The mother of neurodiversity: how Judy Singer changed the world
The mother of neurodiversity: how Judy Singer changed the world
In 1997 she transformed the way we think about human difference – and provided a name for a burgeoning movement
Judy Singer is several thousand miles from her Australian home, on a two-week trip around the UK, which includes an onstage interview at Cambridge University and her receipt of an honorary fellowship from Birkbeck, University of London. The neurodiversity movement is a political movement for people who want their human rights. To some extent, what people were discussing online was centred on their own psychologies, but it was also about wider society: the ways that its organisations, institutions and attitudes made many people's lives all but impossible, and how those things could be changed. In the meantime, Singer had decided to write a thesis focused on the online communities she was now part of, and her sense that they were cohering into a new social movement, comparable to those focused on feminism and gay rights. One of the writers involved was Steve Silberman, who contributed a piece titled Neurodiversity Rewires Conventional Thinking About Brains, which began by crediting Singer with the idea's invention. "They said, 'Did you know you've just been cited in Wired magazine?' I thought, 'Oh wow.' Then I contacted Steve, and said, 'That's me.' He said, 'I've been looking for you.' And that was that." Silberman has since paid tribute to Singer by not only telling her story in Neurotribes - which was a bestseller - but paying glowing tribute to her work: "Few can claim to have coined a term that changed the world for the better. Judy Singer can." Singer then watched as neurodiversity began to snowball, including in Australia.
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What confused her, she says, was that autism tended to be understood as a clearly differentiated condition, largely associated with people who were either non verbal or had very limited speech, and appeared somehow cut off from other individuals. Her daughter, by contrast, was “the most loving, affectionate child you could ever hope to meet”
This was a quote that really spoke ot me. It's why I considered so many options before ASD. I'm very lucky that you basically must test for ASD before the other things I was considering in my area. ASD most certainly wasn't on my radar. My daughter is so cuddly and affectionate after all. She must be ADHD and just in an enternal daydream. That's why she doesn't talk and rarely listens I told myself.