An autistic science teacher considers what genuinely inclusive education might look like. This was originally a talk at Autscape in 2020, the conference for and by autistic people. The video of this talk should be online soon.

Many of us — autistic people, and those who are neurodivergent or just ‘weird’ in other ways — have difficult memories of our school days. …

Exponential growth is a simple idea, with far-reaching consequences, and it’s something that everyone really ought to understand.

When something grows in proportion to how big it is already, it grows exponentially. So if it’s twice as big, that means it’ll grow twice as fast. It follows from this that it will regularly double in size. That doesn’t necessarily mean it will grow quickly — it might take 100 years to double in size! …

Listen to this piece on SoundCloud or watch me reading it on YouTube.

There are a lot of reasons why I like the word ‘queer’, and a lot of reasons why some people don’t. One reason for both is that in a literal sense, ‘queer’ just means ‘weird’. Not everyone who isn’t straight and cisgender is weird in any other sense — but, well, many of us are. Recognising that is key to dealing with much of the abuse that queer people get. …

This essay appears as Chapter 10 in The Neurodiversity Reader. A reading of it is on SoundCloud, and on YouTube with visuals of water.

Ecosystems are richer when they are diverse: biodiversity makes for a more resilient system, with more ability to deal with shocks and to fill niches. Diversity is good for groups of humans, too, from the level of committees up to societies. It helps us make better decisions. We thrive on cross-pollination, learning from people with different perspectives who bring new ways of doing things and thinking about problems. Diversity is also just an unavoidable feature of…

I’ve written before about autism as a disability: how important it is to recognise that it qualifies as one, however positive we want to be about neurodiversity, and how even the best things about it can be disabling. I think it’s fair to say that in the context of a society that’s not built for us, most autistic people are disabled at least to some degree. So are most other people who are diagnosably neurodivergent: the neurodiversity movement is largely a movement of disabled people, and it has much to learn from the wider disability rights movement. Even so, for…

Being poor really takes a toll on people. There’s the malnutrition, of course; and the fact that cheap stuff costs more in the long run; and the reduced access to education. On top of all that, there’s the toll it takes on mental resources. The cognitive load associated with scrabbling to make ends meet is colossal: people have to spend much of their time putting mental energy into ensuring they (and those they care for) have the basic essentials of survival. The more you have to worry about, the less headspace you have left over for actively making things better.

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I don’t have the energy to be angry all the time. I don’t have the time. There are things I want to be getting on with. We should be building — building new systems for support, exchange and control, building working replacements for the stupid old broken mechanisms of power and accountability. We shouldn’t have to be pouring all our energy into opposing things; there shouldn’t be so much to be angry about.

But there is so much to be angry about. We are stuck with people at the top who don’t understand the problems, or who actively benefit from…

I believe that the best way to understand autistic minds is in terms of a thinking style which tends to concentrate resources in a few interests and concerns at any time, rather than distributing them widely. This style of processing, monotropism, explains many features of autistic experience that may initially seem puzzling, and shows how they are connected. I want to give you six starting points for making sense of autism.

I’m writing in the first person here, as a late-identified autistic adult who has worked and talked with many other autistic people in various contexts over many years. I…