AS THE ongoing carnival of self-implosion that is the Tory leadership contest approaches its bewildering conclusion, no-one should be surprised that the final two contenders are ramping up the rhetoric, presumably to appeal to the most extreme wings of the party membership, if such a thing dare be imagined at this point.

Similarly, it should probably come as no surprise that of the two, it is Kemi Badenoch who has taken the more extreme position. While her rival, Robert Jenrick, is no slouch in the currently vogueish culture wars, he’s a mere armchair general compared to Badenoch’s battle-scarred veteran and this was yet again made apparent last week.

This time, Badenoch took a break from her usual victims — migrants, pro-Palestine protesters and so on — to punch down on another minority, that of the autistic community.

A campaign pamphlet, launched at the recent party conference and introduced and endorsed by Badenoch, claimed that if you “had a neurodiversity diagnosis (ie anxiety, autism)” then it offered you “economic advantages and protections” and put schools or prospective employers at a disadvantage by compelling them to provide “reasonable adjustments” for those with such a diagnosis.

The first point that has to be made is that the pamphlet is woefully confused on the actual subject itself. Anxiety and autism are not the same thing. One is an aspect of mental health and one is a neurodevelopmental condition.

You are born with autism, but you are unlikely to be so with anxiety, and while it’s true that a great many autistic people will suffer from anxiety, this is more to do with them having to negotiate a largely neurotypical world rather than a symptom of their autism itself.

Similarly, there are plenty of neurotypicals who will go on to suffer from anxiety in later life for a number of reasons, although a great many of them will, I suspect, boil down to the psychologically destructive nature of neoliberal capitalism. However, the two are by no means synonyms.

But leaving aside the extremely muddled thinking on these fundamentals, let’s focus on what these adjustments, as enshrined in the Equality Act 2010, actually involve.

The key word here is “reasonable.” It’s hardly the case that a neurodivergent individual can swan into a place of work and demand any capricious luxury that takes their fancy.

Mostly, these adjustments will consist of little more than a considerately placed workstation, the discretion to avoid arriving and leaving at stressful, peak commuter hours or simply a pair of noise-cancelling headphones.

None of these are likely to place any particular financial or operational stress on any employer. Especially when you take into account that only three in 10 autistic people in Britain are able to find employment of any kind.

Rather than winding back provisions for the neurodivergent, that statistic suggests that much more, in fact, needs to be done to encourage further social participation.

There are undoubtedly employers out there who are more than happy to accommodate neurodivergent people within their organisations, it’s far more likely that a lack of information on how they can do so is actually the problem rather than any economic or operational reluctance.

It would be tempting to see the pamphlet as a whole as yet another example of Badenoch’s predilection for monstrous sociopathy, but there are some worrying indications that this is not an isolated political incident. This year’s controversial Cass Review into NHS treatments of gender dysmorphia/incongruence is another case in point.

Much has been written about the Cass Review, both for and against, and that’s not likely to change anytime soon. However, I’m not about to discuss the merits (or lack thereof) of the review in terms of social and political attitudes to gender, but I will dwell briefly on what it says about autism and neurodivergence in general.

Cass highlights the high interrelationship between neurodivergence and questioning of gender and suggests that one is being mistaken for the other. This common interrelationship is unquestioned and has been long identified, but to date, there have been no firm conclusions as to causation.

Rather than Cass’s assertion that two common autistic traits, interoception and alexithymia, lead to mistaken assumptions about gender identity, I’d say there’s as much a case to be made for the fact that autistic masking (and subsequent unmasking) can often lead to an identification and rejection of neurotypically formed social conventions, which can often include but are hardly limited to gender identity.

Regardless, it’s difficult not to see Cass’s assumptions with regard to neurodivergence as being somewhat on the ableist side. At the very least, they’re dangerously infantilising and run the risk of robbing autistics of their hard-won agency.

And despite Cass’s warnings against conversion therapy, it’s hard not to see the baleful shadow of the controversial (and some might say) notorious applied behaviour analysis therapy behind her recommendations, something that would give many in the autistic community genuine cause for concern.

And even if those fears ultimately prove to be unfounded, Cass is still playing with fire by reasserting the primacy of the medical model of disability over the indisputably more progressive social one.

Badenoch is far less ambiguous in her ableism, of course, and her long-term goal would seem to be the complete repeal of the Equality Act and the protections it affords not just the disabled but all minorities.

Hopefully she’ll never be in a position to achieve such a thing but in the meantime the dangerous rhetoric that she is far from alone in employing runs the risk of setting back the cause of neurodivergence acceptance that’s only now beginning to recover from the negative stereotypes of Rain Man or The Curious Case of the Dog in the Night-Time.