Everybody deserves to experience a healthy, satisfying sex life, if they choose to do so. Many times, marginalized groups (i.e., neurodivergent, disabled), are ‘desexualized’ through mainstream media sources that promote dominant societal standards and norms (Brooks, 2018). This presentation provides an overview of the intersecting lived experiences occurring in domains of neurodivergence and disability in relation to sexual practices that fall into the erotically marginalized category (Constantinides, Sennott, & Chandler, 2019; Gunning et al., 2023; Jackson-Perry, 2020; Parchomiuk, 2019).
The neurodiversity paradigm (Walker, 2021) and sex positive models focus on aspects of ‘difference’ as ‘diversity’, rather than ‘deviance’ or ‘deficit’. The presenter addresses common issues that arise within this population and ways that a sex positive approach can help transform trauma. Models of conceptualization, ranging from the deficit perspective (Dinishak, 2016) to sex positivity (Burnes, Singh, & Witherspoon, 2017) are presented in detail to represent the historical roots of where we have been, where we are now, and where we want to be as clinicians in regard to awareness, representation, and training to best support the needs of this population.