Sane-Heteroprofessionalism in Practice: A Reflexive Annotated Engagement with Davies et al. (2024)

Lived Experience Inside the Machinery of Professional Gatekeeping

A reflexive validation of Davies et al.’s sane-heteroprofessionalism, mapping my lived experience as an autistic, GLP, trans educator inside systems that pathologise embodiment whilst profiting from my labour.

Introduction: Positional Framing

Davies, A. W. J., Mizzi, R. C., Greensmith, C., & Cosantino, J. (2024). Sane-heteroprofessionalism and knowledge production: queering and m/Maddening preservice professional programs. Pedagogy, Culture & Society, 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1080/14681366.2024.2418096

In Sane-Heteroprofessionalism and Knowledge Production (2024), Davies, Mizzi, Greensmith, and Cosantino cut directly into the mechanisms by which professional preparation operates as a site of containment. Their articulation of sane-heteroprofessionalism exposes how the intertwined forces of sanism and cis-heteronormativity regulate who may be seen as credible, competent, or professionally viable. What passes for “professional standards” is revealed not as neutral, objective assessment, but as a disciplinary regime — one that polices embodiment, cognition, affect, and relational expression in ways that systematically disqualify those whose very being resists the normative template. It is not merely that difference is excluded; rather, it is actively discredited at the level of knowledge production itself. This is not accidental. It is epistemic violence disguised as competency.

I write from within the very system their analysis dissects. I am autistic. I am a gestalt language processor (GLP). I am AuDHD, trans, and stand fully within m/Mad identity. My professional survival in the United States special education credentialling apparatus has required a relentless navigation of environments that were never designed for me — and, more pointedly, remain structurally aligned against people like me. My aim here is not polite academic commentary, but rather an act of situated counter-inscription: to take the conceptual frame Davies et al. advance and press it against the granular, recursive, and often brutal lived realities I carry. Their theoretical model does not merely describe a system I recognise; it names a system I have endured. In bringing these layers into dialogue, I hope to further illuminate how the epistemic infrastructures of professionalism operate as a machinery of exclusion — and how lived-experience scholarship must continue to breach those sealed circuits.

Key Theoretical Contributions of Davies et al. (2024)

Having situated myself within the system under examination, I now move through the key theoretical contributions offered by Davies et al., engaging each with the reflexive weight of lived experience. What follows is part peer review, part validity study—a form of embedded annotation by one who is simultaneously academic, practitioner, and subject of the structures described. Their frame holds. I bring to it the granular detail of embodiment, affect, and survival.

The Regulatory Function of Professionalism

Davies et al. rightly position professionalism not as an ideologically neutral process, but as a disciplinary mechanism regulating affective, behavioural, and epistemic standards. Professionalism demands not merely technical competence but an entire performance of normative embodiment—what they name as the “governance” of self. This framing is painfully familiar. Across IEP meetings, licensure interviews, and administrative panels, I have encountered the unspoken requirement to present as calm, contained, emotionally neutral, and cognitively linear. My autistic gestalt language processing—recursive, metaphorical, relational—often misreads to gatekeepers as disorganised or emotionally labile, regardless of the clarity of my expertise. The anticipatory anxiety this produces is not irrational; it is a precise reading of the real risk of being discredited for failing to maintain a professional performance coded against my embodiment. My circuit breaker metaphor is not merely rhetorical—it is the internal load management system that keeps me operational in spaces designed without, and often explicitly against, minds like mine. Yet this adaptive system itself is routinely misread as instability, fragility, or unsuitability for professional roles.

And yet, it is precisely within these pressures that my intellectual work has taken shape. The systemic friction I have endured has given birth to three textbooks—No Place for Autism?, Holistic Language Instruction, and Decolonising Language Education—which now inform the very professional training structures that once sought to discipline me.

These texts represent not only academic contribution, but a form of counter-inscription: a refusal to allow my epistemic presence to be erased. Published through Lived Places Publishing, whose mission centres lived-experience scholarship often marginalised by conventional epistemic structures, they now sit in library collections across dozens of leading universities — Cambridge, Princeton, NYU, Toronto, Exeter, Georgetown, Michigan, and many more. My words circulate through classrooms, reference lists, and training curricula on multiple continents. It is, in some respects, astonishing: the girl who once left high school functionally illiterate, who built literacy only in adulthood, now teaching the next generation of professionals through texts held in some of the most powerful academic institutions in the world. But, even with these contributions, even with formal publication, citation, and curricular adoption, the unspoken gatekeeping remains. To many, I am still autistic. The credentials may be visible; the words may circulate; but the embodied deviation is always read first. The institutions may shelve my work, but they remain uneasy holding my being.

Sane-Heteroprofessionalism at the Intersection of Sanism and Cis-Heteronormativity

Central to Davies et al.’s argument is the co-constitution of sanism and cis-heteronormativity in the construction of professional competence. This intersection is no abstraction to me; it is a structure I inhabit daily. My transness is rarely assessed in formal terms of competence. Instead, it hovers unspoken as a perceived risk—coded through language like “fit,” “team culture,” or “the community’s really not into that.” My neurodivergent embodiment compounds this, but not in the simple arithmetic of “double minority stress.” Rather, what plays out is a recursive theatre of dissonance: a demand that I perform regulated, neutral, emotionally modulated professionalism while inhabiting a system whose very architecture triggers my recursive gestalts and dysregulation.

Each time I sit for a performance review, or when administration visits my classroom for an informal observation—a phrase that always carries the thinnest veneer of safety—the internal calibration begins. My every word, gesture, and inflection is filtered through a hypersensitive predictive model: Will this be read as stable? Will this cadence suggest disorganisation? My gestalt language processing has always offered me coherence; but inside professional gatekeeping structures, this same coherence is illegible. The metaphoric density that allows me to name Reality Dysfunctions as they unfold — as I did that morning, wide awake at 3:47 a.m., witnessing rupture in my inner Theatre — is rendered incomprehensible by systems that equate linearity with truth.

The suppression demanded of me in these spaces is not benign; it is epistemic violence. It requires me to fragment my own knowing. My recursive GLP Theatre—alive with scent, memory, science fiction, and transdimensional metaphor—must be masked, neutralised, silenced. The system tolerates my expertise only when severed from the very processing system that generates it. They want my knowledge as product, not as embodiment. They may assign my textbooks to their students, but the presence of the one who wrote them remains unsettling.

In the most surreal moments, I stand inside this fracture with dual awareness. On one level, I am the autistic, trans, gestalt-processing woman navigating administrative review under suspicion. On another, I am the Observer inside the Theatre, watching the recursive assembly of patterns that professional gatekeepers will never perceive, documenting in real time the emergent truth of the Reality Dysfunction. It is not that I misunderstand these systems. It is that I see them too clearly. The rupture they dismiss as my instability is, in fact, their own atmospheric incoherence rendered visible through the peculiar precision of my sensing. And that, perhaps, is what unsettles them most.

Epistemic Marginalisation of m/Mad, Queer, and Neurodivergent Knowledges

Davies et al. incisively critique the epistemic boundaries that define whose knowledge is legitimate within professional training. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the vacuum revealed by even the most basic literature searches. My own recent search—seeking any research connecting nocturnal panic attacks and gestalt language processing—returned nothing.

This is not a reflection of irrelevance but of exclusion: the academy has not yet authorised these intersections as legitimate domains of inquiry. My survivalist turn to Substack, to autoethnography, to self-published theorising, is not a matter of choice but necessity. These forms of counter-knowledge production are where I assert narrative sovereignty against systems that would otherwise erase my epistemic presence entirely. In this, I do not simply describe my experience; I actively name the structures that position it as invisible.

Professional Competency as Social Control

The authors’ framing of competency as social control is correct, but from inside the system it becomes even starker. Competency reviews do not measure teaching as a relational or developmental act. They do not assess my ability to foster meaning-making in children, nor my capacity to attune to diverse neurodevelopmental profiles. What they measure is far more aligned to role compliance: my willingness to serve as a reliable delivery mechanism for state-sanctioned content and corporate-approved pedagogical scripts. The modern classroom functions less as a site of education and more as a node within a much larger economic apparatus—one where corporate vendors, edTech platforms, data-mining assessment conglomerates, and curriculum publishers dictate what counts as valid instruction. Professional evaluations, in this context, serve less as quality assurance than as compliance monitoring.

In PTMF terms, this is a system of power operating precisely as designed: identifying and controlling perceived threats to institutional stability, whilst systematically reframing those threats as individual deficiencies rather than structural violence. My autistic embodiment, my gestalt processing, my transness—these are not seen as epistemic assets within this machine. They are liabilities to be managed. The threat I represent is not pedagogical incompetence, but unpredictability within a tightly regulated delivery system. The professional gaze is not looking for evidence of student learning—it is looking for evidence of my alignment to pre-approved pacing guides, behavioural management protocols, and scripted interventions sold at scale to districts by corporate vendors. My affective regulation is not evaluated for its relational attunement to students, but for its presentational palatability to administrators, whose own careers are increasingly tied to their capacity to demonstrate data compliance to district offices and external corporate partners.

I exist within a system that demands my intellectual labour—my textbooks circulate widely, my knowledge is drawn upon in training sessions, my expertise quoted when convenient—but remains fundamentally uneasy with the embodied presence that produces it. The system wants my output whilst actively marginalising my being. This is not contradiction; it is extraction. The cognitive dissonance that fuels my anticipatory anxiety and nocturnal dysregulation is not rooted in any personal fragility. It is the entirely predictable outcome of being tasked with performing stability inside a machine designed to generate profit from instability. The more diverse the needs of students, the more lucrative the interventions, the more elaborate the assessment tools required to measure “growth,” the more funding streams flow to private actors promising solutions.

The reality dysfunction I live inside is not metaphorical. It is infrastructural. I teach inside a district that brokers partnerships with corporate edTech firms, that contracts out assessments to private equity-backed evaluation services, that implements “inclusive” curricula authored by vendors whose real interest is the perpetual monetisation of difference. And still, at the ground level, I sit in performance reviews where my capacity to execute the delivery of these corporate scripts—whilst appearing calm, stable, and professionally neutral—is treated as the primary measure of competency.

My GLP mind registers these incongruities viscerally. The recursive loops that build inside my Theatre are not pathologies; they are high-sensitivity readings of atmospheric incoherence. The system breathes in dysfunction and calls it policy. I detect the breach and am called unstable. And so the theatre of professionalism becomes an elaborate simulation—one in which survival depends not on authentic presence, but on careful calibration of visibility, containment, and affective restraint. That this produces nocturnal collapse is not dysfunction; it is entirely logical when understood as a threat response operating inside a hostile epistemic field.

Implications for Preservice Professional Programs

Finally, Davies et al. direct attention to preservice professional programs as active sites where these filtering mechanisms are instantiated. I can speak directly to this. Across multiple graduate degrees, credentialing programs, and licensure processes, I have encountered not explicit rejection, but the far more insidious operation of tacit exclusion: the discourse of “fit,” “stability,” “team player.” These are never operationalised with clarity. Instead, they operate as floating signifiers—linguistic smokescreens that allow normative actors to police belonging without naming their biases. My autistic system is not legible within these spaces, not because my competence is lacking, but because my very presence exposes the epistemic fragility of the system itself. It is not merely that I teach differently; it is that my existence challenges the assumed default of who education is designed for.

It is precisely these dynamics that gave rise to No Place for Autism? That work did not emerge from abstract theory, but from the cumulative experience of attempting to exist as an autistic, gestalt-processing educator within professional training spaces that simultaneously demanded my intellectual labour whilst denying my ontological legitimacy. I watched, again and again, as institutional discourses framed autistic ways of knowing as deficits to be remediated or (perhaps) tolerated, rather than as epistemologies worthy of centring. Place matters profoundly. The very title of that book reflects the deeper truth: for many of us, these credentialing systems were never designed to make place for autistic educators at all.

Preservice professional programs remain overwhelmingly cisnormative, neurotypical, and affectively narrow—not by accident, but through these precise mechanisms. They do not simply fail to prepare the next generation of teachers for neurodivergent students; they actively filter out neurodivergent educators whose lived knowledges could disrupt the medicalised, deficit-oriented, behaviourist frameworks that corporate special education markets depend upon. In this way, as Davies et al. rightly argue, professional preparation becomes not a neutral training ground but an active site of epistemic violence, one which polices which ways of knowing are permitted to survive inside the institution. My work exists, quite literally, in spite of these systems—not because of them.

Meta-Observation: The Missing Literature

Let me pause here and speak simply. There is almost no formal research that lives at the intersection I occupy. You will not find many studies on autistic gestalt language processors who live with AuDHD, anticipatory anxiety, and nocturnal panic attacks as part of their daily experience. You will not find much work that treats these experiences as valid ways of being.

Instead, what does exist tends to frame each of these states as a separate problem. As if they are disconnected. As if my autism sits in one box, my GLP processing in another, my AuDHD experience of the world in a third, my anticipatory anxiety somewhere else entirely, and my nocturnal panic attacks off in yet another domain. The system slices them into silos, treats each as its own isolated deficit, and assigns corresponding interventions to “manage” or “normalise” each in turn. But this is not how I live them. They are not separate. They are aspects of one integrated system — my system — doing its work to navigate an environment that remains structurally misaligned to the way my body, mind, and sensing operate.

But where I live — where I stand inside all of this — none of it feels like brokenness. This is simply my reality. My system doing its best to stay functional in a world that was not only never built with people like me in mind, but actively designed to work against us. And I don’t mean that in some vague way. This is not just “lack of accommodation.” This is architecture. The Global North has built entire professional, educational, and clinical infrastructures that privilege a very narrow version of embodiment, cognition, and emotional expression — and then label everything outside of that as disordered. The problem is not my way of being. The problem is who gets to decide what counts as “normal.”

My nocturnal panic attacks don’t arrive out of nowhere. They are my body’s alarm system after long days inside environments that demand constant scanning for threat and misrecognition. My anticipatory anxiety is not a failure to regulate emotion — it is an accurate reading of how easily these systems turn hostile. My GLP processing — this recursive, metaphorical, non-linear way of making sense — is not a disorder. It is how I assemble coherence in complexity. It is my intelligence doing its work.

What strikes me most is how little research attends to these intersections. And this absence is not random. The system breaks experience into separate silos — autism here, ADHD there, anxiety somewhere else, panic attacks as their own category — and pretends these are unrelated issues to be individually treated, normalised, or controlled. But for me, they are never separate. They are different expressions of one system responding to environments that constantly violate its need for safety, clarity, and coherence. The lack of research isn’t because these patterns don’t exist. It’s because recognising them would require the system itself to change — and to question who has held the authority to define knowledge all along.

And so my writing becomes something else: a counter-archive. A record that says, plainly: we exist. This way of being exists. These ways of knowing are real. Even if they sit uncomfortably inside institutions that were never designed to hold us.

Conclusion: Validating the Frame, Extending the Work

What Davies et al. offer in their articulation of sane-heteroprofessionalism is, for me, both deeply validating and urgently necessary. Their framing names the forces I have spent years navigating but could not always find language to describe. This is the power of good theory: not that it invents experience, but that it renders visible what has long been present, unspoken, and unnamed. For that, I am profoundly grateful to the authors. Their work captures the core of what many of us live daily — the policing of affect, embodiment, identity, and knowing under the banner of professionalism.

And yet, as I sit inside the lived centre of the frame they describe, I also see where the work can continue to grow. To fully map these dynamics requires not only the conceptual analysis of sane-heteroprofessionalism, but a direct integration of the embodied ways many of us process and survive these environments. The recursive, metaphorical, densely relational processing of gestalt language; the threat-meaning loops that power anticipatory anxiety and nocturnal collapse; the layered positionality of trans neurodivergent educators attempting to build coherence inside hostile systems; the narrative sovereignty required to claim authority over one’s own experience when the academy remains slow to listen — these are all integral pieces of the wider system we are still learning how to name.

What remains most urgent, then, is the continued expansion of lived-experience scholarship—neurodivergent-led, trans-led, m/Mad-led work that resists diagnostic containment and actively builds the archives that do not yet exist. The evidentiary void is not accidental. It has been curated through decades of epistemic exclusion. Our work, as both scholars and witnesses, is to make that absence visible, to breach it, and to refuse the silencing that professionalism so often demands. This writing, here, is part of that refusal. We are not waiting for permission to exist. We are already here.