I’ll try to keep this brief; if anyone wants the long version, I would point them to this highly intelligent and well-informed panel discussion and the very detailed statement put out by Boycott Spectrum 10k. Eugenics While it is now well-understood that autism is genetically complex, this does not altogether…

Dr. Dinah Murray (1946–2021) — If you knew my mum, I don’t have to tell you that she was kind, passionate and sometimes fierce: she was appalled by injustice and unfairness, and she was outspoken in challenging it. …

Originally a talk to the Waldorf Handwork Educators Teacher Conference on the 15th of July, 2021. Watch a video here. Hopefully this is of some interest to anyone interested in autism and learning, not just teachers of fibre-craft… I want to talk today about different experiences of education, of making…

If anything is a disability, autism is. But is anything a disability? The social model of disability sees disability as arising from the interaction between a person and their environment. …

The first ever Weird Pride Day was on the 4th of March, 2021, and the second was on the 4th of March, 2022. This is a day for people to embrace their weirdness, and reject the stigma associated being weird. …

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 is now online. Many of us — autistic people, and those who are neurodivergent or just ‘weird’…

The mathematics of pandemics — 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…

Queer pride in light of weirdmisia — 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…

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…