This is not about identity policing.
It is about epistemic authority.
Neurodiversity is not a neutral topic area or a branding category. It is a social justice movement and an epistemic intervention that emerged from autistic community spaces as a response to dehumanizing, medicalized, and eugenic logics of normality. To claim authority over “neurodiversity research” without engaging autistic-authored scholarship, without reflexive attention to positionality, and without accountability to neurodivergent communities is not neutral—it recenters dominant frameworks while wearing emancipatory language.
When institutions position non-autistic, non–neurodiversity scholars as authoritative leaders in this space, the result is not inclusion but extraction: the language of a liberation movement is taken up while its politics, histories, and risks are set aside.
Epistemic Authority
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