Dean Beadle is an autistic conference speaker and inset trainer who has spent twenty years educating audiences to better understand and meet the needs of autistic people. He is passionate about making environments more inclusive and accessible to autistic people, at school, in the workplace and beyond. Dean is patron of three autism related charities.
Dean writes…
When NDwise asked to write a piece on “questions I wish I’d been asked as a neurodivergent person”, I was excited. What a wonderful opportunity. Free rein to write about whatever I fancied. Happy days. But then it hit me. As an autistic conference speaker and inset trainer, I’ve answered thousands of questions over the years. What question could there possibly be that hadn’t been asked of me a million times already?
Perhaps I could be irreverent and write a piece addressing the question: “Should kebab shops give free food to all neurodivergents?” But no, that would be squandering an opportunity to say something meaningful (though it goes without saying, I would welcome complimentary doner meat and chips with open arms).
In many ways, it would be infinitely easier to write about the questions I wish I wasn’t asked as an autistic advocate. The ones that make my heart sink every time they’re uttered. My goodness, that article would write itself! Except the world isn’t ready for that level of fury and I’m pretty sure NDwise wouldn’t want me effing and jeffing on their website like a trucker in a traffic jam.
And then it came to me. The question that we need to be asking neurodivergent people far more often. The one that’s so often overlooked.