Whodunnit? Who corrupted my Wikipedia profile and the Neurodiversity page?

Don't even look at Wikipedia on either #Neurodiversity or my profile "Judy Singer". These entries are either a clueless hodge-podge of misinformation by faceless, self-appointed, and clearly unqualified  "editors" who rely on social media scuttlebutt or more sinisterly have been corrupted by malicious rivals in the field or their agents.

As for what these amateurs did to the "Judy Singer" and "Neurodiversity" page - it's beyond belief! Every single time I've found the courage to check Wikipedia over the past few decades, it has been utter garbage. But what can I do? Wikipedia's amateurs answer to nobody. I hope nobody here has ever relied on such a disreputable site. My official brief biography is on this blog. (NB, I have tried to fix the Wiki entries from time to time, so who knows? If they are unusally kind to me at any time, you can find the edit history of the trail of misinformation  or disinformation there.) 

The Wikipedia entries have constantly been hijacked by goodness knows who, but they appear to rely on evidence going back to the age of the dinosaurs, including among them: 

• the Anti-Neurodiversity Gang of Four, Clements. Mitchell et al, a bunch of 4 malcontents who claimed to be the "Autistic Dark Web" - all 4 of them (!).  These lads pretended to represent a groundswell of opinion.  But anyway they disappeared off the face of the earth years ago

• Martijn Dekker, a non-academic who is clearly clueless about processes in the discipline of social sciences , and how academic theses and dissertations are officially verified and certified. Dekker has thus  cooked up a load of resentful and uninformed allegations which I have refuted here 
  
  
• But more seriously, could it be that these libellous calumnies were inserted into Wikipedia by my academic rivals or their agents? I.e the recently formed actual collective of  UK and USA academics,  Chapman, Walker,  and their less well known associates, Kapp, Botha, Stannard, Giwa Onainu. 

?

These rivals rely heavily on Dekker's clumsy confabulations, which any actual academic or lawyer would laugh at. (I base this observation on experience, as I have shown it unofficially to a few such acquaintances). Dekker is lucky that, being in my mid 70s, I am not really about to spend my last years in litigation. Even if I could afford it, since even the meagre income I received from the occasional presentation has dried up, as potential employers have been scared off. 

Thus this libellous crew have destroyed even my livelihood. I can only hope Dekker gets his Karma instead. 

• I suspect, and have had my suspicions confirmed by people in the field (who are afraid to speak out), that this is a "Revenge of the Trans" scenario. Thus I am especially disappointed that young women Monique Botha, Morenike Giwa Oneinu, and maybe Abs Stannard Ashley,  have been gulled  into attacking another woman. This is exactly what I warned against. It is so sad when women go against the interests of "sisters" at the behest of a couple of female impersonators... or is one of them, Robert J. Chapman a male impersonator? It's hard to tell. What was wrong with the honest label of  #Tranvestite? If Chapman is a biological female or intersex, I can understand why they present themselves (ie. how s/he dresses)  as male, given the intersectional disadvantages of being female continue to dog academia.

• Just a reminder that I am not transphobic, I have no reason to be. Why would I champion diversity, if I was? For a start, we live in different subcultures and our paths rarely cross. But when our paths have crossed, I cannot say that, actually some of my best friends are Trans. Because the F--ing Nazis criminals ruined it with "Some of my best friends are Jewish". So I'm not about to start virtue-signalling. Draw your own conclusions.  
  
  
• However, I have been forced to become Walkerphobic and Chapmanphobic. These two presumably envious followers in my footsteps have used the climate of the times to attempt to clamber over me on the greasy pole of academic supremacy. (Note that I am not now, nor have I ever been, an academic. I was just an undergraduate, albeit mature aged, honours students). Unfortunately for these academic pole vaulters, the climate of the times have changed. It gives me no pleasure that Trump got elected and to find that trans overreach is considered partly responsible for this dreadful result. 

• Actually TBH, maybe I do hope they all get their karma. I'm no angel, and I wish them either repentence or  reincarnation as Turtles in the next life. But unfortunately as a  sceptical Western atheistic,  I cannot take comfort from believing in "karma".  Unless it comes in the form of the advent of a righteous pro-bono solicitor and a winning defamation suit. (Any takers out there? Please DM me. How an we lose?).

Wikipedias's Weasel Words

Last time I look in the shifting sands of Wikipedia, some faceless editor had downgraded my coinage of "Neurodiversity" by replacing "coined" with "popularised"

I hope this was just another random amateur. But if this was by or at the behest of the usual suspects: Nice try, guys! (And if I'm a wee bit paranoid, it doesn't prove they're not out to get me)

I did not merely popularize the term “Neurodiversity”.

I coined it in an academic thesis, which I completed and submitted to the University of Technology in September 1998. And the work was submitted at the same time to the then Open University Press, UK for inclusion in academic book series "Disability Discourse. (eds: Corker and French)". 

Don't believe me? You can easily borrow a copy of this book at your local library or buy a copy at McGraw Hill who have now acquired the OUP UK. It is probable that it was through this that my work became somewhat known tp the general public. 

My work was actually popularised by American author Steve Silberman in 2001 in Wired Magazine's 20th Anniversary issue devoted to the biggest ideas in its first 20 years of publication. It is still available online at Neurodiversity rewires conventional thinking.   

Harvey Blume

Much is being made of Harvey Blume because he was the "first to publish the term". 

Hardly surprising, given that he was a journalist with bylines in mainstream American media.  While I was just an unknown Australian student. 

Blume and I began corresponding in 1997, and I mentioned my ideas and  to him by phone. But luckily for me, I have written proof. I referred to it in an email as early as 1997 prior to his using it in print,  as shown in the facsimile below. As you can see, I didn't make an issue about it the text, because ofthe  earlier phone conversation. Not to mention that who knew my idea would take off?

The fact that Blume published first was because he was a journalist with a few days turnaround, while my academic thesis which was submitted at the same time in 1998 as a book chaptes, was was not available till the following year. This is due to the fact that it takes much longer to publish a book than a magazine. 

Not to mention USA Cultural Imperialism as we called it here in Australia. Blume had a wide audience in major USA media outlets. I was just a Australian mature age student.  Note that Chapman in his book called me a "young Australian student" -  just another sign of poor research. I was well into middle-age at the time. I am now well into my seventies. And frankly I did not expect to spend my retirement years dealing with defamation by a younger generation of contenders. 

BTW , in Sage Journals, Chapman disputes my claim to coining the word because I didn't trumpet it. I think that says volumes about his ambition. I had no such ambition other than to tell my story, and complete my BA Honours. 

Despite that, it is now absolutely GALLING that I keep seeing Blume getting equal billing for Neurodiversity. 

• Blume had no background or interest in the Disability Rights movement, or the Social Model of Disability, whereas it was based on my and my family's "lived experience" of intersectional disadvantage. 
• I worked hard over several years to get my degree and write my thesis 

In short:

Blume got the term from me, used it once, then moved on to chase other rabbits. 

Harvey and I continued to correspond for several years, though we moved on from the Neurodiversity issue  after just a few post,  to our other cultural and political interests. (I am currently considering publishing our extensive correspondence,)

I am sorry to report that Harvey Blume passed away in November 2023 after a hard battle with cancer. He was a brilliant man and a great loss to the world. 

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*Of course, wikipedia may have removed the line I am quoting by now.  

Revealed: Who "Really" Coined "Neurodiversity"? An evidence based corrective

Blume? Singer?

or...

Turtles All The Way Down?

An Actual Correction of a Scurrilous Libel

(based on actual original documents!)

  Spoiler: It was me!

I refer to the scurrilous, erroneous and self-serving trashtake of my work by the two most prominent Northern Hemisphere academic Johnny-Come-Latelies to the #Neurodiversity discourse, Robert J Chapman, Nick Walker, and their 4 acolytes. They promote their confabulations as :

An "overdue correction" on the origins of neurodiversity theory".

         (Scare quotes mine. It's actually a "premature ..."... oh, never mind...)

How did this seemingly envious crew manage to get their mishmash of wishfulthinking and confirmation-bias past the - so far nameless -  purportedly "expert" fact-checkers of the highly esteemed Sage Journals: Autism? 

Alas, when I complained to the publishers that they had been misled, I had a visitation from the mighty Sage Corp's inhouse team of Legal Beagles who retorted with what appeared to be a threatening letter. But who am I to know what a threatening letter from lawyers looks like? I have never had one before.  But

 Dammit, Sage Journals have spawned a whole new industry
 based on my original work! 

Soooo not nice of them!

Meanwhile, thanks to Sage's gullibility, my brief holiday from living below the poverty line is over. But don't cry for me, America, UK, wherever...  Fortunately I live in Australia, which has a relatively more human welfare system than what goes down in the US and UK.  Thus, I live in secure, albeit neglected, Public Housing and receive the Age Pension.  So at least I can't end up on the streets living in a cardboard box on a diet of tinned baked beans. 

You can see the Sage 6's poorly researched allegations and my factual rebuttal on Dropbox in "blow by blow" tabular format. 

• Dropbox: Rebuttal of Sage Publication claims in annotated and commented essay
• Dropbox: Detailed paragraph by paragraph rebuttal in tabular form
  Stop Press: Oops! Sorry! you can't access my Dropbox because I can't even afford to pay the subscription fee. Since Sage published the calumnies of these contenders, I appear to have been cancelled, and people seem afraid to hire me. I am looking into Google Docs which appears to be free, and has better tools. 

So this new generation of upwardly mobile scholars and academics identify themselves as a group of “6 International Scholars of Neurodiversity”. 

"International"? Quite an over-reach for a mob of Brits and Yanks. But what can we expect of the relics of the former British Empire? It seems they haven't got used to the fact that the days of empire are over. 

As a Southern Hemisphere scholar I'd like to issue the first of my own correctives: this crew may more accurately be described by a more nuanced subtitle: one which references what used to be known as "Northern Hemisphere Cultural Imperialism". But I couldn't think of a suitable acronym for 

 "6 Unreconstructed Northern Anglo-Colonialist Pretenders to The Neurodiversity Crown"

So for brevity I will refer to this crew as "The Sage 6".  Though you may soon conclude that they have shown anything but "sagacity".

Given the error-laden claptrap this collective have dished up, any academic worth their salt might deduce that the Sage 6 are singularly devoid of the most basic research skills let alone ethics. And even logic, as I will outline below. But for the grandfather of all absurdities, see  down below, "The Final Absurdity" that got past Sage's esteemed editors".

The gang of 6 are: 

• Dr Robert J Chapman, the Young Pretender to the neurodiversity crown,  
  Hey Robert, be my guest! Take it if you want it that badly, for you will find that "heavy is the head that wears the crown".
  
  
• the Not So Young (despite his very fetching avatar ... depicted below) American author Nick Walker.  PS. I don't do pronouns on command. If someone does not respect me, why should I respect their demands?
   
• ... and their 4 acolytes

What might have motivated the Sage 6?

Their beatup is rumoured to be motivated by a "Revenge of the Trans" vendetta, but who am I to say? 

You may ask what my "crime" was to invite such vicious payback. You can see the answer here. 

Sage Publications Inc.'s Defence

According to Sage's publishers, their purported fact-checkers are "people with expertise in the matter". 

I'm still waiting to find out who these so-called "experts" are. Whoever they are, Sage's highly experienced editors might surely have had the nous to realise that these people might not have access to my original documents and correspondence. Which they absolutely do not!

And to add insult to injury, Sage have sooled their dedicated in-house legal team onto me, who have sent me some (very deniably) threatening letters. Although who am I to decide what feels threatening to me in the face of Sage's learned legal counsel?

As I already explained, I cannot afford a legal team to go up against a publishing juggernaut like the mighty multinational corporation Sage Publications Inc. 

My correction of an actual Disrepresentation

I begin on a far from trivial correction,: 

The Sage 6 are hardly “International” scholars. 

American + British does not = “Internationality”.
It adds up to North-Centrism aka
Northern Hemisphere Cultural Hegemony

The 6 contenders rely heavily on two shaky platforms:

1. The, dare I say, resentful so-called “evidence” of a non-scholar, Martijn Dekker, whose ignorance of academic process in the social sciences should be glaringly obvious to any academic. But somehow the Sage 6 fell for it anyway. For Dekker's information, every academic thesis undergoes a comprehensive ethics review before acceptance. From this, it can be deduced that my thesis was checked and accepted.  I have rebutted Dekker’s absurd confirmation-biased confabulations here. Not only are they libelling me, but they are libelling my university. 
2. A lot of freewheeling assumptions about the role of American freelance journalist Harvey Blume in the development of the term Neurodiversity.  All of which can be traced back to the work of Wikipedia’s amateur “editors”. 

Spoiler: I have 100s of pages of correspondence with Blume and we only talked about Neurodiversity a few times (shown below). Believe it or not, we had other matters that interested us more than petty academic rivalries*.

* To make it absolutely clear, our relationship was collegial not romantic 

To underscore: I am not an academic. I chose not to be. Like anything in life, academia has its strengths and weaknesses. I found it both inspiring and suffocating. The senior academics at my university certainly did not "get" that I was actually creating a new paradigm in disability studies (sorry, Nick Walker, in 1998, mate) which at that time was only understood within the limited categories of: either  Physical, Intellectual or the dilly bag of everything else  "Mental Illness" to which autistics were consigned. It's understandable that at the time, my supervisors did not "get" that I had developed a new paradigm. Neither did it occur to me. But career academics are very discomfited by paradigm shifts, for obvious reasons. And so, to Wikipedia... 

 

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Wikipedia is not an academic resource

While we can blame Wikipedia and its amateurs, so much more culpable are any lazy academics who venture to use Wikipedia as a research authority or even as a research gateway.

I would hope the 6 academics have not been relying on Wikipedia's nameless and self-appointed northern "editors" given their dubious qualifications. And that's assuming these individuals even have any. Wikipedia’s scandal-loving amateurs have been playing around with my entries for going on 3 decades now. I long ago gave up trying to set the record straight with them. 

I notice the Sage 6's pejorative allegations have even been inserted into the item on Neurodiversity, and most disgustingly into my actual biography. And they or their agents have even inserted themselves.  I have registered a complaint with Wikipedia, but it seems the good ship Wikipedia is deserted... 

Sexism too?

I cannot help wondering if it is completely beyond Wikipedia's amateur so-called "editors" to imagine that someone who is neither American nor Male can nevertheless be capable of coming up with a "Big Idea" all by ourselves!

Reflexivity

Click to enlarge if not familiar
with the term 

BTW, academics working in the social sciences are required to practice reflexivity and question their own motives. I commend this practice to the Sage 6. 

As a non-academic blogger, Dekker is of course free to throw self-reflection to the winds and write whatever fantasies he dreams up. But academics are liable if they take amateurs on trust because. 

Harvey Blume

If the authors had shown even a modicum of common sense, they might have made some pertinent enquiries. They might have found out that I corresponded with Harvey Blume for many years from 1997 onwards. Indeed I believe I shared this information years ago with Chapman. I need tech support to get back into my archives, but I can't afford it, as I already explained. 

I have retained my correspondence with Blume, which shows, unsurprisingly, that he was a jobbing journo and knew nothing about disability politics or the Social Model of Disability until I educated him to the extent that he was remotely interested. He learned the term "neurodiversity" from me. He wrote about it once or twice and moved on, never to return. He did not cite me, nor, as a generalist op-ed writer in mass media was he required to do so. 

My rivals have even turned Blume's ommission into another scourge to beat me with. It did not bother me in the least at the time. Because, who knew that 20 years later, the Neurodiversity banner would actually go viral?

Sleuths, private eyes, legal eagles are welcome to peruse these documents, even carbon-date them if they want, but I'm damned if I'm going to go to the expense of paying for carbon-dating myself because of this scoundrelly crew.  

Transcript of correspondence with Blume in which I mention Neurodiversity
 prior to his being "the first to publish   

. 

Note: I used the term Neurodiversity freely witih Harvey because I had already talked to him about it on the phone.

Where I said ''that I'm sure I coined Neurodiversity'' I also implied that the concept but not the coinage was probably ''in the air'' aka "the zeitgeist". I said the same thing in my thesis. 

The article with the "Tentative Title" was eventually published as a book chapter by the then Open University Press, now owned by McGraw Hill. Available at https://search.worldcat.org/title/disability-discourse/oclc/39182312

In case it has escaped my learned rivals, ALL paradigm shifting ideas arise from the zeitgeist (Eng: the spirit of the time/era), ie the human discourse of the given time)  but it takes a theorist to name, explicate and analyse them first. They don't come down in a bolt of lightening from the blue. 

Next, may we expect Nick Walker to abandon his claim to the phrase "Neurodiversity Paradigm"? Because not only was it "in the air", but it was based on my coinage. They even drag Kassiane Asasumasu into it, despite the fact that she derived her idea from my coinage as well. Does anyone know if Asasumasu even cited me?  

It seems to surprise my career academic rivals that I did not make a song and dance about my neologism: Absurdly, Chapman seizes on, as evidence that I "did not coin neurodiversity", because I failed to proclaim it it with blazing trumpets.

"Singer did not claim to have coined the term of neurodiversity herself"

  Chapman et al, Sage Journals: Autism,  March 12, 2023       

Unlike my career academic competitors,  I was not all agog for academic glory and fame.  I was simply writing from my heart about my "lived experience". This absurdity says more Chapman's ambitious ego than mine

You may ask: then why did I go back to university at all? 

Because I was a sole parent of a toddler who needed a lot more care than most. Who knew we autism in the family way back then? No-one, not even the pscho-medical professions knew the extent of the autistic spectrum. Thus I was not able to work regular hours, not least because most of the money I earned would have been seized by Australia's punitive welfare system anyway. I was just one of many, mostly females of course, caught in a (well-documented here) poverty trap by government fiat.  Thanks to the pandering idiots of our major parties, the effect was to create a HUGE disincentive to work and employment. 

But enrolling at university meant that I got an extra $AUD 30 a fortnight supplement to the carers pension.  Believe me, it mattered! And it was something meaningful to do. 

My Academic Majors

When people asked me what I "majored" in, I joked - though it was no joke - that I majored in anything scheduled on Wednesdays, because that was the only day my father had free to babysit my child. I could not afford childcare on top of rent. 

The Jane Meyerding accusation

I hope the 6 Sages will not continue to seize on a conversation I had with Jane Meyerding when I asked her if she had ever heard the term "Neurodiversity". It is important to note that Jane is in no way to blame for our conversation being wilfully misinterpreted by these dirt-digging desperados. I consulted her because she had been in the USA mainstream of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Movement long before me.  And because I had no intention of using the coinage until I was absolutely sure that the word did not exist. By then,  I had already exhausted all the resources of university libraries, the internet and never found a single mention. As a further note, my supervisors would have demanded a citation of the word, if they had any doubt that it was not my original coinage. 

Jane confirmed she had never come across it either, which left me free to use and interpret it in my thesis.

Notice that my defamers interpreted my correspondence with Jane in a twisted and mean-spirited way. Perhaps it is because they imagine I think the same way as they do?  Can we deduce that they do not feel the need to check in with others before they make their self-promoting claims?. 

Blume

It is frankly galling to find Harvey Blume getting equal billing with me in the history of the movement, when he was simply a freelance journalist specialising in interviewing literary figures.  

Blume mentioned "neurodiversity" once, having picked my brain about disability politics, and then moved on to chase other rabbits.  Meanwhile, the development of this concept was my life's work, born out of great family hardship and struggle and my fortuitous discovery of Disability Studies. And it was NOT written just for the sake of personal catharsis, but also because I didn't want other families affected by Autism to have to endure the same. By that time, I had already founded the first of about 8 local and international autism support groups

Nor do journalistic ethics or the laws of defamation appear to daunt the Wikipedia crew,  whose hogwash has been lapped up by my academic rivals. Hardly surprising, since they well know that defamation cases can only be afforded by corporations or billionaires. Which brings me to...

Any billionaires interested in funding my defamation case? 
Don't let me dissuade you. Remember I have original papers. How could we possibly lose?

The Final Absurdity in the Neurodiversity Saga

How could this example of Botha, Chapman, Walker et al's blundering "logic" possibly have got past the learned editors of Sage Publications? 

Having made up their minds, for reasons we can only guess at, that the term Neurodiversity could only be attributed to anyone else but me, the 6 academicians put their heads together to gather the killer evidence. 

Yet despite their advanced research skills, however desperately hard they tried, they simply could not find a shred of evidence anywhere of prior usage.Just as I couldn't when I exhaustively researched my thesis in 1998 (as accredited by the Sydney University of Technology's Ethics Committee).  And BTW, by defaming me, they Sage 6 are actually defaming my University.  About which more later. 

So they came up with this absurdity :

"Unless further archival evidence comes to light, it is possible we will never     know who coined the term neurodiversity"  

(Botha, Chapman, Walker et al)    

 

All I can say in reply to this absurdity is that if it wasn't me,

then it could only have been coined by  

    'Turtles all the Way Down'

 

   ----------------------------------------------------------------------------

But now, I leave you with a time-honoured lesson
from our Ancient Sages

     Albeit note the time-dishonoured sexism I have been forced to correct. 

_______________________________________________________

Dramatis Personae

Do any psychologists out there have any ideas about what this reveals?

_______________________________________________________

Bibliography

The Provenance of the Neurodiversity Concept

Judy Singer

*Thesis

Singer, J. (1998).  Odd People In: The Birth of Community Amongst People on the “Autistic Spectrum”: a personal exploration of a New Social Movement based on Neurological Diversity. A thesis presented to the faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts Social Science (Honours), Faculty of Humanities and Social Science, University of Technology, Sydney, 1998. Submitted September 1998.

Book

Singer, J. (2016) NeuroDiversity: The birth of an idea. Kindle https://www.amazon.com/NeuroDiversity-Birth-Idea-Judy-Singer-ebook/dp/B01HY0QTEE/

Book Chapters

Singer, J. (1999). Why can't you be normal for once in your life?: From a 'Problem with No Name' to a new category of disability. In Corker, M. and French, S. (Eds.). Disability Discourse Open University Press UK https://www.worldcat.org/title/disability-discourse/oclc/39182312

Singer, J. (2002). When Cassandra was very very young. In Rodman, K. (Ed.) (2002) Is anybody listening? Jessica Kingsley Publishers, UK

Singer, J. (2003). Preface: Travels in Parallel Space: An Invitation. In Miller, J. K. (ed). Women from Another Planet? Our Lives in the Universe of Autism 1stBooks Library, New York

Singer, J. (2019) Reflections on the Neurodiversity Movement 20 years on. In Neurodiversity: 20th anniversary of the birth of the concept: Advocacy for positive recognition of human diversity and its future available https://www.etsy.com/ca-fr/listing/701221413/neurodiversity-20th-anniversary-of-the?

Translation available at La Neurodiversité - 20e anniversaire de la naissance d'un concept: Plaidoyer pour la reconnaissance positive de la diversité humaine et pour son avenir https://www.etsy.com/ca/listing/688599087/neurodiversity-20th-anniversary-of-the?

Government Publication

Singer, J. (2000).  Disability Employment Services Information Kit.  Department of Family and Community Services, Australian Government publication (Comprises 8 illustrated booklets, half in Easy English and half in Pictorial English, fact sheets and posters. 50,000 copies in print, distributed to every Disability Employment Service office in Australia)

Academic papers

Singer, J. (1999). No Longer Fair Game: Human Rights for Nerds, Weirdoes and Oddballs: The current situation of people with Autistic Spectrum Disorders in the NSW education system. A paper given at the 1999 Conference on Human Rights, Disability, and Education at the University of NSW.

Singer, J. (1999). Uncovering the Neurological Procrustean Bed. A paper given to the "Sydney Disability Research Network". University of Technology, Sydney

Singer, J. (1999). Voice and “Neurological Difference”.   A seminar paper given to the "Sydney Disability Research Network"  UTS

Satirical Pieces

Singer, J. (1998) NT Social Skills Deficiencies: A case study available archived online by Eric Engdahl at The Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical  https://erikengdahl.se/autism/isnt/

Singer, J. (1998) What to do if you suspect your child has NT available archived online by Eric Engdahl at The Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical  https://erikengdahl.se/autism/isnt/ 

Debut Appearance of the Word “Neurodiversity”

Singer, J  (1997)  Mentioned by Judy Singer in private email to Harvey Blume. Correspondence archived, pictured above. 

Blume, H (1998)  On the Neurological Underpinnings of Geekdom The Atlantic Monthly: September 1998

Blog

Reflections on Neurodiversity:  Afterthoughts, Ideas, Polemics. Not always serious

What is Neurodiversity? Definitions and discussion.