🕸️ Session 17: Intersectionality in Practice — Race, Gender, Class, and More

🌿 Transformative Education for Neurodivergent Liberation

Jun 04, 2025

“Intersectionality means loving people in the complexity of their truth—not despite it.”

“There is no racism without ableism. There is no ableism without racism.”
— Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics

📌 If you’re just joining us, I recommend reading [Session 1 – Why I’m Leading This Workshop (My Positionality)] for shared agreements and to understand how this space is held.

🧶 Intersectionality Isn’t a Buzzword—It’s the Terrain

I’ve been thinking about how often we say, “None of us live single-issue lives.” It’s true. And yet, even in spaces committed to justice or neurodivergence, that truth often gets flattened into performance—diversity as optics, identity as branding.

But intersectionality is not about layering labels. It’s about recognizing how our identities and experiences collide with power—internally, relationally, and systemically.

First named by legal scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality emerged as a framework for understanding how race, gender, and other forms of identity interact to shape systemic oppression. It has since evolved—deepened by disability justice, queer theory, and lived experience—as a way to hold complexity, contradiction, and power in the same breath.

For me, whiteness opens doors. Neurodivergence often closes them. My gender presentation, class background, and trauma history all shape how I’m seen—or erased. And being in relationship with others who live at different intersections has taught me this: solidarity that doesn’t account for complexity isn’t solidarity. It’s shadow performance.

In Session 3, I wrote that intersectionality illuminates interdependence. Now, with more of the workshop behind us, I see how deeply true that is. We don’t need more boxes to check—we need frameworks that can metabolize contradiction, hold grief, and build reciprocity.

This session is about practicing intersectionality—not as theory, but as relationship. As reflex. As repair. As refusal.

Let’s begin by asking:
📍 Where does your identity protect you?
📍 Where does it expose you to harm?
📍 And how do those realities shape the way you see—and are seen?

🌐 Mapping Intersectionality Through the Cognitive Ecology Model (CEM)

Intersectionality isn’t just a social theory—it’s a sensory reality. You can feel it in the body. In the pauses before you speak. In the pressure to code-switch. In the exhaustion of being read through only one lens while the rest of you goes unseen.

The Cognitive Ecology Model makes room for that complexity.

The Cognitive Ecology Model functions not just as a theory of neurodivergence, but as a tool for transformative learning—one that integrates lived experience, challenges dominant paradigms, and fosters relational coherence.

Where traditional models ask:

What’s your diagnosis? What support level? What label applies?
CEM asks:
What forces are shaping your experience right now? What systems are you navigating? How do your identities interact with those systems—in ways that empower or disempower you?

It doesn’t place you inside a category.
It places you in context.

CEM recognizes that race, gender, class, ability, neurotype, and trauma histories don’t exist in isolation—they form a relational ecology. And that ecology is always in motion.

Here’s how intersectionality shows up in each layer of CEM:

🌀 Inner Layer (Self)

Internalized narratives: “I’m too much,” “I need to work twice as hard,” “If I rest, I’m lazy.”
Trauma conditioning shaped by identity-based harm.

🌱 Relational Layer

Code-switching, masking, or shrinking to stay safe.
Navigating intimacy, belonging, or exclusion in community spaces.
Facing relational microaggressions, tone policing, or misrecognition.

🏛️ Systemic Layer

Gatekeeping in education, healthcare, and work.
Policies that uphold ableism, racism, classism, transphobia.
Diagnostic disparities that erase multiply-marginalized people.

🌍 Ecological Layer

Class structures that limit access to rest, care, diagnosis, or self-expression.
Cultural values that define what is “normal,” “productive,” or “deserving.”

By mapping these layers, CEM helps us ask:

What part of this is me?
What part is the system?
And how can we respond with care that’s rooted in reality—not assumption?

🌱 Real-Life Reflections: When Labels Don’t Serve the Whole

I didn’t come to understand intersectionality in a classroom. I lived it.

I was identified as gifted as a child—but nothing came of it. No programs. No support. Just a label with nowhere to land. Because for lower-class white kids like me, giftedness wasn’t a door—it was a label without a map.

Years later, I saw the same pattern mirrored in my sons. They are undeniably autistic and gifted. But they reject the labels—and I understand why. In a world where your class already marks you as lesser, why add a label that can become a leash?

We don’t frame autism in our home as disability or deficiency. Not because we deny support needs, but because we know those needs are contextual—and the current systems don’t support complexity. For us, pathology is not a path. And in this class structure, neither is “accommodation.” What we need is co-regulation, not correction. Reciprocity, not pity.

My own diagnosis came later in life, and it cracked something open. But I entered a double bind: in the medical model, I was too functional to be taken seriously. In the neurodiversity space, I was sometimes too complex, too traumatized, too... much. There wasn’t a place where all of me fit.

So I built one.

The Cognitive Ecology Model didn’t come from theory alone. It came from noticing the patterns—online, in the stories of late-diagnosed adults, and in my own. I saw that autistic folks 18–35 often carried internalized oppression: diagnoses that turned into identities that turned into limitations. But those of us who arrived later? We sometimes experienced autism as a liberation. A chance to decolonize our lifestyles, to shed the masks, to finally understand.

Not because we’re stronger or wiser—but because we had been shaped by life, not just diagnosis. We had failed systems long enough to stop blaming ourselves.

And that’s what intersectionality in practice demands: not just awareness of difference, but accountability to how systems shape who gets to thrive.

⚖️ Systems Don’t Discriminate Equally—But They Do Discriminate Systematically

These disparities are not personal failures—they are structural patterns of exclusion. And until systems change, we must build spaces that hold what institutions erase. When we talk about intersectionality, we’re not just talking about identities—we’re talking about systems.

Systems that:

Underdiagnose Black and Indigenous children.
Pathologize multilingual communication.
Assume autism in boys, overlook it in girls, and erase it in nonbinary people altogether.
Reward white ND people who speak the dominant language, while ignoring those who don’t fit the curated image of “relatable neurodivergence.”

For many of us, our first experience of “help” came wrapped in control. Services designed to support us were really about making us more compliant. Interventions weren’t about care—they were about containment. And if we resisted that? We were labeled oppositional, defiant, unstable.

This isn’t accidental. This is how supremacy sustains itself—by defining whose pain is legitimate, whose difference is valuable, and whose life is worth accommodating.

When Inclusion Replicates Exclusion

And even within the neurodiversity movement—despite all its progress and promise—those same patterns of erasure and hierarchy play out.

In many neurodivergent spaces, white, verbal autistics who conform to dominant norms of communication and ideology are more likely to be platformed. Not necessarily because their insights are more valuable—but because they’re more comfortable to listen to. More relatable to gatekeepers. Easier to feature in campaigns or panel discussions. Their stories affirm the narrative of progress.

But what about the rest of us?

🔇 Non-speaking, multiply-disabled, trans, nonbinary, and racialized folks are not just underrepresented—they are often systemically excluded. Their stories aren’t missing by accident. They are inconvenient to systems that still equate worth with productivity, fluency, and proximity to whiteness.

These are the people whose lived truths:

disrupt the curated image of “relatable neurodivergence,”
refuse to perform resilience on cue,
challenge the very foundations of institutional inclusion.

They are often treated as too complex, too political, too risky to platform. But the real risk is continuing to center only those whose experiences don’t threaten dominant comfort.

🧠 Trauma Isn’t a Side Story—It’s the Soil

Too often, trauma gets treated as a footnote in conversations about neurodivergence. It’s framed as an anomaly. A side effect. An unfortunate coincidence.

But for so many of us—especially those late-diagnosed, multiply marginalized, or misrecognized for years—trauma is not an exception. It’s the baseline.

It shows up in:

chronic self-doubt,
sensory defensiveness layered with hypervigilance,
relational rupture and masking so habitual it’s mistaken for personality.

This isn’t because being autistic or ADHD is inherently traumatic—it’s because living in a world that constantly misreads, misnames, or tries to erase your way of being is.

And when trauma is dismissed as “unrelated” or “secondary,” we lose the chance to understand how deeply systems of harm and neurodivergence intertwine. Not just in individuals, but in entire populations—especially BIPOC, queer, disabled, poor, and gender-diverse communities whose stress loads are compounded by structural violence.

The truth is: you can’t talk about neurodivergence without talking about trauma.

We’re not broken because of our brains. We’re hurting because of how those brains have been treated.

🌐 Cognitive Ecology as an Intersectional Lens

This is why I built the Cognitive Ecology Model—not just to map neurodivergence, but to hold the full relational, systemic, embodied context of what it means to move through the world in a multiply-marginalized mind.

CEM does not ask:

“What are you?”
It asks:
“What systems shaped you?”
“What expectations broke you?”
“What supports helped you remember yourself?”

It recognizes:

That support needs are emergent, not fixed.
That identity is shaped not just by who you are—but by how you're read in a room.
That class, race, gender, and culture are not add-ons to autism. They are the ecosystem within which it is expressed.

In CEM, intersectionality is not a footnote. It’s the framework.

Because we can’t create liberatory models for neurodivergence without interrogating the systems that privilege whiteness, individualism, and economic productivity as the standard.

And we can’t ask people to be “understood” in parts if we’ve never seen them in pattern.

📓 Reflection Invitation: Whose Lens Are You Seen Through?

Intersectionality isn’t just about naming identity. It’s about noticing how identity lands—in systems, in relationships, in your own body.

Take a moment to reflect:

When did someone interpret your experience through a lens that flattened or distorted you?
Which parts of your identity have been named before you could name them yourself?
Which parts have gone unseen or misunderstood?

And perhaps most importantly:

What would it look like to be understood not just for who you are, but for the systems you've survived?

You can write. You can draw. You can sit in stillness and let it rise. The form doesn’t matter. The noticing does.

🌿 Closing Reflection

Intersectionality isn’t a checklist. It’s a worldview.

It asks us to:

Sit with complexity instead of reducing it.
Notice power—not just who has it, but how it moves.
Speak in pattern, not just parts.

As we move forward:

Let’s stop talking about “diversity” as if it’s separate from domination.
Let’s stop treating trauma as a detour from neurodivergence—instead, let’s recognize how deeply they intertwine.
Let’s honor each other’s truths with depth, context, and care.

You are not a diagnosis.
You are not a category.
You are not a checkbox.

You are a pattern. A story. A whole ecology of becoming.

💫 New Sessions Every Monday & Wednesday

This 12-week journey unfolds twice a week—every Monday and Wednesday—with each session building on the last. Each is a thread in a much larger tapestry of unlearning, remembering, and imagining.

You can view the full session lineup here, and here’s what’s coming next:

✨ Session 18 – Undiagnosed ≠ Undeserving
We’ll explore what it means to carry neurodivergence without formal recognition. How do we honor the truth of our lived experience in a system that demands proof? What does it mean to validate ourselves—and each other—outside of diagnosis?

💬 Share Your Reflections
This space thrives when we co-create it. Your insights, stories, and resonances deepen the collective learning. You’re invited to share in the comments or send a private message if that feels safer.

💖 Support the Work
This series is freely offered—because healing and justice should never be paywalled.

If you’re in a position to support financially, a paid subscription helps sustain this labor and expands the reach of The Compassion Collective: a community grounded in equity, care, and transformation.

Every share, every response, every ripple of resonance helps keep this alive.

With gratitude,
🌿 Shamani of The Compassion Collective