Queerness, Neurodivergence, and the Workplace: Moving Beyond Performative Inclusion

Dear employers and professionals,

Workplaces love to say they’re inclusive—slapping rainbow flags on their logos, adding pronouns to email signatures, and hosting the occasional DEI training. But for Queer, neurodivergent employees, true inclusion requires much more than surface-level gestures. It’s about rethinking communication, challenging misconceptions, and embracing the full spectrum of identity beyond corporate-friendly checkboxes.

In this conversation, we explore the deep connections between Queerness and neurodivergence—how both disrupt the status quo, how workplaces often misunderstand neurodivergence, and what real inclusion should actually look like. Our guest writer this week, Thandi Cai, shares insights on how communication styles fail neurodivergent employees, the fluidity of identity, and why organizations need to move beyond the superficial and tap into the richness of intersectionality.

Let’s dive in.

Neurodivergence & Communication:
You’ve mentioned that neurodivergent people are often highly attuned to when visual communication isn’t working. Can you share some specific examples of how traditional workplace communication methods fall short for neurodivergent individuals?

Yes! As a graphic designer, it’s important to have all the written content complete before I embark on a visual project. I take immense pleasure in utilizing grids, considering negative space, line spacing, and all the other elements that make communication work well visually. 

It wasn’t until later in my career that my other graphic design friends and I began to uncover the overlap between our neurodivergence and design. Design serves the single-minded focus and obsession that comes with neurodivergence by granting a healthy and sometimes lucrative outlet for our visual stims*. As folks with acute visual sensitivities, our neurodivergence provides uncommon insights on how to make visual communication more accessible and therefore more effective and pleasurable for any audience. 

This is not without its challenges. For example, a colleague might send an email with long paragraphs describing the project brief or a blog post they want to publish with long blocks of text. My brain experiences pain when I try to digest information in this format. My first strategy is to open an entirely new document, copy and paste the text, reorganize the information, diagram the sentences and reformat the paragraphs so that I can comprehend my colleague’s intentions. At times, when I’m in particularly long meetings with no visual aids, I have to replicate this strategy from scratch just to keep up.  

I spend a LOT of time and labor doing this in various parts of my work, which can be exhausting, especially in a remote environment. I pour the same amount of care into how I communicate with my colleagues and clients online, and it can be frustrating when that care is unreciprocated, dismissed, or ignored. At the same time, this process I’ve adopted for my personal needs has allowed me to develop the skills to craft concise and effective storytelling and visually accessible designs for others too. 

Misconceptions About Neurodivergence in the Workplace:
What are some of the biggest misconceptions about neurodivergence in professional settings, and how do these misunderstandings impact neurodivergent employees?

The biggest misconception is probably the underestimation of the toll masking your neurodivergence takes on a person. A lifetime of conditioning has enabled us to perform the facade of professional composure well, even though many of us are running ourselves into the ground behind the scenes. I’ll break this down in the following workplace scenario:  

We are troubleshooting a major issue with our CRM data in a team meeting. We uncover the core problem and talk through a strategy of how to resolve it. 

Masked: I don’t gel with data work, but I can’t resist the challenge. I respond to this invitation with gusto. After the meeting, I allow my brain to churn with the possible solutions, going out of my way to dig into datasets and taskflows, even taking on the work of others because I can do it faster and better. Over the next few days, I obsess over this, watching hours of YouTube videos on the topic and combing through online forums to understand the various angles of the issue. I return to the next meeting with multiple solutions and immediate responses any time someone asks a question. I end up leading subsequent CRM projects because of my knowledge. And the cycle continues. 

Unmasked: I don’t offer extra information, just enough to answer questions directed my way. After the meeting, I take notes on the things I want to explore on the topic and share them with the team. Then I move onto my other work. 

Masking does not address the effort it takes to engage in the professional environment. It allows my neurodivergence to be co-opted by the workplace without acknowledging the negative impacts on my wellness. 

Unmasking requires me to acknowledge that my neurodivergent abilities to tackle the problem could provide a faster and more thorough outcome, but not at the expense of having an equitable distribution of work across the team and most definitely not at the expense of my personal wellbeing. Though effortful, this is more sustainable than the alternative. 

Like many of us with ADHD, when my mind focuses in on a problem, it relentlessly chases a solution. It’s a fantastic skill in a company environment, but is terrible for self-care. Sometimes I take on the extra work, not because I want to, but because my mind needs to reach closure to be satisfied and allow me to tackle other things. 

It takes a lot of consistent practice to say no, both to myself and others, when this impulse takes over. To even make this judgment and maintain my self-awareness, I have to make sure my basic needs are met, which can be challenging, especially in the nonprofit environment where your mission-based work feels urgent all the time. I’m always resisting this to ensure I’m protecting my break times, meal times, and sleep. 

The Intersection of Queerness & Neurodivergence:
Many neurodivergent people describe themselves as inherently resistant to conformity, which aligns with queerness in powerful ways. How do you see neurodivergence influencing how people experience and express their gender and sexuality?

I will speak from my own experience here. As I gain a greater understanding of neurodivergence within myself, I become more occupied with authenticity over popularity. I experienced a strong link between being closeted and masking throughout my upbringing. The moment I was able to gain the confidence to claim my gender and sexuality markers explicitly was the same moment my mental health journey truly unraveled. 

I believe that relinquishing the barriers that control your life, be it gender roles or ableist conditioning, opens your eyes to how intertwined all of these identities are in the reality we are in. Gender, sexuality and neurodivergence are all experiences on a spectrum; your relationship to each can change with the place you occupy and the time in your life. To know what your needs are, you have to develop an attunement with yourself that then makes it easier for others to exist in harmony around you. That is the root of any real change. What’s more powerful than that? 

The Limits of Performative Inclusivity:
Many workplaces focus on surface-level LGBTQIA+ inclusion—like adding pronouns to email signatures or flying a Pride flag—but fail to embrace the full spectrum of queer and neurodivergent identities. What would a truly inclusive workplace look like beyond these symbolic gestures?

I am not an expert in this arena, but I do wish that more workplaces valued creating spaces for every person to locate themselves on the spectrum of those identities. I think most people do not understand what true inclusion looks like because they have not acknowledged the presence of queerness and neurodivergence in themselves. I’m not saying that everyone must adopt the identity markers with an airhorn and explosions of glitter everywhere, unless that feels authentic to them. I think authentic inclusion begins with the quiet work of allowing workplace professionals to explore questions such as: “What is my experience with gender and how do I express it? How do I view my sexuality? What role does neurodivergence play in my life?” 

I also wish there was more representation of the vast and various ways that queerness and neurodivergence can appear in humanity. Growing up, I struggled to accept myself because I didn’t have exposure to the ways gender can be expressed. 

As a non-binary person, I don’t see these identities as a deficit but as a universe that is constantly expanding. My time on earth is short and I have so much of myself left to explore. That is exciting and beautiful to me. I am disappointed when the company conversations fixate on pronouns. They are crucial to our livelihood in a world that does not value our presence, and yet they are such a tiny piece of the grander picture of our queerness. 

Sincerely,

Queers

About the Contributor: Thandi Cai (they/them)

Thandi is a queer, Indonesian, Chinese American artist, designer and filmmaker from the American South exploring the futurities of Asian diasporic identity through critical dialogue, textiles, performance, film, graphic design, and print media.
LinkedIn | Design Services

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