I’m Not Neurospicy | The Neurodiverging Podcast

Is neurospicy just a cute, quirky word to describe someone with neurodivergent traits? Or is yet it another example of ableism sneaking into our common parlance? That’s what we’re talking about today.

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Transcript: I’m Not Neurospicy | The Neurodiverging Podcast

DANIELLE: Hello, my friends, and welcome back to The Neurodiverging Podcast.

My name is Danielle Sullivan, and I am your host. Today, we’re getting into what might be a bit of a controversial topic, or maybe not — you’ll have to let me know. The word neurospicy has sort of exploded in the past year or so all over social media, and I have been following it with interest and a little bit of discomfort. And today, I would like to talk about — from my opinion anyway — why I am uncomfortable with the way that the community has been using the word neurospicy and why I would like to encourage folks to think through their use of this term as we think through our use of lots of words when it comes to re-empowering communities like us who have been traditionally disempowered.

Before we get into that, I just want to say thank you, as always, to my patrons who support this podcast and make it possible for us to do this. If you have not checked out the Patreon lately, I strongly encourage you to do so. We have group coaching options, we have ad-free podcast episodes, we have monthly social meetups and twice-a-week accountability group meetings. It’s a really great place with some really great people, and if you’re looking for autistic community and sort of personal development stuff, it’s a great place to be!

Check us out at Patreon.com/Neurodiverging, and thank you to everybody who already supports over there. It means the world, and it gets us going to places we wouldn’t be able to go without you.

So, let’s dive into this. So, a couple of months ago, a friend of mine was talking to me about a business idea that they had, and one of the things they were considering using in the title of the business or the framing or the copy for the business was the word neurospicy as part of their product name.

An Emotional Reaction to “Neurospicy”

I had this sort of immediately uncomfortable reaction to the idea of labeling something with this term neurospicy, and I ended up declining to work further with my friend on this particular project, though I wish them complete success with it. I couldn’t wrangle myself around to feeling okay with the use of the term. And I kind of went back and forth on this a lot because I was like, well, am I just being an old-fashioned curmudgeonly person? Like, why don’t I like this term? It is so popular!

I see it all over Instagram, I see it all over Tumblr. I’m not on TikTok, but when I see the TikToks that have been reuploaded to other platforms, I see it everywhere. A lot of people have really glommed on to this word, and when I see a lot of movement into a new term like this, it means that people are feeling heard or described or validated in some way by a term that hasn’t existed before. And I think that’s really important to notice, right? Is when people find a new word attractive and they want to label themselves this way, that means that some part of them is feeling validated by this word.

But I still felt really uncomfortable about it, and I couldn’t really talk myself into being okay with it despite my, kind of, awareness of this validation aspect. And so, I spent about two or three months like really thinking about this, really thinking about this, and here’s kind of where I’ve come along. So, before I get into this further, in case you’re not familiar with the word neurospicy, let me just give you a basic definition, as far as I — and I’ve not done any research on this, right? So, this is just from my experience. What I see is the word neurospicy appearing in social media, primarily among folks kind of like me.

It describes a kind of neurodivergent person who is quirky or has some weirdnesses or some differences, but like not, “too,” abnormal, quote-unquote, and usually has lower support needs, and who often seems to want to identify as neurodivergent but doesn’t actually want to say the word neurodivergent. Again, my opinion. But that’s what I see. When I see people say neurospicy, it’s like a cute way to say neurodivergent, but I don’t actually want to say neurodivergent, and I definitely don’t want to say disabled. I think a lot of people think it’s just this cute word, but I also think, and this is after several months of wrangling with it, I really think it’s a step towards ableism, and it makes me uncomfortable, and let me talk more about this.

The History of the Word “Asperger’s”

So, if you’re an autistic person or you know anyone who is autistic, you’re probably at least somewhat aware of the term Asperger’s, right? Asperger’s is still used a little bit in some other places as an actual diagnosis, like so it’s the term you get when you are identified as autistic, and, as I found out when I talked to Kate McNulty a couple of years ago now about her book, “Love and Asperger’s” — I’ll put a link below if you haven’t listened to that podcast, it’s really fantastic — Many older adults in the United States and elsewhere self-identify as Asperger’s individuals because that was the diagnosis they received when they were younger and they were originally identified.

In the United States and some other places, Asperger’s has really fallen out of favor as we’ve learned more and become more aware as a society about Hans Asperger’s ties to Nazism, right? And there’s lots of articles on that, I’ll link some down below, I’m not going to get into it too much here.

Instead, many diagnosticians and their diagnostic manuals, as well as individual humans, have transitioned away from using Asperger’s as a terminology and into the word autism, sometimes with additional descriptors like a level of severity or a need of support, right? So, again, I’m not going to get into this too much here, but in some places, you get the label autistic, and then you get a support level, so, you are level 1, level 2, level 3 autistic. I do not think that’s a great way to do that, but that’s not what I’m talking about right now. I’ll put links below if you want to look into it more.

And then what’s becoming more popular now is to talk about autistic people in terms of our support needs, right? So, like, hi, I’m Danielle, I’m autistic. I have low communication support needs. In most cases, I can communicate by myself. I have moderate to high levels of support needs when it comes to handling executive function tasks, for example, okay? So, we label the amount of support we need based on the sort of section of our life that it applies to.

How ‘Asperger’s’ Implies Ableism

So, if you’ve listened to this podcast or you’re aware of me for any length of time, you might have noticed that I don’t tend to try to push people in how they label themselves. I do not personally think it’s okay to use Asperger’s as an individual label, and that is my opinion. I also don’t feel like it’s okay for me as an individual human being to step on other people and how they label themselves, especially folks who have been marginalized for a lot longer than I have. And in the case of Asperger’s, specifically, the folks who are mostly — mostly— labeling themselves Asperger’s are our older generation autistics. They are our elders. So, I don’t like the term Asperger’s, but I’m going to support autistic elders’ use of it in part as a show of respect, because I wouldn’t be here without them, and I would say most of us would not be here without them. The work would not have been accomplished without them.

And, so, I don’t think it’s cool to use Asperger’s, but I also think that if anybody gets to use a really problematic term — Like, I don’t agree with them but I’m not going to tell them what they should call themselves, they’ve had enough of that over their lives.

All of this said, one of the main criticisms of the term Asperger’s and Aspie and related terms, is that these words are only used for autistic folks with lower support needs, right? “Level 1,” quote-unquote, autistics. People who mask well, people who mostly blend into neurotypical society and expectations. So, Aspies, Asperger’s people, are quirky autistic people. They’re still, quote-unquote, “productive” members of society, and we can, quote-unquote, “fix” them. So they look like neurotypical people. Do you see what I’m saying?

So, Asperger’s people, Aspie self-identified people, tend to be framing themselves as sort of the better version of autistics, right? The lower support needs, better masking, people who can function — whatever that means — in society, right? Words like Asperger’s and Aspie are used to divide autistic folks into levels of social acceptability, where some of us are kind of okay and contribute to society, and thus we can be marginalized, but otherwise left alone. But those of us who are highly disabled or have stigmatized mental health conditions or have significant support needs are a drain on society. We are unproductive and we are subhuman, and therefore, it’s okay to marginalize us even more or put us away in group homes or in sheltered workshops or, you know, in the Special Ed room at school, and dismiss us as neurodivergent nonhumans.

Neurospicy Serves the Neurotypical Gaze

So, in some very real ways, language is used to further marginalize people, to disrupt their access to basic human rights like education, shelter, autonomy, personal safety, and more. How we talk about people affects the real-life experience of these groups, okay? So, do you see where I’m going with this? When we use words like neurospicy, we are saying that we are neurodivergent lite. Whether that’s autistic lite, ADHD lite, OCD lite, PTSD lite — We’re saying, “We’re neurodivergent, but we’re not a drain on society! We’re still contributing. We’re still producing. We’re still full humans.” We’re allying ourselves with neurotypical society and separating ourselves from all of our higher support needs cousin.

Using words like neurospicy, or Asperger’s, are just other forms of masking. To me, the word neurospicy is kind of like the concept — I don’t know if you’re familiar with this — of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl in film, right? The Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a quirky, cute, beautiful — but a little bit weird — girl who is there primarily to serve the male gaze, right? She’s not there to be her own person. She’s there so a privileged group in our society gets to look at her and enjoy her. And to me, neurospicy is sort of similar.

It is not there to help or support neurodivergent people or disabled people. The character of the neurospicy neurodivergent person is there to serve the neurotypical gaze. It’s so that we look better and like we’re contributing and like we’re close enough to neurotypical that you can just kind of ignore us. You don’t have to treat us like full humans worthy of full human rights, but we’re also not a threat to you. Neurospicy, as a term, is there to make neurotypical people feel better about us existing. It’s not there to help our community get stronger and win back the rights and the privileges and the basic level of human respect that we all deserve.

And here’s what I want to say, and this is, I think, my main point. As neurodivergent people, even those of us with lower support needs who do sort of fit in to neurotypical society, it is not our job as neurodivergent people to reduce ourselves or limit ourselves, beautify ourselves, to make neurodivergence smaller so that neurotypical people accept us. It is our job as advocates to widen representation of what neurodivergent means so that we stretch that space so wide that the whole binary of neurotypical and neurodivergent falls over, right?

When we have a concept like neurospicy, all it does is striate the levels of how human we all are. And in the end — Especially when you are working from a social justice perspective in which all humans are worthy of dignity and respect and basic human rights — if we are all worthy of those things, we are all the same kind of human. There is no better human, right? We cannot ally our levels of humanness with morality the way that words like Asperger’s and neurospicy do.

There is not a better way to be neurodivergent. There is not a more moral way to be neurodivergent, there is not a more correct way to be neurodivergent. Same thing goes with disability, same thing goes with any other marginalized identity you want to pull out of the pile. We are all human beings. We are all deserving of the same level of individual dignity and human rights and autonomy about our own lives.

Don’t use the language of the oppressors is what this comes down to, right? If you are a neurodivergent person, then you might be a disabled person, and that might feel scary, and it might feel upsetting, right? That’s because you’ve been trained since birth because it’s in the air, just like racism, just like sexism, just like all the other things that we have to fight against. Ableism has been in the air since you were born. If you are learning that you are disabled, that’s scary! You don’t want to be disabled because you’ve been taught that being disabled makes you not as human as everybody else.

Neurodivergent People Are Fully Human

And here’s what I need to tell you: regardless of who the heck you are and what marginalized identities you may possess, you are just as human as everybody else. Part of our job as advocates and as self-advocates is to help everybody notice and recognize and internalize the fact that all humans are humans. There’s not better humans and worse humans. All humans are humans and all humans are worthy of the same basic rights and respect, okay?

So, I know that a lot of people who have been using the word neurospicy, for example — because it’s a pretty new word — use it because it feels cute and quirky. And I think that there’s an aspect to this where so many of us have not been able to be happy, have not been able to find joy in our day-to-day lives, and we deserve to find joy in our day-to-day lives. And if you can find words to use to describe yourself that align you with feeling joyful, I want you to do that. But with neurospicy, specifically, I have this concern that we are, when we use that word, aligning ourselves with the wrong side.

And as much as I don’t want there to be sides in how social justice work happens, part of the way that we make change is by thinking through how we align ourselves with these norms, right? If the norm right now is to assume that disabled people are not worth as much as able-bodied people, we need to push back against that norm. And the language we use, how we talk about ourselves, and how we talk about ourselves as part of a community of other people is one of the ways that we push back against norms.

And so I just want to encourage you that whatever language you choose to use to identify yourself, to identify other people, think through it. Make sure it not only feels good to you emotionally but that it aligns you with your true purpose in life, right? If you are somebody who would say that one of your purposes in life is to work against ableism and for disability rights, then try to make sure that you’re using language that actually supports disability rights, okay?

Who has ideas about this? Who disagrees with me and thinks I’m full of bunk and who feels like I might be onto something? I would really love your feedback on this one. Please feel free to leave a comment or if you want to make sure I absolutely 100% see it, join us in the Patreon or on the Discord where we can have actually really good conversations in a safe-ish space with people who really understand you at Patreon.com/Neurodiverging. Thank you so much to all you all again for supporting me in my work, and I hope to see you again in the next one. Please remember, we’re all in this together.