Using the February 2026 BAFTA controversy involving Tourette’s activist John Davidson as a cultural flashpoint, this essay examines why neurodivergent people are instinctively rejected. Blending research, lived experience, and sector insight, it argues that discomfort with autistic cognition is not merely institutional but biological and tribal. Instinct, however, is not justification. Inclusion requires discipline, not sentiment. Tolerance must extend beyond what feels comfortable.

Contents

1. Introduction: Instinct Is Not Justification

There is a phrase I have heard in one form or another for most of my life: “I just can’t understand how you think”.

It is usually delivered with a smile, occasionally with a frown, and sometimes with a kind of exhausted resignation. The tone varies. The meaning does not.

It means: I am unwilling to do the cognitive work required to engage with you.

And that refusal has shaped my life more than autism ever did.

We saw this reflex play out recently at the BAFTAs, when Tourette’s activist John Davidson involuntarily shouted a racial slur during a live ceremony. The backlash was immediate and moralistic. The conversation pivoted not to neurological constraint, but to self-management and responsibility. Discomfort eclipsed understanding. That moment was not an anomaly. It was a mirror.

2. The BAFTA Reflex

The BAFTA incident made visible what usually happens quietly. A neurological event occurred. The word carries historic and lived harm. The actors on stage were visibly composed and professional. The audience was unsettled. Online, the response defaulted to moral outrage and calls for control.

Very few paused to engage seriously with how Tourette’s works. Coprolalia is not confession. It is not ideology escaping containment. It is involuntary neurological misfiring. Both truths can coexist: the word carries a history of harm, and the person who uttered it may have had no agency in doing so.

The dominant reaction, however, was not curiosity. It was containment.

That reflex mirrors the everyday response to autistic cognition. When directness disrupts tone, when cadence misaligns, when micro-signals fail to match expectation, the instinct is not to recalibrate interpretation. It is to manage, correct, or exclude.

The scale differs. The mechanism does not.

3. The Thin Slice of Rejection

There is published research demonstrating that neurotypical people form negative impressions of autistic individuals within seconds of meeting them. Not hours. Not weeks. Seconds. Those impressions persist even when intelligence, competence, and delivery are held constant. Roughly a third of neurotypical people report discomfort or dislike within minutes.

If you are autistic, you do not need the paper to confirm this. You have lived it.

You feel it in the slight recoil. In the micro-pause after you speak. In the shift in tone when you have said something structurally accurate but socially inconvenient. It is not always hostility. Often it is something worse: low-grade aversion.

I have spent a great deal of my life being technically necessary and socially surplus.

As a child, I spent most of 1977 pretending to be R2-D2. That is not a metaphor. I did not require the company of other children in the way they required each other. I was content in pattern and imagination. That contentment was misread as oddness, and oddness is a currency children understand instinctively. It can be traded for status.

I was bullied heavily at school by a boy, now a barrister. He hung me from a third-floor art room window. He put me in a storm drain and encouraged others to spit on me. He slapped me every time he entered or left shared classes. When I finally walked to the headmaster’s office and said, calmly, that I was tired of being bullied, I was accused of racism by his parents. A narrative was manufactured to neutralise my complaint.

Institutions do not protect difference. They protect equilibrium.

This pattern did not end at school.

4. The Social Lag

One of the quiet violences of autism is not malevolence but delay. I do not reliably detect sarcasm. I do not instinctively detect lies. Teasing that is obvious to observers can be invisible to me until it is too late.

I remember being in a pub with my parents while girls teased me, pretending interest. My parents could see it. I could not. The memory is not painful because of teenage humiliation. It is painful because of asymmetry. Everyone else had the map. I did not.

People like to talk about autistic deficits in empathy. What they rarely discuss is reciprocal effort. If I struggle to model your mind, you struggle to model mine. The difference is that your failure is socially forgiven and mine is pathologised.

When people say they cannot understand neurodivergent thinking, what they mean is that they are not prepared to recalibrate their interpretive framework. They expect convergence toward normality.

Normality is simply dominance with better branding.

5. This Is Not Just Structural. It’s Biological.

It would be convenient to pretend that this is purely institutional. That there is a policy switch somewhere that, once flipped, resolves the problem. There isn’t.

The response to neurodivergence is not just structural. It is genetic. Cultural. Social. Embedded in baseline human pattern recognition.

Neurotypical people do not recoil because I have three heads. They recoil because I do not handshake correctly in the social dance. I do not read the micro-cues. I do not modulate tone in the expected rhythm. I do not detect the slight narrowing of the eyes that signals sarcasm. Those signals simply do not occur to me in real time.

And when you miss those cues, the other person feels it. They do not articulate it. They experience it as discomfort.

That discomfort is ancient. It is tribal. It predates HR departments and diversity frameworks. Humans evolved to trust familiarity and distrust deviation. We read micro-signals as safety markers. When someone does not mirror correctly, the body registers unease before the intellect has formed a sentence.

That is the real battlefield.

This is why thin-slice judgements happen in seconds. This is why likeability metrics diverge before competence is even assessed. This is why “I just can’t understand how you think” feels instinctive rather than reasoned.

It is not malice. It is pattern misalignment.

6. The Uncanny Misalignment

There is a concept in robotics called the uncanny valley. The closer a machine approximates a human being, the more unsettling it becomes if it is not quite right. Perfectly mechanical is acceptable. Perfectly human is acceptable. But almost human, almost right, produces unease. I sometimes suspect that neurotypical discomfort with autistic people operates along similar lines. We look human. We are human. But the micro-signals are fractionally off. The handshake lingers half a beat too long or ends half a beat too soon. The eye contact is either too little or too deliberate. The conversational rhythm is precise but not elastic. The body registers that deviation before the mind explains it. What follows is not hatred. It is disquiet. And disquiet, if left unexamined, curdles into avoidance.

Ancient brains are not an alibi for modern exclusion.

But here is the uncomfortable extension of that truth: instinct is not justification.

If a man with Tourette’s involuntarily shouts a word that nobody wants to hear, the neurological event is not erased by the fact that the word is painful. The word is painful. The condition is real. Both truths coexist. Demanding that he simply “manage himself better” ignores the biological constraint.

The same applies to autism.

If I miss your cue, fail to mirror your tone, or disrupt your conversational cadence, that is not moral failure. It is neurological variance. You are allowed to feel discomfort. You are not entitled to translate that discomfort into exclusion.

Because the numbers are not ambiguous, and they are not small.

Autistic adults struggle to sustain employment at rates wildly disproportionate to the general population. Suicide risk is multiple times higher. Loneliness is endemic. Masking correlates with burnout and depression. These are not fringe anecdotes. They are statistical signals.

7. And So We Are Sisyphus

Everything must be earned harder. Social capital must be built deliberately. Trust must be constructed through performance rather than assumed through familiarity. And once it is earned, it remains conditional. Useful during crisis. Optional during stability.

If we are honest, what is happening is not policy failure but tolerance failure.

Tolerance does not mean approval. It does not mean preference. It means the discipline to resist letting instinct dictate exclusion.

That is the work.

And if the cyber community has any claim to moral or strategic superiority, it is precisely here. Because cybersecurity depends on minds that do not handshake correctly in the social sphere but handshake perfectly with complexity. It depends on people who think adversarially, pattern-match obsessively, and refuse to accept surface narratives.

In national security environments, this is quietly understood. Competence outweighs cadence. Mathematical elegance outweighs conversational smoothness. Difference is not indulgently celebrated; it is operationally necessary.

That is not utopia. It is pragmatism.

And if more sectors want the innovation they claim to value, they will have to make the same adjustment. Not because it is fashionable. Because it is rational.

I am not writing this to ask for sympathy.

I am writing it for every person who has learned to contort themselves to survive in rooms that were never calibrated for their nervous system.

You are allowed to say: this is how I am wired.

And the correct response from society is not applause, not indulgence, and not fear.

It is tolerance.

And if that tolerance feels uncomfortable, that is the point.

8. Work: Competence Without Belonging

Across sectors and organisations, the pattern becomes more sophisticated but no less crude in professional life.

At a major global technology firm, I raised patents. Significant ones. A competitor for a CTO role wrote to the patent board asserting that I could not have originated the ideas; that if I had, I could not have done so alone; and that if I had done so alone, they must already have been operational and therefore invalid. The patents went no further. When confronted, he could not articulate his reasoning. It was not reasoning. It was a territorial reflex.

In a central government department, a contractor sought to have me removed so his firm could install its own resource. My line manager informed me I was being bullied. I had not noticed. I was focused on delivery. The behaviour was textbook: undermining, belittling, positioning ideas as outlandish. When escalated, the individual was moved. The system protected itself quietly.

I am not an easy employee. I am direct. I prioritise structural correctness over social smoothing. That is part of the equation.

At an FTSE-scale online business, I refused to disable firewalls on a £1.7bn business to expedite a release. I was publicly called unprofessional in front of two hundred people. When I complained, leadership declined to intervene. I was told, in effect, that as a contractor, the matter did not warrant escalation. Disposability makes accountability optional.

At a multinational healthcare organisation, I was excluded from meetings while being told to deliver. At another organisation, I was handed five roles across architecture, platform, product ownership, engineering and team leadership, then criticised for backlog hygiene and cadence when under-resourced. Output was not the issue. Relational comfort was.

In crisis, atypical cognition is valued. In stability, social conformity often regains priority.

The statistics tell the same story. Only around a third of autistic adults in the UK are in full-time employment, despite many having qualifications and capabilities well above the median. Autistic graduates are disproportionately unemployed. Underemployment is endemic. This is not because autistic people lack skills. It is because social filtering mechanisms operate before merit is fully evaluated.

Published research shows that neurotypical evaluators make negative judgments about autistic individuals within minutes, even when performance is strong. I do not require a citation to confirm that. I have watched it unfold across decades.

I have also masked for decades. Excessively.

9. The Cost of Masking

Masking is not professionalism. It is self-suppression.

I sing to regulate internal noise. I struggle with eye contact because visual processing competes with cognitive bandwidth. I pattern-match at scale, and sometimes that spills into compulsive extensions beyond the technical domain.

Masking means suppressing these regulatory behaviours to appear tolerable. Research correlates high masking with increased depression and suicidality in autistic adults. Autistic individuals are several times more likely to attempt suicide than the general population. Some studies suggest a dramatically elevated risk in autistic women. Social exclusion, camouflaging, and chronic invalidation are central drivers.

Autism is not what kills people. Isolation does.

10. The BAFTA Incident and the Illusion of Moral Clarity

Recently, the BAFTA incident became a morality play. Commentators debated acceptability, institutional responsibility, and reputational harm. Very few interrogated the deeper question: what does society owe individuals whose neurological conditions produce socially unacceptable output?

The instinct was to ask what the activist should have done differently. The quieter, more difficult question is what we should do differently when instinctive discomfort collides with neurological constraint.

The same pattern governs responses to autistic cognition. When discomfort appears, people default to control rather than curiosity. They ask how the neurodivergent individual might better manage themselves for collective comfort.

The world must be safe for everyone, we are told. Hurtful words are harmful. That is true.

But there is a qualitative difference between isolated involuntary utterance and structural exclusion. One shocks. The other accumulates. One trends online. The other quietly shapes employment rates, mental health outcomes, and social isolation.

11. Cyber and the Paradox of Tolerated Difference

In cybersecurity, neurodivergence appears to be disproportionately represented. Workforce surveys suggest overrepresentation in the sector, with IT more broadly exceeding population averages.

This is not accidental.

Cybersecurity requires adversarial thinking, rapid pattern disruption, relentless curiosity, and short-form innovation. It requires the ability to imagine how systems break and how attackers think. It is cognitively misaligned with complacency.

Neurodivergent cognition thrives in that environment.

Yet even here, social norms remain neurotypical. The industry benefits from the output while remaining ambivalent about the people producing it.

The West Midlands Cyber Hub was conceived partly as a safe space for this community. Not as indulgence, but as recognition. If a sector’s competitive advantage is disproportionately powered by atypical cognition, it is strategically irrational to marginalise those minds.

12. You Do Not Want to Understand

When someone says they cannot understand neurodivergent thinking, I believe them. It is not trivial to reframe one’s interpretive assumptions.

But understanding is not automatic. It is work.

It requires slowing down. It requires separating tone from substance. It requires tolerating directness without reading hostility into it. It requires acknowledging that “normal” conversational flow is not neutral; it is culturally dominant.

Many people are unwilling to make that effort.

It is easier to classify the neurodivergent individual as difficult, intense, odd, or abrasive. It preserves hierarchy. It avoids self-examination.

In one instance, I requested to join a couple of informal events taking place in the office complex. It was casual, conversational: an attempt at friendliness. I thought it was charming. The request was interpreted as opportunism. An email was circulated suggesting I was attempting to gain access for personal benefit. The implication was trivial, free wine at a social gathering, but the framing was not. It positioned intent as manipulation.

I had misread the temperature entirely. What I had experienced as banter was received as an intrusion. By the time I understood the reframing, the narrative had hardened. I withdrew. Not out of anger, but because once the motive is questioned, proximity becomes unsafe.

From their perspective, it was likely a minor misunderstanding: something to be cleared up with a conversation. From mine, it was reputational destabilisation. Once intent is framed as suspect, the nervous system does not interpret the situation as administrative. It interprets it as a threat. What might be, to a neurotypical mind, a routine clarification can, for an autistic one, trigger acute dysregulation. Not because the topic is large, but because the social ground has shifted without warning. The assumption that “it’s just a chat” presumes a shared calibration of stakes.

I have been hung from windows, undermined in boardrooms, publicly criticised for safeguarding infrastructure, excluded from meetings, accused of petty motives for attempting friendliness, and quietly positioned as socially inconvenient after delivering measurable value.

I have also, at times, misread rooms and pushed too hard on substance when others prioritised tone.

The common denominator is not incompetence.

It is discomfort.

13. Conclusion: Final Position

I do not romanticise neurodivergence. I do not enjoy it. There are days I resent it profoundly. The internal noise, the regulatory strain, the misreads, the asymmetry.

But I also recognise what it has enabled: innovation, pattern recognition, structural analysis, relentless systems thinking.

If you claim to value diversity, then value it operationally. Not aesthetically.

Do not tell me about your uncle or your son. Tell me how you adapt your behaviour. Tell me how you recalibrate meetings. Tell me how you separate delivery from discomfort. Tell me how you stop confusing unfamiliar cognition with threat.

You do not have to like neurodivergent thinking.

You do, however, have to decide whether your discomfort is sufficient justification for exclusion.

Because history suggests that what people fail to understand, they eventually marginalise.

And some of us are no longer prepared to accept that as the price of participation.