Blackness x Neurodiversity IX: “Sensory Processing Disorder” is A Myth

by: Kay Salvatore (They/He) — autistic afro-realist, INTJ, 8w7w9, screenwriter sans representation.

People who talk about neurodiversity and argue the existence of “sensory processing disorder” are perpetuating racist, white supremacist, antiBlack, ableist, and eugenicist lies about human beings, especially autistic people.

I. An Addendum

So, I’ll be upfront and say that I wasn’t exactly completely honest in my previous article where I said that there’s only one difference between autistic and allistic people.

To be completely honest, there are three, in my experience, key differences between autistic people and allistic people:

1. How we socialize and communicate. Allistic people are indirect communicators. Autistic people are direct communicators. This is true both when allistic people try to copy how they think autistic people communicate, and when autistic people try to force themselves to communicate the way society (often violently) conditions us all to socialize and communicate the way all allistic people are expected to, since society was built for and by allistic people.
2. How we think. Allistic people are linear/analytic thinkers, and autistic people are system thinkers. (Which I explain here.)
3. How we process our senses. Allistic people don’t have synesthesia, and autistic people do. And this, due to the intentional and unintentional spread of misinformation and disinformation about synesthesia and how all humans process and experience our senses, is what I’ll be talking about more in depth in this post.

II. There Is No “Normal” Way to Experience and Process Emotions

On her site explaining the intricacies and challenges of neurodiversity and the co-opting of the term and the movement, Judy Singer (the Australian sociologist who coined the term neurodiversity) says:

“The rise of Neurodiversity takes postmodern fragmentation one step further. Just as the postmodern 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 is something we all fundamentally know to be true. It’s why we don’t all love the same ice cream flavors, music, movies, TV shows; why we don’t all experience sexual and romantic attraction the same; why we are not all cisgender and straight; why we don’t all think the same; and why there’s so much abuse in the world to force an idea that there’s a “normal” way to exist in society.

So, if there’s no one way to experience and process our senses — if there are, in fact, as many ways to do so as there are humans in existence — why do people argue that autistic people and “people with autism” are the only people with “sensory sensitivities/issues”?

In Ian Parker’s Radical Psychoanalysis and Anti-Capitalist Action, he says:

“Fascism and other reactionary political forces — those designed to block anti-capitalist and liberation movements — are driven by a fantasy about what is normal and natural in society.”

And as I said in my last post, the need for “autism” to exist and for autistic people to be seen as fundamentally “disordered” is born from allistic people’s desire to be seen as “normal,” inherently superior to autistic people and any allistic person “not normal enough,” and to have complete power and control over how people are allowed to exist in society.

III. “Sensory Processing Disorder”

You’re probably asking me and yourself: “So, what is sensory processing disorder then?”

Well, it’s two things:

The first is that the othering, and therefore dismissal and delegitimization, of the fact that people don’t experience and process emotions “normally” like we’ve been conditioned to believe via the media we consume. As a result, people are encouraged to try to experience and process their emotions “normally” and not speak out against the “norms” set by society. One of the most significant examples of this is how love is depicted in most TV shows, films, books, and music in these grandiose, “sparks flying,” fairy tale-esque ways. It doesn’t ever match up to the reality that love is a lot more mundane, and requires people to actively choose and work on being in love, rather than just thinking that being in love is all that’s needed to make a romantic relationship work. Another example of this is how we’re taught to believe that anxiety and depression are “mental illnesses” and not legitimate emotions that all humans are capable of experiencing and often do experience.

The second is that it helps to pathologize synesthesia and obfuscate the fact that only autistic people have synesthesia. This is why the narrative that “not all autistic people have synesthesia, but some non-autistic people have synesthesia” exists as well. It hides how unique synesthesia is to autistic people by also arguing that allistic people’s sensory sensitivities are exactly the same as synesthesia, despite the fact that being sensitive to different sensory stimuli is natural for all human beings (including autistic people).

IV. Synesthesia: The Literal X-Gene

Synesthesia comes in multiple different forms, including some we probably have yet to discover since there’s been an intentional effort to keep everyone misinformed about how expansive even the known forms of synesthesia are. Some of them are:

1. Auditory-tactile synesthesia.
2. Chromesthesia
3. Misophonia
4. Mirror-touch synesthesia
5. Colorblindness
6. Lexical-gustatory synesthesia
7. Kinetic (or kinesthetic) synesthesia (which I’ll come back to later)

The reason why I call it “the literal x-gene” is because:

Also, to explain how synesthesia is inherited, there are a few ways:

1) if the pregnant parent is autistic, it’s incredibly likely that their children will also be autistic.

2) if both parents aren’t autistic and both carry the gene for synesthesia, their children will be autistic.

3) if the non-pregnant parent is autistic and the pregnant parent either isn’t or carries the gene for synesthesia, then you’d have to do the punnet square thing since, technically, synesthesia is a recessive gene similar to eye colors other than dark brown.

4) if both parents are autistic. it doesn’t mean that they can’t have an allistic child; however, the likelihood is incredibly low since synesthesia is the dominant gene in them.

As for people who’ve “experienced synesthesia” after an accident or head trauma, I haven’t met anyone like that so I can’t tell you any more than you can tell me; however, it’s also very likely that they’ve experienced it prior, and the trauma of the accident unlocked it fully. Kinda like how some X-Men develop their powers during traumatic experiences.

This is why scientists incorrectly argued the association between mothers and the likelihood that a child is autistic.

V. “This is my design.”

Back in 2013, NBC released one of the greatest series ever to hit the airwaves: Hannibal. It stars Hugh Dancy as William Graham, Mads Mikkelsen as Hannibal Lecter, Caroline Dhavernas as Dr. Alana Bloom, and Lawrence Fishburne as Jack Crawford. In it, Will has this incredible ability to read a case file and perfectly explain exactly how a murder went down. He is used by the FBI (Jack and Alana being his handlers) to solve cases involving serial killers they couldn’t catch even though they knew how detrimental that kind of work was to his mental health (because being trapped in and consumed by the darkness of others to do things others cannot and/or are unwilling to do on their own is worth the risk, apparently, just because a therapist is around). It ran for three seasons, and were some of the best hours I’ve spent at a laptop screen, feeling very seen.

Three years prior, for better or worse, a little known series titled Sherlock aired on the BBC. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch as the titular character, Martin Freeman as John H. Watson, and Mark Gatiss as Mycroft Holmes. It ran for four series, and by the time it concluded (with many a misstep along the way) Sherlock developed in such a way that made me feel even more seen. Even though the show leans heavily into the smartest-asshole-white-man-in-the-room trope and a lot of ableist tropes about autistic people by (initially) portraying Sherlock as lacking empathy and literally calling him a “high-functioning psychpath,” what it gets right towards the end is how emotional and empathetic he actually is in his own way and how much his deduction skills are dependent on and deeply impacted by his emotions and being empathetic.

Last year, Tom Holland did a red carpet interview for Spider-Man: No Way Home, and he stopped the interview because he sensed that Zendaya arrived without having seen her. Truly a great moment in history.

Yesterday, the trailer for Sony’s Kraven the Hunter film was released. In it, we see Kraven (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) being able to sense his enemies from far away because “he uses his connection with animals to track his prey.” It’s a stunning -display of power.

What do these things have to do with anything?

These are four examples kinetic synesthesia, even though only one (Sherlock) is accepted and understood to be kinetic synesthesia. Will Graham is considered to have “hyper empathy disorder.” Tom Holland’s is jokingly referred to as using his “Spidey Senses” because he plays Spider-Man. And it remains to be seen how audiences will react to Kraven’s unique abilities.

They’re also pieces of media that has helped me understand that I have kinetic synesthesia. Because it’s considered to be rare, particularly because of its being defined within the context of STEM (think: Rain Man), it’s difficult to explain the particular version of kinetic synesthesia that I have. I don’t visualize numbers and such; however, because it’s also said to be a combination of different forms of synesthesia, some of the ways it has shown up as:

1. In the past, I used to be able to smell my mom’s perfume when she’d call from work.
2. I can sense allistic people.
3. I can sense autistic people.
4. I can feel the movement of people and animals in my surroundings.
5. Sensory hypersensitivity.

My theory is that kinetic synesthesia operates in this way for me because I can’t create or hold images in my mind (I’m one of the people who has a constant monologue in my head; or, to put it another way, I think only in words not images), it just affects how I process my other senses and my sensitivity to kinetic energy.

It’s been interesting to become more aware of my synesthesia, and being able to explain things about myself that I only ever saw talked about in the media. And I’m sure it’s the same for a lot of other autistic people with forms of synesthesia that are uncommon or rare not because people with them are few and far between but because of how much ignorance, misinformation, and disinformation about autistic people and being human in general limits our ability to do more meaningful research on synesthesia and autistic people that is not depended on pathologizing humanity and perpetuating racist, white supremacist, antiBlack, misogynistic, queerphobic, transphobic, ableist, eugenicist, etc. ideas of what a “normal” human being is and isn’t.

So, now here I am. Growing increasingly intent on breaking the canon as each day passes. Because my goal is to do less harm, and I can’t do that if I’m not honest about shit.

Hopefully this will help at least one other autistic person in figuring themselves out.

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