Critical Neurodiversity Studies Conference takeover: Ren reflects on their time as a trainee school counsellor at Apnishala Foundation’s Khoj School, Mumbai, identifying the neuroqueering practices of gender non-conforming and neurodivergent children.
For the longest time I did not socialise with children, not because I did not like them or wanted them to not exist on airplane flights, but because my autistic brain did not yet have a script to know how to interact with humans that age. It requires a certain vulnerability, a revealing of sorts, which I find is very similar to writing, only after which are you able to weave out a conversation. I frantically texted about seven different people before I opted for the School Counselling Elective in my final Applied Psychology semester. The message said lots of things, but it essentially screamed, “How do I survive around kids??? What do I do with them???” It was safe to say I did not feel equipped nor was I specially trained to work with children.
Something that three out of seven people told me was that children are forgiving, introducing me to a side of them that, yes, was submerged in the murky waters of limited control and raw innocence; but they were not unknowing of the ways of the world. They knew just what they wanted, even if it was not always in their immediate awareness. They knew just what they did not want, even if they did not know they could communicate it. They were also by far the least keen group of people when it came to reinforcing neurotypical norms.
Fieldwork in M-East Ward
This essay is pretty much me questioning my two-month long part-time post as a trainee school counsellor, my (“therapy”) interactions with two students, M and D, at Apnishala Foundation’s Social and Emotional Learning (SEL)-aligned BMC school, Khoj (BMC is short for Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation, Mumbai’s local municipal governing body responsible for public schooling and other services). Situated in M-East Ward of Mumbai, this was a place where my presence as a neurodivergent queer-trans person stood out among students not necessarily exposed to my labels but definitely not alien to the experiences.
What started off as a compulsory task assigned by the school counsellor slowly turned into something that 5th Grader M almost enjoyed. She never really understood why she was being called out of class for sessions, but she showed up anyway. M didn’t really register on anyone’s radar. She was quiet, rarely got in trouble, consistently finished her work, and had a solid group of friends. She didn’t seem to “struggle”. And maybe that’s why the counsellor assigned her to me. In fact, she once proudly told me during our Snakes and Ladders get-to-know-you game that she had a perfect attendance record in 3rd Grade.
At the time, I was just a beginner fumbling through counselling-related work I wasn’t even sure I liked. Something shifted after a short, almost accidental chat with the school social worker. I found out M and I shared something quiet, something unspoken. We were both trying to make peace with not fitting into the neat little boxes the world assigns when it comes to gender. There were no labels handed to me, and that’s what made room for something meaningful to M to unfold.
This common point with M initially gave me purpose to go to school and engage with my students, but it quickly became a point of confusion, something requiring supervision and help from people more experienced.
Even though I was probably more comfortable about gender beyond the binary than most people around M, M never brought this up in sessions. She wasn’t told why she was being engaged with, wasn’t explicitly asked for consent, wasn’t directly labelled, but the subtext was loud. I had to respect what M brought to the table, regardless of what others hoped I would address.
M’s gender didn’t stand out as a “problem” to me. While both the counsellor and the social worker had M’s best interests in mind and said all the right things, there seemed to be a sense of discomfort in their approach. So instead, it became important to focus on what was there in our sessions: her stories, her anxieties, her discomfort at the mention of family, her small victories. These things were still connected to gender, just not in a way that required naming or questioning or explaining. Just in the way that being often is.
Trauma-informed care
M once told me she disliked being home, because of which she even won a prize for full attendance, which I only understood the gravity of much later. M didn’t express much verbally, but drawing allowed her to share more. We started with a game of Snakes and Ladders, using gentle icebreaker questions. Then I found a worksheet in the counselling box. I asked M if she’d like to draw based on the prompts. She drew herself as someone trustworthy, deliberately chose not to give the figure any hair. The cat she drew for someone calm represented her little sister. Someone angry also looked sad. We sat with this for a bit.
Knowing I had just a few sessions with her, I grounded our time in trauma-informed principles. I didn’t know all the details of what she was carrying, and I didn’t need to. What I could offer was a space where she could feel even slightly more in control. So I taught her the energy scale and simple ways to upregulate or downregulate her energy. It was the most practical thing I could offer in a limited time, grounded in a trauma-informed elective from the previous semester. It was basic, a little artificial, attempting to create some false sense of control, but M grasped it quickly and used it actively.
She drew a reminder card. Going clockwise from the top-left corner of the drawing below: slow music, finger breathing, asking for help when she needed it, jumping and shaking herself, fast-paced music, 5-4-3-2-1, washing her face with cold water, imaginary candle blowing, balloon breathing, etc. I reminded her that high energy isn’t always good and low energy isn’t always bad.
Who gets to gender away?
Over time it became apparent that M didn’t have a coherent sense of her gender or labels, but she seemed to neuroqueer anyway. Like Dr Nick Walker describes in Neuroqueer Heresies (Walker 2021), neuroqueering is a refusal to perform normativity. M’s haircut, uniform choices, going against her family, these were small but deliberate refusals. It reminded me of what I learned in my Master’s dissertation on how Indian neurodivergent and queer individuals neuroqueer across spaces and identities. What changed here was that M might not have access to this language soon enough. Across the board, participants, whether Bahujan (those historically oppressed within India’s caste hierarchy) or Savarna (dominant caste) spoke of the ache of not knowing how to name themselves or articulate their experiences. But Savarna participants had faster, easier, smoother access to those words, to affirming spaces, to people who got it. Bahujan participants often had to claw their way toward that language, or found it only much later, if at all. This highlights how the caste system shapes who gets access to language, labels, and frameworks to make sense of their lives. The compounded marginalisation of being Bahujan while also being neuro-queer, acts as a barrier to resources that might give access to the very language being gatekept, more often than not, by Savarnas. Savarna department heads in educational spaces, savarna doctors in psychiatry departments, savarna bosses in DEI; access and accommodations are never constructed with Bahujan neuro-queer lives in mind.
M drew her brother as a dog who barked and hit her. Her sister as a calm cow, her youngest sibling a cat. Her mother was a tiger, father a lion. M herself was a dinosaur, extinct but holding a balloon.
D and the pathology paradigm
One of the things Walker critiques heavily is the pathologisation of neurodivergent behaviour, this idea that difference equals disorder (Walker 2021). When people around M, even the “well-meaning” adults, look at her with a question of “what’s wrong with her?”, they’re stuck in what Walker calls the pathology paradigm. D was in the same class as M, but his presence or absence did not seem to make a massive difference to most people in class, because he was either sleeping during class hours, or stimming in a corner. His advances to build social relationships were often rejected or ridiculed by peers and his only “friends”, according to him, were those who helped him in his studies, often out of a teacher’s compulsion.
He struggled with academic concepts but had sharp insight into what helped him. In a Canva activity, he designed his ideal classroom, choosing soft blue lighting, comfortable chairs, no fighting. Every element had a reason. But the school kept waiting on a diagnosis. A diagnosis that his parents were reluctant to pursue, and one the school required to offer the very accommodations he needed. In the meantime, he was left waiting, dealing with a systemic clog he had no control over.
D picked toys he actually used in class, then added a comfy chair, table, his friends, books, and his favorite food, maggi. He also added a bed since he was often tired. He preferred only male teachers, saying ‘no didis’, and chose class rules that banned violence, asked for peace, and allowed space for both study and play.
Neuroqueering is political. D’s classroom wasn’t just a wish, it was a protest. His drawings, like M’s, were acts of worldbuilding. Another session I did with D was very similar to the one I did with M but less planned, because a plan did not go as I had imagined. D was also encouraged to draw his family as animals after I found out that he was not being treated with a lot of care at home, was being denied a diagnosis by his parents, which in turn was preventing him from getting much needed accommodations in school. He drew his mother as an elephant, his father a barking dog, one brother as a crow, the other as a cat. D drew himself as a lion eating a man. That image stayed with me. It wasn’t just imagination, it was a declaration of power, rage, and maybe survival. D had the most interesting way of drawing his family as animals, he was also so wildly neuroqueering perhaps because not many people had paid attention to him.
Neuroqueering as resistance
Neuroqueering in M-East Ward isn’t just a thing you do with intention, it’s often something people are forced into doing, because the world around them leaves no other space to exist. Children of this school come from low-income families in Mumbai’s Govandi, Mankhurd, and Chembur areas, mostly neighbourhoods that fall within M-East Ward, one of the most marginalised administrative zones in the city. Most parents are daily wage workers, and missing even a single day’s income can be detrimental to their survival. As a result, students are less likely to receive the focused attention or support they need at home. Parent-teacher meeting turnout is consistently low despite the school struggling with foundational issues like school readiness, personal hygiene, emotional regulation, answering back, physical abuse, and social media misuse.
M-East Ward itself is shaped by systemic violence and state neglect, where slum residents are treated as illegal occupants and subjected to eviction, denial of services, and surveillance (Bhide and Solanki 2016). For youth who are neurodivergent or gender-nonconforming, this marginalisation is even more acute. Neuroqueering, in such contexts, becomes a survival strategy, an improvised response to institutional exclusion and everyday insecurity. The city’s redevelopment agenda, framed as inclusive, in reality deepens these exclusions, attempting to reshape slum life through market-driven logics that erase alternative ways of existing (Bhide and Solanki 2016). Both D and M were neuroqueering under pressure, adapting and resisting in a city that refused to accommodate them on their own terms.
Their neuroqueering acts brought to light an important question for me, an adult neurodivergent-queer person who has better access to reading Nick Walker’s work, becoming aware of my neuroqueering as a verb rather than as a noun. It made me question, who gets to neuroqueer consciously? Who gets to access the knowledge of neurodivergence and queerness? Whose representation are we asking for when we look toward “communities” of neurodivergent and queer individuals?
About the author
Ren (they/them) is an autistic, queer, bahujan, student from India with an MA in Applied Psychology (Clinical and Counselling) from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai. They are currently a Research Fellow with the Global Critical Neurodiversity Studies Fellowships. Ren’s work is grounded in lived experience and engages deeply with the intersections of queerness, disability, and caste. While still finding their footing within psychology, they are currently more drawn to community mental health and research, and are exploring alternatives to individualised mental health care without being fully opposed to it. Their interests lie in collective care, critical inquiry, and challenging pathologising frameworks in mental health.
About the Critical Neurodiversity Studies Conference
Critical Neurodiversity Studies: Directions/Intersections/Contradictions is a free fully-hybrid international conference taking place from 24-26 June 2025 at Durham University and online. It is believed to be the first formal research event in the field undertaken at this scale, responding to a gathering energy and engagement with neurodiversity across disciplines and methodologies. The conference takeover of The Polyphony runs from 23-30 June, with the full collection of articles available under the Critical Neurodiversity Studies Conference 2025 tag.
References
Barnett, Jessica Penwell. 2024. “Neuroqueer Frontiers: Neurodiversity, Gender, and the (a)Social Self.” Sociology Compass 18 (6). https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.13234.
Bhide, Amita, Durgesh Solanki, Centre for Urban Policy and Governance, School of Habitat Studies, and Tata Institute of Social Sciences. 2016. “Transforming the Slum Through Creation of Property Market: A Case Study of M-ward in Mumbai.” https://idrc-crdi.ca/sites/default/files/sp/Documents%20EN/output_5.pdf. Accessed 24 June 2025.
Walker, Nick. 2021. Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities. Fort Worth, TX: Autonomous Press.
