In the last few weeks, I've seen the issue of neurodiversity come up in the BDSM community in ways that give me concern. This post is a rough outline of my feelings on the topic.

I am neurodivergent. What that means specifically is that my neurological makeup is significantly different from most people. I have a great deal of difficulty, for example, in the area of in-person communication. I also have enormous difficulties with sensory stimuli such as noise or odors. A noisy room is quite literally physically painful to me, and strong odors can so disruptive to me that I need to leave the area.

I am not Autistic but have a lot in common with people who are diagnosed with Aspergers or Autism, now classified in the DSM 5 as Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). In fact, ADHD is now considered part of this spectrum and I am ADHD.

Understanding how these issues come into play into my everyday life would take pages, but I can tell you that life as a person who is neurodivergent is painful. If I were physically disabled, people would not hesitate to assist me, but being neurodivergent is to have an invisible disability, and while no one would ascribe malice to someone who is unable to walk, I have seen people ascribe malice to things that I and others have done which were related to our disability, both outside and inside the scene.

Recently the issue of neurodivergence came up in a discussion about handling people who don't understand social cues. Several people chimed in with what they thought was entirely clear communication but was not. Some then began to ascribe negative attributes to those who could not understand their communication, and while no one said these exact words it sounded like "And if they don't understand this, they don't want to understand".

This belief is sadly prevalent in society at large, where behavior that one doesn't understand is confused with negativity or attributed to "attitude" or "personality" rather than as an expression of a disability.

The BDSM community prides itself on being welcoming and diverse, but when ablism, especially in regards to neurodivergence is a serious problem that gets very little attention. Instead, I hear people joke about being "ADHD" when they aren't diagnosed as such, or saying that someone has Aspergers as a slur. Those are the obvious actions, but there are also the less visible issues that I mentioned earlier, of ascribing motive to actions or inactions of an individual. This will take far longer to change, and I'm not sure where even to begin, but if we as a community care about being welcoming and protecting the rights of the disabled, we need to set the same kind of welcoming example in regards to neurodiversity as we do for other forms of diversity.

Society at large does not understand neurodiversity.