketing.

I'm interested in something better.

Schools, workplaces, and communities that recognize more than one kind of mind as legitimate. Support systems that respect people's autonomy. Opportunities that don't require someone to become a more socially acceptable version of themselves before they're considered worthy of participating.

People own themselves.

Labels should help people make sense of their lives, not shrink them.

And if an institution can only recognize one way of thinking, learning, communicating, or participating as legitimate, the problem is considerably bigger than vocabulary.

References

Baumeister, R. F., & Leary, M. R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.

Blume, H. (1998, September). Neurodiversity: On the neurological underpinnings of geekdom. The Atlantic.

Botha, M., Chapman, R., Giwa Onaiwu, M., Kapp, S. K., Stannard Ashley, A., & Walker, N. (2024). The neurodiversity concept was developed collectively: An overdue correction on the origins of neurodiversity theory. Autism, 28(6), 1591–1594.

Botha, M., Hanlon, J., & Williams, G. (2023). Does language matter? Identity-first versus person-first language use in autism research: A response to Vivanti. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 53, 870–878.

Dwyer, P. (2022). The neurodiversity approach(es): What are they and what do they mean for researchers?. Human Development, 66(2), 73–92.

Dwyer, P., Mineo, E., Mifsud, K., Lindholm, C., Gurba, A., & Waisman, T. C. (2023). Building neurodiversity-inclusive postsecondary campuses: Recommendations for leaders in higher education. Autism in Adulthood, 5(1), 1–14.

Kapp, S. K., Gillespie-Lynch, K., Sherman, L. E., & Hutman, T. (2013). Deficit, difference, or both? Autism and neurodiversity. Developmental Psychology, 49(1), 59–71.

Kenny, L., Hattersley, C., Molins, B., Buckley, C., Povey, C., & Pellicano, E. (2016). Which terms should be used to describe autism? Perspectives from the UK autism community. Autism, 20(4), 442–462.

National Autistic Society. (2026). The neurodiversity movement.

Walker, N. (2021). Neurodiversity: Some basic terms and definitions. Neuroqueer Heresies.

Google Sites

Report abuse