Weird Pride Day came out of the autistic community, but it’s a day for everyone who has ever had anyone make them feel ashamed of their differences.

In a society like ours, that’s probably nearly everybody!

It certainly includes neurodivergent people of every stripe, but there are all sorts of differences that have people feeling like they’re other, or less than, or not normal. One response to that is to insist that we’re just differently normal, and that’s valid – but some of us prefer to own our weirdness! Sure, we’re weird, but why would that be a bad thing?? We believe that true acceptance of neurodivergent people can only come when ‘weirdness’ in general is not assumed to be a problem.

In many ways society has become more accepting of difference in recent decades, but it had a long way to come, and progress has not been uniform.

Difference of all sorts is at times celebrated, but at other times punished. We know that the economy benefits from people who see things differently, and arts of all sorts rely on them, but variation is still treated as a threat much of the time. Weird Pride Day is about helping people get over that, and embrace the things about ourselves and others that get labelled as ‘weird’.