🧭 Session 3: What Is Intersectionality, Really?
🌿 Transformative Education for Neurodivergent Liberation
“There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle, because we do not live single-issue lives.”
— Audre Lorde
📌 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 is a word that gets used a lot—and often misunderstood.
But for many of us, it isn’t a concept.
It’s a felt reality.
It’s how we make sense of our lives in systems that weren’t built to hold our complexity.
It’s the reason some of us fall through every crack—and still get blamed for breaking.
Before we talk about what intersectionality is, we need to talk about what it feels like.
Like this spider, some of us have been here all along—misread, mislabeled, misunderstood.
When we flatten difference, we kill the very truths that could have made us more whole.
Intersectionality isn’t optional.
Not for those of us who’ve lived at the edge of too many margins to count.
Not for those who’ve been told we’re too sensitive, too smart, too loud, too fragile, too much—and not enough.
Not for those who’ve spent a lifetime navigating misdiagnosis, poverty, addiction, grief, gendered violence, systemic abandonment, and being misunderstood by the very communities we thought might hold us.
I didn’t know the word intersectionality for most of my life. But I felt it. In my body. In my nervous system.
I felt it when I was dismissed in doctor’s offices and praised in classrooms.
I felt it when I was told I was resilient while silently unraveling.
I felt it when white autistic creators were centered for saying the same things Black, Brown, and Indigenous autistics had already been saying—and getting ignored, punished, or criminalized for.
As a white person, I’ve benefitted from that centering.
I’ve had doors open that never would’ve opened if my skin had been darker.
That doesn’t make my pain less real—but it does mean I’ve been granted legibility in places where others were made invisible, or worse, made into threats.
I’ve been centered in rooms that weren’t built for me, and left out of ones that should’ve seen me.
I’ve been welcomed for how well I write—but judged when my body couldn’t keep up.
I’ve been praised as a leader and punished for my boundaries.
And for a long time, I thought it was my fault.
I didn’t yet know how my whiteness, class, neurotype, gender expression, trauma history, and late-diagnosed identity were colliding—and how those collisions were shaping every space I entered.
I didn’t know I was being read through systems that weren’t designed to understand me.
I just knew I didn’t fit anywhere, and that trying to make myself fit was killing me.
Intersectionality has been diluted.
What began as a radical legal framework to name the compounding nature of oppression—specifically for Black women—has been flattened into a buzzword, a checkbox, or worse, a brand.
Kimberlé Crenshaw gave us this word to challenge systems that refused to recognize how racism and sexism intersected in ways that uniquely harmed Black women. It wasn’t about adding identities together like math equations—it was about exposing how institutions were never built to hold more than one axis of experience at a time.
Though this language was born in U.S. legal scholarship, the dynamics it names are global—shaped by colonial legacies, migration, caste, class, and more.
But somewhere along the way, the word got lifted from its roots.
Academic programs started treating it like a theory instead of a lived reality.
Social media turned it into aesthetic activism—something to sprinkle into posts for legitimacy.
Even DEI trainings began using it as a surface-level inclusion metric, without ever touching power or discomfort.
I’ve seen white autistic creators invoke intersectionality while still silencing or speaking over BIPOC voices. I’ve seen it used to justify personal branding instead of collective care.
This isn’t about individual blame. It’s about systemic patterns that we can all replicate—especially when our trauma meets unchecked privilege.
And in ND spaces, it gets especially tricky.
People will say “we all experience oppression” as if racism, ableism, fatphobia, xenophobia, and transmisogyny aren’t materially different forces.
They’ll say “intersectionality divides us” when really, it’s our refusal to name differences honestly that fractures the collective.
Intersectionality is not a distraction.
It is the foundation of any liberatory practice.
Because if we don’t understand how systems interact—how trauma, identity, power, and oppression collide—then we’re not building support.
We’re building performance.
And calling it solidarity.
Intersectionality shows up in my life every day.
It shows up in who gets diagnosed—and who gets dismissed.
It shows up in who gets support—and who’s told to “just try harder.”
It shows up in who’s believed when they say they’re struggling—and who has to prove their pain over and over again just to be taken seriously.
For me, being white and articulate has often given me access.
But being economically unstable, traumatized, gender-nonconforming, and autistic meant I was still misread by every system I encountered.
I was offered help that didn’t fit and denied the help I actually needed.
I was praised for “how well I advocate” and simultaneously excluded from spaces because my support needs were too much.
I was told I didn’t qualify for services because I was “doing fine”—but I was not fine. I was just used to surviving.
Intersectionality shows up when I realize how many people will never be diagnosed—not because they’re not autistic, but because the diagnostic system wasn’t built with them in mind.
It shows up in:
Black autistic adults being criminalized while white ones get accommodations.
Poor and working-class autistic people being denied access to diagnosis, support, and basic care—because poverty itself is treated as a personal failing.
Nonbinary people being told they’re “too complex” for care plans.
Immigrant families being gaslit about their children’s developmental needs.
Autistic women being given anxiety meds instead of recognition.
It shows up in how I’ve been told I “don’t look autistic” because my masking is legible to neuronormative culture—while others who can’t mask, or won’t, are dismissed as “difficult” or “dangerous.”
My diagnosis didn’t give me clarity at first.
Intersectionality did.
Because once I started seeing how race, class, gender, trauma, and disability collided—I finally understood why I’d been invisible to every institution I turned to for help.
Intersectionality is not just something we name—it’s something we practice.
It’s not about stacking identities like badges.
It’s not about being “more oppressed” or “less privileged.”
It’s about asking: What is my location in this moment? Who is centered? Who is missing? Who is unheard, and why?
In neurodivergent spaces, I’ve seen people weaponize their own marginalization to avoid accountability.
I’ve seen community leaders shut down critique by pointing to their trauma.
I’ve seen support needs get ranked in ways that erase people living at the intersection of systemic violence and cognitive difference.
And I’ve done it, too.
I’ve misunderstood someone’s experience because it didn’t reflect my own.
I’ve centered my exhaustion without asking who else had been carrying more for longer.
I’ve let my good intentions speak louder than someone else’s actual harm.
Practicing intersectionality means being in ongoing relationship with complexity.
It means moving from “speaking for” to “speaking from.”
It means not needing to be right in order to be real.
It means learning how to hold someone else’s truth without losing your own.
It means listening when someone tells you they’ve been harmed—even if it was you who caused it.
It means being willing to shift.
To repair.
To pause before you post.
To ask yourself what power you hold—and what responsibility comes with it.
This is what makes a community different from a brand.
This is what makes a movement sustainable.
Not perfection. Not purity.
But shared responsibility, shared care, and a shared refusal to collapse difference into sameness for the sake of comfort.
For those of us engaged in transformative education, this is pedagogy in action.
It matters who we cite, who we design for, and who we make space for—especially when no one else has.
Intersectionality practiced with integrity makes space for all of us to be more whole.
Intersectionality is how we remember we are not alone.
It reminds us that no one system can explain our lives.
That no single label, diagnosis, or identity will ever tell the full story.
That we are shaped by what we've survived and by what we've been denied.
It teaches us that support cannot be standardized.
That healing is not linear.
That justice must be rooted in relationship.
You don’t need to have all the language.
You don’t need a degree in critical theory.
You just need to start where you are.
🌿 Reflection Prompts:
Who has made space for me that I didn’t notice before?
Where have I spoken over someone whose experience I didn’t fully understand?
What privileges or protections have I mistaken for truth?
How can I move forward with more humility, more care, and more clarity?
Let your answers be messy.
Let them live in your body.
Let them shape how you move—online, in community, with yourself.
Because intersectionality is not about saying all the right things.
It’s about becoming someone who can hold multiple truths.
Together, we get freer when we stop pretending we are the same—and start practicing the kind of presence that honors difference as a source of wisdom.
Let’s keep building that kind of world.
💫 New Sessions Every Monday & Wednesday
This 12-week journey unfolds twice a week—every Monday and Wednesday—with each session building on the last.
You can view the full session lineup here, and here’s what’s coming next:
✨ Session 4 – Diagnosis Is Not the Beginning
We’ll explore how late discovery, misdiagnosis, trauma, and systemic gatekeeping shape our understanding of neurodivergence—and why diagnosis alone can’t hold the full truth of who we are.
👇 Drop a comment if you’d like to be tagged in future sessions, or follow along at your own pace. This space is here for you.
💖 A Note on Support
This work will never live behind a paywall.
It’s here to be accessible, co-created, and shared freely.
If you have the means to support it through a paid subscription, please know that it truly matters. It helps sustain this series, supports my work as a neurodivergent creator, and directly contributes to The Compassion Collective—a community rooted in justice, mutual care, and transformative change.
Every subscription, every share, every message of resonance keeps this space alive and open.
Thank you for walking this path with me.
❤️
Shamani of The Compassion Collective
"Because if we don’t understand how systems interact—how trauma, identity, power, and oppression collide—then we’re not building support.
We’re building performance.
And calling it solidarity."
Exactly this!
Insidious, immeasurably frustrating and deeply harmful to all those affected by it.
Thank you Sher. 💜