Minding Theory of Mind

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Minding Theory of Mind
Melanie Yergeau and Bryce Huebner
Theory of Mind. The theory that some minds can’t know the minds of those who
invented Theory of Mind; even though the minds who invented Theory of Mind can’t
know the minds of those who lack Theory of Mind, they do not lack Theory of Mind
because, dude, they invented Theory of Mind. Synonyms: Borat’s cousin, circumlocution
Many philosophers who discuss the relationship between Theory of Mind

(ToM) and autism adopt an uncritical medicalized perspective, assuming that
autism is best characterized as an inability to understand other minds and a cor-
responding inability to genuinely empathize (e.g., Carruthers 1996; Andrews
2002; Kennett 2002; Goldman 2006; Barnbaum, 2008; Adams 2011, 2013).
They typically note that “autism is a spectrum” to distance themselves from the
exclusionary practices that often accompany this medicalized perspective, some-
times acknowledging that an unjustified fear of autism motivates the antivacci-
nation movement. But these claims feel hollow and mechanical,1 and the
assertion that autistic minds are essentially socially impaired persists unabated.
More troublingly, these kinds of platitudes serve to sustain micropolitical practi-
ces that exclude autistic voices from the study of autistic minds, in particular,
and the study of sociality, more broadly. Generally speaking, the rhetoric that
surrounds autism serves to delimit a highly significant political boundary
between normal and pathological minds.
Our aim is to think together about the philosophical and political issues that
arise in examining the relationship between social cognition and autism. Our
methodology is somewhat unconventional: we have constructed this article as a
conversation, in hopes that our exchange of ideas will open new possibilities
that have previously gone unrecognized. We occupy distinct disciplinary posi-
tions with respect to the subject matter of our conversation, as well as diverging
standpoints in our relationships to autistic identity and community. Our conver-
sation, as it were, takes as its model emerging, interdisciplinary work in disabil-
ity studies on narrative and the social construction of scientific knowledge
(Savarese and Zunshine, 2014). Over the course of the article, we discuss the
scientific rhetoric regarding ToM, its tendency to foster a medicalized under-
standing of autism, and its support for the assumption that ToM is a unitary
capacity that distinguishes humans from other animals. Our conversation like-
wise addresses the ways that this understanding of ToM promotes dehumaniza-
tion and social exclusion, as well as a logic of deficit. Against this backdrop, we
JOURNAL of SOCIAL PHILOSOPHY, Vol. 48 No. 3, Fall 2017, 273–296.

C 2017 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
V
274 Melanie Yergeau and Bryce Huebner
suggest that essentialist understandings of ToM reveal a limited theory of other

minds—one that privileges neurotypical minds and ignores all others, while
simultaneously working to deny, undermine, and delegitimize autistic concepts
of identity and community.
Bryce (BH): I am a philosopher of cognitive science. Melanie (MY) is an
autistic rhetorician. We both realize that many readers of this philosophy journal
will be unaware of the theoretical and rhetorical issues that arise in discussions
of autism. So, we will begin with a brief discussion of the term theory of mind
(ToM) and its association with autism. I will start with the story as it is typically
told, but we will problematize this story over the course of the article by work-
ing through its propagandistic and ideological effects.
The initial discussions of ToM took place in comparative psychology.
David Premack and Guy Woodruff asked (1978): “Does the chimpanzee have a
theory of mind?” Premack and Woodruff were trying to determine whether
chimpanzees draw inferences about mental states, and whether these inferences
hang together as a unified theory of other minds. The initial data did suggest that
chimpanzees had a robust understanding of other minds. But subsequent experi-
ments tempered this claim, revealing significant limitations in the socio-
cognitive abilities of these apes. Chimpanzees can figure out what others can
see, and they can draw some inferences about what their competitors are aware
of. But they do not seem to appreciate the possibility of false beliefs, and they
struggle with forms of cooperation that require understanding the needs and
interests of others (Call and Tomasello 2008). There is a broad consensus that
chimpanzees lack a “fully human” theory of minds, and that they primarily rep-
resent others’ motives to guide strategic interactions over food and mates.
So, what is a “fully human” theory of minds? To begin with, one can attri-
bute true beliefs just by understanding the world; but attributing false beliefs
requires understanding how a person represents the world, as well as recogniz-
ing that they can do so in a way that differs from how the world is. By the age of
five, most human children have developed the ability to reliably attribute false
beliefs to others; but even younger children are able to solve sociocognitive and
cooperative tasks that even highly trained chimpanzees would struggle with.
Most humans acquire sociocognitive abilities that allow them to represent others
as thinkers with little overt instruction, along a relatively stable developmental
trajectory. These facts have led some philosophers and cognitive scientists to
suggest that ToM may be a distinctively human capacity, which distinguishes us
from other animals.
Since the mid-1980s, it has also been suggested that autistic children have a
ToM deficit.2 In a paper entitled “Does the Autistic Child Have a ‘Theory of
Mind’?” Simon Baron-Cohen, Alan Leslie, and Uta Frith (1985) reported that
typically developing children and children with Down syndrome acquired ToM
capacities along the same developmental trajectory, while autistic children, even
those with” high IQs,” failed to attribute (false) beliefs to others. On this basis,
they conclude that autistic children do not possess ToM capacities and suggested
Minding Theory of Mind 275
that autism is a dysfunction that yields “an inability to represent mental states”
(Baron-Cohen et al. 1985, 143). This deficit is thought to be wide-ranging,
although precisely where the deficit lies has remained a matter of scientific
contention.
The subsequent literature has become more subtle about both what is denied
and what is attributed to autistic people. Some psychologists have recognized
that false belief tasks are not an adequate measure of sociocognitive capacities
more broadly (Bloom and German 2000). Many cognitive scientists have recog-
nized that autistics often succeed in false belief tasks and that many of them dis-
play capacities that are indicative of ToM capacities. In a recent review paper,
Shaun Gallagher and Somogy Varga (2015) have examined the disputes, incon-
sistent data, and conceptual issues that arise in discussions of the relationships
between autism and ToM. They note, for example, that a substantial minority of
autistics do acquire capacities for understanding the false beliefs of others.
Autistic children that have verbal abilities comparable to a neurotypical 12-
year-old easily attribute false beliefs to others (Fisher, Happe, and Dunn 2005).
So-called “high-functioning” autistics and neurotypical peers often perform sim-
ilarly on advanced ToM tasks—second-order false beliefs, emotional display
rules, double bluffs, faux pas, and sarcasm—and adolescents consistently out-
perform children in both groups (Scheeren et al. 2013), suggesting that at least
some autistics possess capacities for engaging in sophisticated forms of mental
state reasoning. Finally, “high-functioning” autistics have displayed explicit
ToM performance that is comparable to neurotypical performance, even where
they still fail to track false beliefs implicitly (using eye-gaze as a measure) after
a brief training period (Schneider et al. 2013). Yet, it is still common to suggest
that autism is a pathological form of mind blindness (Carruthers 1996; Baron-
Cohen 1997), which affects self-referential cognition and empathy (Lombardo
et al. 2007; Uddin 2011), spontaneous imagination (Harris and Leevers 2000),
and the ability to interpret behavioral signals that underwrite cooperation and
sociality (Holt et al. 2014). Autistics are also thought to have difficulties under-
standing the difference between intentional and accidental harms (Moran et al.
2011), and to have problems understanding more complex kinds of intentional
action, especially when actions are done for instrumental reasons (cf. Zalla et al.
2009; Machery and Zalla 2014). According to the standard story, autistics lack
many of the sociocognitive capacities that make humans unique. Some autistics
may be able to compensate for these deficits, but autism is essentially a social
impairment that must be overcome if one is to live a “normal” life.
Across a wide range of situations, people have been described as ape-like
and less-than-human to exclude and marginalize their perspectives (David Liv-
ingstone Smith 2011). I see this common form of dehumanization tacitly
deployed in discussions of autism. But most neurotypical people will probably
find it hard to believe that the use of this trope affects the lives of autistic people.
So, perhaps, Melanie you can say something about your work on the rhetoric of
ToM, and how it shapes the assumptions people make about autism?
Melanie (MY): As you mention, Bryce, the dehumanizing propensities of

ToM rhetoric are often tacit, and the impact that ToM theories have on autistic
lives are infrequently considered in clinical contexts. In order to understand how
and why theories about ToM wreak violence on autistic people, scholars would
need to imagine what it must be like to be autistic—a task at which scholars
have sorely failed. In many respects, the treatment of autistic activists in public
policy discourse serves as an apt example. Autistic advocates frequently agitate
for civil rights, community living supports, and equitable representation in pub-
lic affairs. On its face, I would imagine most readers would find these to be rea-
sonable issues for activist engagement. And yet, frequently these campaigns—
whether waged via Twitter, on the IACC3, or in a local op-ed—devolve into
nonautistic people claiming that the autistic activists in question lack empathy
(because they are too “high-functioning,” because they ask for too much,
because they are too autistic to understand how burdensome their condition is
on the body politic, etc.).
In order to capture ToM’s many rhetorical and material violences, I find it
important to deconstruct the rhetorical stances that scientists and clinicians fre-
quently adopt. They condemn autistics to lives of rigid, asocial thinking, to lives
bereft of cognitive empathy and imagination. Uta Frith (2003) has gone so far as
to claim that autistic people’s universal impairment is an “absent self,” an
impairment that includes correlative impairments in mentalizing, executive
function, and central coherence. And yet, despite claiming these characteristics
as autistic (and thereby pathological), scientists demonstrate a number of these
characteristics themselves. Within ToM literature, there is persistent failure to
account for logical gaps and fallacies when it comes to the question of autistic
minds. Time and again, autistic people have performed in ways that contradict
the verdict that autistics are mindblind. As you note, Bryce, many autistics have
passed false-belief assessments (Bara, Bucciarelli, and Colle 2001; Lind and
Bowler 2009). But even in the face of such evidence, scientists refuse to cede
ground. We are claimed to pass false-belief tasks, variously, because we hack or
reason through the rules of the test rather than organically understand concep-
tions of false belief (Frith and Happe 1999); because we are not significantly
impaired enough to properly call ourselves autistic, and thus ToM deficits are
universal but simultaneously a matter of degree (Lombardo et al. 2007); because
we have learned, through natural (albeit delayed) development, what this test
aims to measure (Tager-Flusberg 2000).
So too have many autistics written autobiographies (or written autobio-
graphically), demonstrating significant introspection, imagination, and aware-
ness of minds outside our own—all elements that are supposedly dependent on
ToM and that autistics supposedly lack. As autistic poet N. I. Nicholson (2011)
notes, poetic craft and character development require audience awareness, and
autistic writers, regardless of age or support needs, routinely engage in such
meta-representational acts. Despite these examples, autistic people are still
denied the right to claim a theory of not only nonautistic minds, but even a
theory of our own minds. That is, we are assumed to lack any theory of any
mind. Ours is not a sociality, not even a sociality of one, because our ToM
impairments are presumed to foreclose access to self-awareness, self-concept,
and identity; for, how can one possess any of these things if their selfhood is
absent? With the aforementioned, I do not mean to suggest that researchers
claim autistics lack sentience—although, some people do certainly argue this,
unfortunately. Rather, self-awareness and identity often congeal in relation to
narrative capacity within ToM literature. There is something profoundly human,
to invoke Jerome Bruner (1991), about telling oneself into being. Humans tell
stories; our lives accrue meanings based on how we tell or construct those lives.
In this regard, memory is as much a cognitive function as a narrative one. For
“telling a life,” to borrow from G. Thomas Couser (2008), requires a narrator to
have some concept of what other minds might wish to be told. However, in these
constructions, autistic tellings are regarded as non-tellings or idiosyncratic tell-
ings, the kind of tellings that nonautistic minds find irrelevant, pedantic, acon-
textual, perseverative, or unornate. Often, studies of the narrative capacities of
autistic people extrapolate verdicts of ToM impairment from writerly phenom-
ena that could just as well be explained by other cultural or individual differ-
ences: autistic people have been found to use fewer words that indicate mental
states (Bang, Burns, and Nadig 2013); autistic people may use fewer personal
pronouns when relating a story (Colle et al. 2008); studies have also claimed
that autistic people either provide too much or not enough contextual informa-
tion in their personal narratives (McCabe, Hillier, and Shapiro 2013). And yet,
these are subjective findings that are also damningly evaluative in their judge-
ments—moving swiftly from an observation of communicative difference and
insisting that difference is indicative of empathic impairment.
To be clear, one of ToM literature’s more pernicious commonplaces is the
appeal to the human. Peter Mitchell (1997), for instance, wrote a theory of mind
book whose subtitle read, quite simply, Children, Autism, and Apes. The separa-
tion between (human) children and autistic (children) has long bothered me. But
the appeal to the human is more pervasive in ToM literature than in mere subti-
tles. Repeatedly, we are told that ToM is a human capacity; storytelling is how
humans construct lives; verbal ability, and pretense, and imagination, and on
and on—these are all framed as uniquely human capacities. And, overwhelm-
ingly, these are the capacities which the autistic is claimed to lack. Rarely will a
scholar directly claim that autistics are not human. Nevertheless, when leading
autism researchers claim ToM as “one of the quintessential abilities that makes
us human” (Baron-Cohen 1997, 3), I do not find it a far stretch to infer that col-
leagues in philosophy, psychology, or narratology believe me and my kind less
than human.
Were I to return to autistics and autobiography, there would be a great deal
to say, for autistics have written a wealth of material since Temple Grandin’s
(1986) Emergence. Although there has been an upwelling of trade- and self-
published autistic life writing over the past two decades, autistic compositions
have been largely regarded as exceptions rather than norms (Hacking 2009). In
some manner, this might be true: there are many autistic people who do not
write by means of alphabetic text, and they constitute a major and vibrant com-
ponent of our community. But when I refer to exceptionalism here, I am invok-
ing the myth that autistic people who compose are somehow extraordinary,
savantistic, or “recovered” (Rimland 1994; Sidonie Smith 1996). In disability
studies scholarship, we refer to this caricature as the “super crip,” who by virtue
of completing mundane tasks while disabled is somehow warranting of super-
hero status. When autistic life writing, then, is deemed “exceptional,” it is fre-
quently deemed non-autistic in some qualitative way—as though nothing that is
modified by autistic could conceivably be described as imaginative, engaging,
or worthwhile. Exceptionality also discounts the merits and transferability of
what autistic people write, and theories about ToM are typically used in direct
service of this discounting. If autistic life writers are so exceptional, then does it
matter when we write a life? That is, what insight is there to be gleaned from the
exceptional, from the super crip, from the “shiny aspie”? (Heilker 2012).
Another strategy—and one far more indebted to ToM—involves finding
fault between the covers of any autistic text. This approach is, in a word,
symptom-hunting. Rather than engage a text rhetorically, scientists and clini-
cians instead approach autistic life writing as textual exemplars of impaired
ToM modules. They often begin from the premise that autistic people lack a
ToM, and, when confronted with data that suggest the contrary, instead modify
their theories about ToM in order to reconfirm the idea that autistics lack it, or
find ways to discount the evidence in order to preserve their hypothesis.
Researchers have variously claimed that autistic life writing is only readable or
enjoyable because it was subject to long-suffering neurotypical editors (Jurecic
2007); that autistic life writers lack introspective abilities because they do not
offer all of the personal, juicy details that a neurotypical readership wants to
know most (Happe 1991); that autistic life writers demonstrate profound audi-
ence unawareness because their stories are too detailed or read like technical
manuals; that autistic life writers are egocentric by mere virtue of writing about
autism, their own condition; and so forth.
My point in the above is not to suggest that autobiographical writing is
equivalent in transferability to, say, empirical or longitudinal research. How-
ever, the ways in which scientists (and even humanists) engage autie-biography
is distinctly different, and far more pathological, than neurotypical-authored life
writing. Theories about ToM empower scholars to claim autie-biography as ego-
centric, as though neurotypical life writing were not.
BH: Many philosophers of science have acknowledged that value systems
play a critical role in shaping the patterns of data that scientists attend to (Doug-
las 2009; Lloyd 2009; Longino 1990; 2013). I think that your claims about self-
knowledge, human nature, and narrativity help to show how the ideological
structures that are built into the science about autism affect the patterns neuro-
typical people attend to outside the lab. These ideologies affect decisions about
which questions will receive research time and money, and these judgments
have downstream effects on both scientific practice and on the attitudes that are
taken up toward autistic people, who are then categorized as exhibiting abnor-
mal, dysfunctional, or pathological behavior. I think that this is an important
insight, as it can also help us to think about how to move beyond attitudes of
exclusion and marginalization.
As we search for ways to make sense of the world we encounter, we often
impose normative and ideological constraints on the information we attend to,
as well as the information we will ignore. Unsurprisingly, how we filter informa-
tion matters. But we have some forward-looking control over the kind of filter-
ing we are going to rely on; by listening to other perspectives, and by trying to
understand the problematic effects of our current ideological assumptions, we
can sometimes find better ways to organize our investigations and better ways of
understanding the world we live in (Anderson 2006; Biddle and Kukla 2017).
Ideology will always be at play, but we can think critically about which kinds of
ideology we want to rely on in guiding our investigations of the shared world
we all inhabit (Haslanger 2000; Barnes 2016). So, I think you are right to criti-
cally target questions about what it means to be human, and what it means to be
self-aware. Your discussion helps to draw out a frequently unquestioned ideo-
logical structure, which initially looks like “objective” scientific reasoning, but
quickly leads neurotypical people to see autism as something that must either be
treated as a deficit, or as an advantage. This way of framing scientific data seems
to compel us to think of neurotypical capacities as the default, instead of starting
from a perspective that treats difference as primitive and pervasive.
I think that treating ToM as a relatively modular capacity, and autism as a
deficit or a dysfunction in this capacity, leads us toward an essentializing and
dehumanizing political ideology that crystallizes as a form of “neuroprivilege.”4
This is consistent with what you’re saying, but it is important to highlight just
how detached this ideology is from “objective” scientific data. The ideology of
deficit shapes the collection and evaluation of data; and the interpretation of the
data confirm the accuracy of the ideology (thus providing ideological support
for the ideology of deficit). This is a problem, because even when people start
from neurodiverse sources of data, like those in autistic writing, they often end
up suggesting that autism must either be seen as a deficit or as an advantage (but
not too much of an advantage, since it is still a disorder). They often place autis-
tic neurodivergence within the framework of neuroprivilege; this reveals a neu-
rotypical failure of empathy (einfuhlung, feeling another’s perspective), as well
as a failure to understand that different kinds of human minds do not all fall
along a neatly ordered hierarchical spectrum. It may seem strange for me to
claim that neurotypical people lack empathy and a robust theory of other minds.
After all, it’s often claimed that the core autistic deficit is the inability to under-
stand the mental lives of others, and a relegation to thinking about the world
from their own perspective. But when neurotypical people interpret autistics as
superhuman or subhuman, they are failing to see that other minds can differ
from there on in countless ways. As Victoria McGeer (2009, 524) puts this
point, “We do not directly perceive their subjective experiences as expressed in
their behaviour any more than they perceive ours. They are blind to our minds,
but so too are we blind to theirs.” Most neurotypical people have an easier time
thinking about minds that are more like their own; and by using neurotypical
capacities as fixed reference points, and assuming that every variation must be
better or worse than neurotypicality, difference can be made more intelligible.
But this leads us to mistake typicality for ethical normality, and, as the history
of dehumanization shows, this is a very dangerous thing. This is the point where
I think that we should think about what kind of ideology we want to rely on in
guiding our investigations of the shared world we all inhabit.
MY: I completely agree. Going further, spectra are what might be termed
“master tropes” (Burke 1941) of disability. For instance, functioning labels
embody one destructive kind of spectral hierarchizing. Even though clinicians
posit functioning as a matter of degree (e.g., there are infinite traversals between
“low” and “high”), degree is rather immaterial. First, degree doesn’t escape
dichotomy. Even when a person is deemed “high-functioning” and has suppos-
edly fewer ToM impairments than someone deemed “low-functioning,” that per-
son is still effectually disqualified from rhetorical citizenship. Put another way,
possessing even a “mildly impaired” ToM renders the autistic person as lacking
capacity to participate fully in a number of political and rhetorical domains. Fur-
thermore, as autistic activists have been arguing for the past two decades, these
pairings of mild/severe, low/high, and even Asperger/autism work to dehuman-
ize all autistic people (Brown 2012; Kim 2015).
Returning to notions of advantage versus deficit, the idea of functioning
unto itself is distinctly neoliberal (Tremain 2005; Siebers 2008; Murray 2010;
McRuer 2012; Fritsch 2015). Disability studies has long problematized the ways
in which binarized discourses (such as mild/severe) work to frame disability in
relation to worth. Patronizing terms like handicapable, for instance, set disabled
people against the presumed incapability of handicap and likewise suggest that
one’s capacity to produce stands in direct conflict with level of disability. The
less disabled one is, the more one can economically contribute to the body poli-
tic (or so the logic goes). In her work on race and disability, Jasbir Puar (2009)
suggests that disability-as-concept in many respects fails to account for the ways
in which neoliberalism subjugates certain bodies, especially those that are
racialized or traumatized. In particular, Puar argues that neoliberal regimes
impose wellness by encouraging individuals to engage in routinized forms of
self-governance. All bodies are debilitated in some ways and capacitated in
others; we are always trying to attain an impossible self-perfection, as if health
were a commodity.
Victoria Pitts-Taylor (2010) and Davi Thornton (2011) pose critiques of
neoliberal approaches to health that are resonant of Puar’s debility/capacity
framework. Their work is pointedly brain-focused. More specifically, they
examine discourses of neuroplasticity and the ways in which lay publics are
bombarded with incitements to “train” their brains toward capitalistic ends. If

our brains are plastic, or potentially and infinitely malleable, then we are com-
pelled to self-improve. We are exhorted, both tacitly and overtly, to become
more efficient, resourceful, and timesaving workers, to become the best brains
that we can be.
And so, enters autism, and functioning, and ToM. I think we have both
made clear how autistics are falsely presumed to possess many a ToM impair-
ment. In concordance with these theories about ToM, a series of rehabilitative
enterprises have emerged, bearing the assumption that autism—and its respec-
tive ToM impairments—is potentially improvable. What’s so key about Puar’s
debility/capacity framework is that, under neoliberalism, one is never capaci-
tated enough. A doctor may deem me “high-functioning,” but in being deemed
high-functioning, I will never be high-functioning enough. (Nor will I ever be
just plain functioning). Improvement is its own Zeno’s paradox, wherein autis-
tics have infinite traversals between autism and neurotypicality, or debility and
capacity. Enter applied behavior analysis, cognitive behavior therapy, occupa-
tional therapy, speech-language therapy, sensory integration therapy, and social
skills curricula. Theory of mind is a multidomain capacity, a module whose
modularity belies its complexity. Researchers research ToM, in large part, to
develop, target, and cultivate interventions that improve or eradicate the condi-
tion of being autistic. If I want to develop a concept of others’ mental states,
then I require a host of interventions to help me hack what it means to have a
sociality. ToM is not simply about me and my (lack of) cognitive modules. It is
also about job creation.
When autistic brains are framed as always-improvable, as that which
requires perpetual intervention, autistic difference becomes fetishized (Mallett
and Runswick-Cole 2012). Autism might endow one with so-called talent, but
that talent is generally only viewed as talent if it can be harnessed in a manner
deemed socially appropriate to and by neurotypicals. What’s more, where so-
called talent and autism converge is often where they diverge: discussions of tal-
ent are usually buttressed with the words despite autism rather than because of
autism. Autism is rarely conceived as a causal of talent, unless that talent can be
economically capitalized.5 However, as autism is commonly understood as a
pathology requiring always-improvement, talent will never be enough for
autism.6 Autistic people cannot exist on their own terms; our tragedy is that we
lack a ToM, which means that we lack understanding of both how amazing and
how pitiful our minds are.
BH: This seems exactly right to me. There do seem to be political and eco-
nomic values lurking behind the standard way of thinking about autism by think-
ing about deficits, failings, and abnormalities. I think these points add depth to a
set of perspectives that are rapidly becoming more common in social epistemol-
ogy (Biddle and Kukla 2017). There is a misguided approach to the philosophy
of science, which tacitly assumes that scientific language is sensitive only to
“facts” that exist independently of power, ideology, and social practice. Were
that the case, focusing on rhetoric and ideology would constitute a retreat from
“objectivity,” and a capitulation to a radical form of social constructivism that
rejects the value of scientific data. But scientific practice is not value-free. Ideo-
logical filtering is always at play in the collection and evaluation of scientific
data (Harding 1992; Scheman 2001; Kukla and Ruetsche 2002; Daston and Gali-
son 2007). But there is an analogue to this misguided philosophy of science that
funds hostility toward discussions of neurodiversity.
Neuroprivileged and neurotypical people often fail to see that the neurodi-
versity movement is concerned with the shaping of social norms, the building of
new forms of social scaffolding and power, and with changing the structure of
the world we all inhabit. No one would deny that many neurodivergent people
have social and cognitive difficulties that need to be addressed; and no one
would deny that we need to work to make sure that people do not incur addi-
tional disadvantages because they live in a world with problematic social institu-
tions. But when neurotypical people discuss autism and neurodiversity, as
outsiders who have not consulted the wide array of autistic people in our world,
they often make the mistake of assuming that scientific data are value-free, and
this leads them to suggest that the neurodiversity movement ignores scientific
facts about neurodivergent people. This is not to say that there is a unified autis-
tic perspective, there is not. But, if we are to have any hope of understanding the
neural diversity in our world, we are going to have to start taking neurodiver-
gence more seriously than we have.
In a recent blog post, the biologist Jerry Coyne (2015) asked “What Do We
Do about Neurodiversity?” Coyne is an excellent biologist, and his understand-
ing of evolution makes him sensitive to the fact that patterns of neurological var-
iation typically result from the interactions between multiple genes and multiple
environmental factors. So, he begins by acknowledging the heterogeneity in the
human species, with many kinds of differences emerging along multiple contin-
uously varying spectra. This seems to me to be the right place to start. But his
tone shifts when he moves to questions about the “suffering” that people experi-
ence and the “problems” people “actually have.” Coyne suggests that “By
accepting the condition as ‘normal,’ or writing it off as simply one segment of a
spectrum, neurodiversity advocates implicitly—and sometimes explicitly—deny
that these conditions should be cured.” There are three points where the ideol-
ogy of deficit structures this discussion: highlighting suffering, focusing on
problems, and expressing a desire for a cure. This focus suggests that acknowl-
edging biological variation, and rejecting assumptions about “normalcy,” must
yield a rampant relativism that cannot make room for politically motivated inter-
ventions to eliminate structural disadvantaging.
This type of position is common, and it is incredibly hard to shake, given
how deep the ideology of defect runs in our culture. It ignores the possibility of
acknowledging difference, acknowledging individual needs and interests, and
treating difference as a foundation for new forms of political action. I think that
the neurodiversity movement aims to open up this possibility; and rejecting it
seems like a rhetorical and ideological move that safeguards neuroprivilege and
fosters forms of social exclusion that disadvantage and disable autistic people
(and others). My inclination is to say that we should expect neurodiversity in all
human populations, and we should remain open to the possibility that neurotypi-
cal power dynamics are responsible for some of the disadvantages autistics
experience. People tend to interact differently with autistic and neurotypical
children (cf. Loveland 2001, 27), as it takes a lot of work to bridge significant
gaps between different thought patterns, even in the best cases. But we can work
to develop more informed and suitable kinds of emotional and physical support
for autistic children, and to find the kinds of educational tools that will allow
autistic kids to flourish as autistic (McGeer 2009). Of course, many autistic peo-
ple may still experience forms of anxiety, isolation, and depression, and some
may still engage in forms of self-harming behavior. These issues should be
addressed (whether they are experienced by autistic or non-autistic people), but
not in ways that are driven by a fear of autism; neurotypical people should aim
to meet autistics where they are. This will not be an easy task, given neurotypi-
cal difficulties in understanding autistic minds. But acknowledging the existence
of neurodiversity should push us to cultivate neurodiverse practices. I wonder
what you think of all of this, Melanie.
MY: I have so many responses to Coyne’s construction of neurodiversity.
But the most troubling element from his piece is the questionable idea that neu-
rodivergence is totalized by suffering. Related to the trope of perpetual suffering
is the falsehood that neurodiversity activists (or disability activists writ large)
believe that neurodivergent people should be (grossly paraphrasing here) “left
alone to rot.” One can take a stance against medicalization and the pathologiza-
tion of difference—one can even take the stance that disability represents a natu-
ral part of human being—and still advocate for social services and even some
kinds of medical support. At many junctures, autistic advocacy for medical sup-
port has often functioned as the very right to live a disabled life, and political
activism on this issue has often been in coordination with organizations such as
Not Dead Yet. Noteworthy stories have included hospital denials of organ trans-
plants for autistic and other developmentally disabled people in need of life-
saving care (Ne’eman, Kapp, and Narby 2013), as well as caregivers who mur-
der or attempt to murder their disabled children. But more than this, the issue of
medical support is not a black-and-white issue, nor is it always a life-and-death
issue. Pain is a topic frequently summoned in caregiver discourse around autism,
and yet autistic people all too infrequently have the political or cultural power to
direct conversations on how their pain is experienced or exacerbated. Therapies
that aim to “help” with such pain can create or exponentialize pain. For exam-
ple, during a 2014 panel on electric shock therapy convened by the U.S. Food
and Drug Administration (FDA), attendees questioned whether autistics could
even feel pain—thus advocating that shocking autistic children was not immoral
(FDA 2014).
But more than raising questions about medicine or pain as integrative physi-
ological issues, it is interesting to me as well that Coyne’s hostility emerges
from (and is sustained by) presuppositions that the Other (in this case, the neuro-
divergent Other) argues from neurodiversity stances because she is, in a word,
insane. It’s almost as though disability rights discourses get taken up symptomo-
logically, that is, “You see disability as crucial to your identity? Wow, you must
really be disabled (but not that disabled).”
Coyne’s is an argument I have seen in many outlets. It is also an argument
that is used in service of silencing autistic people: autistic people are too autistic
to intuit neurotypical others and thereby make claims about autism that neuro-
typicals will care about; yet, they are not autistic enough to make claims about
autism as diversity or culture, because surely if they can even make a claim,
they must not have it “bad.” Being autistic is like being wedged in a rhetorical
catch-22. And this catch-22 has little to do with our neuronal makeup.
In discussing Coyne, I am reminded of an essay by Uta Frith (2014) in The
Psychologist. Frith’s piece makes acerbic claims of neurodiversity while some-
how managing not to cite anything about neurodiversity or from anyone who
identifies as neurodivergent. In addition to citing two of her own books and her
personal website, Frith’s only other bibliographic entries are Howlin et al.’s
(2014) “Cognitive and Language Skills in Adults with Autism” and Lorna
Wing’s (1996) The Autistic Spectrum. Each of these authors, including Frith, are
nonautistic. In the body of her text, Frith also invokes Freud, Rain Man, Hans
Asperger, and the DSM-5. And yet, despite being only a two-page spread, a sig-
nificant part of Frith’s essay is dedicated to what she calls “diagnostic
stretching,” which she subsequently claims is part and parcel of the neurodiver-
sity movement. In all of her defining and delimiting of neurodiversity activism,
Frith fails to engage with a single autistic person in her essay. Her invocation of
neurodiversity activists, instead, revolves around phrases such as “these people”
and “these individuals”—and, following that, a series of rhetorical constructions
that work both to delimit and overhype the autistickness of “these individuals.”
Some choice examples:
“these individuals should be classified as having ‘autistic-like personali-

ties’ rather than an autism spectrum disorder” (Frith 2014, 745);
“perfectly neurotypical people like the idea that they—or one of their neu-
rotypical friends—may be a ‘little bit autistic’” (745); and
“these individuals do not have a medical condition. They may feel differ-
ent from other people, but aren’t we all different and don’t we all have
our problems?” (745).
Frith uses the above caricatures of autistic activists—again, none of whom

she has cited—as a means of contrasting her own vision of true autism, and
thereby the truly autistic: “people with autism really have a very different mind
and different brain” (2014, 745). And although she claims that neurodiversity-
affirming autistics are insufficiently autistic, she simultaneously asserts the

reverse: Neurodiversity-affirming autistics are so shrouded by their autism that
they fail to understand the profound rhetorical impact that their autism has on
their self-identification. These are the rhetorical funhouses that ToM rhetorics
and neuroprivilege more generally sustain.
BH: Patterns of deindividualization and dehumanization seem to pervade
discussions about what it “really means” to be autistic. I guess that is not a sur-
prise. Treating someone as less than human, or as one of “those people,” tends
to generate psychological distance and encourage the adoption of a spectatorial
stance, which precludes understanding autistic people as participants in shared
activities.7 From a spectatorial stance, neurodiversity is something to be
explained and managed, not something to be understood as part of the range of
human possibilities. The neurodiversity paradigm tries to disrupt this ideology,
but the adoption of a spectatorial stance makes it hard for neurotypical people to
give uptake to neurodiverse perspectives.
Consider a recent article in the Atlantic Monthly called “Autism’s Hidden
Gifts.” In this article, Olga Khazan (2015) attempts to move beyond the assump-
tion that autistic “skills are always impractical and unconnected to ‘real’
intellect,” and to show that “even autistic people who seem, at first glance, to be
profoundly disabled might actually be gifted in surprising ways” (Khazan 2015).
Unlike Coyne and Frith, she acknowledges that advantage and disadvantage are
socially situated, and that they can vary independently of one another; and she
notes that a child with robust social difficulties may still have skills in other
domains, which could be cultivated if we were to attend to them early in develop-
ment. But this way of framing things is troubling. While Khazan acknowledges
neurodiversity, she interprets autistic neurodivergence within a framework of neu-
roprivilege: her claims about gifts and “real intellect” express precisely the kind
of neoliberal ideology you have mentioned above, Melanie. Moreover, by arguing
that autistic lives are just as worthwhile as neurotypical lives, Khazan ends up
relying on a view of what it means to have a worthwhile life, which frames human
possibilities in terms of the hegemonic value structure of neuroprivilege. This is a
pitfall that neurotypical discussions must be careful to avoid.
More positively, Khazan’s piece also directs readers to research carried out in
Laurent Mottron’s lab, showing that autistic and neurotypical brains tend to focus
on different sources of information. Mottron and his colleagues suggest that this
often yields divergent patterns of expertise, at least partly as the result of differ-
ences in learning histories. I do not want to oversell the value of this research, as
it no doubt runs afoul of its own self-imposed rhetorical and ideological limita-
tions. But Mottron and his colleagues are doing something right. They rely on a
neurodiverse team, which includes autistic researchers, to find ways of approach-
ing scientific questions that would otherwise be missed. More importantly, this
neurodiverse team can frame their results in ways that treat difference as primary,
instead of focusing on forms of divergence from neurotypicality. As they put this
point in an early paper, “autistic cognitive atypicalities are more accurately
described as an entirely different processing system, rather than as a collection of

negative cascade effects resulting from one or many major impairments (excesses
or deficits) impeding typical processing and development” (Mottron, Dawson,
and Soulières 2009, 1385; also cited in Saverese and Zunshine 2014, 19).
Studies from Mottron’s lab have shown that some autistic people are faster
at solving some kinds of problems, faster at processing some kinds of complex
visual patterns, and more accurate in recalling the details of some kinds of past
events (note all the qualifications!). These capacities do not show up in studies
that were designed by neurotypical people to investigate neurotypical minds;
and these studies therefore help to reveal patterns of neurotypical deficits, which
were not previously acknowledged because neurotypical people failed to enter-
tain neurodivergent possibilities and relied exclusively on a theory of neurotypi-
cal minds. I do not think that it is surprising that a neurotypical perspective on
scientific inquiry yields a narrowed understanding of the possibilities that the
biological world affords, and a highly circumscribed understanding of what it
means to be a person. Given our discussion thus far, I think we should expect
most research to express the ideology of deficit that is used to disadvantage, con-
trol, and exclude autistic people. But these data suggest that neurotypical people
have an impoverished theory of the kinds of minds that exist in our world. And
since nonautistics do not really understand what it is like to be autistic, we end
up framing claims about autism in ways that depend on values and ideals that
need to be dismantled if science is to proceed in a way that understands neurodi-
vergence as divergence.
MY: This ideology of deficit, as you so aptly phrased it, is something that
autistic activists routinely decry. One of my favorite emerging autistic bloggers
is Sam Harvey (2015), whose blog, Antleader’s Journey, deconstructs theories
about ToM. Among other items, Harvey questions whether a lack of ToM is of
necessity a bad thing. Ultimately, he comes to the conclusion that theories about
ToM perpetrate real violence on marginal subjects. Following the work of
Gernsbacher and Frymiare (2005), Harvey lists nonautistic others who have
likewise been claimed to have impaired ToM: deaf people, blind people, indige-
nous peoples, and poor people, among others—people for whom claims of dis-
empathy have wrought significant cultural and personal strife. And yet, in spite
of these violent figurations, Harvey considers what having no ToM might mean
in terms of potentiality. Harvey suggests that lacking a ToM could imply an
excess of empathy rather than the lack to which so many scholars lay claim, for
lacking a theory of others minds could result in having an underdeveloped the-
ory of one’s own mind, and thus a propensity toward nonbias and generosity.
What Harvey poses here is a substitutional theory of cognitive empathy, one
that brushes up against some of the theory-theory and simulationist theories that
dominate ToM literature in philosophy and psychology. Notably, the idea that
lacking a theory of other minds might bend toward divergent kinds of empathies
stands in direct contrast to neurotypical imaginings of ToM paucity. Alison
Gopnik (1993) will be forever famous, I think, for maintaining that
mindblindness means seeing other bodies as bags of skin rather than as cohesive,
human wholes (as cited in Baron-Cohen 1997, 4–5). There is also John Horgan’s
(1999) portrait of mindblindness in The Undiscovered Mind, wherein the author
asserts that autistics “often seem to make no fundamental distinction between
humans and inanimate objects, such as tables and chairs” (228). Whereas Har-
vey’s exercise seeks to underscore autistic people’s cunning methods of imagin-
ing other minds, Gopnik and Horgan exocitize the autistic Other, emphasizing
just how far from the human the autistic can be.
Dehumanization impacts us on a number of political levels. If we are not
considered fully human—if we are indeed missing a core human capacity in
missing a ToM—then autistic “inclusion” in public life can never move beyond
mere tokenism (Erevelles 2011). We might find one such example of tokenism
at work in Advancing Futures for Adults with Autism (AFAA), a consortium
headed, in part, by Autism Speaks. In 2009, AFAA hosted a series of town hall
meetings across the United States. In one recounting of the town halls, a writer
for the Autistic Self Advocacy Network condemned both the lack of autistic
presence and participation in the events (Anonymous 2009). In particular, he
lamented AFAA’s tokenistic gestures, noting, “The central site in Chicago,
seemingly desperate to show a person with autism ‘participating,’ allowed an
autistic to read [a] sentence” about the town hall’s “five-year vision plan” (n.p.).
This particular example—wherein autistic inclusion is packaged as cutesy
afterthought or as merely ornamental to the “real” work of autism advocacy—is
not an isolated phenomenon. Autism organizations frequently assume that hav-
ing an autistic person physically present in a room is evidence enough of inclu-
sion or systems change. In 2012, for instance, Autism Speaks held its first
national conference in Columbus, Ohio (Autism Speaks 2012). In the conference
program, Autism Speaks noted that its intended audiences included “physicians,
psychologists, nurses, allied health professionals, educators, behavioral thera-
pists and other professionals, individuals on the autism spectrum, and families
whose lives have been touched by autism” (4, emphasis added). In claiming
autistics as an intended audience, however, it becomes quickly apparent that
Autism Speaks is guilty of at least one of the following:
1. Autism Speaks does not intend autistics as an actual audience, but instead
name-drops autistics to create the appearance of inclusivity;
2. Autism Speaks does indeed intend autistics as an audience, but lacks a req-
uisite theory of autistic minds and is thereby woefully unsuccessful at
meeting their target demographic.
I make the above claims of Autism Speaks’s intentions because their con-
ference program does not engage autistics in any substantive way. None of the
planning committee or presenters from 2012 are identified as autistic, nor are
any of the sessions designated as targeting autistics (though they are coded, vari-
ously, as being for professionals or for family members). What’s more, the only
space in the program that might be generously read as autistic-geared is that

which involves “family events,” such as a room for young children. Notably,
these activities are marked as separate from the main conference sessions,
thereby fostering inclusion by means of segregation and infantilization. How,
one might ask, are these gestures inclusive or humanizing? In what ways are
autistic people being privileged or respected? How is the structure of this confer-
ence—replete with its “special” environments—a model of or for neurotypical
empathy?
BH: In light of these questions, I would like to conclude by appealing to a
set of distinctions suggested by Nick Walker (2013), which help to summarize
what I am taking away from this discussion.8 First, when we discuss neuordiver-
sity, we are concerned with the patterns of biological variation that arise as the
result of complex interactions between multiple genes and multiple environmen-
tal factors, including patterns of socialization and education. In accepting a Dar-
winian understanding of evolution, we should expect neurodiversity to be
prevalent in human populations (this is what Coyne acknowledges). Second, the
neurodiversity paradigm is driven by a concern with the social and institutional
power dynamics that tend to generate disadvantages—by creating forms of
inequality and oppression, and entrenching neuroprivilege and which could fos-
ter untapped forms of creative potential if diversity were embraced. Finally, and
most intriguingly, Walker posits a form of neurocosmopolitanism, which is a
way of approaching neurodiversity that refuses to “pathologize neurocognitive
styles and experiences that differ from our own, and to accept neurodiversity as
a natural, healthy, and important form of human biodiversity—a fundamental
and vital characteristic of the human species, a crucial source of evolutionary
and creative potential” (Walker 2013). To me, this seems like a powerful exten-
sion of the kind of antikyriarchical politics that many people on the political left
would like to be committed to. Neurocosmopolitanism is not just about accept-
ing diversity; it requires attempts to “actively explore, engage with, and culti-
vate human neurodiversity and its creative potentials, in a spirit of humility,
respect, and continual openness to learning and transformation” (Walker 2013).
Put somewhat differently, this is an attempt to think about difference as differ-
ence, and to think about the creative opportunities that diversity affords; indeed,
it is an attempt to think about differences horizontally, as opposed to thinking
about differences as hierarchically ordered, or as depending on a hegemonic nor-
mative structure of neuroprivilege (cf. Mills 1998, on the distinction between
horizontal and vertical understandings of difference).
It seems to me that many people who are otherwise committed to values on
the political left have a hard time thinking of difference as difference. Most of
us have grown up in a world that privileges hierarchical thinking, and this makes
it easy to impose better-or-worse or higher-or-lower frameworks on the phenom-
ena that we encounter in the world. Anything that doesn’t fit comfortably within
such a framework ends up being forced into it. And in the case of thinking about
autism, this leads people who want to do what they see as best to treat autistics
as less than fully human. In general, neurotypical people—myself included—

have no plausible theory of autistic minds, and no plausible understanding of
what it means to be autistic. So, the best we can do is to rely on the tacit rules
and theories we have learned—and this is at best an imperfect workaround. Sci-
entists, as well as popularizers, thus end up imposing an excessively narrow
understanding of what it means to be a person on autistics. To put this point
more contentiously, neurotypical people seem to have an impoverished theory
of minds—or more accurately, neurotypical people tend to be insensitive to the
variety of different kinds of minds that there are in the world.
By treating ToM as a value-free ideal or as a way of understanding what it
means to be human, people end up flattening the domain of human possibilities
in a way that is rigid, unimaginative, and bound to the concrete world of their
own experience. This leads to publicly expressed claims that disadvantage, con-
trol, and exclude autistic people from discussions about autism. This is one of
the things that I really like about the neurocosmopolitan approach: it disrupts
scientific practice from the inside, and makes it harder to conceptualize various
kinds of minds as falling along a single spectrum as opposed to populating a
multidimensional space of human possibilities. I think that neurotypical people
need a more Darwinian worldview, which treats diversity as the norm and
acknowledges that variation pervades every level of biological aggregation. We
need to stop searching for an account of normal function (Amundson 2000). We
need to adopt a more nuanced picture of diversity and recognize that human
minds can vary across multiple dimensions. Nature does not build hierarchies, it
builds constantly branching, rhizomatic structures that cross-cut one another in
multiple ways, yielding a multidimensional space of human possibility. And I
think that’s pretty damn amazing!
MY: I would like to close our conversation by returning to questions around
inclusion and respect for neurodiversity and human variation, as you frame them
above. I recently read an article by Rana el Kaliouby and Peter Robinson (2005)
titled “The Emotional Hearing Aid,” which problematically represents autism
and difference. The article focuses on a futuristic prosthetic device for autistic
children: a so-called emotional hearing aid, which is a wearable camera that
functions as a “portable” theory of mind (122). In short, the authors imagine a
world in which autistic kids are fitted with obtrusive and sensorily overwhelm-
ing devices, under the faulty premise that autistics lack the ability to recognize
that they and other people have their own unique mental states and desires. Not
only do the authors presume autistics lack a ToM; they also presume that a host
of autistic behaviors and rhetorical practices are caused by this supposed lack of
ToM, and that erasing those differences will be to the benefit of autistics and
their loved ones.
There is a perverse fetishization of difference that often attends autism, in
part because those differences are so often couched in terms of negativity or
symptoms. As I mentioned earlier of talent, when autistic people are perceived
to have positive qualities those qualities are out-shadowed by the sensationalism
that has come to constitute autistic being. Rain Man might be able to count
toothpicks instantaneously, but would not it be better if he did not have autism
at all? Toothpick-counting, in these logics, might be represented as a cute parlor
trick, or as a consolation prize for the otherwise humanity-impaired. But these log-
ics thrust the weight of debility against capacity, and the productive value of mem-
orization, rote, or detail-obsession do not hold against the other (read: negative)
qualities that clinicians attribute to autism. This is where ToM lands us in trouble:
It is, quite simply, one rhetorical exercise among many that works to eradicate neu-
rological difference without even questioning the ethics of eradication.
In this I am reminded of Sesame Street’s much-lauded introduction of an
autistic muppet named Julia. Overwhelmingly, parents and disability organi-
zations have praised this new TV character. Her mere existence has become
evidence for that buzzword, inclusion. However, as many autistic bloggers
have noted, what we know about Julia is second-hand, narrated only through
another muppet, Elmo (Caffeinated Autistic 2015; Human 2015). Julia is not,
as of this writing, a muppet proper9—she is a cartoon on a website who does
not engage in any first-person narration, and whose thoughts and feelings we
do not have access to. (Elmo is not an omniscient narrator). What’s more,
Julia’s “inclusion” within Sesame Street dictates how nonautistic others are to
respond in the presence of an autistic other. A number of the Sesame Street
webpages are geared toward nonautistic people, teaching autism service pro-
fessionals and neurotypical children how to “befriend” autistics. In many
respects, Sesame Street is participating in the long-held tradition of making
over autism into a market, and this addition will only further validate numer-
ous autism treatment enterprises, such as behavior analysis and social stories.
In claiming that autism is being made into a market, I am calling upon
Rebecca Mallett and Katherine Runswick-Cole’s (2012) contention that
autism has monopolized disability discourse: When, where, and how else is
disability named, identified, and feared in popular culture and public policy,
and with such specificity? This is not to say that other disabilities have not
been enterprised or capitalized. Rather, autism’s dominant moment is now,
and it is being sold as a rather particular and often personless condition, a
condition in which empathy is more frequently directed toward nonautistic
caregivers and friends than it is toward autistic people.
Autism is being coded in numerous ways, in domains of treatment but also
identity. ToM is both a rhetorical and a philosophical problem: it impoverishes
not only our notions of what it means to have a body mind, to exist, to cogitate,
or to participate, but it also reduces how we interrelate or think about interrelat-
ing. The idea of others outside oneself is both rhetorically and philosophically
complicated (understatement of the year)—but, with so much irony, ToM col-
lapses all of this complicatedness and difference in such a way as to deny the
rhetoricity, symbolicity, and empathic potentialities of numerous kinds of
minds.
Notes
1
We acknowledge that terms like “hollow” and “mechanical” may seem uncomfortable to some
readers. We have chosen to use them because they are often deployed in explanations of autistic
psychology, and they thus signal an argument that we develop below: neurotypical discussions
of autism often display a pronounced lack of empathy and understanding when it comes to neu-
rodiversity, and this results in a form of “mindblindness.” We hope that readers will stick with
us to see how this claim is developed in the conversation below.
2
We primarily use disability-first language (e.g., autistic person as opposed to person with autism).
Issues of naming are controversial within discussions of autism; and we use disability-first lan-
guage because our approach is influenced by the neurodiversity movement. Overwhelmingly,
neurodiversity activists have argued for disability-first language, maintaining that autism is inte-
gral to selfhood and a core component of personhood. Person-with constructions, conversely,
suggest that autism is little more than an appendage (Sinclair, 1999).
3
The IACC, or the Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, is a federal advisory committee
meant to represent the many stakeholder positions in the autism community in the United States.
Importantly, only three of the committee appointments are reserved for autistic people, and the
transcripts of IACC meetings routinely reveal the denigration and suspicion that autistic appoint-
ees face from their nonautistic colleagues. If autistics are there, then they are not really impaired;
and yet, they are impaired enough to lack empathy and true cognitive understanding of nonautis-
tic positions, thereby rendering autistic beliefs moot and pathological (because autistic beliefs
are not beliefs in the mindful sense of the word).
4
We do not have the space to explore the analogies and disanalogies, nor the patterns of convergence
and divergence with sane privilege. In many cases, autism may end up being perceived by clini-
cians, and by people who see it as a medical disorder, as a form of madness—if only tacitly.
However, a detailed analysis of the relationship between sane-privilege and neuroprivilege
would require a paper of its own. We would like to thank an anonymous referee for calling our
attention to these important issues.
5
In this, I often think of technology corporations, such as Specialisterne, that primarily hire autistic
people (and, importantly, pay them less than neurotypicals) because of their supposed ability to
systemize and remain attuned to detail.
6
See, for example, Happe and Frith’s edited volume Autism and Talent (2010).
7
Mattia Gallotti & Chris Frith (2013) suggest that social interactions encourage adopting a partici-
pant stance; they argue that “when they act together in groups, individuals have access to
information about the intentions, reasons, and emotions of their interacting partners that opens
up novel possibilities for action unavailable to isolated observers” (162). A spectatorial stance
places one in the position of an observer and theorist, who must attempt to understand the
world from his or her own perspective. I contend that the ideology of deficit compromises the
ability of neurotypical people to understand autistic people as joint participants in shared
activities; it compels a theoretical view of autistic minds, which reflects neurotypical biases
and sustains neuroprivilege. To my mind, this is another way of framing the point that BH
makes in the next section.
8
I am thankful to Melanie for introducing me to this concept, to Nick Walker’s work more broadly,
and to the discussion of neurocosmopolitanism in Savarese and Zunzhine (2014).
9
As of March 2017, Sesame Street announced its intent to debut Julia as a muppet in the show due to
her popularity in their storybook series.
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