Naming the Pattern
Neurodiversity Lite – using neurodiversity as a buzzword, a way to profit from the appropriation of a human rights movement. It’s an intentional strategy to sell more stuff.
Performative Neurodiversity – the appropriation and watering down of a Human Rights Movement for profit – Therapist Neurodiversity Collective
Increasingly and alarmingly, clinical professionals and companies that are clearly operating within a highly pathologizing model of assessment and treatment – a medical model that is the anthesis of the Neurodiversity Movement, are selfishly, systematically using a human rights campaign for their own personal bonanza. They are appropriating a human rights movement, watering it down, and commercializing it to advertise or sell…
Performative Neurodiversity – the appropriation and watering down of a Human Rights Movement for profit – Therapist Neurodiversity Collective
Neurodiversity lite has created a cottage industry for therapists, clinics, and companies to sell their associated products, classes, books, and training to the public without having a clue about neurodiversity. Suddenly, everyone is ‘neurodiversity-affirming’ and caShing in. If you are spending your money on a neurodiversity product, it doesn’t necessarily mean your money is going to someone who is knowledgeable about the movement, and it doesn’t mean that their product or masterclass or handbook is going to end up helping neurodivergent people in a neurodiversity-affirming manner.
Performative Neurodiversity – the appropriation and watering down of a Human Rights Movement for profit – Therapist Neurodiversity Collective
The Lineage of the Term
“Neurodiversity-lite” was coined by Shain M. Neumeier in 2018, in their Rewire News article “‘To Siri With Love’ and the Problem With Neurodiversity Lite.” Neumeier named the pattern that has since become recognizable across the neurodiversity community — a marketable, diluted version of the neurodiversity paradigm that adopts affirming language while preserving the structures the paradigm was built to challenge.
In the seven years since, the term has been developed substantially across multiple contributors. Robert Chapman has done sustained academic work, most recently in “Neurodiversity Lite Is Still Evolving” (2025), tracking how the dilution pattern adapts inside academic spaces. Nick Walker’s foundational work on the neurodiversity paradigm provides the conceptual scaffolding the lite critique depends on. The Therapist Neurodiversity Collective, particularly Jenna Roberts, has named the same pattern as “performative neurodiversity.” Stimpunks, GROVE, and the PDA Space have developed the critique through practitioner-facing materials. Helen Edgar at Autistic Realms has recently synthesized the literature in “Beyond ‘Neurodiversity Lite’: Why Neurodiversity-Affirming Practice Matters” (2025), which is currently one of the clearest community-facing articulations of the framework.
On Lineage: Where “Neurodiversity-Lite” Comes From, and What I’m Adding – Lori Hogenkamp, Evo-Stress Blog
Model Drift, Not Language Drift
The pattern isn’t language drift. It’s model drift. The words keep arriving because the underlying conceptual shift is real and ongoing. The words keep getting absorbed because the dominant clinical model can’t actually hold them. So they get translated into something it can hold — and what survives the translation is the shell of the word, not its meaning.
The Wrong Fight – Lori Hogenkamp, Evo-Stress Blog
Borrowing vocabulary from the second model while still running the first one is what produces every flavor of “lite.”
The word arrives carrying the conceptual content of the systems model. The receiving environment is still running pathology logic. So the word gets translated into what pathology logic can hold — and the translation strips out exactly the architectural meaning the word was built to carry.
The Wrong Fight – Lori Hogenkamp, Evo-Stress Blog
Neurodiversity inside pathology logic becomes the affirming poster in the lobby with nothing changed underneath.
In the systems model, neurodiversity describes architectural variation — distinct regulatory configurations across human nervous systems, none of them deviations from a baseline. Pull it inside the pathology logic, and it becomes a vocabulary refresh for the same categorical structure underneath. Affirming language, strengths-based framing, identity celebration — with no change to assessment, accommodation, environmental design, or who holds decision-making power. The same baseline-and-deviation model running underneath, just described more gently.
In each case, the word isn’t the problem. The model trying to hold it is.
The Wrong Fight – Lori Hogenkamp, Evo-Stress Blog
Terminological Inclusion vs Architectural Inclusion
Terminological inclusion is what happens when a system updates its vocabulary to signal that it values, welcomes, or accommodates a previously excluded group. Person-first language. Strengths-based framing. Diversity statements. Neurodiversity-affirming branding. These moves are real and not nothing — they signal intent, they shift the surface of institutional culture, and they raise the cost of overt hostility. They are the linguistic surface of inclusion.
Architectural inclusion is what happens when a system updates its underlying model so that previously excluded people are actually structurally accommodated. Different assessment tools. Different sensory environments. Different communication norms. Different time scales. Different criteria for what counts as evidence. Different decision-making structures. These are changes to the architecture of the institution, not to its vocabulary.
The two are not the same, and one does not produce the other.
The Wrong Fight – Lori Hogenkamp, Evo-Stress Blog
Terminological inclusion without architectural inclusion is what allows institutions to feel like they’ve done the work without actually doing it. It’s also what produces the conditional affirmation pattern, where the language stays warm until support needs become visible or expensive — at which point the framing snaps back to pathology, because pathology was the architecture running underneath all along.
You can’t language your way out of an architecture. The vocabulary can update without the model updating, and when it does, the people the vocabulary was supposedly built to include keep running into the unchanged structure underneath.
The Wrong Fight – Lori Hogenkamp, Evo-Stress Blog
The Wrong Fight
The fight we’ve been having for decades is the wrong fight.
It’s not whether to use neurodiverse or neurodivergent. It’s not whether resilience is empowering or ableist. It’s not whether self-regulation is therapeutic or moralistic. Those fights are real, and the people fighting them are right to fight — but the fights are downstream of something the language can’t reach.
We keep trying to defend new words inside old architectures. The words survive. The meaning doesn’t. The architecture keeps running.
The Wrong Fight – Lori Hogenkamp, Evo-Stress Blog
What Both Layers Require
The disability-justice critique without the architectural critique can be answered with “we’ll do better next time, with sharper boundaries and better representation” — and the cycle repeats because the underlying conceptual structure hasn’t changed. The architectural critique without the disability-justice critique is depoliticized theory that risks reproducing the very pattern Chapman, Walker, Neumeier, and others have warned against — academic framings that sideline community voices.
The two together do more work than either alone.
On Lineage: Where “Neurodiversity-Lite” Comes From, and What I’m Adding – Lori Hogenkamp, Evo-Stress Blog
