The Neurodiversity Movement: Where It Came From and Where It Is Going

The term "neurodiversity" was coined by sociologist Judy Singer in 1998. She used it to describe the natural variation in human brain function — the idea that autism, ADHD, dyslexia, and other neurological differences are not defects to be fixed, but variations to be accommodated.

The timing was significant. The late 1990s and early 2000s saw the rise of the internet — and with it, the first time autistic people could find each other at scale. Online communities like Wrong Planet gave autistic people spaces to talk to each other without neurotypical mediation. The ideas that emerged from those conversations shaped the modern disability rights movement.

The neurodiversity paradigm challenges the medical model of disability — the view that autism is a disorder to be treated and cured. In its place, it offers the social model: the idea that the environment, not the person, is often what needs to change.

This is not a comfortable idea for everyone. Parents of severely autistic children, who may require 24-hour care, sometimes experience the neurodiversity framework as dismissive of their reality. The movement has had to grapple honestly with this tension — the spectrum is genuinely vast, and the needs at different points on it look nothing alike.

The most honest articulation: neurodiversity does not mean every autistic person does not need support. It means that support should be aimed at the person's own quality of life and self-determination — not at making them appear less autistic.

The movement is young. It is still figuring out how to hold complexity without fracturing. But its core insight — that neurological difference is part of human diversity, not a deficit — is sound.