As a science educator, I’m quite sensitive to people abusing scientific language to lend a veneer of credibility to things. I can live with Star Trek writers looking to paper over plot holes with technobabble, but I draw the line at pseudoscience used in service of regressive politics. You do not get to pretend your bigotry is somehow based on science.

The use of ‘biological male’ to describe trans women is one such abuse of scientific language. It dishonestly implies that biology says trans women are male, when science says no such thing. Its uncritical use by, first, the UK Supreme Court, and now (repeatedly) by the BBC, gives us reason to doubt the impartiality of both.

Neither sex nor gender is scientifically simple, and neither are they identical. Let’s start with sex: the biological side of maleness and femaleness.

The first thing to note is that sex is not a binary category — in other words, it is not something that comes in exactly two varieties. Most animals (including humans) and quite a few plants have a cluster of traits that it’s convenient to file under either ‘male’ or ‘female’, and most of the time these traits line up, but not always. There are genetic, hormonal, physiological, anatomical and reproductive aspects. Each of these can vary separately from the others, even though they are all biologically linked. They might be different from birth (which makes someone intersex) or thanks to modern medicine (through the gender-affirming treatments received by many trans people). It might be both — indeed, there is some reason to think that for at least some trans people, their gender identity is rooted in neurobiological differences.

The Supreme Court, in its judgement in For Women Scotland Vs Scottish Ministers (2025), ruled that for the purposes of the Equality Act 2010, ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ should be interpreted to mean ‘biological sex’. They did not make any attempt to clarify what they thought that meant; they seemed to think it’s obvious, which suggests they never asked a biologist. It looks like what they actually meant is what was put on someone’s birth certificate when they were a baby, but it’s hard to be sure.

The ‘biology’ involved in determining someone’s sex at birth (or assigning their gender) is nothing more than a quick genital inspection. For most people that’s fine, but UK law has long acknowledged that it doesn’t work for everyone — although unlike some jurisdictions, we have never legally recognised the possibility of anything beyond male and female. Intersex people’s birth certificates can be amended, when further development doesn’t match medical professionals’ first guess.

Trans people have had the right to amend their birth certificates for more than twenty years, by virtue of a Gender Recognition Certificate (GRC). The Gender Recognition Act 2004 introduced this right after the European Court of Human Rights ruled that trans people’s rights to privacy and family life were being violated by keeping them in a legal grey area; a GRC was supposed to mean that “the person’s gender becomes for all purposes the acquired gender”. The Supreme Court’s 2025 ruling assumed that the Equality Act passed six years later quietly created major exceptions to this, which seemingly went unnoticed for fifteen years.

Returning to the question of biology, when the hormonal and anatomical features associated with sex can be transformed medically, it is wilfully misleading to suggest that this has no impact on biological sex. Anyone with more than the most basic understanding of biology will recognise living things change over time, and that biological categories are often complicated. A trans woman’s body can share many sex-associated features in common with a cis woman; likewise trans and cis men. Trans women often grow breasts thanks to their ‘female’ hormones, for example; trans men regularly grow beards. These are biological facts, and socially significant ones.

That brings us on to gender: the social and psychological aspects of maleness and femaleness. How someone is treated in our sexist society depends on how they are seen — whether people who meet them think they’re looking at a man, a woman or something else, and also how well they are seen to be ‘performing’ that gender. Medical sexism remains an enormous problem, but the fact is that in most other contexts, sexism is based on social perception rather than biology. Competent scientists recognise the need to study sex and gender. The BBC’s stock formulation, “a biological male who identifies as a woman”, deliberately glosses over the fact that there is far more to being trans than just how you identify: trans women generally live their lives as women.

Science clearly doesn’t justify the description of trans women as ‘biological males’. Doing so is a political decision, and it is one that has been driven by anti-trans campaigning groups like Sex Matters. It is a ‘dogwhistle’: something that signals agreement with a certain worldview, without coming right out and saying so.

One of the things about dogwhistles is that they are sometimes used in ignorance of what they imply. That’s crucial — if nobody ever used them unknowingly, they would no longer provide the plausible deniability that bigots treasure. So somebody using the phrase ‘biological male’ is not necessarily a fully signed up anti-trans campaigner, but an institution like the BBC has no excuse for not knowing how large segments of its audience will interpret phrases like this. Either they are deliberately signalling their alignment with anti-trans campaigners, or they are doing so negligently.

In response to my complaint the first time I noticed the BBC using this phrasing, they sent a stock reply including this claim:

BBC News doesn’t believe that the language used in this article amounts to taking sides, in an area with strongly held and sometimes incompatible views.

Perhaps this is their sincerely held belief, but they are wrong. They add:

We value knowing when audience members have been disappointed with any aspect of our reporting and appreciate your feedback, which has been discussed with senior editors, recorded on our overnight reports and circulated widely.

With that in mind, you might like to know that the BBC Complaints form is here. You might also like to use the Media Complaints Collector tool to allow the Trans Advocacy and Complaints Collective (TACC) to track complaints and how they are handled.

When I first complained in early December, I already suspected that they had actually introduced editorial guidelines recommending the use of this dogwhistle. This has since been confirmed, and many articles on their site now use this pejorative and unscientific phrasing. They are of course in a difficult position, with a well-funded and carefully manufactured international moral panic on the one side and a small, marginalised minority on the other. Their failure to find a respectful balance between these two forces suggest they have decided to cave to the former.

Postscript: the TACC have already written to the BBC Board & Editors (who sent this lousy reply), the Women & Equality Committee at Westminster, and two relevant ministers about the BBC’s ongoing failures of impartiality regarding trans people.

Addendum: a couple of people have complained that I didn’t talk about how we should describe trans people. I don’t have strong feelings about this, and I’m not in a position to have the final word on it. The truth is that most of the time, there is no need to do anything more than to use the standard terms: trans women, trans men, non-binary people. We don’t usually spell out what ‘lesbian’ means, or ‘disabled’, or any number of other identity categories. People can always look up terms they don’t understand!

Where it is necessary to expand on the standard terms, TACC suggest using Sex Assigned at Birth, as in Assigned Female At Birth (AFAB) or Assigned Male At Birth (AMAB); (Assigned) Sex to (Acquired) Sex: Female to Male/Nonbinary (FTM/N) and Male to Female/Non-binary (MTF/N). All of these are well-established and widely used terms, which are not particularly loaded and are broadly accepted by the people they describe. If you want to be pedantic about whether ‘assigned’ is strictly correct, there are other neutral and easily understood terms available, like ‘recorded’.

Adapted and expanded from a talk I gave at the AVATAR Launch Extravaganza Professional Learning event on the 31st of March 2025.

I want to talk about three key theories developed by autistic people, all of which are really about people in general, but which are all needed by anyone who hopes to understand Autistic people in particular.

Neurodiversity describes the place of autistic people and others in society and the human population at large; the Double Empathy Problem describes how empathy breaks down between people with different perspectives; Monotropism describes autistic processing from the inside, in the context of a model of the mind as a system of interests.

Before I get into the details of these theories, I want to talk a bit about how we got here, because none of these ideas are new. Autistic people have been saying more-or-less the same things for decades, and although many people may be hearing them for the first time even now, elsewhere these ideas are already well embedded in practice.

History

It’s safe to say that autistic people have existed since before recorded history, but this year marks a century since the first clinical descriptions of autism, by the Ukrainian psychiatrist Grunya Sukhareva — who was writing about autism in girls and boys, around two decades before Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger. This April is the 55th ‘Autism Awareness Month’, although many prefer Autism Acceptance or — my personal preference — Autism Understanding.

Passive acceptance is not enough. If you have autistic people in your life (and there are a lot of us out there) you need to try to understand autism.

Fortunately, many autistic people have been working to explain our own experiences, for more than a third of a century now — so there is plenty to draw on! The earliest published ‘autie-biographies’ were Temple Grandin’s ‘Emergence’ (1986), and Donna Williams’ ‘Nobody Nowhere’ (1991). These were very personal stories, heavily influenced by the narrative of autism-as-tragedy that was so prevalent at the time, encouraged by professionals. When autistic people started talking to each other, a new narrative began to emerge.

Jim Sinclair met Donna Williams when she visited the USA to promote Nobody Nowhere in 1992, and together with Xenia Grant they formed Autism Network International — the world’s first organisation run by and for autistic people. In 1993 their newsletter, Our Voice, published Sinclair’s highly influential essay, Don’t Mourn for Us. Originally a presentation at the 1993 International Conference on Autism in Toronto, it was addressed primarily to parents, but its messages resonated with many of the autistic people who heard them. Indeed, they laid a foundation for much of what autistic people have been saying about autism ever since. This is one key passage:

Autism is a way of being. It is not possible to separate the person from the autism.

Therefore, when parents say,

I wish my child did not have autism,

what they’re really saying is,

I wish the autistic child I have did not exist, and I had a different (non-autistic) child instead.

Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure. This is what we know, when you tell us of your fondest hopes and dreams for us: that your greatest wish is that one day we will cease to be, and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces.

Our Voice was a paper publication, but within a year or two, the internet started allowing more and more autistic people to find each other, learn from each others’ experiences, and refine these ideas. Many found that the slower pace of email communication, and the absence of the nonverbal cues that so often cause confusion, suited their communication style. ANI started an email list called ANI-L in 1994; another was started in Europe, called InLv (for Independent Living) in 1996.

Meeting in person remained important. The idea of in-person Autistic Space was first formalised, or at least scaled up, with Autreat, the ‘retreat-style conference run by autistic people, for autistic people and our friends’ which started in 1996. Such autistic spaces have played a profound role not just in facilitating the sharing and development of ideas, but also allowing autistic people to be themselves — and to work out what that means, away from the fear of being misunderstood and rejected by neurotypical people.

In the UK, we didn’t get our own autistic conference/retreat until Autscape started in 2005, but there were many smaller-scale opportunities for autistic people to spend time with like-minded people from the 1990s on. My first experiences of autistic space were in my own home, although I didn’t realise it at the time. After she first formulated the theory of Monotropism in 1991, my mother, Dinah Murray, worked with and befriended many autistic people — including non-speakers she worked with as a support worker, as well as prominent self-advocates. She went to great lengths to connect people up, and ensure that people were listened to who might otherwise have been easy to ignore. Eventually, thanks to meeting people like this, we both realised we are autistic ourselves.

Informal networks and opportunities to spend time with other autistic people play a profound role in developing positive self-image and self-understanding for autistic people, and sharing coping strategies. With events like Autistic Pride, Autistic People’s Organisations like AMASE and AVATAR, and some of the better groups organised by service providers, many autistic people now get the chance to experience this for themselves, but sadly this is still not universal.

Neurodiversity

Once autistic people had the means to start finding each other, the autistic community collectively worked out the details of the idea that soon became known as neurodiversity.

Here is how I think about it:

Autism is a healthy part of the variability of humans

It’s not a disease, not something that’s gone wrong. Humankind is richer for having people who process the world differently, just as any ecosystem is richer and more adaptable with a wide range of species living in it. Diversity is a positive thing in general — even though it comes with challenges, and it’s not always easy being different from most of those around you.

Disability depends on the environment

The human world is rarely designed with the full diversity of human beings in mind. We don’t even design a lot of things to work properly with women, and they’re half of the population; autistic people are much rarer than that, and a great many things are designed in ways which are disabling for us. This can include aspects of the physical environment (like flashing lights and strong smells), but also the social environment (like expected ways of communicating, or unpredictable demands).

The social model of disability is an indispensable tool for understanding disability in general: the degree to which someone is disabled is not fixed. An accessible environment, with the right adjustments, can make an enormous difference.

Autistic thriving is worth pursuing

One of the reasons the once-dominant narrative of autism-as-tragedy is so harmful is that it ignores the many positive things about being autistic, while treating suffering and disablement as inevitable. Distress is not built into being autistic; it is always a response to something. Failure to recognise this has led to far too many autistic people having medical problems go unrecognised, and other avoidable sources of distress ignored. In many cases, responses to distress have been seen as ‘bad behaviour’ and punished as such.

None of this is inevitable. Thriving might not always look the same for autistic people as it does for others, and living a good life might be much harder when you’re disabled, but it is always, always worth pursuing.

Most autistic people don’t want to be “cured”

Autism is such a pervasive part of the experience of being who I am that a “cure” would mean replacing me with a different person. I actually quite like being me, even though I’m disabled in this society.

As with minority sexualities and gender identities, the quest for a cure, a way of making us “normal”, is fundamentally insulting and stigmatising, and has led to an array of harmful, abusive practices. Much better to work towards a world where we can be accepted as ourselves.

Listen to autistic people’s insights on autism!

Psychologists and psychiatrists, looking at autistic people from outside, have often misunderstood what they are seeing. This has led to diagnostic criteria which are a mix of distress behaviours, interpersonal difficulties (which we’ll come back to) and things like intense interests and sensory differences, which can be sources of great joy as well as inconvenience.

Autistic people are the leading experts on what it is like to be autistic — especially those of us whose ‘special interests’ include autism, and who have autistic friends, and who work with other autistic people. If you want to understand a foreign culture, you don’t just observe its people and draw your own conclusions without talking to them. You listen to people with first-hand experience.

Monotropism

Monotropism is a tendency towards intense interests, which may be lifelong or fleeting, but either way, they tend to be all-consuming in the moment. To look at it another way, monotropic people tend to have fewer interests aroused at any given time; they tend to be aroused more strongly, pulling in more of our attention, leaving relatively few processing resources for other things.

Monotropic people tend to enter ‘attention tunnels’, which can be sources of great joy when engaging with things we are passionate about; or unpleasant rumination, when we get stuck on things that have gone wrong. Entering and exiting attention tunnels takes time and energy — a big part of the reason for autistic inertia, and what is often described as ‘executive dysfunction’. Being wrenched out of an attention tunnel can be acutely distressing.

This processing style means that autistic people tend to struggle to master things which require attention to be divided, or switched rapidly between things. This includes neurotypical communication, which assumes that people are adept at communicating simultaneously with words, tone of voice, facial expressions and body language, in both directions at once, while keeping in mind the context of the relationship between speakers, and smoothly resolving frequent ambiguities in speech.

Misunderstandings frequently occur in both directions. Non-autistic people assume that autistic people have picked up the nuances of their nonverbal communication, while inferring meaning in the autistic person’s behaviour which is often at odds with what they were trying to communicate. Autistic people often miss nonverbal cues, and struggle with ambiguous phrasing because they don’t have all the same contextual information in mind.

With practice, monotropic people can often master complex skills like conventional communication and, say, driving. This process involves chunking — learning to understand things as unified wholes, rather than collections of disparate information. It stops feeling like rapid, effortful switching of attention between different things, when one attention tunnel can accommodate all these aspects of one larger focus.

When such chunking is not possible, it can be incredibly stressful and draining for a monotropic person to have to divide or constantly switch their attention between different things. It is likely that this kind of strain — what Tanya Adkin calls ‘monotropic split’ — plays a major role in many meltdowns and other effects of autistic overload, like burnout.

The Double Empathy Problem

Empathy is not magic. Recognising the emotions of other people requires an understanding of the cues that tell you how they’re feeling, and the internal experiences behind them. If those cues match up with what you’re used to seeing — and especially if cues and feelings match up with what you would do and feel — empathy is much more likely to be effective and accurate.

It follows that people with very different experiences and ways of expressing themselves are likely to have difficulty empathising with each other.

This is perhaps a conclusion that anyone could have reached with a bit of thought, and Jim Sinclair made a similar observation back in 1988, but for whatever reason, autism researchers and psychiatrists seem to have ignored this glaring flaw in their conclusion that autistic people lack empathy, for decades. Autistic scholar Damian Milton describes this issue as the ‘Double Empathy Problem’ in 2012 — empathy goes in two directions, and non-autistic people regularly struggle to empathise with autistic people. In the decade after, a whole series of experiments clearly demonstrated this in action.

While it’s most relevant to autism because autistic people have been thought to be weak empathisers, the general principle has wider relevance. It is worth pausing to note that with groups which are more dominant in a society, people outside of them generally get to hear quite a lot about their experiences and perspectives: everybody in a majority-white society hears about what it’s like for white people; everybody in a patriarchal society hears about what it’s like for men. In the same way, autistic people get much more practice understanding non-autistic people than the other way round.

It’s never just about autism

One thing many autistic people are tired of hearing is ‘your autism doesn’t define you’. Of course it doesn’t: nobody is defined by one characteristic, even though autism shapes every aspect of how I experience and interact with the world.

For all its pervasive influence on who we are, there is always much more to anyone, and there is no way to understand how someone’s autism affects their life without understanding other aspects of their identity, and how they interact. Most of the early descriptions of autism (and many of the later ones) were based on young white boys, and it shows.

Autistic girls and women have very different experiences, on average, from autistic boys and men — even though there is nothing categorical about the differences. There are boys whose autism has been missed or misunderstood for the some of the same reasons as many girls’ — largely because they have learned to internalise their difficulties, and try to blend in. Then again, sexism also directly shapes the experiences of women and girls — not least the sexism of people whose jobs should include recognising them as autistic. Gender nonconformity and trans identities (which are far more common in the autistic population) also complicate the picture.

Racism plays a huge role in how autistic people from racial minorities are seen, and cultural differences shape what autism looks like in practice. Neurodivergent Black boys are more likely to be seen as threats by white people, for example, and less likely to be greeted with empathy.

Finally, autism is part of a suite of related differences, physical and mental, which frequently co-occur, and are not always possible to separate. Anxiety is so prevalent in autistic people that non-anxious autistic people are almost unheard of, but it’s not part of autism. Depression is also very common in autistic people, probably because of how society treats us.

ADHD is more common than not, leading to speculation that it might be part of the same thing — yet it’s associated with some things that are so at odds with stereotypes about autism that each is sometimes overlooked when the other seems obvious. Something like a third of autistic people have learning disabilities, a figure which was once thought to be much higher. Hypermobility and EDS are strongly correlated with autism and other neurodivergence. Throw in ME/CFS, POTS and epilepsy, and it’s clear that a high proportion of autistic people are disabled in multiple ways. Most of these connections remain under-researched and poorly understood.

Above all, autistic people are humans: as diverse as the rest of the population, if not more so. Understanding any individual autistic person means getting to known them as a person; there is no autism without autistic people, and there are limits to how well it is possible to understand autism in the abstract.

As diverse as we are, though, we have collectively worked out a great deal about what autism means for us — and we have been patiently explaining it for decades, to anybody who is willing to listen. Thankfully that includes more people than ever, but there are still so many who have a lot of catching up to do.

Books

These are just the autistic-authored books I have on my bookshelf; many of them are excellent, but their inclusion is not necessarily a strong endorsement, because I haven’t read all of them. Here they are, alphabetised by author surname:

• A Different Sort of Normal — Abigail Balfe
• Underdogs — Chris Bonnello
• Empire of Normality — Robert Chapman
• Understanding and Evaluating Autism Theory — Nick Chown
• Autism in Translation — Edited by Elizabeth Fein & Clarice Rios
• Ten Steps to Nanette — Hannah Gadsby
• Wired Our Own Way: An Anthology of Irish Autistic Voices — Edited by Niamh Garvey
• Different, Not Less — Chloé Hayden
• Defend Sunlight: Illuminating Ways Through the Darker Times — Katherine Highland
• Stim — Edited by Lizzie Huxley-Jones
• Odd Girl Out — Laura James
• Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement — Edited by Steven K. Kapp
• Concepts of Normality — Wendy Lawson
• The Passionate Mind — Wendy Lawson
• Autism, Bullying and Me — Emily Lovegrove
• Letters to My Weird Sisters — Joanne Limburg
• The Neurodiversity Reader — Edited by Dr. Dinah Murray, Dr. Damian Milton, Dr. Susy Ridout, Professor Nicola Martin, and Richard Mills
• A Mismatch of Salience — Dr. Damian E. M. Milton
• The Routledge International Handbook of Critical Autism Studies — Edited by Damian Milton and Sara Ryan
• A Kind of Spark — Elle McNicoll
• Like A Charm — Elle McNicoll
• Show Us Who You Are — Elle McNicoll
• The State of Grace — Rachael Lucas
• M is for Autism — The Students of Limpsfield Grange School and Vicky Martin
• Perfectly Weird, Perfectly You — Camilla Pang
• Understanding Autistic Relationships Across the Lifespan — Felicity Sedgewick and Sarah Douglas
• Understanding Others in a Neurodiverse World — Dr. Gemma Williams
• What I Want to Talk About — Pete Wharmby
• Un-typical — Pete Wharmby
• Learning from Autistic Teachers — Edited by Dr. Rebecca Wood

On Being an Autistic Therapist — Edited by Max Marnau — is missing because I couldn’t find my copy, and for some reason so is Autism Equality in the Workplace — Janine Booth.

Capitalist culture has an uneasy relationship with non-conformity.

Individuality is celebrated, in principle: a stock talking point against all forms of socialism has long been that socialism mandates conformity, while capitalism promotes individual self-expression. Heroes are non-conformists almost by definition, and capitalist culture loves heroes (heroic figures in Communist propaganda have often been nameless workers, which is a different kind of thing).

An inability to fit in is a ubiquitous element in the back-stories of people who achieve extraordinary things, both fictional and real. Being an outsider is seen as romantic.

But then, the villains in fiction are very often non-conformists too — and our culture obsesses over its villains almost as much as it loves its heroes. Notably, the ways that villains don’t conform are far more likely to be identifiably queer-coded (and often Jewish-coded).

Regardless, non-conformity sells. Everybody, it seems, wants to be different from everyone else. This is a problem on a number of levels, starting with the basic fact that if everybody’s special, then nobody’s special.

All too often, symbols of nonconformity — and resistance to the existing order of things — are carefully packaged and mass-produced, with their rougher edges sanded off for easier consumption. Weirdwashing is when people and especially corporations trade on surface indicators of strangeness, difference or rebellion, without making space for the real thing.

As well as reducing political movements to little more than marketable images, this can lead to signifiers of real, important differences between people — which have often been targets for othering and stigma — catching on among people with the social power to bear them without getting any trouble for it. This usually dilutes the meaning they held for the people they came from, and does little to prevent those people still being stigmatised for the same things.

Traditionally Black hairstyles are one much-discussed example of this. Styles that are popular with Black people (both for deep cultural reasons, and because they are just very practical for tightly curled hair) have often been suppressed in white-dominated societies: prohibited in schools and workplaces, and so on. It can be annoying, to say the least, for people who have been punished for certain choices to see other people make those choices with no repercussions: adopting them as generic markers of nonconformity (or fashion statements) shorn of their practicality and cultural significance.

A best-case scenario might see this adoption of other people’s cultural signifiers leading to people learning something from the relevant culture, and to greater acceptance of practices for the less-privileged people who originated them; it might even result in some fruitful hybridisation. On the other hand, a worst-case scenario could see even more stigma added, as these cultural expressions become associated with naive attempts at rebelliousness, often with confused mythology attached, while their original meanings are buried.

The more privileged a person is, the easier it is for them to step outside the bounds of normativity. Rich white straight men get to be celebrated for their eccentricity; everyone else has to be careful how they tread. As the film-maker Alice Lowe memorably put it, “being a woman is weird, and you’re allowed one weird. Being surreal is two weirds, and you’re not allowed two weirds… Two weirds is too weird.” If someone is very lucky, their perceived genius might compensate at least a little for their failure to be a rich white straight man, but the pressure to be ‘conventional’ and unchallenging gets greater for every way that a person is marginalised. Acceptance can often be stiflingly conditional.

I think it’s important for everyone to be proud of their weirdness — and I do think that everyone is weird in one way or another (some more than others) — but it is vital to recognise how much harder it is for some people to be openly weird. My hope is that Weird Pride will help make it easier for a lot more people to be open about their weirdness, especially people whose baseline existence is minoritised. That has to include people who aren’t excitingly weird, in ways that can make them a lot of money; who are just intensely passionate, disablingly neurodivergent, different — in ways that are not marketable.

Everyone deserves the chance to understand that their weirdness can be a strength.

• Strangers — Essays on the Human and Non-human, by Rebecca Tamás
• Other Minds — The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness, by Peter Godfrey-Smith
• Understanding Others in a Neurodiverse World — A Radical Perspective on Communication and Shared Meaning, by Gemma Williams

The three of them are all concerned in different ways with the problem of the other, which I suppose has occupied me to a greater or lesser extent for almost as long as I’ve been conscious.

I was maybe six years old when my brother, Leo, decided to become vegetarian (well, pescetarian) after watching King Kong and Tarka the Otter: two films in which humans treat other creatures with unspeakable cruelty, as if their feelings, their pain, were of no consequence at all. My own vegetarianism followed not far behind, along with a concern for the wellbeing of other animals that has never left me. It seemed obvious to me that it was not only humans who suffer, and I was never clear why human suffering was the only kind that most people seemed to care about.

Decades later, I realised I was autistic; I suspect that my own early experiences of being othered played a part in this early conversion to the vegetarian cause. I knew what it was like to have people act as if you were incomprehensible, and therefore your distress wasn’t important, was not to be taken seriously. I haven’t been able to find any research on this, but anecdotally, there seems to be a strong correlation between vegetarianism, perhaps especially veganism, and autism. My guess is that this relates to those early experiences of being othered and dismissed, combined with a tendency to scrupulously follow rules like ‘reduce suffering where possible’ through to their logical conclusions, when the rules make sense to us.

Strangers is a short, beautiful and fairly eccentric collection of essays on ethics, otherness and coexistence, by a writer better known as a poet, published in a physically pleasing edition by Makina Books. As the subtitle suggests, the essays are about the human as much as the non-human, and partly about the edges of who or what is seen to qualify. If I say that it takes in politics, history, cultural criticism and psychology, I’m probably making it sound less coherent and more pretentious than it really is.

Other Minds is pretty solidly about non-humans, although at least part of its motivation is to think about what other kinds of minds can tell us about ourselves. Written by a scuba-diving philosopher of science and the mind, it orbits around the octopus: the closest thing we can get to a truly alien intelligence on Earth, with a good chunk of its smarts distributed between its tentacles, and such a short lifespan that it is baffling that it is able to learn so much in so little time.

On its way, Other Minds dives into the evolution of life, with a focus on the development of forms of organisation which allow something approaching sentience, and ultimately consciousness. It explores the ways that cephalopods behave, sense and process the world in some depth, and discusses what this all might mean for how we think about our own minds, but I found it surprisingly light on actual philosophy. I would have appreciated more exploration of what such incomprehensible intelligences imply for humanity, particularly from an ethical perspective; but this is not really a criticism, just a personal perspective. For a book of only 200 pages, it already covers a lot of ground, without feeling unduly dense.

It’s very clearly and engagingly written, which is more than I can say for a lot of philosophy texts; and the audiobook I listened to was very well read by Peter Noble, although something bugs me slightly about an Australian writer being narrated with an English accent. I look forward to Metazoa and Living on Earth, although I may end up reading more of his very good introduction to the philosophy of science, Theory and Reality, first.

The third book, by autistic linguist and autism researcher Gemma Williams, explores what the diversity of human minds means for communication and coexistence. Like the other writers mentioned here, she explores deep questions and difficult ideas with a clear eye and an impressively readable style. Her exposition of academic linguistics is lightened with humour and well-grounded in personal stories.

While her focus is very much on human communication, she describes herself as a ‘recovering beekeeper’, and the ways that bees communicate and cooperate provide a sweet narrative frame for much of the book.

Her favoured angle on linguistics is Relevance Theory — a school of thought which aims to make sense of how we make sense, looking at what it takes to make communication work, despite its inevitable ambiguities. The more that two people share a cognitive landscape, the easier it is for the listener to resolve those ambiguities, and for the speaker to avoid them.

Applying this fact to communication between people whose brains work quite differently, Williams deepens Damian Milton’s ‘double empathy problem’ to explore broader failures of cross-neurotype communication, and to look at strategies for improving it.

On the way, she provides a very accessible introduction to theories of autism (including Monotropism, which itself was originally born out of thoughts around relevance theory) and draws useful lessons from various approaches to communicating across divides, like the use of English as a Lingua Franca in cross-cultural exchanges. This book provides a valuable contribution to how we think about and work with different ways of thinking and communicating. It does all this in a way that carefully avoids jargon (or clearly explains it, where necessary).

I found all of these books charming and thought-provoking; all have vital lessons for people existing in a world where they cannot hope to fully understand the experiences of others, but where the wellbeing of all depends on us making the effort to try.

I bring them all together here because I think that there is a lot of scope for learning about related problems from people who approch them very differently. The study of animal minds and human neurodiversity can be seen as part of the same project: of recognising and respecting different ways of being, and learning how to live together. The use of philosophy and literature or storytelling, alongside scientific understanding, seems to me absolutely indispensable in all of this. It is satisfying to see how these approaches surface and interact across all three books.

If autism is a disorder, or a syndrome, of course it must have symptoms. Otherwise it wouldn’t be a disorder at all, and then where would we be?

We can list them out, with the help of a diagnostic manual: to count as autistic, you must demonstrate x, y and z, and they must “cause clinically significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of current functioning”.

The whole idea of symptoms is usually associated with diseases, of course, which autism… is not. As psychiatry has taken on things it sees as disorders but not diseases as such, it has imported much of the vocabulary used to describe illnesses. So a symptom is something wrong with your body or mind that’s a sign of an illness or disorder. In medicine, symptoms (experienced by the patient) are sometimes distinguished from external signs, but the distinction isn’t always clear, including in the DSM (the diagnostic manual I’m looking at) and I’m not going to get into it here.

There are a couple of serious problems with categorising signs of autism as symptoms, even leaving aside the question of whether it’s right to think of it as a disorder at all — which has, of course, been discussed extensively elsewhere. One problem is that a symptom is usually something wrong: undesirable by definition, usually a target for treatment. Another is that a symptom is often assumed to be something caused by a condition. Let’s look at how each of these assumptions breaks down when it comes to various supposed symptoms of autism.

The DSM divides autism ‘symptoms’ into two domains: “deficits in social communication and social interaction” and “Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities”.

The first ‘symptom’ listed is “Deficits in social-emotional reciprocity” — but difficulties with social-emotional reciprocity are always two-way! That’s literally what ‘reciprocity’ means, and it’s clear that it’s what it means in practice here. These difficulties arise whenever two people are not well-attuned to each other, and this affects anyone whose experiences are very different from those around them. We have extensive empirical research now, showing that putting these difficulties down as ‘deficits’ on the autistic side of any interaction is just wrong. They go both ways, and they largely drop away when autistic people communicate with each other.

Is this an appropriate target for interventions? Sure, to a point — in the same way that speakers of minority languages might be encouraged to learn the dominant language where they are. But efforts to stamp out the use of minority languages are rightly seen as gross imperialist abuses. It is widely understood that languages, ways of communicating, are profound parts of individual and community identities. Opportunities to communicate in your native tongue are often prized — even for people completely fluent in the dominant language, it can be a relief communicating in the way they feel most at home.

The second, closely related ‘symptom’ is “Deficits in nonverbal communicative behaviors used for social interaction” such as “abnormalities in eye contact and body language or deficits in understanding and use of gestures” and the third is “Deficits in developing, maintaining, and understanding relationships.”

To a large extent, these can again be put down to a mismatch in communication styles: ‘abnormal’ is just a pejorative term for ‘unusual’; and people coming from other cultures have trouble understanding and using gestures, too.

Social skills classes that are geared towards teaching autistic people how to communicate like neurotypicals, without acknowledging that autistic ways of communicating are valid, just different, are deeply problematic. They teach learners that their own ways of being are wrong and need fixing, and try to train them to behave in ways that are more acceptable to mainstream society. The skills themselves may be useful in some circumstances, but teaching people to hide their natural ways of being turns out to cause serious mental health problems. It is a constant source of strain and dissonance.

Maintaining relationships with other autistic people is rarely a much bigger problem than maintaining relationships is for anyone — although in the context of a society that is so hostile to autistic ways of being, it certainly comes with some added challenges. Many autistic people identified in adulthood discover that people they gravitated towards all their lives are also neurodivergent; many have found belonging in communities where various kinds of weirdness are expected and accepted.

The other ‘symptom domain’ is described as “Restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior, interests, or activities”, although bizarrely this category also includes sensory differences.

The first ‘symptom’ here is “Stereotyped or repetitive motor movements, use of objects, or speech”. Autistic people usually just call this stimming: we’re talking here about movements done to express emotions and self-regulate.

It is not at all clear why such movements would be a problem, except that people sometimes think they look weird. Some movements might be self-injurious, but this is largely a separate issue.

On the contrary, suppressing stims is a very real problem. Self-expression and self-regulation are important! Especially when your brain is set up in a way that often makes living in modern society very stressful.

Many psychologists now realise that trying to train autistic people not to stim was always a grave error, but it seems that ABA practitioners (who are not required to learn anything about autism) often still do this.

Next we have “Insistence on sameness, inflexible adherence to routines, or ritualized patterns of verbal or nonverbal behavior”. These are certainly things that can make life as an autistic person difficult, but as with stimming, what is being described here is largely a set of coping strategies. Finding the world unpredictable and confusing, with distressing sensory experiences which are often dismissed by those around you, can lead people to cling onto things they can predict, understand and control. Hopefully I don’t need to explain how dangerous it is to interpret coping strategies as symptoms to be treated.

It’s possible you could make a case for the differences underlying such experiences being ‘symptoms’, but that’s clearly not what the DSM does. What are the differences underlying the behaviours referred to? The world is unpredictable and confusing for autistic people largely because other people process it so differently: they notice different things, make different assumptions, reach different conclusions. They seem to operate by different rules, which nobody ever explains very clearly, and they don’t seem to understand autistic people’s sensory experiences, which we’ll come back to after the next ‘symptom’ — which is my favourite one.

“Highly restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus” — or, as they’re usually known among laypeople, passions.

We’re talking about the things that fire people up here, that bring meaning to people’s lives. If it wasn’t for people with “restricted, fixated interests that are abnormal in intensity or focus”, science would never have got anywhere near the point it’s at. Would musicians even be a thing? Would artists? Would writers?

I don’t want to suggest that intense interests are always uncomplicatedly good. There are reasons the word ‘obsession’ has negative associations, and I think that autistically intense passions come from the same place as our ruminations, our loops of concern. I just think something has gone badly wrong when you start calling the things that people love ‘symptoms’.

Finally, we have “Hyper- or hyporeactivity to sensory input or unusual interests in sensory aspects of the environment” — a bizarrely late addition to the diagnostic manuals, given that sensory differences in autistic people have been observed since the very start.

It’s certainly true that most autistic people’s sensory systems work differently from others, and it’s clear that these differences can be distressing and disabling. However, they can also be a source of great joy, and they can help keep us — and others — safe! Being highly sensitive to sounds and smells that might signal danger is not always fun, but it certainly has advantages.

As for my unusual interests in sensory aspects of the environment, those are some of my favourite things about being alive. I get that it’s unusual to really pay much attention to the way light plays on water, and the smells of the natural world, and the many tiny living things we share it with, but I’m not sure why.

Like many (but not all) autistic people, I think I like the way my senses work, overall — even though I often wish it was easier to tune out textures, smells and sounds that I don’t get on with. I’m grateful for tools that help me to filter out stimuli when I want to: sunglasses, earphones, and so on; but I don’t think I would give up the intensity of good sensory experiences in order to get rid of the difficult ones.

So where does this leave us? The DSM lists a hodgepodge of interpersonal difficulties, coping strategies and intense experiences, and declares them ‘symptoms’.

Interpersonal difficulties always involve other people, and interventions aimed at ‘fixing’ autistic socialisation are heavily implicated in promoting masking, with all the mental health difficulties that follow. Coping strategies are wildly inappropriate targets for interventions, unless equally effective strategies replace them. Intense interests and experiences have advantages and disadvantages; there are plenty of accomodations available to soften sensory inputs, but no actual treatments.

Most of the ‘symptoms’ described are at least second-order effects of being autistic: things that arise out of interactions between a person and their environment, and often become problems only when other people take issue with them.

Framing these things as ‘symptoms’, then, lends itself to interventions and research aimed at preventing things that could more easily be accommodated. Too often, the harms of these attempts are not recognised — including the message that autistic people are broken and need fixing.

Meanwhile, these ‘symptoms’ provide only oblique hints at many of the things that really make life difficult for autistic people. Meltdowns don’t feature; there’s nothing in there about overwhelm at all — although you might be able to spot it just outside of the frame, if you know what you’re looking for. The sleep difficulties that plague so many autistic people don’t obviously follow from any of the listed ‘symptoms’. The anxiety, depression and other mental health problems faced by many of us are more likely to be worsened than improved by most attempts to attack these ‘symptoms’.

Of course, if ‘symptoms’ isn’t the right term for our differences, then ‘disorder’ doesn’t fit either — which is what many autistic people have been saying for decades.

Neurodiversity is a paradigm (as well as a movement). Are paradigms scientific? It really depends what you mean by ‘scientific’.

The neurodiversity paradigm is about science: it is the position that human brains are naturally very variable, and that’s broadly a good thing, even when some of those variations come with challenges. Interpreting variations as pathological is often problematic, on this view.

Neurodiversity is scientific in exactly the same sense that the medical model of autism, or pathology paradigm, is scientific. Scientists do not passively report on objective facts they have discovered about the world — certainly not when they are studying humans! Instead, they make all sorts of interpretations and value judgements, which inform how they talk about their subjects; what they study; and what kinds of evidence they pay attention to.

Describing something as a disorder implies a value judgement: that the difference being described is wrong in some way. Thinkers like Jerome Wakefield have tried to ground this sort of judgement in observations about distress levels or disruption of ‘normal’ capacities, and hypotheses about evolutionary fitness: “a disorder is the failure of a mechanism to perform its evolved function, in a way that is harmful to the organism.”

As he acknowledges, none of this avoids the fact that the term ‘disorder’ is heavily value-laden. The concept of ‘harm’ is subjective, while objective judgements about causes of distress and disablement are largely impossible; in a very general sense, these things arise out of the interaction between a person and their environment. Even if we can pin down some mechanism’s “evolved function”, its failure to perform it is contextual. As an autistic person I have experienced great distress, and been disabled in many ways, but it is not at all clear if any of this was an unavoidable consequence of autism. Autism can still be a disability, and a valid category, either way! But it’s not a disorder in any ordinary sense of the word, and the supposition that it’s a disorder in a technical sense really seems to be based on untested guesses about the sources of difficulties.

As for the evolutionary fitness angle, it’s not remotely clear that autism is an evolutionary disadvantage, either at the individual level or at the level of groups — either in humans’ evolutionary past, or in present societies. Tendencies towards high alertness and single-minded focus, for example, can be disabling or highly adaptive, depending on circumstances. Research within the pathology paradigm has a history of either ignoring advantages, or somehow turning them into problems.

The neurodiversity approach is a corrective to unscientific assumptions made by scientists.

Once you stop assuming, by default, that the problems faced by autistic people (or anyone who’s neurodivergent) are directly caused by their ‘disorder’, it becomes much less appealing to look for ways of preventing or ‘curing’ their differences, and much more appealing to look for ways of improving their lives. That’s likely to mean finding ways for them to more easily access education, employment, healthcare and wider society, but crucially, it means asking them what is important to them.

Besides changing the framing of differences conventionally interpreted as disorders, neurodiversity is strongly associated with taking people seriously about their own experiences. That’s because researchers working in a medical framework have not, historically, seen it as very important to listen to their subjects; after all, subjects are subjective. Better to have all the interpretation and priority-setting done by trained scientists who have no personal experience of what they’re studying and are, presumably, objective.

Anyone with any familiarity with anthropology might be able to spot some problems with this approach. I leave this as an exercise for the reader.

Decades of research in this paradigm have yielded strikingly little of real value to autistic people, our families, or people working with us.

Non-autistic people have developed theories of autism that explain only a few facets of autistic experience, while getting other parts disastrously wrong (see ‘Theory of Mind’ vs the ‘Double Empathy Problem’). Interventions, developed without meaningful autistic involvement, have focused on changing behaviours without ensuring that the people delivering them have the faintest idea what the meaning or purpose of those behaviours might be.

All this, and the descriptions of autistic people that have been produced are often misleading, dehumanising, and alienating.

It is no wonder, then, that a different way of approaching and interpreting autism research has gained so much currency in recent years — not just among autistic people, but with a wide range people with an interest in the subject. That includes a great many scientists, at this point.

Ultimately, the question of whether neurodiversity is scientific is academic. A far more relevant question would be is neurodiversity something that scientists should take seriously? The answer to that is unequivocally yes — and as an autistic person existing in this world, it is a huge relief to me that so many now do.

The United Kingdom has just had an extraordinarily strange election — more to the point, an extraordinarily strange electoral result. I have a proposal to avoid future elections being as undemocratic as this one, by taking non-voters seriously.

The headline result of the 2024 general election was that the Labour Party won a landslide, and the Conservative Party lost astonishingly badly. There is a lot that this summary misses.

Labour now have a virtually unassailable majority in parliament… despite winning only about a third of the votes cast. John Curtice called this election “the most disproportional in British history” — and that is really saying something. Labour came first in 411 of the UK’s 650 constituencies; each one has its own winner-takes-all race, and that’s the end of the story under First Past The Post (FPTP). It doesn’t make a jot of difference to the result how much any of those seats were won by, or what proportion of votes any party got overall — or how many people didn’t think it was worth voting.

Interpreting Abstention

Labour winning 63.2% of seats on 33.7% of the vote is not even the strangest thing about this result. Once you factor in that less than 60% of registered voters turned out to vote at all, and only 52% of the total adult population, it becomes clear that Labour has full control of the UK parliament despite only one adult in six actually voting for them.

The way that our existing system deals with voter abstention is to completely ignore it. I question that approach. Turnout is, at best, a bonus statistic right now: provided as an afterthought for the curious, along with the similarly irrelevant count of spoiled ballots. It can’t affect the outcome, and political parties are not expected to factor it into their calculations — indeed, politicians who make any effort to appeal to non-voters are often ridiculed by mainstream commentators.

If someone doesn’t vote for anyone, that’s treated as a decision not to be heard, not to have your opinions taken into consideration.

But is ignoring abstention really the correct way of dealing with it? I am not the first to observe that if No Vote was a party, it would be bigger than any of the other parties in many recent elections. In the 2024 UK general election, 40% of the electorate chose No Vote, against a mere 20% for Labour. I think that bears repeating.

In the 2024 UK general election, 40% of the electorate chose No Vote, against a mere 20% for Labour.

Taking Abstention Seriously

What if we took seriously the implied message of abstention — that none of these candidates are worth voting for? Under the existing system, a No Vote is treated as a vote for whichever politicians everyone else decides on. But if you ask abstainers, they are far more like to tell you that they didn’t think anyone was worth voting for.

In other words, it’s not that abstainers are happy to go with whoever gets elected. It’s typically the opposite: they’ll be unhappy with any of the options on offer. I would suggest that this implies that whoever is up for election, they’ll be no better than some random person off the street.

What if we take that seriously? Rather than counting them out of the equation, I suggest that we treat No Vote wins as a vote for some random person.

By this measure, the 2024 general election becomes a catastrophic loss for professional politicians, and a landslide victory for sortition: the process of choosing people by lottery, and putting them in positions of power and responsibility.

It might sound silly when you first come across it, but ‘citizen juries’ have been employed to great effect in many parts of the world, finding solutions to problems in ways that often involve open discussion and compromises, in a way that seems anathema to career politicians. Serious proposals have been made for upper chambers consisting at least partly of randomly selected citizens, empowered with the resources to learn enough about a range of issues to make informed choices about them (for example, by Common Weal and Tom Shakespeare). Deliberative democracy has a long pedigree, and many well-established advantages, including breaking deadlocks, widening participation, and considering perspectives that are often missed.

Representation Matters

Introducing sortition into the electoral system in this way would plug a major hole in our democratic system: politicians would have something to lose by alienating swathes of the population even if their opponents are no better.

This would be a radical change for the better. The Labour Right, for example, has notoriously relied on the belief that the working class has got nowhere else to go. If they don’t want to vote Labour, they just won’t vote… and so what if they don’t? The calculation goes like this: even if Labour lose two votes for every Tory they convince to switch to their side, in a two-horse race, they’re effectively breaking even.

If every refusal to vote was respected as an expression of the belief that the politicians aren’t worth voting for, there would be a whole lot more pressure on politicians to be worth voting for. They would be forced to look at who is not being represented.

Yes, it would also result in an influx of non-politicians into the halls of power. Would that be a bad thing? It’s not at all clear that it would. Politicians are literally the least trusted profession in the country — it’s no wonder that so many people don’t want to vote for them! And yet, we leave them in charge of all the law-making, again and again.

We know that elected politicians are not remotely representative of the populations they come from — they are far more likely to be male, white, rich, and older; and to be educated in one of a small range of academic subjects. Adding fully random citizens to the mix would immediately go some way towards balancing that out, but it would be straightforward to go one step further: to skew the selections towards demographics that are otherwise systematically under-represented. For example, if Parliament is two thirds male, two thirds of those chosen by lottery could be female. Most sortition systems have weighted selection towards representative samples, rather than choosing purely at random.

It is not surprising that — as the IPPR shows in their report Half of us: Turnout patterns at the 2024 general election — turnout is much lower among people who are younger, poorer, or not white. The disparity is even bigger once you take into account people who are not registered to vote. These people do not see themselves or their priorities reflected in parliament, and have persistently been left behind by the UK’s political system.

Making It Work

I would suggest that serving as a Random Parliamentarian (RP) should be voluntary, in the sense of allowing anyone to opt out. Nobody should be forced to take on great responsibility, but nor should power go only to those who seek it.

The role could come with a salary pegged somewhere above the national median, but not massively so. The pay would be fair, but being an RP should not be something you would want to do just to get rich. Those who earn well above the national average would have much less incentive to take part than poorer citizens; this is a feature, not a bug.

As with existing MPs, RPs would be allocated generous expenses to hire researchers, office staff and so on, and guidance on how to go about it. They could be allocated additional resources to help them to access expert advice. To avoid discriminating against those with caring responsibilities, there should also be a budget available to hire people to take on existing responsibilities.

It would be sensible to allow RPs plenty of education opportunities and a period of adjustment — say, a few months — to get up to speed with their new role, learn about major issues of the day, and so on. They should also be warned ahead of time that they could be called up if more than a certain number of seats are not allocated to politicians.

Perhaps it would be helpful to give RPs the opportunity to work part-time. This would make it feasible for many who might otherwise struggle to take that time out, including those who can only work part-time. This would mean they don’t have to leave behind their existing jobs and responsibilities, and can stay anchored in their communities and industries. I have long thought that politicians should have this opportunity, for all of the same reasons — some people face far greater barriers to participation in Parliament, and that is always a problem.

If people don’t believe that random members of the public will do at least as good a job as elected politicians, of course, then that would be one more reason to show up and vote.

Some Calculations

You might be wondering what this election would look like under this new system, if we leave FPTP in place and simply treat No Vote as if it were a party. It turns out that by my calculations — which you can check here — abstention won in 609 of the UK’s 650 constituencies in 2024. In other words, only one seat out of every sixteen had more voters for any political party than it had non-voters.

Labour barely managed half the support of No Vote (20.4% to 40.3%). Their vote was also well behind the combined vote of all the smaller parties (25% of registered voters, or 42% of actual votes). The result was a landslide in spite of this, with 411 Labour seats — still nowhere near what No Vote would have got if it was counted.

Truly, this was an election that was lost, very badly, rather than won.

Adam Ramsay put it beautifully:

In 2024, Starmer promised to make politics boring again. He didn’t win by exciting people to the polls with hope, but by convincing Tories he was so dull they could ignore the whole thing, stay at home, and not bother to vote against him.

Evidently, this was a viable electoral strategy for Labour this year — but should it have been?

To be clear, this election was exceptional in the sheer scale of support for nobody at all. The picture was very different in 2017, which was the first election in 20 years where more than two thirds of registered voters turned out, energised by a Labour Party that worked hard to represent people who had previously felt disenfranchised. On that 69.2% turnout — still low by historic standards — just 155 constituencies would have gone to the No Vote non-party. Even in 2019, when turnout dropped to 67.3%, only 220 RPs would have been selected.

The fact that 2024 would have seen an overwhelming landslide for No Vote is an artifact of the UK’s indefensible FPTP system, just as Labour’s real-world landslide was. Under straightforward proportional representation, only 40% of seats, 262, would have gone to RPs. That would still have been enough to profoundly change the political calculus of Westminster, but it would not have made politicians irrelevant in the way that they would have been under FPTP, faced with a tidal wave of 609 RPs.

What Next?

This Abstention-Based Sortition proposal is, of course, just one of the ways that we could be working to revive British democracy. I’m sure it has its flaws, and many other improvements are also worth considering.

The Institute for Public Policy Research report mentioned earlier suggests automatic registration on the electoral roll, votes for 16 and 17 year olds and tighter controls on political spending: all eminently sensible, if a little on the cautious side.

Replacing FPTP with almost anything closer to Proportional Representation would be another obvious step; the failed referendum on replacing it with the Alternative Vote system suggests that it is worth thinking carefully about which replacement to choose, but I make no judgement here on which way to go with this.

As I argued in 2016 in a (partial) defence of democracy, we should also be paying far more attention to opportunities for democracy outside of electoral systems: there is a place for direct democracy, if it’s done right; more urgently, every part of our economy could benefit from being made more democratic.

My proposal here is no doubt an imperfect one, and you are invited to pick holes in it. Whatever changes we see, though, it is high time that we stopped disregarding non-voters. Concluding that our electoral system won’t represent you is not the same as saying you have no interest in being represented.

The current situation is incredibly fragile, once you scratch beneath the surface. Any government would be challenged by the combination of the climate crisis, international tensions, the cost of living and the after-effects of Brexit. The ruling party may have a virtually unchallengeable majority right now, but it could only convince a sixth of the adult population to vote for it. Worse, most of that sixth voted for them to get rid of the Tories, or because they wanted change — and yet, Labour achieved this victory by promising to continue many of the Tories’ policies.

When so little of the population feels represented by the government, and the political system provides so little hope for them to ever be, all of that discontent is bound to come out somehow. This is going to be an interesting few years for UK politics, despite Keir Starmer’s best efforts.

Electing ‘None of the Above’ was originally published in Socrates Café on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

First, let’s look at why this angle of attack seems so effective.

The thing is, the far right are extremely weird, but their whole thing is about attacking weirdness. They are weirdo-hating weirdos.

The authoritarian right has always been about imposing control by enforcing conformity, persecuting those who deviate from certain norms, and idolising people seen as embodying those norms. The control might be the real point, but the mechanisms for maintaining power revolve around attacks on the undesirable other.

So of course, there is power in pointing out that people like Vance are in fact deeply peculiar personalities, with values and priorities wildly at odds with those of the population at large. If the norms they’re trying to enforce don’t match up with those of their nation, what kind of nationalists are they? If they themselves are oddballs, creepily obsessed with the genitals and reproduction of strangers, who are they to be telling anyone else how they should act?

Speaking as someone who has always been weird, though, and drawn to other weird people, it seems dangerous to be reinforcing the idea that being weird is automatically bad and shameful. People see me as weird because I’m autistic (although I didn’t make that connection until I was in my 30s) and because I’m queer, have complicated feelings about gender, care deeply about things that many people are seemingly indifferent to (like science and injustice), and struggle to deal with hierarchies and authority. I have learned not to be ashamed of any of those things — to embrace my weirdness, in other words, despite what conservatives want. It hasn’t always been easy.

Weird Pride is something that many people badly need.

So if I see someone using ‘weird’ as an insult or an attack, I am less inclined to trust that person — I know that progressives sometimes push conformism too. They may not mean to, but people using terms like ‘weird’ as insults are implicitly positioning themselves on the side of ‘normality’ against ‘weirdness’, and that puts them in opposition to diversity. Valuing diversity absolutely has to mean accepting and embracing things seen as weird.

The far right is rattled when they get called ‘weird’ because they see themselves as being for normality, and against diversity and weirdness. It rattles them, but on some level it plays into their hands at the same time.

It’s possible that’s a price worth paying here, but it is a lot like when people who think of themselves as left-wing or liberal ridicule right-wingers for their weight, masculinity, femininity or anything related to disability. The attacks might well hit home, but who else is being hurt when stigmatised characteristics are used as fuel for attacks?

This was a talk recorded for the Autism Cross-Party Group (CPG) at the Scottish Parliament, meeting on the 22nd of April 2023, on “Accessing Education: Exclusions and ‘Presumption to Mainstreaming’”. Watch the recording here.

I’m Fergus Murray, a science teacher, writer and autistic community organiser. I’m the Chair of AMASE, Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh, but I’m speaking here mainly as an autistic teacher.

The first thing I want to say is that I support the ideal of inclusive education. There are good reasons why disability rights activists have pushed for it over the decades, and why it is enshrined in Article 24 of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities.

The main alternative, segregated education for disabled and neurodivergent children, has rarely delivered equal access to education, and has too often fallen far short of this — although schools for the deaf and for the blind have had some notable successes. Unfortunately, truly inclusive education remains elusive. As UNICEF puts it, this would require “education environments that adapt the design and physical structures, teaching methods, and curriculum as well as the culture, policy and practice of education environments so that they are accessible to all students without discrimination.”

I do not believe that anyone, hand on heart, thinks that Scottish schools consistently achieve this. Based on what I know, I think it is rare — which is not to suggest that Scotland is doing unusually badly on this front, only that it is not doing well enough.

So I want to address what I think the main barriers are to realising this dream, for autistic and otherwise neurodivergent students; what truly inclusive education might look like; and what else might be needed, even if the mainstream school system became as inclusive as it could be.

First, I should say a bit about myself, because my perspective is obviously shaped by my specific experiences. I’ve been a science teacher in Scotland for around a decade now, but weirdly I have no direct experience of Scottish state education, having completed my own education in England, and worked only at independent schools in Scotland. That doesn’t mean that I have no relevant experience, though!

So I completed my initial teacher education at Goldsmiths, in London, before moving back up to Edinburgh, where I have spent most of my adult life. My PGCE was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever done, and it is no wonder that so many teachers drop out before they have even begun, or within a year or two of graduating — especially those with disabilities or caring responsibilities. There is simply too much to do and learn, crammed into far too little time. I mention this because the failure to accommodate those groups in the teaching profession makes it that much harder for schools to fully include disabled children, including neurodivergent kids — and because teacher education is not adequately preparing teachers to work with those kids, but I know how challenging it is to fit anything more in there, in the current system.

I was assessed as autistic a few years before training to become a teacher; up to that point, my education had been completed without the benefit of this key information about how my brain works. Not that I have any confidence that my school experiences, in the 80s and early 90s (or my universities, later) would have been improved by this knowledge; but we have come on a long way since then, and I like to think that most teachers have a much better idea now of what autism is, and how to accommodate it. Unfortunately, I think it is fair to say that many still have a long way to go.

My teaching career has been an unconventional one, which is the only way I have been able to stay in the profession for this long. I am uncomfortable with the fact that this has meant working in the private sector, but my PGCE experiences showed me that I would probably never be happy working with big classes of kids who mostly didn’t want to be there. That was also my experience of school as a learner, and it was largely miserable.

I have been very fortunate to find work in schools that have allowed me to teach small classes, mostly of kids who have actively chosen to learn what I am teaching, and to be flexible and autonomous in how I teach. And largely thanks to the promise of small classes and flexibility, those schools have attracted large numbers of children who have been failed by mainstream state schools (and often by one or more private schools, as well). Those kids, as you might imagine, are largely neurodivergent. Thankfully, I have seen many of them thrive once they are in the right environment, often after years of traumatic school experiences.

So what are mainstream schools doing wrong that for all their inclusive intentions, so many neurodivergent kids have to leave — sometimes to specialist provision; otherwise to private schools or home schooling, if the parents have the resources; or to worse situations, if they don’t? For that matter, why are many of those who do stay developing chronic anxiety and other mental health difficulties that will stay with them for years afterwards?

I don’t want to spend too long on what’s going wrong, because I think the problems are better-understood than the solutions, but we need to look at where the main barriers lie, in order to effectively address them.

The deepest problems have to do with the overall culture of education, embedded as it is within this neoliberal capitalist society. This breeds a focus on measurable achievement, over things like mental health and wellbeing which are far harder to quantify; it perpetuates inequality, by giving children with wealthy or educated parents multiple, systematic advantages; it pushes people towards studying subjects that are seen as beneficial for the economy, or reliable moneyspinners at an individual level; it promotes competition over cooperation; and it builds in the expectation that some fraction of learners will fail — or, as I would see it, will be failed.

I would argue that these factors affect most children negatively, but autistic and otherwise neurodivergent and disabled kids are often the worst hit. Schools, and education policies, certainly have their roles to play in fixing these, but they are huge, systemic issues, calling for much broader social and political change. We always ought to keep these in sight, but let us focus on things that we can change in the short to medium term.

There are three broad types of factor that lead to exclusion at the level of the school, besides staff to pupil ratios: the understandings and attitudes of teachers; the behaviour of other pupils; and the physical environment of the school.

If we want teachers to understand enough to include autistic learners effectively, they should all be receiving up-to-date training on autism and neurodiversity, designed and delivered by neurodivergent people. Outdated attitudes are still far too prevalent — which is hardly surprising, given the paradigm shift that neurodiversity demands, and the far-too-limited time available for teachers to learn new things. Teachers want to understand neurodivergent learners and what they need to access education, but for the most part, they simply don’t have the chance.

A few years ago I was involved in developing a set of autism resources for initial teacher education in Scotland, released under the title ‘We Were Expecting You’. This was a positive development, but much of my feedback on the draft materials was ignored, and we ended up with a much less useful set of resources than we could have had, with minimal input from the population being described. Even if this pack had been perfect, initial teacher education has little effect on established teachers, who are the ones most likely to have formed their ideas about these things a long time ago. Given how much our understanding of neurodiversity has come on in recent decades, it is imperative to ensure that every teacher is exposed to modern understandings of neurodevelopmental differences.

The attitudes of other students are just as important. Students who stand out as ‘different’ often have a hard time at school. I think they are much more likely to understand neurodivergence than they used to be, and series like Pablo and A Kind of Spark surely help with that. Still, understanding and acceptance are far from universal, and projects like LEANS — Learning About Neurodiversity at School — could go a long way towards filling that gap… if only they were more widely implemented.

Meanwhile, schools are still being built with bizarrely little regard for the sensory needs of neurodivergent students. Fluorescent lighting is still common, shared spaces are often overwhelmingly noisy… and horrifyingly, some schools are even going for “open plan” layouts, so that is not just the noises of one classroom causing disruption and overload, but all of the classrooms around.

Most of these issues could be fixed if it was compulsory for every school to employ autistic people to conduct sensory audits, and if the need for quiet spaces to retreat and recover was universally recognised.

Between all of these factors, mainstream Scottish schools as a whole are not yet ready to effectively include every autistic learner — or many of the other children identified as having ‘additional’ support needs. I have suggested various routes towards making them more inclusive, but in the meantime, we also need to consider what can be done to ensure access to alternatives. Lockdown showed us that some children who have a terrible time at school actually thrive with online learning at home. What can we do to ensure that home education is a viable option for more families, when school doesn’t work out?

And what can we do to ensure that every child has the chance to meet and learn from others with similar experiences of the world to themselves? One reason that schools for the Deaf remain popular with many in the Deaf community is that they give children the opportunity not to feel isolated, to connect with Deaf culture and learn how to be Deaf in a society that assumes hearing.

Many minority communities have Saturday schools, for broadly similar reasons. So far, we don’t have anything like that for Autistic communities. Autistic culture often goes unrecognised, and children have little support to understand and advocate for their needs. After all, the people around them in mainstream schools mostly don’t understand those needs either — or how important it is to learn how to advocate for them.

So truly inclusive education is a beautiful dream, but even if it is eventually realised, it won’t be enough on its own. People need the opportunity to meet others who are something like themselves, as well as people with very different experiences. And many of the barriers to equality in education come down to deeper cultural and political issues — things which will take many years to change.

Video version here, audio here.

My mum, Dinah Murray, spent over thirty years thinking about autism. She completed her PhD on language and interests in 1986, and when her friend Robyn lent her a copy of Uta Frith’s 'Autism: Explaining the Enigma' a few years later, she realised that her model of the mind as a system of interests suggested a much better explanation of this enigma than Uta Frith had managed — essentially, that in autistic people, a relatively small number of interests are aroused at a time, relatively intensely.

She had been supposed to write a book based on her PhD thesis – ‘Talking, Thinking, Wanting’ – and the first thing she did with her ideas about autism was to write a chapter for that, which she called ‘Holy Fools and Bullshit Artists’. She sent it round to various people she knew of in the autism world, in 1990-91, and started volunteering at a school for autistic kids. One thing led to another, and she ended up presenting Monotropism, her theory, at the 1992 Durham conference on autism, in a talk titled Attention Tunnelling and Autism.

She never did finish writing that book. Instead, autism became her main professional focus for the rest of her life. With her old friend, the mathematical philosopher Mike Lesser, she developed the theory of monotropism further, and started a small organisation, Autism and Computing. They promoted autistic people’s access to information technology, explaining why computers suited people who processed the world monotropically.

She made friends with many autistic people, as well as parents and professionals, and made a habit of connecting them up. She worked to ensure that autistic people were taken seriously and listened to by professionals and policy makers, at a time when this very rarely happened.

Through all of this, she was applying and refining her ideas about monotropism based on observations and conversations with the autistic people she worked with as a support worker, and her autistic friends — including Wenn Lawson, who had hit on many of the same ideas at around the same time.

At one point in the late 90s, after my brothers and I had all left home, she realised — thanks to her work as a support worker — that antipsychotics (neuroleptics, also known as “major tranquillisers”) were being dangerously over-prescribed to people with learning disabilities, largely to make them more passive, and she devoted several years to fighting this practice. She quit her day job, started an organisation called Autistic People Against Neuroleptic Abuse (APANA) together with Wenn, taught herself enough neuroscience to write authoritatively about why these drugs are so dangerous, wrote a report called “Potions, Pills and Human Rights” for the first issue of the journal Good Autism Practice, and more…

It was a classic example of the power of monotropism in action — her persistent hyperfocus allowing her to attain an expert level of knowledge in a subject she had no prior training in, while pursuing every avenue available to make sure that the right people were getting the message. As she wrote in ‘Liberating Potential’ in 2017, “There is potential for extraordinary — atypical — levels of productiveness, resourcefulness and creativity in many autistic people when they are pursuing concerns close to their heart.”

In 2005, Dinah, Wenn and Mike together published Attention, Monotropism and the Diagnostic Criteria for Autism in the journal Autism, which systematically demonstrated how their theory could explain all the defining characteristics of autism – and more. Given that none of the established theories of autism had ever convincingly achieved that, this paper should perhaps have made more of a splash than it did!

The autism establishment is a funny thing, though, and here were three outsiders thinking they’d got it all worked out — even though Mike was almost completely unschooled, Dinah’s PhD was in psycholinguistics, and Wenn’s — on monotropism — wouldn’t be finished until 2009. All three were autistic, though Dinah had only cautiously start to refer to autistic people as ‘we’ by then.

The paper did garner some attention, as did Dinah and Wenn’s lectures, both together and separately. Autistic people, and those who live and work with us, often felt a huge sense of relief and validation when they heard about monotropism, but it was only in the last few years of Dinah’s life that she got to see her papers receive more than a trickle of citations. I think it helped that I got Me and Monotropism: a Unified Theory of Autism published in The Psychologist magazine in 2018, but it was partly just that the international autistic community had matured to the point where ideas could easily spread and receive critical attention.

By the time she died of cancer in 2021, she could see that her work had really paid off, at last: new research was being published regularly referring to monotropism, and it had become widely known among autistic people – at least, those who participated actively in the autistic communities she had done so much to help make possible, in the early days.

I started building monotropism.org in May 2022, partly because I wanted to make sure that my mother’s work had a secure home, and partly because I wanted to make sure that there was one central place to direct people to, to learn about Monotropism, its applications and history, and to keep up to date with developments.

I started her archive there by copying across her work from her site, Productive Irritant, and digging up papers that had been lost to the internet when the old Autism & Computing site went down. Over the last few months, I’ve supplemented that with more that I was able to find online, photocopies from a friend, and most recently, her first two conference papers on Monotropism, from 1992 and 1993, which I found in the National Library of Scotland.

It feels like the archive of her work is finally somewhere close to complete — at least with respect to monotropism. The only big omission that I know of is that 1990 chapter, from before Monotropism had a name, and I have no idea if that’s ever likely to turn up now…