Weird Pride in a Hostile World

Ahead of Neurodiversity Celebration Week (which we kick off on March 16th with the launch of Aimee Cliff's How to Read Minds) we invited Fergus Murray to mark Weird Pride 2026 with a guest post, enjoy:

I started Weird Pride Day in 2021, partly as a tribute to my mum, Dr Dinah Murray, who had terminal cancer at that time. She had worked for years with autistic people: as a support worker, advocate and independent academic, and at some point she made herself a Weird Pride badge to wear to formal events. She wrote in 2005 about how her background had allowed her to be proudly weird throughout her life, in her book chapter ‘One that got away’; she was intensely aware that not everybody has that privilege, and that she was lucky to have born into a family where "being the ‘different’ person who was Dinah never meant being left out, never meant being treated as alien." I talked about this in my own chapter for the book Someone Like Me, and its launch event at Lighthouse last year.

Many of us have no choice but to be seen as 'weird'. Even if we do learn to mask it, to pass as 'normal', that always comes at a cost I didn't know I was autistic, growing up - or that I was bisexual and genderqueer, for that matter - but I certainly knew from a very early age that people thought I was weird, and that they saw this as a problem. I had the luck of being born into a family where some degree of weirdness was pretty much expected, and it didn't take me long to notice that all the most interesting people were weird anyway; as an insult, it really didn't have much sting for me.

My pride didn't protect me from being bullied, both by fellow pupils and by teachers, but it certainly helped me not to internalise the message that who I am was fundamentally unacceptable. Many people are not so lucky - whether they are queer, trans, neurodivergent, disabled, have a different philosophy of life from the mainstream, are passionate about things that those around them do not value, or stand out because of their skin colour or background. I don't think 'normal' is a healthy thing to aspire to, let alone to have enforced.

Right now, we are living in the midst of a huge international backlash against everything that progressives have been fighting for. Powerful people are openly denouncing the whole idea of diversity, ridiculing the notion of equality, trying to close the door on inclusion. Being visibly different is riskier than it has been in decades, but we have beaten the forces of conformity and hierarchy before, and we will do it again. Being proud of our differences - refusing to allow them to make us feel ashamed, taking joy in our diversity, in all our weirdness - is a necessary part of that.

This year's theme is Weird Pride in a Hostile World. I hope you can join us.

Everyone is invited to celebrate Weird Pride Day in any way that feels right for them. This year's events include live, online Lightning Talks co-hosted by AMASE (Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh) and Stimpunks; and three separate discussions premiering on YouTube, featuring Robin Ince, Surekha Davies and several more of the authors of books listed on this page. Read about them here. You might also enjoy 'Divergent: Weird pride, unruliness & outsider wisdom' from last year's Radical Book Fair.