(And What Happens When It Does)
The conversation around neurodiversity is growing. That is a good thing. What needs to grow alongside it is the quality of the foundations on which that knowledge is built.
In delivering neurodiversity training across a range of organisations, one pattern consistently stands out: many people arrive already carrying misconceptions. They have absorbed terminology without context, and that actively makes it harder to support neurodivergent colleagues. It makes it harder still to show up well for friends or family members who have just received a neurodivergent diagnosis and are trying to make sense of what that means for them.
The reason those gaps exist is clear. The conversation, too often, leaves out intersectionality entirely.
You Cannot Separate Identity from Diagnosis
Neurodivergent conditions do not present in a vacuum. The way a condition shows up, the way an individual masks, the way they engage and communicate at work, all of this is shaped by the full context of who that person is. Race, gender, socioeconomic background, and cultural environment: these are not peripheral factors. They are central to understanding how neurodivergence is experienced, expressed, and identified.
Kimberlé Crenshaw’s framework of intersectionality is instructive here precisely because it challenges the habit of addressing complex human experiences in isolation. In medicine, no clinician would assess a symptom without considering the wider picture. A headache is not simply a headache until the surrounding context is understood. What other factors are present? What might be contributing, compounding, or masking what is actually happening?
That standard of contextual rigour belongs in every conversation about neurodivergent conditions. In most spaces, it is still absent.
We are never one singular thing at a time. We are the sum of everything we carry into every room, every relationship, every workplace.
Neurodiversity training and conversations that fail to account for it are training built on an incomplete foundation.
This is precisely what inspired the doctoral research that underpins this practice. Before a research proposal was even drafted, the patterns were already visible. Looking at the trends occurring across communities, particularly within racialised communities, a clear and troubling picture emerged:
- People from racialised backgrounds were receiving neurodivergent diagnoses in their mid-20s
- Many were being pushed toward private assessment routes because statutory pathways were inaccessible or inadequate
- People were getting stuck in the diagnostic process, sometimes for years
- Understanding of their own neurology was being pieced together, not through clinical or educational support, but through peer communities and shared lived experience
Each of those patterns, taken individually, tells a partial story. Taken together, tell a systemic one.
A late-stage diagnosis is not simply a delayed piece of paperwork. If a neurodivergent condition affects how a person processes information, manages executive function, regulates emotion, and navigates tasks and relationships, then spending formative years in education, employment, and social environments without that understanding is a compounding disadvantage.
The system asked those individuals to run a race without ever acknowledging the weight they were already carrying.
The research in this area is advancing rapidly. What is already clear is that neurodivergence does not present the same way in every person, and the diagnostic frameworks most practitioners were trained on were built on research populations that were narrow, outdated, and largely unrepresentative.
What Changes When Organisations Get This Right
When neurodiversity training incorporates intersectionality, something meaningful shifts in the room. The feedback from participants, particularly in sessions exploring how gender intersects with neurodivergence and how race intersects with neurodivergence, reflects genuine enlightenment rather than surface-level awareness.
People begin to understand why the same diagnostic criteria can look radically different across individuals. They start to see how their own biases and assumptions about what a neurodivergent person looks like or how they should present themselves have shaped the support they have or have not offered. They begin to move away from applying uniform frameworks that were never designed to account for the full range of human experience.
That is when real neuroinclusion becomes possible. Not as a policy checkbox, but as a genuine shift in how people see, understand, and support one another.
The conversation around neurodiversity and neurodivergence cannot be had effectively without addressing intersectionality. The support cannot be implemented effectively without acknowledging that this does not look the same for every person.
Those two things are inseparable, and any training that treats them as separate is leaving the most important work undone.
Where to Start
If you are thinking about how to build meaningful knowledge around neurodiversity in your organisation, how to better support neurodivergent colleagues, or how to move your team closer to genuine neuroinclusion, you are in the right place.
Let’s arrange a free 20-minute consultation to explore how neurodiversity training or a keynote could support your team’s development.
Get in touch through the contact form, and the conversation can start there.