What is Neuroqueer? Exploring Gender Non-Conformity and Nature’s Diversity
- Colette Condorcita Schmitt
- Jun 30
- 7 min read
Updated: Jul 21
To be Neuroqueer is to exist in resistance to imposed order, not as a rebellion for rebellion’s sake, but as a living, breathing affirmation that minds, bodies, and identities are not meant to be standardized. In a world built on rigid binaries, to think differently, feel differently, love differently, or move differently is often pathologized, but nature tells a different story.
Diversity is not a deviation from nature. It is nature! From queer sex in animal species to polyphenism in insects, the natural world is anything but linear or uniform. Likewise, the human mind, when freed from the cages of conformity, reveals pathways just as wild, adaptive, and sacred. Neuroqueering sits at the intersection of both neurodivergence and queerness.
Key Takeaways:
Queerness and neurodivergence are not pathologies. They are natural expressions of human diversity. Modern systems often pathologize what does not conform, but across history and nature, divergence has been a source of strength, adaptability, and sacred meaning.
Many Indigenous and ancestral cultures revered those who defied binary norms. Queer and neurodivergent individuals, often occupying roles as shamans, healers, or spiritual leaders, were essential to cultural and spiritual life before colonial erasure reframed difference as deviance.
Nature thrives on variety, not conformity. From same-sex behavior in animals to dynamic role changes in insects and fluid intelligence in mycelial networks, the natural world reflects the same diversity, fluidity, and resistance to rigid categorization that Neuroqueerness embodies.
What Does Neuroqueer Mean? On Queer & Neurodivergent Meaning
The term Neuroqueer was popularized by Dr. Nick Walker, an autistic trans scholar, in her collection Neuroqueer Heresies. For Walker, to Neuroqueer isn’t just to be neurodivergent and queer. It is a verb, a practice, a way of living, thinking, sensing, and creating, that challenges the deeply internalized norms of what is considered rational, normal, or sane.
To Neuroqueer is to unmask in more than one sense, to unlearn the ways we’ve been taught to suppress our stimming, our sexuality, our softness, our synesthesia. It’s to reject the expectation that we flatten our experience to become digestible.
Neuroqueerness resists categorization. It exists in fluidity, contradiction, and in-between spaces. It makes room for those who don’t fit neatly into diagnostic boxes or identity labels, who live at the jagged edge of language. It is a practice of remapping the self from the inside out.
To break down what Neuroqueer means, we have to first understand what neurodivergence and queerness are. Neurodivergence refers to those who diverge from typical or culturally accepted ways of thinking, behaving, and feeling. Neurodiversity, on the other hand, refers to variations in the human brain and nervous system that affect how people think, feel, sense, and relate to the world, and fundamentally acknowledges that diversity is a key part of nature.
Neurodivergence includes conditions such as autism, ADHD, dyslexia, Tourette’s, OCD, and more. Neurodivergence refers to a subset of the population, while neurodiversity applies to everyone, regardless of where you fall in the neurotypical-to-divergent spectrum. To read more about neurodiversity, check out our article, Defining Neurodiversity.
Furthermore, queerness is a broad and fluid term for identities and expressions that diverge from heteronormative and cisnormative expectations around gender and sexuality. This includes people who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, nonbinary, asexual, pansexual, genderfluid, and more.
Synonymous with LGBTQ+, queerness also represents a political and cultural resistance to conformity, an embrace of complexity, ambiguity, and nonconformity in identity, love, and embodiment.
Where Queerness and Neurodivergence Intersect
The overlap between neurodivergent and queer identities isn’t just anecdotal. Nearly 70% of neurodivergent individuals also identify as non-heteronormative. That includes people with autism, ADHD, dyslexia, sensory processing differences, trauma-related neurodivergence, and more.
Specifically when it comes to autism (setting aside the many other forms of neurodivergence), they are 2-3 times more likely to be non-heterosexual, making up with around 15-35% identifying as lesbian, gay, or bisexual in comparison to the general population at 4.5% (Sarris, 2020).
In another study by Dewinter et al. from 2017, they found that autistic women were far more likely to report being lesbian or bisexual than autistic men were to report being gay or bisexual.
Furthermore, autistic individuals are more likely to identify as non-cis-gendered (George and Stokes, 2018). There was also a higher prevalence of transgender and gender-diverse identities in autistic populations (Warrier et al., 2021). For more information, please check out the full report from Neurodivergent Insights.
This isn’t a coincidence. Queerness and neurodivergence both involve departures from socially constructed norms, i.e. how we’re supposed to think, love, relate, or behave. Many neurodivergent people come to their queer identity through their experience of already being “different” in other ways and vice versa.
The queer lens can often make space for the richness and multiplicity of neurodivergent experience, while neurodivergent frameworks allow for nonlinear, expansive understandings of identity beyond binary labels.
And yet, both have long been pathologized and erased. Queerness was once diagnosed as a mental illness. It wasn’t until 1987 that homosexuality was taken out of the DSM. Autism and ADHD are still medicalized and often misunderstood as deficits. These pathologies aren’t about the traits themselves. They’re about cultural discomfort with difference.
The overlap between these identities also brings shared struggles, for example, higher rates of anxiety, depression, suicidality, marginalization, and misdiagnosis, but it also brings shared resilience.
According to Dr. Walker, Neuroqueer people are often creative, adaptive, emotionally sensitive, and deeply connected to meaning and justice. Our very ways of surviving are, themselves, forms of art and resistance.
Recommended Reading:
Queerness is Natural: What Ecology Teaches Us About Biological Diversity
One of the most pervasive myths used to marginalize queer and neurodivergent people is that their existence is somehow “unnatural,” but nature is inherently queer. In fact, it is homogeneity that is unnatural. Control, domestication, and imposed uniformity are products of culture, not biology.
In the animal kingdom, same-sex behavior has been documented in over 1,500 species, from penguins and bonobos to dolphins and giraffes. Some animals naturally shift sexes. Some engage in cooperative breeding and caregiving outside the nuclear family structure. Many species rely on individuals who don’t reproduce at all but contribute in other vital ways to the ecosystem.
Similarly, in forests and fungi networks, growth happens in tangents, spirals, and underground webs. Neuroqueerness can be understood ecologically, offering diverse roles in the human ecosystem. A society that only values one kind of intelligence or identity is like a forest that only grows pine: brittle, homogenous, and vulnerable to collapse.
The beauty and balance of nature lies in divergence, not just tolerance of difference, but dependence on it! There is one thing for sure, throughout nature, non-conformity is rampant throughout nature via biological diversity, meaning that queerness is just one of many examples.
Recommended Reading:
The Sacred Role of the Queer and Divergent
Historically, queer and neurodivergent people have not always been pathologized. In many Indigenous and ancestral cultures, individuals who defied binary norms of gender, sexuality, or consciousness often held sacred roles. Referred to as “two-spirit” people in North American cultures, these were often the shamans, healers, storytellers, diviners, and edge-walkers, the ones who moved between worlds and brought back wisdom.
In some Indigenous North American nations, Two-Spirit individuals were revered. Across Asia, Africa, and the Pacific Islands, gender-variant and nonconforming people were part of cultural and spiritual traditions long before colonial forces sought to erase them. These roles were needed and respected.
The Neuroqueer person may not always feel at home in mainstream society, but their very existence pushes the collective toward a more inclusive and soul-aligned way of being.
Psychedelics, Non-Traditional States, and the Neurodivergent Experience
Altered states of consciousness, whether through psychedelics, dreams, or meditative insight, are often central to Neuroqueer experience. For those who already live with fluid time perception, synesthetic associations, or heightened emotional landscapes, psychedelics can feel oddly familiar. They can validate and even amplify the nonlinear, interconnected way many ND folks experience reality.
For that very reason, psychedelic use among neurodivergent individuals requires extra care. Those who are autistic, highly sensitive, trauma-impacted, or otherwise neurologically complex may:
Experience more intense or longer-lasting effects
Have greater difficulty re-integrating after a journey
Be more prone to overwhelm or dysregulation
Require more preparation, pacing, and post-journey support
Rigid and less suggestible or highly suggestible and cognitively flexible
Have heightened sensory, emotional, or psychological phenomena related to other frequently co-occurring neurodivergent traits
Neurodivergent folks are often navigating cultural invalidation, masking, and burnout already, and psychedelics can bring all of that to the surface. Without a trauma-informed, neurodiversity-affirming container, the experience can feel disorienting or even retraumatizing.
But with the right frameworks, psychedelics can be powerfully liberating. They can affirm inner truths, release internalized shame, and reconnect us to the sacred, especially for those whose minds and identities have been made to feel wrong.
It is also worth noting that nontraditional relationship structures, such as polyamory, communal parenting, or fluid kinship networks, are often more common in Neuroqueer communities, and these models frequently intersect with psychedelic subcultures and practices of expanded consciousness.
Reclaiming the Neuroqueer Future: Beyond Gay Pride Month
To live as a Neuroqueer person is to live with complexity and courage, to refuse easy answers or fixed identities. It is to reclaim a sense of sacredness in our sensitivity, a sense of purpose in our peculiarities.
It is also deeply political. To Neuroqueer is to resist the colonization of the mind—to unlearn internalized ableism, homophobia, transphobia, and neurotypical expectations. It is to understand that many of our wounds are not personal failures but responses to a system that was never designed with us in mind.
Neuroqueerness is not just about identity. It is about practice, about finding rhythms that honor your nervous system, about storytelling that honors multiplicity, about community that allows you to be incoherent sometimes, to be magical sometimes, to be messy and still belong.
It’s about returning to the understanding that difference is divine, and that our divergence isn’t just something to tolerate. It’s something the world urgently needs.
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Thank you for exploring this topic with us! We hope the insights resonate with your goals for personal growth, healing, or professional development. To dive deeper into neuroplasticity, psychedelic therapy, and how neurodiversity intersects with these fields, visit our blog for cutting-edge articles, our practical tools for personalized support, and stay up to date on our latest releases!
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