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.

I am not Transphobic. Just Chapmanphobic, Walkerphobic and ...

 ... and phobic about a Yankee gutter tabloid journalist, but who cares about him? Not giving him oxygen. 

I only respect the pronoun choices of people who respect me, not academics who seize the opportunity to clamber over me up the greasy pole to academic glory. 

NB: I am not an academic and hsbr never had the slightest desire to be

In retrospect, if this is how vicious academic competitiveness gets, I think I made the right decision.

What do you make of Walker, a man with a shaved head which arrogantly proclaims his sex, who then demands to pene-trate the ranks of womanhood and dictate his  "pronouns" at us.  

And who then tries to destroy the reputation of the actual woman who pioneered his field? (For those who don't know, that is verifiably me, in a 1998 academic thesis). 

Any psychologists care to comment?

STOP PRESS!
April 2025 
Walker has seen which way the wind blows
and reverted to admitting he is a male

I await his public apology for joining the witch hunt against  me

Sure, Walker did an impressive job of unpacking the density of meaning coiled within my coinage of Neurodiversity. And I have huge respect for that. Especially as his accuracy proves that the concept was lurking in the Platonic realm with a specific meaning all along, waiting to be constellated by the right person in the right place at the right time. 

Why was that me? Because I was at the very intersectional node of everything to channel it. This is not being "mystical". I just happened to have the misfortune to be at the intersection of a lot of disadvantages and barriers:

Southern hemisphere, female, Jewish, impoverished background (because working class father, disabiled mother), child refugee in Australia from the Hungarian revolution, nerd kid, outsider. 

And no,  I am not "White". Jews are only "white" when it suits Gentile to call us that, as my mother discovered. One day, she told me, she was at home in Hungary, a 16 year old "fan girl" swooning over Clark Gable at the movies, and within a week, the Nazis arrive,  she was in a ghetto, in transit to Auschwitz. She was the only one in her family to survive, and brought me into a world of trauma. .  . . 

Thus sensitized to oursiderhood and injustice, I find myself in a Jonah and the Whale situation.  I remember well that when I was begining my honours thesis, I sought all over for the term "neurodiversity"and for experts in the field that I could cite. And then it gradually dawned on me that I had to be "the one".  I was neither happy about it nor proud, just anxious that I would be laughed at.

And yes, people did think I was an "oddbod" when I started talking about how the Autistic Self-Advocacy Movement would change the world. I never expected my idea to "go viral". My honours thesis languished for several years until US journalist Steve Silberman "discovered" me in the 20th Anniversary Issue of Wired Magazine. It was immensely gratifying at first, but with success must come envy...

I can only guess that it must have been painful for Walker to think he was pipped at the post. I sympathise, but his response has been unforgivable. 

Transphobia?

And how would I be "transphobic", when I have been a champion of the value of diversity? Trans people and I live in different subcultures and our paths rarely cross.  And not to mention that I marched with Gay Liberation in the good old days of the 60's. But I can't take care of all the world's ills. 

My subculture was primarily "Single Mothers".And don't imagine that queer people were kind to a dowdy middle-aged mother worn out by breast-feeding and subsisting on the meagre Sole Parent Pension. Well, occasionally kindly patronising, as I recall.   

Also a reminder that as I am not of Christian heritage I don't buy into the Christian binary of Good and Evil. So if you are of Christian heritage, even if you don't identify, ask yourself if you might be unconsciously influenced by binarism... 

Global gender diversity

If you are White (ie Christian in the First World) you may not be aware that Whites are not the centre of the universe (except by colonial domination). So you may not know that there are many cultures that recognise more than two genders. (here is a list).  This is especially so among many indigenous peoples, whose beliefs are actually based on living on actual indigenous land, not on the heritage of Roman Imperialism (origins of Christianity, ICYMI) .

Did you know that the Talmud recognises up to 8 genders, all with their own names! 

My post which is claimed to be "transphobic" was NOT based on binarism, but on my cultural background and my other major in Anthropology (the study of all human cultures), which I much preferred to sociology (actually the study of Western society).

From Anthropology, I learned that the binary was not "normal" or "natural". It was a Christian construct.

The biological reality is that Trans"women" may either be biological male or intersexual.  Biological males can never be women.  But instead of digging their heels in, they might learn from other non-binary cultures and make up a new appellation for themselves. When the only name for an emergent social/cultural phenomenon is created by the dominant culture and is derogatory, make up your own. That's what I did with "Neurodiversity".  And I'm proud of it. 

But I have made it perfectly clear that I am no Dr Pangloss, the original (male) Pollyanna who believes everyone is inherently "good". (Poor Pollyanna! Why does a woman get to be the icon of naivete?)

But I do strongly believe that society has a responsibility to find a niche for everyone, even if that niche is protective custody. 

ENVY 

We all partake of the 7 Deadly Sins. But of them all,  Envy is the deadliest. 

Can it be possible that Chapman and Walker, presumably insane with jealousy because they coulda, shoulda, woulda come up with Neurodiversity, but didna, have kept picking at the wound until they came up with a strategy to destroy my reputation.

And they managed to persuade a couple of second fiddles (in the discipline, they may be very accomplished in their work) to accompany them. Sadly one of them, a woman, has sent me shockingly vicious letters, presumably based on misinformation someone fed her or social media scuttlebutt.. 

And then this crew went on to dupe a reputable journal Sage into publishing their confabulations, which were craftily garnished with impressive quotes from important postmodernist (or whatever the latest fad is) theorists. 

I've long believed that the backlash to all this kind of overreach by a small fraction of an already small minority would lead to the election of Trump.

The analysis I'm reading is that sadly, I was right. 

Anyway, I am in my mid 70's now, and I'm over their envious bullshit, but not till I have refuted it in the name of intellectual integrity, and the fightback against Fake News

Nuff said. 

You can see a partial rebuttal of their beatups on this blog.  It has taken me nearly 2 years but I am about to submit a detailed rebuttal of their allegations, along with screenshots of unashamed gossip, commitment to collusion, and other nastiness.

To remind you much of their evidence relies upon the memories and confabulations of a non-academic Martijn Dekker. A rebuttal of his frankly confirmation-based twaddle is here. 

Sage Journals publish defamatory allegations by Chapman, Walker et al

For the Record: 
First published April 7th 2024

Now updated March 7th 2025 and again late April
More Relevant than Ever

  
It has taken me this long to send a second rebuttal of the fallacious and  libellous hatchet job published by the highly esteemed multinational academic publishing juggernaut Sage Journals.  Sage's publishers have dug their heels in, claiming that "persons with expertise" have "fact-checked" this negligently researched and easily disproven tripe. 

Did these (conveniently nameless) expert personages ever venture beyond their local Dublin public library? 

FTR, I and my university are Australian.  This specious article is nothing more than a desperate concoction by Northern Hemisphere academic rivals - Johnny-come-latelies  who have followed in my footsteps in the Neurodiversity discourse 25 years after I first launched it. 

Please note that I'm not an academic, nor have I ever been. Isn't it amazing what you can get done with a BA Hons thesis? I had an offer of a PhD but why would I want to go further? I watched my stressed out women friends sweating over them for years, for very little reward. I felt bad enough neglecting my child even then. When I first started university in 1969 all you needed was Honours to become an academic, and we had brilliant ones. It's simply a form of "inflation", just like financial inflation. You have to work harder and harder to get to the same goal. 

So, Sage rejected my first rebuttal , and responded by sooling their in-house legal standover people onto me.

As the (now) disabled septuagenarisn sole-parent of a disabled adult, both of us living week to week on minimal age and disability pensions respectively, I am in no position to take on this multinational juggernaut of publishing.  

But at least Sage can't sue me because I live in public housing and have absolutely no savings. 

In no small measure due to them, since the credibility of their imprimatur has intimidated my former sources of income.

But I suppose I can always use the computer at my local library if I finally lose everything 

Which is getting close, because my desktop is buggy, my laptop has died, and I can't afford to do a damn thing about it. 

I have had to go into paragraph by paragraph in detail to refute their trash.
To think I used to have a life! To think I thought I'd be spending my 8th decade gardening!
Instead I'm breaking my back to ensure that these buck-aneers (sic) don't get away with this.

I'm doing it purely for the sake of taking a stand against this world of 

FAKE NEWS

but also for the innate satisfaction of seeing these villains with their pretentious academese and their cherry-picked citations bite the dust

THAT FELT GOOD!

Anyway: let's get back to polite academic patter

Here is the outrage in its full glory. 

My "Abstract"

The highly-rated Sage Journals:Autism has published an "Open Letter" authored by a group of 6 Northern Hemisphere authors, Chapman, Walker et al. Their letter seeks to downgrade my contribution to the Neurodiversity discourse. Their so-called "correction" is riddled with false allegations. 

This post is intended to correct their erroneous so-called "corrections", and a copy will be sent to the publishers.  

Introduction

CLICK TO ENLARGE

A group of six individuals identifying themselves as "an international group of autistic scholars of autism and neurodiversity"’ have achieved the publication of a defamatory ‘open letter’ that undermines my pioneering role in the development of the Neurodiversity paradigm. This letter
appeared in the esteemed academic journal Sage Publications. 

The 6 authors claim that they are offering a "correction" of my reputation, ostensibly "in the public interest".

I intend to show their so-called "correction" is in fact Misinformation at best (assuming their motives are unimpeachable). At worst,  I would hope, not deliberate Disinformation

It is outrageous and disappointing that such highly respected academics and scholars would stoop so low.  It has taken months of my time and energy to refute their claims, and there has been

a huge impost on my emotional and physical wellbeing.

It is understandable given the reputation of these scholars that Sage Journals' has accepted their immaculately laid out and referenced piece. But now that I have presented Sage with my extensive rebuttal of the authors' mendacious claims,  and asked them to redact the article, the editor of Sage Journals Autism has dug her heels in and refused, thus: 

STOP PRESS! The Sage Publications legal team responded thus to my complaint about the many false allegations by my prime contenders in the Neurodiversity paradigm, Dr Robert J. Chapman, Nick Walker and a few of their devotees. Sage claims that: "The publication was in accordance with our standard practices  and all legal requirements - reviewed by both the editor and numerous people with expertise in the matter concerned." It does not say much for Sage editor Kerry Barner, or her team of “expert fact checkers”, that they did not approach me when they might reasonably have assumed that I would obviously possess original documents. Which I do.  Note that I cannot afford a "legal team" to go against the mighty multinational Sage Corporation. Thanks to my scurrilous detractors, I have not had any paid work since July 2023. I subsist on the scant Australian Age Pension. I can only assume that Sage's expert fact checkers have not realised that there is actually a Southern Hemisphere and that "here be scholars".

Discussion

The prestigious academic journal Sage Publications has posted an "open letter" aimed at diminishing my role in the development of the Neurodiversity discourse. The letter was submitted by a group of 6 northern hemisphere individuals who describe themselves as an "international group of autistic scholars of autism and neurodiversity"

The authors are Monique Botha, Robert Chapman, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, Steven Kapp, Abbs Stannard Ashley and Nick Walker.

I will show that the authors' letter is riddled with errors and misrepresentations which belie the research skills and ethics such highly-qualified scholars are expected to possess. 

I am amazed by the group's foolhardiness: did the possibility not occur to them that I might have original documents? Indeed I do, and can thus offer a genuine correction of their so-called "correction". 

I will not attempt to guess (at least in print) this group's motivation in submitting such an easily refuted mish-mash of wishful misinformation,  and will leave it to readers to draw your own conclusions..

Click to view full refutation
on Dropbox  

Refutation

You can view the detailed paragraph by paragraph refutation on Dropbox. Yes, you will find it ia complicated because lies are simple but truth is complex. 

NB: If you have been influenced by the Sage letter and intend referencing it, please exercise due diligence and read this first. 

Misrepresentations

The first misrepresentation - albeit minor compared to what follows - is that the 6 authors appropriate for themselves the rubric of an "international" group. They constitute a Northern Hemisphere Anglosphere cartel, as they gained their qualifications in the USA and UK, thus benefitting from the North's intellectual hegemony. 

For the record, my qualifications are from an Australian University. My work is thus from the Southern Hemisphere. We Oceanians know only too well the colonising tendencies of the geographic "North". Unfortunately I cannot afford to go north to "network" and promote myself. But I will not sit quietly when these Northerners attempt to colonise my work and do their utmost to sideline me and cast shadows over my reputation.

Criticism is not the same as Critique

Social Science scholars welcome critique - that is the very basis of the scientific method. But critique is supposed to be based on verifiable and accredited facts, expressed in respectful dialogue. It is thus disappointing to find that the information provided by the six authors is based on: 

1. unreliable testimonies from non-academic source(s)
2. a failure to follow accepted academic practice by checking original documents
3. social media gossip
4. misinterpretations (or willful disinterpretations?) which would clearly be recognised as self-serving by all but the most innocent reader... or the average scandal-loving troll.

Are the six authors engaging in wilful competitive sledging? Or is it simply wishful thinking by envious rivals trying to clamber over each other up the greasy pole to academic glory? Whichever the case, it is immaterial because scholars and academics are meant to research their claims, and it is glaringly obvious that the six authors have failed to do so. 

Relying on Unreliable Memoirs

It is hugely dispiriting to find that these credentialed scholars, including a couple of luminaries of the "Neurodiversity" discourse, continue to rely on the testimonies and "memories" of a non-scholar, Martijn "McDutchie" Dekker. I have comprehensively rebutted Dekker's libellous op-ed several months ago. If you possess an academic background and have the accompanying responsibilities of transparency and accountability,  or even if you are not an academic but have a serious interest in this issue, my rebuttal of Dekker's unscholarly opinions and memories is pre-requisite reading. 

More so, it is disturbing that the combined research skills of these highly-credentials scholars did not extend to the most basic tenets of fact-checking, i.e.

1.  going back to original source documents
2. interviewing the subject of their allegations before rushing into print. 

There are several possible explanation for such outstanding negligence:

1. Northern Hemisphere educational standards have fallen so low that anyone can get a doctorate without basic research skills.
   JS: Clearly this is not the case. This cartel have excellent research skills, unless they choose to disregard them 
   
   
2. Northern Hemisphere doctoral programs do not include a formal ethics review.
   JS: This is hard to believe. Bit if if the G6 were not required to complete an ethics component, can we conclude that they have no innate ability to distinguish right from wrong without supervision?
   
   
3. Wilful disregard and fear of accidentally discovering evidence that does not support their urgent need to supersede me 
   
   
4. Could it be humanly possible that their scurrilous letter was born of unbearable resentment and frustration  that they "coulda, shoulda, woulda" thought of the "Neurodiversity" buzzword first themselves?  But didn't.

I am not hard to find, and indeed Chapman has contacted me by video conference in the past. I need hardly point out that it is so much easier to libel a fellow scholar if you don't have to "look them in the eye" (In the case of autistics who, like myself, can have difficulty with eye-contact, I mean "at least be in the presence of the accused, by whatever means, whether video, audio or otherwise").

The Blume Issue:

I attribute the constant accreditation off the term Neurodiversity to American freelance journalist  Harvey Blume to what I like to call "a potent cocktale" (sic) of sexism and north-centricism. Perhaps it is difficult for northerners to believe that southern hemisphere people, and female to boot, are capable of coming up with big ideas all by ourselves!

If the authors had made even the slightest effort to contact me before thundering in to discredit me, or had they shown even a modicum of common sense, they might have learned some basic facts. Including that I have retained  my correspondence with Harvey Blume, which shows, unsurprisingly,  that he knew nothing about disability politics, and learned the term "neurodiversity" from me. It is galling that Blume often gets equal billing with me in the history of Neurodiversity, when he was simply a freelance journalist specialising in interviewing literary figures, who happened to learn the term from me in online and phone conversations. 

Blume wrote on the topic of “autistics in cyberspace” once or twice, a quarter century ago (!),  then moved on to chase other rabbits. 

Meanwhile, this was my life's work, born out of great hardship and struggle, and written in 1998 because I didn't want others affect by Autism to have to endure the same. 

Amateur sources e.g. Wikipedia

I blame Wikipedia and its amateur editors. But so much more culpable are those lazy academics who use Wikipedia as a research authority.

I would hope the academic authors have not been relying on Wikipedia's nameless and self-appointed northern "editors" and their dubious qualifications - if these people have any. These amateurs have been playing around with my entry for going on 3 decades now. I long ago gave up trying to set the record straight with them. 

It seems to be 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! 

Nor do journalistic ethics or the laws of defamation appear to daunt the Wikipedia crew. Hardly surprising,  since they well know that defamation cases can only be afforded by corporations and billionaires. 

Follow up with Sage

My detailed refutation of the  authors’ self-serving claims is currently with the editor of Sage Publications, Kerry Barner. Despite my extensive documention, she has refused my request to withdraw the authors’ scurrilous letter. However she has offered space for me to refute them. Great! I am in my 70s.  I am supposed to be cleaning up my affairs aka "Swedish Death Cleaning". Thanks’ to Barner’s intransigence, am I to spend my remaining time on this earth on refuting these despicable calumnies? It appears that while liars can say anything they damn well please, their victims have to be absolutely meticulous, because those who are driven by envy and malice will make a mountain out of a molehill of the tiniest ambiguity.  I has taken months out of my life already just to write this blog piece in accessible language. 

As I have said previously in this blog, with reference to Dekker's calumnies: 

 

A lie will travel around the world  while the truth is putting its boots on

Whether the six authors’s allegations are deliberately made in bad faith, or simply based on wishful thinking cherry-picked from social media gossip is irrelevant.

Ignorance of the laws of defamation is not a legal excuse. We are meant to have an innate moral and ethical sense! Luckily for the six authors, I can't afford a lawyer

 

And so much for Solidarity and Collegiality
in the Neurodivergent Community!

* Libel is a defamatory statement that is written. Slander is a defamatory statement that is oral.

** Excuse the Freudian Slip. It's the truth though. Also, I'm aware that several members of this crew are female. The feminist concept of false consciousness is relevant. It may feel more powerful and useful to side with the dominant group.    

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

APPENDIX 

Note for the academically minded

This is a personal blog article, I have not written this letter in high flown academese, which posits itself as "pure fact without emotional bias". As a sociologist, and in accordance with the views of feminist sociology, I have long critiqued the actual impossibility of  "what epistemologists have called the false objectivity of the stance of positivist social research, which they dub “the view from nowhere” (Haraway, 1991, Thesis P21 ). Feminist philosophers like Sandra Harding  have instead insisted that researchers must reveal their biases their standpoints, in what can be called “a view from somewhere”. (ibid) 

. 

Positioning myself: I am

• an adult biological female
• the 3rd of at least 4 generations of autistic women
• a shy, nerdy child, a born outsider diagnosed after nearly 50 years only when Asperger Syndrome was recognised in the 1990s 

I built on that legacy to write the first sociological exploration of the rise of what I called "a new social movement based on neurological diversity", in the course of which I coined the term "Neurodiversity" to suggest a catchy banner term for that movement. 

References

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.

Book

Singer, J. (2016) NeuroDiversity: The birth of an idea. Kindle version. Retrievable from Amazon https://www.amazon.com/NeuroDiversity-Birth-Idea-Judy-Singer /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