Kade Elphinstone is an author and PhD researcher writing from an autistic perspective about autism, empathy, and social justice and understanding.

Essays and short pieces are published regularly on this site, plus there are numerous posts and threads on Mastodon as well as other social platforms.

Kade is currently working on a series of articles called But is it really a deficit?, each looking at a different autistic characteristic that's traditionally seen as a symptom or deficit, and exploring how it might be understood differently when we consider things like social expectations, lived experience, trauma, and ideas about what's ‘normal’. Some of the problems with how we currently understand autism are explored in “The trap of diagnostic circularity”. The first article in the series, looking at autistic “black-and-white thinking”, was recently published in Thinking Person’s Guide to Autism.

There was a recent episode of the podcast ‘Let’s Talk Neurosense’, where Kade (previously known as Katy) responded to recent shifts in the autism conversation, including those associated with Uta Frith. Among the topics discussed was the risk of setting autistic people, professionals, support workers, educators, and others against one another in increasingly polarised ways, and ways in which that risk may be mitigated. The podcast is available on Substack, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify. References for the episode can be found here. In case anyone would like to listen to the earlier podcast this was a response to, the episode featuring Uta Frith is available here.

Articles and books

You can read Kade Elphinstone's writing on Thoughts on Things, or find out more about the book How to Raise Happy Neurofabulous Children below.