Eric, a Black queer parent in his forties had to spend years looking for a psychiatrist who would even entertain assessing him as Autistic.
He knew he wanted the potential legal protections that a diagnosis could afford him, particularly the option to take qualifying exams for graduate school in a quiet, private setting. He’d found test-taking environments to be completely destabilizing and distracting his entire life — so much so that he’d barely even gotten into his graduate program. Yet for all the exclusions he had repeatedly faced, Eric’s neurodiversity was something that white-dominated institutions around him always refused to see.