In October, I will be presenting this at a neurodiversity themed teacher conference for the school division that employs me. I would love some feedback in advance:
Today, I am going to look at school through the eyes of neurodivergent students. However, just as importantly, I will be viewing it through the eyes of neurodivergent teachers. I will explore how traditional school environments can accidentally make these people feel unsafe or misunderstood, and how we can change that.
As part of this journey, I will look at the power of the neurodivergent community online. By listening to neurodivergent online creators, we can learn what it truly feels like to navigate our school systems. Next, I will dive into a friendly but honest critique of everyday school frameworks—like PBIS and compliance tracking—to see where they might be missing the mark. My goal is simple: to help you build a classroom where every single student feels safe, dignified, and free to be themselves.
Neurodivergent teachers are the ultimate leaders for neuroaffirming practices in schools. They possess vital lived experience that cannot be taught. Traditionally, society equates expertise with credentials and institutional degrees. When addressing neurodivergence, this credentialing often spreads harmful, deficit-based discourses as objective truths. These models use clinical checklists to measure a child’s deviation from an artificial “normal”. By flipping this power hierarchy, neurodivergent educators shift the focus from correcting a student’s internal flaws to dismantling the external, disabling barriers within the school environment.
Non-Autistic voices predominate in research, medicine, and policy, setting the default standard for what counts as credible expertise. This dominance narrows Autistic agency. Against this backdrop, Autistic online writing is more than personal storytelling; it is a vital political text. These digital spaces form Autistic lived-experience collectives, where creators author their own meanings. They dismantle the deficit-based lenses used to speak over them.
Vocabulary is fundamentally political because the words we choose shape who is granted authority. Drawing on Nick Walker’s definitions, a neurotypical individual fits dominant social standards of normalcy. Neurodivergence means processing the world differently. Autism is merely one form of divergence. When a group shares an inborn neurotype that society views through a deficit lens, they form a neurominority. These labels too often dictate whose voice is taken seriously.
How we frame disability determines how we treat Autistic and neurodivergent individuals. The medical model views disability as an internal tragedy, aiming to remediate the person toward an artificial norm. Conversely, disability scholar Mike Oliver’s social model shows that disability is co-created by environmental barriers and cultures that treat difference as a problem. Rehumanization requires resisting deficit checklists and focusing on rights, accessibility, and systemic transformation.
Ableism is vast; it is a structural value system rather than an individual bad attitude. Drawing on Fiona Kumari Campbell, ableism establishes an invisible standard of wholeness, rendering anyone who falls short less valuable. We must separate this from disablism, which involves direct negative treatment, such as exclusion or mockery. Institutions and language work together to enforce ableism, dictating which ways of being are acceptable.
As scholar Subini Annamma argues, “normal” functions as a moral category rather than a neutral description. Once normalcy becomes the ultimate goal, our diagnostic and evaluative systems treat divergence as deviance. The question shifts from human needs to deficit tracking. Autistic individuals face immense pressure to orient toward this norm simply to remain safe and access basic human opportunities. Normalcy operates as a systemic demand.
Othering occurs through daily language that places Autistic people outside the boundaries of the human. In blog texts, authors highlight recurring metaphors, labelling them as aliens, robots, animals, changelings, monsters, or burdens. These are not harmless figures of speech. They normalize stigma and justify controlling practices in education and medicine. This pairs with what Botha calls epistemological violence—where professionals dismiss Autistic testimony as the product of anxiety or irrationality.
The systemic devaluation Autistic people face did not appear out of nowhere; it has deep roots in medical history. Leo Kanner’s early work was strictly deficit-focused, interpreting self-protective sensory boundaries as a lack of affection. More severely, Hans Asperger’s legacy in Nazi-era Austria involved sorting children by utility. These historical practices prove that diagnostic classification has never been neutral—it has repeatedly decided which lives are worth supporting.
As blogger Kitin Miranda explains, misinterpreting an Autistic meltdown is a direct denial of agency. A tantrum is goal-directed and relies on an audience. A meltdown is entirely different; it is an involuntary physiological response to an overwhelmed nervous system and cannot be stopped on command. When adults mislabel meltdowns as tantrums, they make a moral judgment, transforming a cry for sensory safety into intentional wrongdoing to justify control.
Ira Kraemer highlights how Autistic reactions—especially in those raised as girls—are dismissed via gendered slurs like “drama queen” or “spoiled brat”. Furthermore, Dawn-Joy Leong notes that when an Autistic child features uneven skills, adults interpret struggles as a wilful lack of compliance. These moralizing interpretations replace curiosity with judgment. Instead of adapting the environment, systems default to punishment, trapping the student in an unresolvable double bind.
As Dawn-Joy Leong details, when children are told their discomfort is exaggerated or unacceptable, they learn to doubt their own senses. Ira Kraemer notes that this is heavily gendered, using tropes like “drama queen” to twist sensory overload into a character flaw. This is where agency removal turns inward. It trains the person to silence their own neurological survival signals just to survive their surroundings.
In my thesis, masking is positioned not as a quirky social tool, but as an intense survival strategy. Solidad Decosta defines it as “passing as allistic… out of necessity”. For many bloggers, masking is the thin line between safety and harassment at school, home, or work. It thrives because our cultures treat being openly Autistic as a problem that must be corrected.
To understand masking concretely, we must look at Solidad Decosta’s structural breakdown. Camouflaging is a broad environmental blending. Passing is a highly specific effort to mimic neurotypicality. As Aria Sky brilliantly reframes it, passing is actually the accommodation Autistic people are forced to make for allistic people. The entire burden of adjustment is pushed onto the minority neurotype.
Masking operates through specific mechanisms like scripting and mimicry. Decosta notes that scripting relies on memorized interactions to navigate conversations safely. Mimicry is performing a rehearsed character. But there is a trap to this success: when the performance is polished, outsiders assume you are fine. They stop listening, and any future requests for accommodation are doubted or denied.
Masking is not a free option; its ultimate cost is Autistic burnout. Dora Raymaker defines this as a long-term state of complete physical and mental exhaustion. It is a structural problem, not a personal failure. Bloggers document practical signs: executive functioning falling apart, losing speech, and memory issues. This proves that functioning labels are an illusion—capacity shifts completely under stress.
Critics often minimize masking by saying “everyone masks sometimes”. While true that adapting to context is a human trait, the degree and cost for Autistic individuals are radically different. Autistic mimicry is manual, constant, and exhausting because social rules were not written for neurodivergent minds. We must use this shared human reality not to demand assimilation, but to build broader ways of co-existing.
Moving into our next major theme, we look at intersectionality—a framework emerging from Black feminist and critical race scholarship. People do not live with only one identity at a time. In my thesis, I deliberately center Autistic bloggers who hold multiply marginalized identities. Dehumanization doesn’t just add up at these intersections; it intensifies and changes shape. Single-axis narratives hide how power truly works.
For BIPOC Autistics, race and disability are intertwined. Bloggers like Decosta, Hammond, and Leong write about this as a constant layer of experience. We see this in schooling, where poor and BIPOC students are pushed into rigid special education tracks at disproportionate rates. When multiple standards of normalcy collide, the system easily dismisses or punishes a student while claiming objectivity.
Tiffany Hammond exposes the stark double standards faced by Black Autistic children. Behaviours interpreted as harmless or quirky in a white child are frequently read as threatening or defiant in a Black child. Ira Kraemer adds that these constraints tighten further for girls and people of colour. Expectations of politeness become absolute demands for compliance, leaving a dangerously small margin for error.
Tiffany Hammond notes: “I am not safe enough in this world to be as free as ‘Autistic’ would afford me”. They cannot drop the mask when they must still code-switch to survive racism. Solidad Decosta critiques campaigns like “Take the Mask Off” as being inherently white-centered. For a white person, unmasking might feel freeing; for an Autistic person of colour, dropping that shield can lead to direct, physical danger.
We now move directly into the institutional critique of behavioural intervention, specifically targeting PBIS and PBS. While these frameworks are marketed as kinder, gentler alternatives to traditional punishment, we have to look past the branding. If the system’s spine is still entirely compliance-driven, what exactly has changed? When we tell students they must perform normalcy to earn a sense of belonging, the system continues to treat human dignity as conditional.
Let’s analyze the actual architecture of the multi-tiered system. In the typical rollout, “tiers of support” frequently translate directly into escalating tiers of monitoring and behavioural control. Tier 1 dictates universal expectations; Tier 2 introduces targeted check-ins and tracking; Tier 3 applies intensive behavioural plans. Look at this through a safety lens: the more a student struggles, the more the system intensifies surveillance and evaluation. This creates an immense threat to trauma-impacted and neurodivergent nervous systems.
In many schools, PBIS manifests as a literal behaviour economy. Tickets, points, and token systems look positive on the surface, but they turn behaviour into the currency of belonging. The hidden message to the child is that safety, inclusion, and adult approval are contingent on suppressing distress signals. Furthermore, when these tracking systems are public, they create a classroom caste system where “good kids” are celebrated, and “hard kids” are publicly exposed and shamed.
The operant engine relies on a highly reductive premise: increase what adults want through rewards and decrease what they don’t want by removing privileges. But a reward system cannot make a child do something for which they lack the immediate self-regulation or neurocognitive skills. It treats a stress response as a motivation problem. Repeatedly running these token economies teaches a devastating identity lesson to vulnerable children: “I am my behaviour, and I am fundamentally bad when I fail”.
What schools code as “respectful,” “appropriate,” or “safe” behaviour in their PBIS matrices is never culturally neutral. These matrices inherently encode neurotypical communication styles and white middle-class compliance norms. Consequently, necessary neurodivergent regulatory behaviours—like stimming, movement, flat affect, or stress-induced shutdowns—are systematically misread as intentional defiance or misbehaviour. This biased sorting is exactly why BIPOC and disabled students are wildly overrepresented in escalating disciplinary tiers.
When a student reaches Tier 3, schools run a Functional Behaviour Assessment, or FBA. Traditional FBA logic assumes that the child is acting with conscious motivation to obtain or escape something. But as the Bowman framework warns, traditional FBAs often become fantasy stories. They try to create a neat narrative about motivation while completely ignoring the real drivers: an activated nervous system, intolerable sensory loads, skill gaps, or environmental threats. When we build plans that strictly target a behaviour for extinction through consequence manipulation, we miss the bigger picture and teach children to dangerously suppress their own bodily survival signals just to keep adults happy.
If we take the “FBA as a Fantasy” warning seriously, our very first step must change. We must stop analyzing the child’s motives and start auditing the environment. The core question becomes: “What is this environment doing to this student’s nervous system?” We have to explicitly search for systemic precautions: sensory triggers, rapid transitions, public tracking systems, and rigid adult scripts that cause relational rupture. We must replace motivation-focused stories with hypotheses centered on safety, regulation, and capacity. Traditional plans fail because extrinsic motivators cannot magically confer a neurocognitive skill a child does not currently possess. If safety is a prerequisite for learning, removing belonging as a consequence is structurally backwards.
As Aria Sky argues through analogy, everything the public “knows” about autism often comes from outsiders, while the community’s own testimony is dismissed as “too biased”. Rehumanization requires turning this hierarchy on its head. Distance is not automatic objectivity—it is a distinct limitation that must be checked through active partnership and shared authority. We must shift to participatory research, which completely alters who sets the agenda. Instead of funnelling money into “cause or cure” science that aims to eliminate an Autistic way of being, research must target what communities need: housing access, communication tools, employment accommodations, and healthcare quality.
Long-term transformation requires building our own cultural and physical infrastructure. As endever* highlights, when non-disabled people use tools like calendars or headphones, they are seen as mundane lifehacks—but when disabled people use them, they are stigmatized as “special” or optional luxuries. To fight this, the blogs show Autistic communities building shared, community-led knowledge banks. These databases capture what works for regulation, schooling, and workplace access from the inside out. The future of advocacy means moving past late-stage “consultations” where we are brought in as an afterthought. It means establishing neurodivergent community centers that hold real, organized decision-making power over the design of environments.
The central paradox of this work is what disability scholars Goodley and Runswick-Cole call the “dis/humanism” tension. On one hand, Autistic individuals must fight aggressively for protection, safety, and rights within the existing language of “the human”. On the other hand, we must critique the very category of “the human” because it was historically built by Braidotti’s “ideal citizen” to exclude anyone who is not calm, logical, and compliant. We cannot safely discard the shield of human rights while our lives are still treated as negotiable burdens. Autistic blogging resolves this by doing agency—narrating life, tracking power, and refusing imposed deficit narratives. The ultimate bottom line is clear: we must build a world where safety and dignity are unconditional rights, never a prize earned through compliance.
Now, let’s take a moment to look at this traditional system from a perspective that is far too often left out of the conversation: the perspective of our neurodivergent educators.
When a school culture refuses to build a neuroaffirming environment for its students, it sends a chilling message to its staff. We operate in a system that equates expertise strictly with institutional credentials and clinical checklists. In doing so, we reject the deeply vital, unteachable lived experience of our neurodivergent teachers.
We talk about building safe spaces, but what happens when a teacher looks around and realizes that the school’s very architecture relies on compliance tracking, deficit models, and enforced normalcy?
It creates a profoundly unsafe work environment.
The grim reality is that current structures are actively hostile to neurodivergent staff. Globally, an estimated 80% of autistic adults face unemployment or underemployment, marking the highest exclusion rate of any disability demographic. Strikingly, this barrier does not disappear with advanced qualifications. For college-educated autistic individuals pursuing high-level, socially intense professions like teaching, only 15% manage to secure full employment. Because schools value neurotypical compliance over diverse cognitive processing, the vast majority of standard educational work environments inherently fail to provide a safe, sustainable space for neurodivergent teachers.
Furthermore, we face a deeply complex cultural barrier when institutional leadership inadvertently misinterprets a teacher’s lived-experience advocacy as being at odds with their professional role, rather than recognizing it as a profound asset to our educational community.
When self-advocacy is misread as a conflict of interest, it forces these educators into a state of constant, exhausting professional masking just to survive their workday. They are forced to witness the daily, systemic devaluation of minds just like their own, knowing that any vulnerability they show will be viewed through that exact same deficit lens.
Coping with this isolation cannot remain an individual burden. While institutions slow-walk systemic reform, neurodivergent educators can find vital protection by joining together as a collective. By organizing peer-led networks, neurodivergent staff can break through the isolation of masking, share grassroots accommodation strategies, and build a unified front to advocate for collective workplace protections.
By flipping this power hierarchy—by finally treating neurodivergent lived experience as the true expertise it is—we don’t just protect our students. We dismantle the disabling external barriers that make our best educators in neurodivergence feel unsafe, misunderstood, and forced into hiding.
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