ABSTRACT
In this concluding commentary for our special issue, Neurodiversity-Affirming Intersectional Approaches that Target Public Policy: Moving the Focus from Changing Individuals to Changing Systems of Power, we seek to ameliorate the pervasive omission of nonspeaking Autistic people and those outside the Global North from research, services, and policy. In our special issue, we tried to nurture the often-neglected intersectional roots of the neurodiversity movement by amplifying perspectives of multiply marginalized Neurodivergent people. However, nonspeaking people remain underrepresented in our special issue. Therefore, we assembled people with diverse connections to the autism constellation, including nonspeaking and minimally speaking people and people from the Global South, to write this concluding piece. Together, we generated neurodiversity-affirming policies and organized them according to these themes arising from articles in our special issue: justice, representation, and systems change. To foster justice, we call for full access to individualized, holistic communication supports, cross-disability alliances, and decolonial approaches. To improve representation, we recommend melding Universal Design, Open Scholarship, and indigenous frameworks to support Neurodivergent representation in all aspects of research and advocacy, particularly leadership. To promote systems change, we call for accessible multimodal resources and valid assessments. Across all themes we stress tech equity, transparency, and community oversight. Accessible and detailed summaries of our policy recommendations that administrators, editors, clinicians, educators, researchers, and advocates can adopt now to make inclusion the default are provided in tables (please share widely). For the most marginalized, inclusion will not come from incremental adjustments but from radical solutions and systemic overhauls.