Spotlight on Weird Pride Day with Fergus Murray, AuDHD Writer, Community Organiser and Science Educator

Celebrating Weird Pride Day on March 4th

Fergus Murray is a science tutor and mentor working with neurodivergent kids, as well as a writer and independent researcher. They run monotropism.org; cofounded the Autistic Mutual Aid Society Edinburgh (AMASE); and started Weird Pride Day in 2021.

Fergus is Monotropic, specifically Autistic + ADHD, and has chronic fatigue syndrome following covid infections.

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Fergus writes…

The origins of Weird Pride Day

My mum (Dr Dinah Murray) worked with autistic people for years, largely as a support worker, after formulating the theory of Monotropism and setting out to see how well it held up in practice.

She made the first Weird Pride badge at home, because she’d always known she was weird, and she could see that many of the barriers faced by the people she worked with related to people being seen as weird: too weird to understand, too weird to take seriously.

In a similar vein to the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical, which started around the same time, this was a half-joking approach, making a serious point while making people laugh - perhaps a little uncomfortably.

After she was diagnosed with terminal cancer, I decided to declare the 4th of March Weird Pride Day, largely in her honour. It has been slowly getting bigger ever since.