The Great Divide: Academic Neurodiversity vs. Autistic Lived Reality
Neurodiversity, as an academic discipline, has become a lucrative industry. Scholars and consultants make the rounds at elite universities and corporate DEI events, advising capitalists on how to be “more inclusive” whilst ensuring that nothing truly changes. They tell hopeful stories about progress, ‘best practices,’ and a future where neurodivergent people thrive in a society that welcomes them. But for actual autistic people, this future has never arrived.
Instead, we live in a world that was never built for us and never will be. We exist in spaces that tolerate us at best, exclude us at worst. We are shut out of employment, healthcare, and social belonging. We are masked, misdiagnosed, unaccommodated, or outright discarded. The reality of autistic survival—burnout, poverty, social exile—stands in stark contrast to the polished optimism of academic neurodiversity.
This gap between theory and lived experience is not an accident. The academic neurodiversity movement has been around for decades, yet it has accomplished little beyond giving the neuro-majority new ways to commodify, study, and control us. In some cases, it has even helped reinforce dangerous myths. Steve Silberman’s Neurotribes, for example, erases Dr. Grunya Sukhareva from history, cementing the falsehood that autism “began” with Kanner. This was not just an oversight—it fundamentally shaped how autism is discussed, reinforcing Western, pathology-driven narratives rather than recognising the deeper, more global autistic history.
So, who benefits from academic neurodiversity? Corporations, universities, and researchers who can package our experiences into grants, lectures, and diversity initiatives. Meanwhile, autistic people remain locked out of the very institutions that profit from discussing us. The DEI consultant who lectures on “neurodiverse hiring” is not advocating to end capitalism—only to find ways to profit from those of us who can be made useful to it.
Today’s article will explore how academic neurodiversity sells a fantasy of inclusion that will never materialise, how it ignores the structural barriers that make autistic survival nearly impossible, and why real change cannot come from corporate-sponsored conversations or from the brain droppings of SBC at the Autism Research Centre but from a fundamental restructuring of society itself.
Put another way …
Academic neurodiversity has become an industry, polished and marketable, designed not to challenge power but to reassure it. DEI consultants, so called ‘autism-coaches,’ university researchers, and corporate trainers have carved out careers from speaking about us, often without us, crafting narratives of progress that bear little resemblance to autistic reality. They sell an image of inclusion that soothes neurotypical anxieties whilst leaving the structures of exclusion intact. Meanwhile, autistic people remain trapped in a world that was never meant for us, barely surviving in spaces that demand our compliance whilst offering none of the support we need. For all the grand discussions of accessibility and acceptance, the material conditions of autistic life continue to deteriorate—worsened by economic precarity, systemic neglect, and the relentless pressure to conform to a society that will never see us as equals.
This industry does not exist to dismantle the barriers autistic people face; it exists to make those barriers more palatable to those who benefit from them. Corporations embrace ‘neurodiversity hiring’ schemes that do little more than reinforce the idea that autistic people must prove our worth in a capitalist framework that has always sought to exclude us. Universities study us, theorise about us, and publish papers that change nothing about our daily reality. The language of neurodiversity has been stripped of its radical origins and repurposed into something safe, something that can be marketed to the very institutions that uphold our oppression. It is no longer about liberation but about management—about refining the ways in which autistic people can be slotted into an unyielding system whilst ensuring that those who cannot conform are left behind.
This is the heart of the gap between academic neurodiversity and autistic lived experience: where the former sees a future of carefully integrated and socially palatable ‘neurodiverse’ professionals, the latter sees the truth of our disposability. Academic neurodiversity presents itself as progress, but progress for whom? Not for the autistic people pushed into poverty, locked out of healthcare, or punished for failing to mask. Not for those of us who burn out, who drop out, who disappear from view because the world will not bend for us as we are. The reality is that we are not meant to survive in this system. And yet, rather than confronting the structures that ensure our exclusion, academic neurodiversity is content to find ways to smooth the edges—to make the machine run a little quieter, even as it grinds us down.
The Comfortable Illusion of “Progress”
Neurodiversity, as packaged for neurotypicals, is less about inclusion and more about optics. It is not a movement for autistic liberation but a carefully curated display designed to reassure the neuro-majority that they are making progress without requiring them to change anything of substance. DEI initiatives parade autistic employees who have “successfully” masked their way into corporate spaces, celebrated only when they do not challenge the status quo. The acceptable autistic is one who does not need accommodations, whose neurodivergence is framed as a hidden “superpower” that makes them a more efficient worker. The autistic superhero saves profitability, not autistic lives. The rest of us—the ones who cannot or will not force ourselves into these rigid structures—are simply ignored.
Universities engage in much the same performance, funding research on autistic people whilst excluding autistic scholars from leadership positions. Pick any organisation, and the pattern repeats: non-autistic experts dictating the conversation, ensuring that academic neurodiversity remains palatable to those who control it. Research that centres autistic perspectives struggles to gain funding, whilst studies that reinforce pathology and interventionist models continue to dominate. Institutions are not interested in dismantling systemic barriers; they are interested in refining their methods of control. The presence of autistic academics in precarious, underfunded positions does nothing to shift the balance of power when the gatekeepers from the neuro-majority continue to define the field.
Even spaces that claim to amplify autistic voices—conferences, panels, professional events—are structured to exclude us. Capitalists have their seats at the table, speaking on our behalf, whilst most autistic people are locked out by financial barriers. Fees are prohibitive, sponsorships are rare, and the expectation is always that autistic people should absorb the cost of participation in a system designed to profit from us (eg. do it for the exposure). We are permitted entry only as carefully vetted guests, never as decision-makers. These spaces are not built for us; they exist to allow neurotypicals to discuss us in a way that makes them feel like they are part of the solution.
This is what academic neurodiversity has become: a relief valve for capitalists. It absorbs pressure, offering a façade of progress that allows corporations, universities, and institutions to continue their exclusion whilst claiming the moral high ground. It does not challenge the systems that exclude us—it protects them. The illusion of progress is far more useful to those in power than the reality of justice.
The Academic Industry of Neurodiversity
The academic neurodiversity movement has existed for decades, yet what has it truly changed? For all the research centres, grants, and conferences, autistic people remain largely shut out of stable employment, healthcare, and community life. Instead of challenging the systems that exclude us, academic neurodiversity has become an industry—one that profits from discussing us while doing little to alter our material conditions. It has not dismantled barriers; it has merely refined the language used to justify them.
The beneficiaries of this system are clear. Universities receive millions in funding—programs like the Autism CARES Act have poured money into research institutions, yet where has it gone? Who has truly benefitted? The salaries of directors running these programs dwarf the income of the average autistic adult, many of whom live in poverty or rely on disability benefits to survive. The bulk of this funding has not been used to materially improve autistic lives but to sustain academic careers built on studying us from a safe, clinical distance.
Corporations, too, have found a way to profit from neurodiversity rhetoric without meaningfully changing their hiring or retention practices. “Autism hiring initiatives” sound progressive, but they still prioritise palatable, high-masking autistic workers (usually cis-hetero white males with a diagnosis) whilst excluding those who do not fit corporate culture. These schemes rarely address long-term career development—how many of these employees are promoted? How many autistic people occupy C-suite positions? Inclusion, in corporate terms, means allowing us in the door as long as we remain low-level workers, unthreatening to the structures above us.
And then there are the DEI consultants, the ‘autism coaches,’ the self-appointed experts who peddle compliance as empowerment. They teach corporations how to extract labour from autistic workers without accommodating them, reframing survival strategies like masking as “success.” The entire industry operates as though the problem lies with autistic people failing to conform, rather than with the capitalist structures that demand conformity in the first place. Reading their pitches on LinkedIn feels like watching Thank You for Smoking, except these hucksters aren’t in on the satire.
Academic neurodiversity does not seek to dismantle capitalism’s exclusion—it simply finds ways to make some autistic people useful to it. The conversation is not about ensuring all autistic people have access to secure, livable conditions. It is about ensuring a select few can be integrated into a system that remains fundamentally hostile to the rest of us. The goal is not justice. It is management.
The Historical Distortions of Neurodiversity
The academic framing of neurodiversity is not just ineffective—it is often historically inaccurate, reinforcing a Western, pathology-driven narrative that distorts the origins of autism research. Nowhere is this clearer than in the continued erasure of Dr. Grunya Sukhareva, the Jewish-Russian doctor who described autism nearly two decades before Leo Kanner. Instead of centring her work, the dominant narrative still positions Kanner as the “father of autism,” erasing not only the actual historical timeline but also the vastly different ideological contexts in which autism was first studied.
Kanner and his Nazi-era contemporaries approached autism through a eugenicist lens, viewing autistic people in terms of productive vs. non-productive. In Nazi race science, the “productive” autistic—compliant, useful, capable of contributing to the state—was allowed to live, whilst the “unproductive” autistic—those who could not or would not conform—was seen as a burden to be eliminated. This was not abstract theory. It was practice. Eugenic programs, including those Kanner was adjacent to, actively sought to classify and exterminate disabled people under the justification that it was “humane”—the same logic used to justify putting down a sick animal. This ideology was deeply entrenched in Western medical thought and continues to influence how autism is framed today.
Sukhareva’s work, by contrast, was driven by entirely different priorities. Studying both boys and girls, she documented autism not as a disorder to be eradicated but as a neurological variation that needed support and integration into Soviet society. The Soviet Union, having suffered catastrophic losses from war and revolution, could not afford to discard its neurodivergent population. Unlike Hans Asperger, who participated in Nazi programs that sent disabled children to their deaths, Sukhareva was focused on how best to educate and include them. But her work, written and published first in German (as the academic world in Europe did at the time) and then in Russian, was ignored in the West, allowing Kanner’s revisionist history to take hold.
And why? Because the truth is inconvenient. Western academia prefers a white, male, Eurocentric narrative—one where a benevolent doctor, crossing the Atlantic, “discovers” autism and saves the day. We cannot have a history that begins with a Jewish woman (gasp!) in the Soviet Union (double gasp!) being first (fainting ensues!). Instead, we get a neatly packaged fable that props up Western medical authority whilst burying the real origins of autistic research. The consequences of this distortion are not trivial—they shape how autism is understood, diagnosed, and treated to this day.
Academic neurodiversity does not just fail to improve autistic lives; it actively reinforces the propaganda and gaslighting that has allowed capitalist, eugenicist, and exclusionary frameworks to dominate autism discourse. If we cannot even tell the truth about where autism research began, how can we trust these institutions to tell the truth about autistic lives now?
The Fundamental Flaw: The System Cannot Be Reformed
The fundamental flaw in academic neurodiversity is the belief that the system can be reformed—that if we just present the right argument, neurotypicals will finally understand, finally make space for us. Frameworks like the Theory of Relativistic Neurodivergence (TRN) rest on the assumption that the problem is misalignment, not deliberate exclusion. Many academics assume that neurotypicals want to include us but just don’t know how, that if we construct the right theory, they will see reason. This is a fantasy.
The neuro-majority has had decades of data on what autistic people need, and they have consistently chosen exclusion. The goal has never been integration—it has always been about extracting value from those of us who can be exploited and erasing the rest. The acceptable autistic is the one who can function within the constraints of capitalism, the one who can work without “too many” accommodations, the one who can be paraded as proof that the system is inclusive. The others—those who burn out, those who cannot work, those who resist compliance—are left to poverty, institutionalisation, or, in far too many cases, death.
Capitalism cannot be made neurodivergent-friendly because its very structure depends on exclusion, hierarchy, and productivity metrics that inherently devalue us. It is built to reward those who conform and discard those who don’t. There is no reforming a system that was never meant for us. No amount of advocacy, theory, or awareness campaigns will change the fact that capitalism sees us as either labour to be extracted or surplus to be disposed of. The hard truth is that autistic survival is incompatible with the structures that rule the world, and until those structures are dismantled, the vast majority of us will remain locked out, struggling against a system that was designed to ensure we do not thrive.
What Needs to Happen Instead?
What is to be done? Not reform, not incremental change, not another decade of polite requests for inclusion that will never come. The structures that exclude us—capitalism, ableism, the medical-industrial complex—must be dismantled, not “improved.” We do not need more awareness campaigns, corporate hiring initiatives, or academic think pieces that do nothing to alter the brutal reality of autistic survival. We need an autistic revolution.
Reform assumes that the system is broken, that with enough adjustments, it could be made to work for us. But the system is not broken. It functions exactly as designed—to exploit those who can be useful to capital and discard those who cannot. There is no seat at the table for us because the table itself was built on exclusion. The only path forward is to reject the institutions that profit from our oppression and build something entirely outside of them. That begins with autistic-led spaces and mutual aid—structures created by and for autistic people, prioritising collective care over capitalist productivity. Survival should not depend on whether we can fit into the oppressive systems of the neuro-majority. It should depend on community, solidarity, and a refusal to abandon those of us who are deemed unproductive by capitalist standards.
This also requires rejecting the gaze of the neuro-majority—the constant need for validation from those who will never see us, or see us as equals. Academic neurodiversity has wasted decades trying to persuade the neuro-majority to “understand” us, believing that if we explain ourselves well enough, we will be welcomed. But the neuro-majority do not misunderstand us; they understand us just fine—and they have made the conscious choice to exclude, exploit, or erase us. It is time to stop pleading for recognition from those who refuse to see us and instead turn our energy toward collective autistic resistance.
That resistance begins with historical truth-telling—a commitment to unearthing and challenging the propaganda that has distorted the narrative of autism for decades. Autism research, as shaped by the Global North, is deeply rooted in eugenics and capitalist productivity metrics, framing autistic people through the lens of their perceived utility rather than their humanity. This narrative erases figures like Dr. Grunya Sukhareva, whose pioneering work predated Kanner and Asperger by nearly two decades, replacing her with a whitewashed, male-dominated version of history that centres figures complicit in eugenicist ideologies. By continuing to elevate Kanner and Asperger, the academic world sanitises a violent legacy, presenting autism as something to be “managed” rather than understood, “treated” rather than liberated.
Academic neurodiversity has further softened these truths, repackaging autism into a palatable narrative that the neuro-majority feels comfortable engaging with. This sanitised version of history ignores the material violence autistic people endure—violence that is not abstract but painfully real, from the systemic exclusion we face in workplaces and schools to the poverty, neglect, and institutionalisation that so many of us experience. Truth-telling demands we confront these omissions, not to seek neurotypical approval but to reclaim the narrative for ourselves, by ourselves.
This is the work I have committed to with this Substack, the AutSide, where I strive to unpick these historical distortions and centre autistic lived experience in its raw, unvarnished truth. It is also the foundation of my books: No Place for Autism?, Holistic Language Instruction, and my upcoming Decolonising Language Education. Through these works, I aim to disrupt the narratives that have excluded us and highlight the systemic forces—colonialism, capitalism, and ableism—that perpetuate these exclusions.
Historical truth-telling is not just about setting the record straight—it is about reclaiming agency over our own stories. It is about rejecting the frameworks imposed on us by those who would use autism as a tool to uphold systems of exploitation. It is about building a collective memory, one rooted in the diversity and resilience of autistic lives, not in the sanitized and exclusionary myths crafted by neuro-majority institutions. For too long, the stories of autism have been shaped by those who do not share our experiences. It is time we take those stories back and demand they reflect the realities of who we are, where we have been, and what we fight for.
We do not need permission to exist. We do not need the majority to validate our experiences or include us on their terms. We need radical change—change that does not come from within the institutions that oppress us, but from outside them, against them, beyond them. The future is not waiting to be handed to us. We will have to take it for ourselves.
Final thoughts …
The divide between academic neurodiversity and autistic lived experience is not incidental—it is a carefully maintained structure that serves the neuro-majority. Academic neurodiversity is not for us; it is a pressure-relief valve, designed to soothe the neuro-majority whilst ensuring that the systems of exclusion remain intact. Worse still, it extracts profit from our struggles, pain, and survival, commodifying our existence into research grants, fake DEI initiatives, and corporate programmes that enrich capitalist institutions whilst leaving autistic people to suffer.
This gap is not bridged by theory. The continued prominence of institutions like Cambridge’s Autism Research Centre under Simon Baron-Cohen and the network of university research centres across the US is testament to this. These entities thrive not by improving autistic lives, but by studying us, pathologising us, and building careers off our exclusion. The Autism CARES Act codifies this dynamic, directing vast sums of money into research that has done little to address the material conditions of autistic adult survival. Decades of academic discourse have failed to alleviate autistic poverty, homelessness, and marginalisation, proving that theory alone will not save us.
What is to be done? Inclusion within the system is not the answer. The system itself—capitalism, ableism, the medical-industrial complex—was built to exclude us. It cannot be reformed to accommodate us because its very existence depends on our exclusion. The battle is not to secure a seat at the table; it is to dismantle the table entirely and build something new, something that prioritises the collective liberation of all autistic people over the profits of the few.
This is not a task that can be left to the institutions that have already betrayed us. Their interests lie in perpetuating the very systems that oppress us. Instead, the fight must come from outside and against these systems, led by autistic people who understand that survival is not enough—we must demand the right to thrive. As Lenin wrote, “Without revolutionary theory, there can be no revolutionary movement.” But theory alone is insufficient; it must be accompanied by collective action, solidarity, and a refusal to compromise with systems that dehumanise us.
We do not need the neuro-majority to save us. We need to save ourselves by fighting for a world where autistic lives are no longer contingent on productivity, conformity, or survival in hostile systems. This is not just a struggle for inclusion. It is a struggle for liberation—a world beyond exclusion, where autistic people live freely, without the constraints of systems that were never meant for us.