Revealed: Who "Really" Coined "Neurodiversity"?

                          Blume? Singer?

                                     or...

Turtles All The Way Down?

An Actual Correction of a Scurrilous Libel

(based on actual original documents!)

Spoiler: It really was me

I refer to the scurrilous and erroneous trashtake of my work by the two most prominent northern academic Johnny-Come-Latelies to the #Neurodiversity discourse and their 4 devotees. 
How did this seemingly envious crew manage to slip their mish-mash of wishful thinking past the (so far nameless) "expert" fact-checkers of the highly esteemed Sage Journals: Autism?

You can see their poorly researched allegations and my factual rebuttal on Dropbox. 

• Dropbox: Rebuttal of Sage Publication claims in annotated and commented essay
• Dropbox: Detailed paragraph by paragraph rebuttal in tabular form 

This generation of scholars and academics identify themselves as a group of “6 International Scholars of Neurodiversity”. In the interests of complete transparency and accountability, I like to think of them by a more nuanced title which references what used to be known as "Northern Hemisphere Cultural Imperialism"

  6 Northern Anglo-Colonialist Pretenders to the Neurodiversity Crown 

For such eminent scholars, they appear to be singularly devoid of the most basic research skills and ethics, given the error-laden libel they've dished up, as I will show below. 

The crew comprises: 

• 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) Nick Walker,  a "professor" at some kind of Californian alternative-type tertiary institution. Scare quotes intentional. Sorry, not sorry, but being a relic of the glorious 60s myself, I'm a bit disillusioned by anything smacking of "New Age"ism. I prefer my "professors"accredited by reliable national institutions.
• ... and their 4 acolytes

For brevity I will refer to them as "The Sage 6", even though you will find below that they show anything but sagacity

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 the Sage 6 might not have access to my original documents and correspondence that disprove their calumnies and wilful confabulations.

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?

I, of course, cannot afford a legal team to go up against a publishing juggernaut like the mighty multinational corporation Sage Publications Inc. Especially since the Sage 6 have frightened off any potential employers sinceSage first published their calumnies in March 2024. Not that I ever made much money anyway, despite the fact that my idea has launched a thousand enterprises. And certainly pretty much zilch since Sage first allowed themselves to be gulled by my competitors. Ok, except some measly royalties from my book, "Neurodiversity: the Birth of an Idea". (You might like to read it as it contains my original thesis, with a preface about its provenance.)  My annual royalties barely equal the weekly wage I earned decades ago as a computer "programmer". 

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 “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 missed. 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.
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 collegual 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 creating a new paradigm in disability studies which at that time only understood within the limited categories of: Physical, Intellectual, and the misnomer of "Mental Illness" to which autistics were consigned. This is understandable.  I didn't "get" that it was a new paradigm myself at the time either. But career academics are very discomfited by paradigm shifts, for obvious reasons.

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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 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 is 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 derogatory allegations have been inserted into the item on Neurodiversity, and most disgustingly into my actual biography. 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 cared. He learned the term "neurodiversity" from me. He wrote about it once or twice and never again. He did not cite me, nor, was he, as an op-ed writer, was he required to do so. 

My rivals have even turned his 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 movement I aimed to promote 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 scoundrelous crew.  

Transcript of correspondence with Blume in which I mention Neurodiversity prior to his being 

 ''the first to publish''.
I use the term with him freely 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. 

In case it has escaped my learned rivals, paradigm shifting ideas arise from the zeitgeist, but it takes a theorist to name, explicate and analyse them first. 

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 she even cited me?  

It my 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       

I was not interested in "big noting" myself then - nor did I ever dream that my idea would 'take off'. I make no apologies. 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". Indeed, Chapman et al, why I didn't lay claim to the coinage. It says more Chapman's ambitious ego than mine

You may, ask 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 had autism in the family way back then?

 

So I could not work regular hours, not least because most of the money I earned would be seized by Australia's punitive welfare system anyway. I was just one of many, mostly female of course, women caught in a (well-documented) 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 meanwhile, on the other hand, enrolling at university meant that I got an extra $AUD 30 a week supplement to the carers pension.  And 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 contenders. I consulted her because she had been in the USA mainstream of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Movement long before me.  And because I didn't want to claim 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. 

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 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 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.

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. 

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:

"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'

 

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But now, I leave you with a note on 

(((  ENVY  ))     

And finally, a time-honoured lesson from our Ancient Sages

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

_______________________________________________________

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

Neurodiversity 2.0

What is Neurodiversity?