Who coined the term?

I believe I coined the term in 1997 while participating in Martijn Dekker's InLv discussion list for people on on the autistic spectrum At the time I was exploring my own AS traits and the obstacles I had encountered for having them. I was preparing for an Honours degree in Social Sciences at the University of Technology, Sydney, and participating in the largest academic disability discussion list, the University of Leeds UK's DISABILITY-RESEARCH List. I was approached on this list by Mairian Corker, a UK academic, to submit a chapter for her book, Disability Discourse to be published by Open University Press in the UK. This was the article as I submitted it. Why can't you be normal for once in your life? From a problem with no name to a new category of disability. My article contained the words: For me, the key significance of the "Autistic Spectrum" lies in its call for and anticipation of a politics of Neurological Diversity, or what I want to call "Neurodiversity" . The "Neurologically Different" represent a new addition to the familiar political categories of class / gender / race and will augment the insights of the social model of disability. The rise of Neurodiversity takes post-modern fragmentation one step further. Just as the post-modern era sees every once too solid belief melt into air, even our most taken-for granted assumptions: that we all more or less see, feel, touch, hear, smell, and sort information, in more or less the same way, (unless visibly disabled) are being dissolved. This was the first use of the term Neurodiversity in the political activist context that it has come to be associated with. Marian Corker decided to edit out the words "what I want to call", which I was a bit miffed about, but thought she might have had legal reasons and didn't make waves. I was just to excited to be published. . However, I had done internet searches beforehand, and no-one had used the term except one obscure neuroscience article which had no similar social or political agend. The credit for the first appearance of the word in print now goes to Harvey Blume. Harvey and I often discussed the ideas behind Neurodiversity, but being a journalist, his article was published more quickly than my book chapter could. There was no competition between us about it. He did not think much of my desire to create yet another political movement, being disillusioned about all that, and my take on his article is that used the term in a different way, in its sense of a necessary biological diversity that should not be tampered with. Provenance of the idea Read full text of article as submitted for publication At the time of writing "Why can't you be normal", I was wild with creative excitement, being sure that I had stumbled into something earth-shaking, purely from the sheer luck of happening on Disability Studies just at the time when I was beginning to recognise the thread of Aspergers Syndrome (AS) that ran through the female line of my family. Finding that no one else had yet landed on the square that had AS as the X axis and Sociology on the Y, I found myself in the exciting position of pioneering a sociology of the emergent "disability" (for want of a better word), of the "Autistic Spectrum Disorders" (again, wanting a better word). I found myself generating new insights by the minute about the social construction of AS the underlying paradigm shift from Newtonian to Quantum Physics and how it reached into Sociology how the traditional notion of Disability was based on the Newtonian model of discrete entities and how the new disability, the Autistic "Spectrum" or "Cluster" arose as Quantum Physics displaced the Newtonian Model the lack of a language to give humans the right to differ from the "normal mind" which turned out to be an ideal, not a norm how the oppression, the bullying, the teasing, and worse, that the "neurologically different" were subject to, may have been primarily due to the lack of a language to describe them/ us. I was excited by the prospect of being able to heal the traditional animosity between the social sciences and the biological sciences, This animosity I believe was due to the historical misuse of half-baked ideas about Darwin's theories to oppress ethnic, 'racial' and disabled minorities, but not to the strength of the theory which in fact as about the evolutionary necessity of diversity. I saw that just as the biological sciences had shown the crucial role of bio-diversity in creating environmental stability, so they might be used to show, at the very least metaphorically, that political stability was to be found in nurturing neurodiversity. I was excited at the prospect of pushing the boundaries of how humanity was defined and structured to the prevent the emergence of new types of humans to populate a "Gaia" that maybe wanted to play, to experiment, to create new types of societies that were not based on the neurotypical ideals, to solve the problems that old models of humanity had created. The ideas in the article were based on my participation in Martijn Dekkers INLV email group, an amazing group of AS identified people who pioneered the AS movement, and blew my mind. During my membership of this group, and the amazing people I met while there, I turned my ideas of who I was, and who "we" the human species were, upside down. Insofar as humans are bio-mechanical narrative generators, I was willy-nilly, ready or not, compelled to retell myself the entire story of my life through the chinks and bars of the autistic spectrum. This world-transforming new paradigm of disability, was itself an early manifestion of the ascendancy of the age of neurology over the age of psychology, as predicted by the brilliant Harvey Blume, who I met on InLv. Harvey was the "Teacher" who turned up as the mystics promised, when the Student is ready to listen. I was drawn into Harvey's orbit because I had researched Autism throughout the world, and he was the only person on the same trajectory, and to make it interesting, ahead of me in the places where I wanted to go, especially in the wit and economy of his writing. We discussed the ideas of neurological diversity many times, but with rather different angles.My take, as an Australian much influenced by British and European traditions of Class Struggle was always within a political, UK oriented activist, disability rights, saving the world model, while Harvey had had a gutful of world-saving in his youth, was suspicious of it, and was moved by literary, scientific and evolutionary explorations. Whatever interest I had in evolutionary psychology and neuroscience , was merely a a tool for perfecting the world..Harvey was my muse, and thanks to a dogged, Shecherezade like persistence on my part, I kept him corresponding through a sort of cyberspace/ aspie obsessive 1001 Neurological Nights, with me dreaming up a constant stream of intellectual provocations to keep the poor man talking. Over that time I hope that I became as much of a teacher for him as he was for me. That period, 1996-2001, was one of the most intellectually exciting of my life. But on September 11, when the globalising project of the Twin Tower of Babel exploded and blew us all back to our separate corners of the world, I went with the prevailing winds, disheartened by the narrowing of ideas to the most atavistic preoccupations with tribal war between Islam and the west, and withdrew to my local area. As the 4th of 5 generations of women somewhere on the autistic spectrum, and the least affected, I was carrying heavy burdens, not least of which was economic disadvantage. I became very involved with local politics and especially the politics of social housing, which is where I am today. At the same time, my Aspar website angered the AS activists who had initially been inspired by my Neurodiversity ideas, by telling the painful stories of the children of AS parents. I was half amused, half horrified to hear that I had been labelled an apostate, and that a whole bunch of rumours were circulating about me, which often wrongly conflated me with my namesake, Peter Singer, who was Head Demon in the Disability Movement panoply. I was fed up with the academic disability rights movement. I argued that they had more in common with Creationism than the Western Intellectual tradition in their dogged refusal to give any credence to biology. My greatest shame is that my Honours thesis pandered to them by giving half a page to feminist theories of science, which I knew in my heart were utter rubbish. The final blow was the level of vituperation when Sheila Jennings Linehan attempted to find ways out of the terrible impasse of heartwrenching custody cases in which judicial ignorance of AS, and, well, political correctness, the very things that I and my generation had forced on the world in our youth, prevented legal systems anywhere in the world from allowing that a diagnosis of Autism, if it includes an inability to read social cues, egocentricity, a short fuse, obsessive compulsive behaviours, must by definition be an impediment to parenting. It was useless to keep reiterating that we were not advocating eugenics, only education and a range of social support services for AS parents. Like all activists with a new cause, the urgency for an enemy was too great for a subtle reading, yet the original article said it all. The pain AS and NT inflicted on each other, both victims, both perpetrators, my mother my father and I battling it out, but also the slow reconciliation as we came to understand that we were talking different languages.   The original website is down, as I'm too broke to pay for a new domain name. A cutdownWordpress blog version is all that's left for now.