The intercrossings of Queerness and Neurodivergence

Are two concepts and identities, in some cases, actually the same?

Some people are both Neurodivergent and Queer. I am one of them. In recent months, I have thought a lot about the interactions between these two identities, both in my personal experience and among Neurodivergent and Queer people as a whole. Two questions regarding the overlap of these identities are intriguing to me:

1. Can Neurodivergence be a type of Queerness?

2. Can Queerness be a type of Neurodivergence?

These two questions are not simply about the existence of intersectionality, but rather about the relationships between the actual concepts of Neurodivergence and Queerness. I am finding through my introspections and web-research that they are, indeed, deeply interrelated.

My digitally hand-drawn version of the neurodiversity symbol, a rainbow-striped infinity symbol with 11 colours. I love it because it incorporates a symbol associated with Queerness — the rainbow — with a symbol associated with Autism — an infinity sign — making what for me is a symbol of Neuroqueerness.

Neurodivergence as Queerness

Autistic self-advocate Erika Heidewald offers the following answer to the first question in their guest post for the Public Neurodiversity Support Center:

I believe that neurodivergent people are inherently part of the queer community because no matter how we express them externally, our internal experiences of gender and sexuality do not conform to traditional cishet [cisgender, heterosexual] norms. Autistic people do not have the same relationship to gender and sexuality that allistic people because we don’t have the same relationship to social constructs. It’s not that we don’t see them as real—it’s that we recognize that they’re fluid, constructed, not fixed. Social constructs are malleable, for us, and often the allistic people around us don’t understand that.

….

Queerness is by definition amorphous, flexible, complex, layered, and unknowable. The confusion so many neurodivergent people feel about their gender and sexuality does not need to be solved to be included in queerness—it *is* queerness.

When I read Heidewald’s essay about a week ago, I had an overwhelming feeling of “oh my gosh, this explains everything.” I have not been officially diagnosed as Autistic, but I have long considered myself to have certain traits that are common among Autistic people (and, as the Autistic community generally welcomes self-identification, I have more recently started to consider myself a part of this community). But my relationship with Queerness has been resoundingly Neurodivergent: wonderfully fluid, terribly confusing, and generally a different “flavor” of Queerness from what I have detected as (implicit or explicit) norms in many Queer spaces. I have long felt uneasy about the “born this way” narrative that predominates popular culture, as I couldn’t confidently say that I was born Queer. My relationship with gender and sexuality has changed throughout my life, and I expect it to continue to evolve. Yet the idea that my Queerness is intertwined with my Neurodivergence and may even come from it is deeply intuitive. It calms down the frequent anxiety I have that I might not be queer enough to be Queer, for it tells me that I am not just Queer, I am NeuroQueer.

Heidewald (whom I will refer to with they/them pronouns, as I cannot find any source verifying what pronouns they use for themself) seems to use “Neurodivergent” to mostly mean “Autistic.” Frequently people equate these terms, as the concept of Neurodivergence arose originally from the Autistic community, but the Autistic community has granted permission for “Neurodivergent” to be used more broadly to describe non-normative ways of being, including learning disabilities, tic disorders, and even mental health conditions like mood and personality disorders and Complex PTSD. So personally I would avoid using “Neurodivergent” when one specifically means “Autistic,” just for the sake of clarity.

In the context of Heidewald’s essay, however, I think it is proper to consider Autism as just one case in which Neurodivergence in itself implicates a “queering” of the social world. It is perhaps a quintessential case, given how central to the concept of Autism are social differences, but I doubt that it is the only one. ADHD, for example, was found in one study to be associated with 6.64 times greater likelihood of gender variance, and this study of people with ADHD or bipolar disorder found that the prevalence of non-heterosexuality according to the Kinsey scale (a psychometric of one’s level of same-sex versus opposite-sex attraction, independent of one’s self-identified sexual orientation) was much higher than the percentages reported by prior studies of the general population. (Incidentally, there are significant genetic overlaps and frequent co-occurences among Autism, ADHD, and bipolar, which may partially mediate some of the shared predisposition towards Queerness.)

Strangely enough, although so many Neurodivergent people are Queer, many Queer spaces are not welcoming or accessible to Neurodivergent people (or to Disabled people in general). I have still not attended a proper Pride parade (other than the tiny inaugural Pride celebration that happened at a single street intersection in my hometown in 2021), in part out of fear of being immensely sensorily overwhelmed.

In their essay, Heidewald does not claim that all Neurodivergent people (or even all Autistic people in particular) should adopt a Queer identity. Indeed, many Autistic people consistently identify as cishet, and that in itself is fine. Yet regarding this, Heidewald comments:

While I’ve spoken to many autistics who identify as cis and straight, upon deeper conversation, every single one of them revealed that they didn’t actually feel an identity with their assigned gender. They didn’t mind being perceived as their assigned gender and didn’t feel a need to change their outward presentation, and they believed that meant they had to identify as cis. Every single one revealed a more complicated internal experience of gender but believed that their outward presentation dictated how they could identify. Obviously I have not spoken to every autistic person in existence and I don’t deny anyone’s right to identify as cisgender if they desire to, but the belief that outward presentation dictates gender identity is a product of a transphobic society and must be challenged.

Perhaps if people stopped gatekeeping one another from adopting Queer identities — as often happens when gay and lesbian people exclude bi and pan people, or when the LGB are favored over the TQIA+, or when experiences of fluidity and nuance are neglected in favor of a strict “I was born this way” narrative — more people, Neurodivergent or not, would feel free to explore the complexity and uniqueness of their experience of gender and sexuality.

Queerness as Neurodivergence

In regards to my second question — if Queerness can be a type of Neurodivergence — it seems that fewer people have considered this question than the first one. I find this surprising, because I think that it can be answered, at least in part, a priori. First, here is a broad definition of Neurodivergence from the website Exceptional Individuals:

Someone who is neurodivergent behaves, thinks and learns differently compared to those who are neurotypical. This term can be used to describe an individual whose brain functions differently to what we consider “normal”.

I argue that Queer people can be considered Neurodivergent by this definition. In our cisheteronormative society, “normal” is behaving according to the expectations of your assigned sex at birth, which encompasses gender identity, gender expression, sexual and romantic (or generally, relational) orientation, and relationship choices (which I consider separate from relational orientation, similar to how gender identity and gender expression do not need to align in any particular way). Queer people indeed behave, think, and learn differently in relation to these norms. We also desire, feel, relate, and generally experience differently, just like Neurodivergent people do.

Of course, a lot of Queer people are Neurodivergent in the more commonly identified ways, too. And I think it is important to recognize that Queer people who are, for example, Autistic, and Queer people who are not Autistic have experiences that are distinct in crucial ways, and that allistic (e.g. non-Autistic) Queer people have privileges that Autistic Queer people do not have.

But if we considered Queerness a form of Neurodivergence in itself, might we begin to recognize that the inclusion of Autism, ADHD, and the like in diagnostic handbooks is just as harmful as the historical pathologization of being gay or trans? (Note that asexuality is a Queer identity that is still pathologized in the DSM and ICD, and some evidence suggests that Autistic people are more likely to be on the asexuality spectrum.) And might we begin to acknowledge that the wellbeing of Queer people as a whole is not going to come from rainbow capitalism and the assimilation of Queerness into the status quo, but rather from uprooting normativity itself, in all its pernicious forms, from our society, as the movement for neurodiversity advocates for?

Although Heidewald does not quite get as far as claiming that Queerness is a form of Neurodivergence in itself, they acknowledge that their argument that Neurodivergence is at least sometimes a form of Queerness joins the two identities and communities together, and they urge people who consider themselves only Queer and not Neurodivergent to think further:

Just as I encourage neurodivergent people to consider and accept their queerness, I encourage queer people who do not identify as neurodivergent to look deeper and consider this other aspect of their identity. If you fear being associated with neurodivergent people, you need to see if that fear springs from your own internalized ableism. Most neurodivergent people don’t know they’re neurodivergent. This society’s insistence that you are neurotypical unless otherwise diagnosed is compulsory neurotypicality, a form of erasure that perfectly mirrors compulsory heterosexuality and cisnormativity. Saying that queer people and neurodivergent people are part of the same community doesn’t mean queer people aren’t normal. Contrary to what we’ve been indoctrinated to believe, neurotypical does not mean normal. Neurotypicality is not default, just like heterosexuality and cisgender identity are not default. Acknowledging the overlap between queerness and neurodivergence doesn’t mean there is something unnatural or wrong about queerness, it means there is nothing unnatural or wrong about neurodivergence, either. Homosexuality escaped the DSM and autistic people are not dragging queer people back into it. We need the rest of the queer community to help us escape the DSM, too. Autism isn’t a disorder, it doesn’t require diagnosis, and it shouldn’t be in the DSM. We all deserve to be freed from the medical model.

In my opinion, no one is truly neurotypical. We all have our differences, quirks, and personal needs that don’t quite align with our society’s neurotypical standards, and we all will benefit from a society without neuronormativity. In the end, it’s not about drawing the “correct” borderlines between social categories. Rather, regardless of what identities we affirm for ourselves, we all must unite among our variegated experiences of social privilege and oppression and fight for the growth of a new world, where we can all be ourselves and be free.

Did I make you think, resonate, object, question? Leave a comment and let’s converse.

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