What does it mean to neuroqueer?
In my recent conversation with Dr. Megan Anna Neff (she/they) of Neurodivergent Insights, we explored the term neuroqueer—a concept coined by Dr. Nick Walker (she/her). The word itself is a verb, describing the process of unlearning neuronormative and heteronormative conditioning, expressing both queerness and neurodivergence authentically, and reclaiming one’s inner world from the expectations of culture.
The second half of this post is based on a section of that conversation that I felt needed to stand on its own.
Growing up in a cult-like religious environment, I wasn’t allowed access to language for queerness, neurodivergence, or even emotional nuance. I masked. I mimicked. And for years, I tried to survive by fitting in. Coming out in my thirties—allowed me to later in life then discover I was autistic and had ADHD—all of which set me on a journey of unmasking that’s still unfolding.
Here’s what’s in the video/podcast:
- Nick Walker’s eight definitions of neuroqueering
- How unmasking is tied to identity grief, inner child healing, and queer liberation
- Why community is essential to identity work
- How neuroqueering offers a path to autonomy, joy, and emotional integration
🎧 [Listen to the episode]
💌 Join my Substack community: https://brettwhitmarsh.substack.com
🔗 Related Links:
Full interview with Dr. Megan Anna Neff: https://youtu.be/Df4V9-vvino
My Substack & Office Hours: https://brettwhitmarsh.substack.com
Nick Walker’s original neuroqueer writing: https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-an-introduction/
📚 Links Mentioned:
- Order Dr. Neff’s Autistic Burnout Workbook: https://bookshop.org/a/108800/9781507223062
- Dr. Neff’s Website: https://neurodivergentinsights.com
-Order Dr. Neff’s Self Care for Autistic People: https://bookshop.org/a/108800/9781507221938
📖 Learn more about Dr. Neff:
https://www.neurodivergentinsights.com/
Substack: https://substack.com/@neurodivergentinsights
https://neurodivergentinsights.substack.com
See below for a full transcript of this video (note this is AI generated):
Brett (00:00):
What is neuroqueering? This is something that came up in my conversation with Dr. Mega Anna Neff of Neurodivergent insights and the author of Self-Care for Autistic People and the Autistic Burnout Workbook. Now, this was an important part of our conversation from my last video, and I actually want to pluck out that section for a special video, which is what we’re going to do today. But before we get into that part of the conversation, I want to actually focus on a little bit more about what the term neuroqueer means, and I’m recording this on the first day of pride in 2025. So I found the term neuroqueer from Nick Walker PhD started to write about in the spring of 2015. Most recent thinking came from the summer of 2021 uses the phrase neuroqueer as a verb. I’ll have a link to this in the description.
(00:47):
Breaks down neuroqueer as a verb in these following ways, being both neurodivergent and queer with some degree of consciousness or awareness and or active exploration about how these two aspects of one’s identity intertwine or are perhaps inseparable. Number two, embodying and expressing one’s neurodivergence in ways that’s also queer for one’s performance of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and or aspects of one’s identity. Number three, engaging in practices intended to undo or subvert one’s own cultural conditioning in one’s ingrained habits of neuron normative and heteronormative performance with the aim of reclaiming one’s capacity to give more full expression to one’s uniquely weird potentials and inclinations. This is actually, I’m going to pause here where I really see myself in the term. I was raised in a highly religious cult-like religion group, and I was never really given access to either things that explain neurodivergence or queerness or anything about the lgbtq plus experience.
(01:51):
It wasn’t until much later in life where I was able to get access to that information, but by that point I was already a very high masking individual. And to a large degree, I still high mask to this day. But when I came out in my early thirties, that was the beginning of unmasking for me. The beginning of unmasking myself and finding my way into my queer identity got me a lot closer to finding out that I was autistic and had a DHD, and when I was able to fully unmask more and more and more for myself. But I also recognized in that process that I was really mimicking behavior of those around me, not having any awareness of queer identities despite feeling so much of the queerness inside of me and needing to come out, wanting to come out in the ways that I was shoving that down or pushing those needs down and pushing myself further and further into the closet.
(02:42):
When I read from Dr. Megan Anna Neff’s book on autistic burnout, and that chapter unmasking talks about suppressing your needs and suppressing your identity, and the more you suppress that true self of yours, the harder it is to unmask. And for me, I was able to be a chameleon in that process and I could pretend or be any way that I needed to be in any social situation that I was in. So being able to find my way to my queerness and finding my way to unmasking was a huge part. So for me, they’re very much, the two identities are very much intertwined, but in order to be unmasked, in order for me to come out, I had to reach a certain point of safety in my life, safety in my financial stability, safety in my awareness of myself, safety in my friends and families and colleagues, and the people that I was comfortable coming out to.
(03:27):
And I’m still not out to everybody but the people that I was able to come out to. Having that ability to feel safety enough in myself that I was then able to start to unmask enough that I could find my way into coming out. Even so even now to this day, it’s hard for me to fully unmask and fully step into my queer identity when I’m everywhere because I’m just so nervous and scared and all of these things that still exist inside of me, and I want to get closer to that identity. I want to get closer to being more unmasked and queer spaces and be more myself and more my true self. And that’s very much still a journey I am working on. Back to Nick’s list, number four, engaging in the querying of one’s own neurocognitive process and one’s outward embodiment and expression of those processes by intentionally altering them in ways that create significant and lasting increase in one’s cultural sense of neuron normativity and heteronormatity.
(04:18):
Number five, for poaching, embodying, or experiencing as a form of queerness. Number six, producing literature, arts, scholarship, and or cultural artifacts that foreground neuroqueer experiences, perspectives and voices. Number seven, producing critical responses to literature and or other cultural artifacts focusing on intentional or unintentional characterizations of neuroqueerness and how those characterizations illuminate and or are illuminated by actual queerer lives and experiences. Number eight, working to transform social and cultural environments in order to create spaces and communities and ultimately a society in which engagement in any or all of the above practices is permitted, accepted, supported, and encouraged. That very much feels like me again. I mean, here I am creating a YouTube channel. Here I am making this video about this. If you didn’t know me beyond my YouTube channel, you would know that I talk about my queer identity a lot in my normal life, and I connect with many people in the space, and I’m studying to really make more connections between my queer identity and being neurodivergent.
(05:17):
And I love talking about those two things together. It’s also a special interest, of course, as I learn and discover more about myself. But also being in the closet for so long and being that heavily mask contributed to a considerable amount of depression and burnout, and having to go through that process of trying to unmask and finding my way out of that burnout was key. And it wasn’t until I finally was able to accept that part of myself that I was able to finally experience both queer joy and neurodivergent joy, autistic joy, and all the joy that comes from those two experiences coming together and unmasking and being the person I need to be in the spaces that I need to be in. But also, it required a lot of grieving. It required grieving because I did come out quite late. It required grieving those lost years, that lost time.
(05:58):
And then when I connected my autistic identity later on than that, I had to grieve not having the access to that information or having other tools or how things were hard for me before I realized I was autistic. And now having to understand how to make those shifts in those dynamics in my life. There’s a lot of grieving that had to do, and probably on some layers I’m still doing that grieving process, but it’s better now. And at the same time, I’m healing my inner child while I do all of that work. And that’s why the work of adult children, of emotionally Imma mature parents has been such a critically important book because there’s a section there about your true self and your role self. And when you’re masking, this is, in my opinion, you’re putting on that role self where you’re pretending to be someone you’re not for the situations that you need to be in, but your true self, your true identity is when you’re unmasked.
(06:46):
And for me, that was a big portion of those two worlds coming together. I’m still working through a lot of that. I’m in a really better place now. I’ve been out for over 10 years, but it’s still a lot of work and it still requires a lot of therapy. And there are still moments where when I think about that part of my life, it gets very emotional when I need to heal that part of myself, both me inner child, my younger queer identity, and all the ways that I had to hide myself and hide my joy away. There are days certainly when I have these moments where I just burst into tears when I think about those things, and I spend too much time thinking about that, but I’m processing those feelings and I don’t hide them away anymore. And that’s the critical thing. I go through those feelings and I go through those experiences and I heal and I continue to heal.
(07:26):
I heal the parts of me that need to be healed, and I keep moving forward and it makes me a better person, and it makes me a better friend and a better person to be around and a better person in the world. With that in mind, we’re now going to switch to that part of my conversation with Dr. Megan Anna Neff and enough who I’m so grateful to. But here again, is this part of neuroqueering part of the conversation with Dr. Megan. And enough, I want to kind of swing into what I think is probably one of the most important things in the chapter I’m masking. There’s this marriage of finding your way into your identity and finding your way into understanding masking can sometimes block us having our needs met or even having an awareness of what those needs are.
Speaker 2 (08:09):
It’s a huge moment, and it does go back to identity work, right? And it reminds me of even what you were saying earlier about locking away your special interests and locking away your joy is that is essentially what masking does is my pleasure. What brings me pleasure and joy, and even the way I move my body, these things are bad, and for safety, I’m going to cue into what other people around me want, and I’m going to deprioritize my signals and prioritize external signals. So if we think both on an identity level, what that does for a person, but also for being able to know our needs and respond to them and to believe they’re actually valid enough to respond to, oh my goodness, if deprioritizing my needs for others is what’s given me safety, the idea of flipping that can feel really scary and really disarming.
(08:57):
So there is so much self-knowledge work and so much learning of self sometimes at really basic levels of what kind of movement do I enjoy, what does feel good, what kind of clothing feels good? And then as we’ve talked about previously, once you start asking those questions, that can actually unlock a lot of other identity questions. So for me, I sometimes share this, it feels a little embarrassing to share, but I sometimes share, and I didn’t actually have language for unmasking yet, but that when I look back, my unmasking started with throwing away Lacey undergarments because first of all, just why the hell would I own that stuff? It’s so uncomfortable. It was me wanting to perform femininity. And then when I threw that away, I was like, wait, what kind of clothes do I like? And I realized, well, I like things that are soft. I like things that are black and gender neutral, and wait, how do I feel about this whole her thing and being a woman because my mask was very feminine. So then that journey led me to exploring gender in more nuance and my experience of gender. And so, goodness, I’ve deviated from your question a lot, but I think
(10:09):
It goes back to that question of once we start asking those questions, simple questions of what do I like? That can take us on really interesting identity pathways too.
Brett (10:21):
Well, and even within that though, I distinctly remember in my journey and that same path, that unconsciously waiting for someone to give you permission, and there’s a moment where you realize, oh wait, it’s just me. I’m the one who gives me permission for this. I don’t have to wear, I don’t like jeans. I’ve never liked wearing
Speaker 3 (10:43):
Jeans.
Brett (10:44):
So being able to say, okay, I don’t have to do that anymore. If I don’t want to wear jeans, I’m not going to wear jeans anymore. Or just accepting that it’s okay to just give yourself that thing can be quite powerful. And it can be quite emotional.
Speaker 2 (11:02):
How did you get free it? It’s neuroqueering. Oh my goodness, I can give myself permission to not do this thing or not wear these jeans. And this is where I think the neurodiversity space has learned a lot from the queer space of it’s really been queer people who have taught us how to get free. And then when we adapt that for neurodivergence, I mean, that is querying to be like, wait, yeah, it is okay for me to move and stand and pace and sway and to not wear the jeans and to not wear the lacy underwear that’s neuroqueering.
Brett (11:38):
Yeah. Yeah. I think I haven’t talked a lot about this, but I came out very late for myself. I came out in my early to mid thirties, but I very much can pinpoint that as the beginning of my unmasking process, that when I gave myself permission that it was okay to come out and that I was safe enough to do so. And then as I started to pull on that thread and I got closer to the place where I realized, oh, I’m masking. I’m high masking. I’m going to start to unmask a little bit more and starting to have my needs met and sort of recognizing all the different ways that I was withholding so much of that for myself that it was a floodgate opportunity at that point of things to just start flushing out. And just the more, and that’s a journey. It takes time. It takes a long time to sort of go through that part. For me, I don’t know, I’m sure it’s different for everybody, but
Speaker 2 (12:37):
I mean, I think autistic people can sometimes go through it rapid fire, but it is a long journey. And I like to remind people of that, of, Hey, you’ve got time.
Speaker 4 (12:45):
You’ve
Speaker 2 (12:45):
Got time. But yeah, once you start querying, it’s like all identities get put back on the table, and it can feel overwhelming if it feels like we need to sort this all at once. And so I like what you say of it took time because it’s delicate work and it honors it when we take our time with it. It’s a deeply emotional process, and it’s also a relational process because especially if we’re doing this in our thirties and we’re perhaps already partnered, for example, then how do we bring our partner into those conversations too, in a way that the relationship can metabolize that I
Brett (13:24):
Specifically wrote down the phrasing that you used, meaning making process and how you then wrote to the need for identity affirmation and support and community remains universal. And just sort of how we begin on that process. That affirmation is I feel like that affirmation is everything. When I do identity work, when I’ve gone through that identity work, suddenly you kind of go back and forth from that self-acceptance to really wanting to be seen, to being really nervous about being seen, but you’re looking for that affirmation and then you’re really looking for support and community and just sort of that juxtaposition of all of those things and just how it’s, frankly, I don’t know. For me, it was difficult and continues to be difficult to navigate a lot of that.
Speaker 2 (14:17):
I think you just nailed why, I mean, that’s so many complex emotions to hold at once that you just named around because it is a mixed bag of liberation and shame and confusion. And is this really my identity, also the imposter syndrome ness around the identity that can happen? And this is why I often say and really believe that neurodivergent community is, I think, the most healing work we can do post discovery. And I see this in therapists all the time too. They’re like, well, I’m with all these folks, but I just want them to talk to each other because that’s, identity work was never meant to be done in isolation. It was meant to be done in community. This whole idea of a buffered self and having an identity that’s located in self,
Speaker 4 (15:09):
It’s
Speaker 2 (15:09):
Not relational, first of all. It’s a very wide idea,
Speaker 4 (15:12):
But
Speaker 2 (15:13):
It’s also a pretty new idea. Identity work was always supposed to be about the community. So there’s the quote from Decart, which captures you Western thought, which is, I think therefore I am. And then there’s this beautiful phrase that I learned when I was living in Malawi, which is a, I can’t pronounce it, tu, do you know?
Speaker 5 (15:38):
I don’t know
Speaker 2 (15:40):
Tu, I think it was the Tu people, but I might be mispronouncing that. And I believe the quote is, we are, therefore I am, which is so different than I think, therefore I am. So that was a big pivot. But the point is identity work was always meant to be in community. Most communities have understood this throughout history. White people are terrible at understanding this, but when it comes to neurodivergent identity integration, I think that’s a really important thing to remember is that it’s best done in community.
Brett (16:15):
I think sometimes I get nervous around that because you are letting your mask off, you’re taking your mask off to do some of that work, and you are therefore letting your guard down. And there’s an element of trust. And I think what tends to come up for a lot of folks when I talk about the unmasking process is I think there’s some all or nothing thinking in there that we want to be able to unmask fully with the people in our lives. And through that identity work, it sometimes is hard to sort of accept that full self can be on display in that process. So sometimes I try to tell people, well, just unmask a little at a time and sort of see where those boundaries are, and you may not be able to fully unmask around everybody. And if that’s what you need in your situation, then that’s okay. In that situation, again, we use that masking for protection.
Speaker 2 (17:17):
I first of all, love that thought. Second of all, I know that this can be, this might get some pushback. I know it can be hard to talk about, but the reality is a lot of us do have cognitive and flexibility as autistic people. And so to some degree, and this is a classic way, it could show up of, well, I’m either masked or I’m unmasked, and if my partnership is going to be stable, I have to a hundred percent be unmasked. Or if my partner doesn’t love me, completely unmasked. And that’s just, we need so much more space for nuance because our relationships are really going to struggle if that’s the expectation. And I’m even thinking about relational therapists and how no relational therapist would say, you should say every single thought that ever comes into your mind, to your mind. Yeah, this is just a human thing. Also to modulate how much of myself do I show in this moment? And that it doesn’t mean we can’t be our authentic self if there’s parts that we keep private,
Speaker 4 (18:25):
And
Speaker 2 (18:26):
That’s not a failing. But I think sometimes when it gets wrapped into the, well, for me to unmask would be to download all of these things that can get us into some tricky waters where we are not thinking about the relational field. We’re just thinking about us and unmasking. But what about, I could go on a huge info dump to my spouse every night, but I also want to think through what’s that impact on that relationship and that dynamic, and how’s his experience of that? When I talk at him for 30 minutes, I can unmask. It doesn’t mean that my partner needs to love every single piece of that. And so maybe I figure out, and this gets back to Esther Perle’s idea of the whole, we are now placing on especially marriages, this idea that you’re supposed to be my whole village. Yes, yeah. Can you make a YouTube channel for your special interest dives? Can you find neurodivergent community where you can talk about these things?
Brett (19:21):
I very much appreciate that specific thought of your partner. Can’t be everything. That’s too much pressure to put on your partner. It’s too much pressure to put on the relationship. And
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Wait, we should talk about this. I think autistic people do that. My world is very small, so I actually do put a lot on my partner functionally in regards to how much he holds for me. And I also love the esta perel idea, but then as an autistic person who has a pretty small social network, I do that even more. Oh, that would be an interesting conversation. That idea paired with
Brett (19:58):
Through
Speaker 2 (19:58):
A neurodivergent lens.
Brett (20:00):
And when you factor in how we look at pop culture and what the systems of pop culture tell us with what relationships have to be and romanticize those things, we have an early learned experience of, oh, it has to be exactly this.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
And
Brett (20:18):
In my autistic brain, when I thought I was straight, I thought it had to be exactly this, and it took years to work through. No, no, no, no, no. It doesn’t have to be this. It doesn’t have to be exactly in that model and in that way, and that’s okay.
Speaker 2 (20:32):
It is interesting. So I was about to be like, wow, we’ve diverged a lot. And then here’s a through line. This is what unmasking is. When you start unmasking, it diverges all over the place because all of a sudden it’s like, oh wait. It’s such a rabbit trail of identity work and so many through lines. So it actually makes, I feel like it’s very meta that we’ve diverged so much in this conversation because that parallels the internal process of unmasking is it takes you in so many different discovery points. So if we can do that with curiosity and compassion because it is a really complex process of diverging all over the place within our internal landscape and also then in our relational landscape,
Brett (21:14):
And it normalizes, it takes the shame away. It takes all of that away at the same time. If we walk into shame, what’s the best way to meet that moment?
Speaker 2 (21:26):
I mean, I feel like kind of a broken record. I say this word all the time, but curiosity
Speaker 6 (21:32):
Like,
Speaker 2 (21:33):
Okay, what’s coming up around that shame? Why did that just show up? And I think curiosity is such a good diffuser of shame.
Brett (21:42):
Thanks for watching, and if you would like to hear more of me talk about this part of my identity, if you’d like to hear more about the intersection of my queerness or queerness in general and neurodivergence, let me know in the comments, let me know in the comments below. And this is definitely an area that I really want to talk about more. This is an area that is a special interest for me. It’s also a part that helps me heal. So the more that I talk about it, the more that I sit with it, the more that I think about it, the more it heals different parts of myself as I go through my journey. So if that’s interesting to you, it’s a little different than the content I normally make about how I show up at work, but also I do bring these identities with me to work, and I talk about my queerness and I talk about my neurodivergence at work.
(22:25):
And because I have a more senior position at work, it helps put a spotlight on that for other people, and it also helps educate people and open doors for people at work. So it is appropriate in the right circumstances to bring that to work with me. If that’s something that’s of interest to you, let me know in the comments below and I’ll be happy to create more content or talk more about this. Thank you so much for watching. Please like and subscribe, check out the full interview with Dr. Megan Anna Neff while you’re here, and my previous interview with Dr. Nuff as well. Be sure to share this channel with other people that you think might be interested. It really does help the channel grow. And also I now have a new substack, which I’m trying to create more content for. If you’re interested in joining that and where I will be doing office hours where you can ask your work questions, please be sure to subscribe to Substack. Thanks so much for watching.