Epistemic Injustice and ADHD Girls in the K-12 Education System

Introduction

In this paper, I take up an ableist problem that has been occurring within the education system, a problem that has been under-discussed in a philosophical context. It is my goal to articulate the ongoing epistemic injustice that has been and continues to be experienced by ADHD girls in the education system and the deep harms suffered by ADHD girls as epistemic agents. This paper draws on my own experiences with neurodivergence as a white queer woman from a liberal middle-class family. Through my academic journey as an undergraduate, I have become interested in the experiences of ADHD girls within the standard education system and the capacity that children and young adults have to be harmed. I am looking both at the harm experienced by the ADHD girl because of what others are doing and at the ways learned coping strategies cause harm to the ADHD girl by impeding her self-knowledge and her ability to be known by others – all affecting her sense of belonging and knowledge of the world.

Ultimately, in this essay, I argue that the education system is harmful to the epistemic agency of ADHD girls as knowers of the world, knowers of themselves, and bodies of knowledge (both as producers but also as beings to be understood by others).

A Note on Terminology

Through working on this project I have come across various testimonies and resources made by neurodivergent women who aim to educate both the neurodivergent community and the neurotypical community on what it means to them to be neurodivergent and what one who is not neurodivergent can do to support those who are. A huge request within the neurodivergent community concerns the language we as a society use to discuss and label those who are neurodivergent. In today's world, there is a mixed debate on language and using terms that are the most politically correct for the time. While I don't disagree with those who believe that being PC is a sign of respect for the communities and individuals whom a term affects, I will say that the fluctuation of terms can be hard to keep up with. That is why I feel it is important for this project to explain the specific terms I am using that are central to the neurodivergent community.

I turn to Vanessa Blanchard, who created a blog post to make this information more accessible. This post became helpful to me as I began thinking through the work that using the term neurotypical is really doing. I often use neurotypical, as do many people, to describe someone who is not neurodivergent. However, this language holds power, and using a term that situates those without neurodivergence as 'typical' or 'normal' is harmful to those who become othered by this language. While I have not found an alternative word, the abbreviation NT is used by the neurodivergent community to reduce the affective value that the word neurotypical holds. Therefore, throughout this essay, I will be using NT instead of neurotypical to describe those who are not neurodivergent.

The term neurodivergent seemed like the most PC to use when I first found myself interacting with and relating to others in the neurodivergent community. This term does not have the same negative affectivity that the R-word or other terms have, therefore it seemed to me to be the most respectful and accurate umbrella term when trying to include all the different types of neurodivergence. However, while this term is the least affectively charged and historically derogatory of them all, its language still works within the typical/atypical framework. Just like neurotypical, the suffix of neurodivergent situates the individual as the other, especially when coupled with neurotypical as a standard for what a neurological state should look like.

By using neurodivergent, we challenge the affective value of previous terms used to marginalize other individuals, such as 'neurological disability/disorder', 'mental disability/disorder', and 'learning disability/disorder.' To classify ADHD as a disorder or disability is to forgo the lived experiences of those with ADHD and dehumanize them and subject them to dysfunctionality. Whereas, in reality, what is deemed normal is just one neurological variation and ADHD is another neurological variation. What is deemed neurotypical (NT) has been naturalized in society and used to develop a standard of how society should be set up to cater to this one variation, which is very harmful to those who do not have the specific neurological variation that just so happened to be deemed normal. In other words, normal is just the construction of an ableist society, and to maintain this construct and establish ways of knowing around it is incredibly harmful to the large number of individuals who are neurodivergent.

History of ADHD

ADHD, Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder, is a common "behavioral syndrome characterized" by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Seen as a moral deficiency from 300CE to the 1800s, then as a physiological condition that caused bad behavior, and finally, in the 1970s, invested with suspicion due to false claims that the diagnosis of ADHD was a pharmaceutical ploy to sell more drugs, ADHD has been grossly misrepresented within society. Today, ADHD is still seen in a negative light, causing any individual with ADHD to be deemed an annoyance or disturbance in many environments including in classrooms. There are many myths or stereotypes about ADHD that have been circulating in the media and in society for over four decades.

When you think of ADHD what comes to mind? Maybe a hyperactive boy who cannot sit still in class or someone who does not follow instructions well and tends to have trouble concentrating. If this narrative feels familiar it is because these stereotypes have been heavily pushed in characterizing the traits of ADHD. While there is some truth to these stereotypes, the idea that ADHD is just an attention disorder or hyperactive disorder grossly underrepresents the true complexities of ADHD. One trait/comorbidity of ADHD, that is rarely talked about, which up to "98-99% of adolescents and adults with ADHD acknowledge experiencing" is RSD or rejection-sensitive dysphoria. Rejection-sensitive dysphoria (RSD) is "an intense vulnerability to the perception—not necessarily the reality—of being rejected, teased, or criticized by important people in your life" and can cause "extreme emotional pain that may also be triggered by a sense of failure, or falling short–failing to meet either your own high standards or others' expectations." RSD is not something to be brushed off as hypersensitivity either, it affects almost, if not all, aspects of the lives of individuals with ADHD from their relationships to their self-esteem, which can lead to emotional outbursts and even thoughts of self-harm.

Having been diagnosed and medicated for ADHD since 2008, I am disappointed to say that I wasn't aware of RSD until last year, 2022. What is even more disappointing is that I came to this knowledge on my own during a deep dive into the ADHD experience for this thesis. There have also been instances where I have talked to mental health professionals and adults working with ADHD children and they were not familiar with rejection-sensitive dysphoria. I wonder how helpful these adults who are meant to support neurodivergent children are when they don't have a basic understanding of the complexity of ADHD or other neurodivergence. Who is being hurt by this lack of information in the dominant discourse? Neurodivergent individuals. Understanding the complexity of my ADHD could have changed the way I interacted with and shared social spaces growing up. If you consider the intersectionality of sexism and ableism you can imagine the psychological impacts that having RSD would have on a girl with ADHD living in a world that is already sexist and ableist.

For an early timeline of the history of ADHD as a psychiatric or mental disorder, I turned to Lange et al.'s "History of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder." The first account of a psychological understanding of what could be ADHD was published by Sir Alexander Crichton (1763-1856) in the late 1700s. Because at the time "when Crichton published his inquiry, it was uncommon to focus on mental issues from a physiological or medical perspective," Crichton's observations were at the frontier of understanding and enabling specific affectivity around mental health in general and what has now become known as ADHD. To recognize that his work established an affectivity around neurological diversity is to recognize that the language he used and the people he studied set the standard attitude that would be carried on for generations to come when trying to understand those with ADHD. Crichton used gendered language that centered around men and boys, leaving women and girls out of the inquiry almost entirely. Further, he used language such as "borders on insanity" and "disease of attention," which enacted negative affectivity onto certain behaviors such as impulsivity or inattention, or the difficulty of controlling emotions.

What Crichton established in the late 1700s carried into the work of others as seen in Heinrich Hoffmann's children's stories that included characters, such as "Fidgety Phil" (1844)—who can now be understood as having traits of ADHD. Hoffmann disagreed with the belief in the psychiatric field that "psychiatric patients were obsessed or criminal" and instead "regarded mental disorders as medical issues." His perspective coupled with the publication of children's books changed the historical affectivity placed on mental health slightly, but as an outlier in his field he could not shift the overall scientific and social understanding away from its focus on criminality.

In one children's story, Hoffmann tells of a child named Phillip who is characterized as being so hyperactive that he accidentally tips his chair back and in an attempt to catch himself grabs the tablecloth, pulling everything on the table off as he falls backward. This results in a conflict between the family and Phillip. Both Lange et al. and the DSM criteria recognize that there is often a conflict that occurs around the behavior of children with ADHD. However, when we stop to consider that the story's protagonist is a child, and the fact that 98% of people with ADHD also have RSD, we can begin to understand the likely harm to the child's self-image or self-knowledge as they are punished for behavior over which they have very little control.

Who's the Attention On?

Thus far I have been articulating a history of ADHD that leaves out the gendered aspect of having ADHD. By doing so I am replicating the male-centered perspective that has been taken in understanding and treating ADHD, which I will now dissect by discussing the relationship between ADHD and gender. This relationship can be complex but really boils down to the fact that the science we fund, support and disseminate has been produced within a patriarchal society that historically leaves out the lived experiences and research done on and by women, especially women of color. Thus, ADHD-specific scientific research is male-centered as it has mainly focused on and studied ADHD in boys and men. This has led to many misconceptions about what ADHD looks like in girls. This is a form of hermeneutical injustice in which the concept to name one's experiences is not accessible to them through dominant discourse, thus they are denied the ability to fully conceptualize their lived experience as it actually is, and instead are limited to using the existing language.

Many thinkers have defined hermeneutical injustice, including Miranda Fricker, Laura Beeby, and José Medina. In the chapter "Varieties of Hermeneutical Injustice" Medina defines hermeneutical injustice as "the phenomenon that occurs when the intelligibility of communicators is unfairly constrained or undermined, when their meaning-making capacities encounter unfair obstacles, or when a gap in collective interpretive resources puts someone at an unfair disadvantage when it comes to making sense of their social experience." While Medina is giving three different criteria of which only one needs to occur for hermeneutical injustice to exist, the ADHD girl faces all three. By researching only ADHD men and boys, the intelligibility of communicators (ADHD girls) is unfairly constrained within a male-centered system. This forces ADHD girls to communicate or understand their lived experiences through terms developed to explain the ADHD male experience, or not to apply ADHD concepts to at all.

Many male-centered understandings of ADHD prove to be misconceptions in regard to ADHD girls. The understanding that the behaviors exhibited by someone with ADHD are always disruptive and outwardly expressed often does not hold for ADHD girls. Because many girls with ADHD have less disruptive behavior or are more inattentive, their neurodivergence is more likely to be missed by teachers or parents who have a bias in terms of what ADHD looks like. Unawareness of their own neurodivergence harms ADHD girls as knowers of themselves.

The gap in collective interpretive resources is exemplified in what is called a referral bias. These misconceptions cause a referral bias in which teachers, or other adults, only refer students to be tested for ADHD if they exhibit specific traits, such as being disruptive. In "ADHD in girls and boys – gender differences in co-existing symptoms and executive function measures," researchers found that "girls may be consistently under-identified and underdiagnosed mostly explained by differences in the expression of the disorder among boys and girls." Therefore, the criteria for a diagnosis of ADHD do not match the female experience and overlook girls with ADHD who do not present in the same ways as boys with ADHD. ADHD girls can go undiagnosed for decades, leading to the feeling that something is wrong with them, but not fully making sense of their social experience.

Even when they are diagnosed early on, like I was, they are less likely to get the accommodations that they need in order to succeed because of misconceptions and insufficient research. This is especially harmful in a world structured around the NT brain because now the lived experiences and challenges of those girls with ADHD do not align with what the world is telling them their lived experiences should look like. Thus, I hope you carry this question with you as you read: how could living in an ableist patriarchal society negatively impact the well-being and livelihood of ADHD girls?

Epistemic Injustice

In the case of the ADHD girl, why should our focus turn to epistemic harm and not other forms of harm? Even more so, why should we look at the education system? The most basic answer to the second question is that the education system is where most children spend over half of their waking hours. If most students attend kindergarten through 12th grade, they are spending thirteen years of their formative lives operating within the bounds of the education system. As a child, I spent more time with my teachers and peers than with my parents during the school year, as do most children. My teachers, peers, and the school system had a large influence on the way I saw and interacted with the world around me. The school system is a site where young people gain a lot of knowledge about themselves, social interaction, and learning itself. Thus, understanding the epistemic harm that occurs in the education system will allow for the most informed epistemic resistance.

As D. Jean Clandinin suggests in Classroom Practice: Teacher Images in Action, teachers as individuals carry with them their own "personal practical knowledge as it [is] expressed in their practices." Our personal practical knowledge informs our individual images, in this case, images of what the classroom is (e.g., the classroom as home), and through our practices, these images are expressed. Whatever may inform our personal practical knowledge thus informs our images and through our actions, through practice, these images come to fruition. If the dominant discourse that informs most lacks the understanding of the lived experiences of ADHD girls, then their experiences will not be taken up as images to be expressed through practice in the classroom. More so, if the ADHD girl challenges the personal practical knowledge of the teacher–the curator of the classroom– then she is directly challenging the images the teacher is trying to enact. Seeing how this deviation from a teacher's personal practical knowledge might be interpreted as a form of defiance or as a disturbance on behalf of the ADHD girl, further requires an inquiry into the epistemic injustices that take place as a result.

Epistemic harm/injustice is the harm done to or discrimination against someone as a knower. This term engages issues of justice in epistemology—the study of knowledge— and has come to mount a significant challenge to traditional epistemological theorizing through thinkers such as Emmalon Davis, Christene Wiesler, Alison Bailey, Ben Kotzee, Kristie Dotson, Miranda Fricker, and many others. As the articulation of epistemic injustice developed, especially within academic feminism, a variety of concepts have emerged, some of which I will be discussing in this essay. Understanding epistemic harm as it applies to ADHD girls is necessary because neurodivergence affects the ways one learns and knows the world, and neurodivergence is improperly understood and accounted for within the education system.

In "On Gaslighting and Epistemic Injustice: Editor's Introduction," Alison Bailey articulates what is at stake in terms of epistemic injustice. When we call out epistemic harm, we are doing so because this intangible harm, done by knowers to knowers, becomes tangible and felt. It takes a physical toll on all aspects of our lives as epistemically disadvantaged individuals:

The harms epistemic injustice produces are not disembodied harms. Repeated acts of injustice (epistemic or otherwise) weather our bodies, dull our minds, weaken our hearts, and traumatize the spirit of our communities. They create public-health precarities and invite mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual illness into our being. Epistemic oppression is a cruel thief. It is disorienting, exhausting, and deadly. It triggers anger, anxiety, depression, and resistance. It steals our time, energy, and attention away from more beautiful things.

By understanding the epistemic harms that occur to ADHD girls we can understand the tangible harms occurring at the same time. What is more, we can work to stop those harms.

To take up an epistemic approach is to liberate. As José Medina writes, "Epistemic injustices…call for epistemic resistance, that is, for the use of our epistemic resources and abilities to undermine and change the oppressive normative structure and the complacent cognitive-affective functioning that sustains those structures." If we can account for the epistemic injustices that occur, then we can work to destabilize the system which is causing these harms to occur and further resist epistemic oppression.

Finally, the main reason that I am focusing on the epistemic harm done to ADHD girls is to bring awareness to the lived experiences that have been systemically kept quiet in hopes that this will fall into the hands of both those who can make changes in their ways of knowing and interacting with the neurodivergent community, but also into the hands of those like me who need to know that they are not alone in their experience.

On A First Name Basis With the Front Desk Lady

With our understanding of gender and neurodiversity that was developed in the previous section, we can move further in our understanding of how the education system is a conduit for epistemic harm in the lives of ADHD girls. Christine Wiesler's understanding of epistemic imperialism will be useful in articulating the ways in which the epistemic agency of ADHD girls is limited in the education system. In "Epistemic Oppression and Ableism in Bioethics" Wiesler rearticulates Corwin Aragon's definition of epistemic imperialism:

Epistemic imperialism simultaneously involves forcing dominant "systems of belief and ways of knowing" on members of oppressed groups and attempting to conceal that this is occurring through presenting these epistemic claims and practices as value-free (for example, "just the way it is" or "the only reasonable way to understand x") rather than being based on dominant experiences, understandings, and values.

In other words, epistemic imperialism works to legitimate the epistemic agency of the dominantly situated knower by illegitimizing the lived experiences of the oppressed group. Regarding my analysis of girls with ADHD and epistemic imperialism, I understand girls to be marginally situated knowers and the ableist patriarchal world around them to inform dominantly situated knowers. In my experience, as a girl with ADHD, I have been seated in the classrooms of dominantly situated knowers who have forced the "dominant 'systems of belief and ways of knowing'' onto me and claimed that this is "just the way it is." I have been stifled as a thinker and knower by educators and mentors who were supposedly there to guide me into my adulthood. Not only did I experience this more than a decade ago when I was in grade school, but children with ADHD in K-12 today continue to experience this type of epistemic harm in classrooms.

Epistemic imperialism can look like establishing rules in a classroom that align with the dominant pedagogy of society. Think back to the images that teachers practice into existence in their classrooms as informed by their personal practical knowledge– and the discursive structures they partake in. These classroom rules can be as simple as raising your hand and being called on before you speak, and the consequence is that the student will be pulled out of the classroom if they do not do so. While simple, these classroom rules can cause lasting harm. Earlier, I summarized the story of fidgety Phil and called attention to the harm done to one's self-knowledge and self-image. In the story, Phil was punished for the effects of a behavior he could not control. When a child is giggling and feeling hyperactive, thus causing them to fidget, they don't understand the annoyance that this behavior might cause within others. Punishing the behavior of the ADHD child assumes that the child has control over their actions, and tells the child that they should have control over their behaviors because if it wasn't their choice, they would not be punished. In other words, the child is told—through their being punished—that they are deliberately doing the wrong thing. When others, typically adults, have negative reactions to the child's behavior, the child over time will begin to understand themselves as the annoyance or burden, and not just their behavior.

When I was in kindergarten I was sent to the principal's office every day, so much so that I was on a first-name basis with the front desk lady. Why was I being sent to the principal's office every day by my teacher? Because I kept forgetting to raise my hand. My teacher, for whatever reason, felt that the best punishment for my disturbance to the classroom would be to remove me from the education setting, thus stymying my educational development instead of dealing with the problem in a more constructive way. For example, telling me that my contribution to the classroom was helpful, but next time I should raise my hand. While punishment was effective in getting me to raise my hand in the following years, I also was exposed to three forms of epistemic harm: harm to me as a knower of myself, harm to my knowledge of the world, and harm to the knowledge others have of me.

As a five-year-old, the behavior I was being punished for was interrupting. The issue my teacher had with me was that I was not understanding a basic classroom rule: raising your hand before you speak. This rule, as mentioned previously, is established and maintained through epistemic imperialism. Interrupting or talking out of turn was caused by a trait of my ADHD—the specific type of ADHD I have is called the combined type in which I have impulsivity, inattention, and hyperactivity— which disrupted the standards of the classroom established by a system that is limited to one framework. The punishment I received for a behavior I had very little control over (impulsivity) coupled with RSD, left me believing that I was the issue and not my behavior. I learned through consistent punishment that I was a wrongdoer, which to my child-self, meant that I was a bad person– because as children we are taught that punishment happens to people who do bad things. This became harmful to me as a knower of myself. Instead of acknowledging that I was impulsive and struggled with things my peers didn't struggle with, I learned that I was a problem in the classroom and overcompensated for being seen as bad by becoming a people pleaser. Becoming a people pleaser allowed for my boundaries to be easily crossed, leaving me more vulnerable to the oppressive world.

By removing me from the classroom every day my teacher used her agency to truncate the early development of my knowledge of the world. Being sent to the office once or twice isn't that disruptive to the formative education learned in kindergarten. Being sent to the office for extended periods of time every day for a year— during reading time, math lessons, etc—disrupted my education and left gaps in my understanding of the concepts taught that year. While other students were able to build on what they were taught from the day before, I was constantly playing catchup because I was being punished for repeating a behavior.

The final harm is the harm done to others' knowledge of me. The teacher who punished me created a specific understanding of who I was that both myself and my peers held onto: I was a disruption. My peers treated me as such. This harm to their knowledge of me reinforced the harm done to my self-understanding, which then resulted in me presenting in a way that is not in line with who I am. Not being known by your peers, friends, and the adults in your life leads to not knowing yourself, which eventually leads you to believe what others tell you. Once you don't know yourself, you stop knowing the world around you. This cyclical relationship is one that is very hard to get out of and can become very isolating to the ADHD girl.

Missing lessons, improper punishment, and the social effects that being removed from the classroom caused had real impacts on how I experienced the world as a five-year-old. It took two years for anyone to realize something beyond my control was responsible for my so-called "disruptive" behavior. This was due both to a referral bias held by many of my teachers and to the beginning of my learned coping mechanisms. During the course of second grade, I was diagnosed with ADHD, attended tutoring for math and reading weekly, jumped up three levels in reading (after two months of tutoring), and tried three different ADHD medications before landing on one of which did not have side effects that caused adverse effects to my sleeping habits.

Self-Accommodating in An Unaccommodating World

By the time I reached high school I had accumulated a battalion of coping mechanisms to help me be the best student possible. However, these coping mechanisms were no match for the high-stress environments that the AP and IB courses created. Don't get me wrong, I was a great student, some may even say–my dad especially– an outstanding representation of my graduating class. I was on the leadership team of the highly prestigious National Honors Society, captain of the dive team two years in a row, and a three-time varsity letter athlete. I graduated with a 4.2 GPA and I was volunteering over 20 hours every semester. However, during all of this, I struggled with severe anxiety and depression as comorbidities of my neglected ADHD. I often, unintentionally, disparaged my experiences by writing them off as time anxiety, because this was the only way I could conceptualize and articulate the tip of the iceberg of feelings I was experiencing. This was due to a lack of resources available to me, at the time, to make sense of my lived experience. In other words, I was feeling the effects of being at a hermeneutical disadvantage.

One type of epistemic injustice is characterized by a lack of conceptual resources available to certain individuals to allow them to understand or articulate their own experiences: hermeneutical injustice. In Miranda Fricker's book, she uses the experience of women suffering postpartum depression to demonstrate how a lack of understanding of one's condition can produce epistemic harm. The woman in her example experienced postpartum depression in the 1960s when the language used to describe this phenomenon had not yet been developed, nor was it widely discussed among women— partly due to a lack of attention to female reproductive mental and physical health. Because of this the woman in this example didn't know what she had, nor did she have the tools to accurately articulate what it was she was experiencing. Fricker's three criteria for hermeneutical injustice are as follows:

1. A subject does not have the interpretive resources to adequately understand or express some important aspect of her experience (this might occur because the subject has not been exposed to the relevant concepts or because adequate concepts do not yet exist);
2. the lack of interpretive resources is due to the fact that the subject belongs to a social group which is hermeneutically marginalized;
3. the same subject is harmed by this lack of meanings, that is, she is prevented from understanding an important and distinctive patch of her own experience; a patch of experience which it is strongly in her interests to understand, for without that understanding she is left deeply troubled, confused, and isolated, not to mention vulnerable to continued harassment.

Like the woman who suffered postpartum depression, I too was struggling with an internal issue that left me feeling alone in my experiences. During K-12 I was given very little support for my ADHD and had a very shallow understanding of what ADHD was. All I knew was that when I was unmedicated people liked me less, I didn't get good grades and I ate too much. I wasn't provided therapy or support for the comorbidities that might pop up through the years, nor was I aware that people with ADHD are likely to have eating disorders and rejection-sensitivity dysphoria and thus that these were something I should look out for. Instead, I felt that something was wrong with me because I, unlike my peers, had to work harder and put more energy into accommodating my needs to meet the same level of success that they were finding with minimal effort. With this, I fed myself the narrative that I deserved the difficulties and challenges I was facing because I was like everyone else, and therefore should deal with the world as everyone around me was. Hermeneutical injustice made it so that I didn't realize what I was experiencing was due to neurodivergence. Instead, I thought I was broken and felt alienated from my peers. I felt incredibly alone when I could have felt a part of a community as I do now, all because I was lacking the resources to make sense of my lived experiences.

During my sophomore year of high school I decided to take AP US History, jokingly called A-PUSH due to the rigor of the course. After failing to finish the first timed writing of the year I panicked. At the time I believed grades defined my worth, thus I sought out the help of my teacher in trying to earn a better grade on this test. While I wasn't confident he would let me retake the test, I went into his office hopeful. What started off as a conversation about learning how to write under time restraints turned into a long-winded explanation of my time anxiety and the impending doom I felt anytime I was required to take a timed test. His reaction to this shocked me. He was one of the first teachers I had ever had that made me feel like what I was struggling with wasn't because I was broken, and instead, because I had ADHD. His suggestion was that I retake the test in his office, without the presence of my peers, and that after that I should try and schedule a meeting with my counselor about getting accommodations.

Within the week I was meeting with my counselor— one might call this impatience camouflaged as efficiency. The meeting was brief. When I walked in she had my transcript pulled up and fit her goodbye in the same breath as her hello. According to her, because I was an A/B student and taking AP and IB courses, my request for accommodations would be turned down immediately. Thus, I should not even try because it would be a waste of my time. She humored me for less than five minutes before concluding that "this is just the way it is" and welcoming her next student into her office. This situation was a case of epistemic imperialism in which she as the dominantly situated knower forced the dominant systems of belief and ways of knowing onto me. Instead of providing me with new ways of knowing the world around me and understanding that there were other ways of learning that could have helped me, she asked me—did I have a choice though?— to "take on ways of understanding that are grounded in the experiences and values of dominantly situated knowers" and requested that I "disavow [my] own" by making me concede to this request and leaving her office believing that I did not need accommodations as I had previously thought. This is what Polhaus conceptualizes as a wrongful request to understand. In this moment the counselor, as an individual with the position to help me, reified my place in navigating unlevel knowing fields.

The epistemic (gendered) assumptions I was up against in seeking accommodations were the continued and widespread belief that students should be accommodated if they do not have good grades and if they are a disruption in the classroom. Testimonial injustice is a form of epistemic harm in which the testimony of an individual is discredited or invalidated due to the listener's prejudice of the speaker's identity. Drawing on the work of several thinkers, Weisler argues that, particularly in biomedical contexts, "disabled people are discredited as knowers when their testimony conflicts with the standard view." This experience of testimonial injustice is also common for neurodivergent people trying to articulate their experiences in the NT world.

Being turned away by the counselor was an instant of testimonial injustice in which my experience in the education system was disavowed because of the lack of legitimacy my counselor granted me as a knower. This also operates as a form of epistemic gaslighting. As characterized by McKinnon:

Epistemic gaslighting is "often unintentional, where a listener doesn't believe or expresses doubt about a speaker's testimony... [and in so doing] raises doubts about the speaker's reliability at perceiving events accurately." In the case of epistemic gaslighting, the agent who gaslights may act intentionally or unintentionally, so intention is not a deciding factor in whether epistemic gaslighting is present…In other words, epistemic gaslighting is oriented not toward psychological breakdown, but rather toward a sort of epistemic breakdown: to put out of circulation a particular way of understanding the world, one that centers the experience of the one who is gaslit.

If we consider my experience in parallel to Polhaus's epistemic gaslighting we can situate the counselor as the (unintentional) epistemic gaslighter who raised doubts about me needing accommodations and used my grades and courses as evidence backing an attempt to change my own beliefs on what I needed (and to get me to stop asking for those needs to be met)— it was incredibly effective.

In response to not getting external support, I began to self-accommodate. Every day for two years (after I was able to drive) I would show up to school two hours before the first class started. I would spend the first hour in my car because the building was locked. During this time I would study, do homework, and mentally prepare for the day. The second hour was when I would go into the building and meet with teachers and catch up on any extracurricular work for the clubs I was in. Doing so meant I was up at 5 am and was out of my house by 5:30 driving to school. I would not return home for another 12-plus hours due to after-school clubs and dive/swim practice. Having taken enough tests to know I did worse when I was testing next to other students I began to call in sick on the days I knew I had tests. Then, I would reach out to my teachers and ask them if I could make up the test in their office the next day–and because they saw me in the halls an hour before school and knew I worked hard they said yes. On weekends I would self-isolate as a way to recharge, inadvertently removing myself from all social groups by the time I was a senior. Despite faking many sick days to accommodate my test-taking needs, I was also often very ill because of the stress I was under. It is very important to note that I was surrounded by high-achieving peers that took on the same courses and extracurriculars as me—if not more—and did not need to accommodate in the ways I did. Nor did they struggle to maintain a social life.

During my junior year, I became closer to a friend who also had ADHD. After discovering that she had accommodations I once again attempted to meet with my counselor and request accommodations. Going into my meeting with the counselor, I nearly begged for her help. When she pulled up my file the first thing she looked at was my transcript and saw that I was still getting A's and B's in AP and IB courses. She turned to me with a crooked smile on her face: "You don't need accommodations, you're smart. You just need to be less of a perfectionist, these grades are fine. No one is going to give you accommodations because you are not struggling. Just look at these grades!" How could she not see? My grades are good but I am not. I am constantly tired, anxious, and struggling with depression and I feel like I am going to slip at any moment. The slew of coping mechanisms I had developed to self-accommodate aided the dominantly situated knowers in further refusing me the help I needed.

Polhaus Jr. uses Bailey's unlevel knowing fields to situate epistemic gaslighting as a form of testimonial harm:

As Alison Bailey has noted, our endeavors to know the world take place within "unlevel knowing fields." In other words, under conditions of oppression, epistemic institutions and practices structure knowers differently such that some will be enabled in their epistemic projects whereas others will be hindered. This is due not only to material inequities that hinder epistemic agency but also to collective epistemic practices, assumptions, and institutions that work against the epistemic interests of particular knowers.

Bailey's notion of unlevel knowing fields describes how the epistemically disadvantaged are situated below the epistemically advantaged in terms of access to knowledge. As I continued high school without structural accommodations, I navigated unlevel knowing fields that hindered my success in epistemic projects—such as developing a sense of self, understanding the concepts I was learning in relation to the world I was experiencing, and developing relationships in which I felt known— while enabling those of my peers. This second refusal positioned me against both ADHD individuals (girls and boys) and NT individuals. My testimony as an ADHD girl was discredited by the counselor based on gendered biases, as I was being compared to the male-centered stereotypes of ADHD and thus wasn't meeting the gendered expectations of how ADHD presented. Understanding myself to have ADHD but being refused the accommodations I saw my ADHD peers obtaining, I repositioned my self-knowledge of what I deserved or needed. Finally, the comparison my counselor was making about me in relation to the NT students illegitimized me as an ADHD girl in need of help. Instead, it aligned me with the NT individuals in my classes who were doing as well as I was, yet experiencing the world and their work differently.

In my case, I was being hindered by the collective epistemic practices of the education system that believe only students who fail to achieve good grades or are disruptive need accommodations. Those of us who appeared to succeed while suffering internally were ignored.

Masking to Cope

Masking is a term used by the neurodivergent community to name the experience of camouflaging one's neurodivergence to blend into the NT society, through the performance of socially acceptable behaviors. Masking, while mostly seen as a subconscious performance, can also occur through conscious choices that are temporally affected.

Halfway through fifth grade, I stopped taking my ADHD medication because of a comment my dad made that led me to believe that I didn't actually have ADHD or that I didn't need to be medicated for it. While I was adjusting to the unmedicated version of myself, those around me were too and they met me with discomfort in my newfound energy. In the months following I was asked by peers, teachers, and family members if I had taken my medication. This very simple question, even to this day, evokes so many negative feelings within me that my mood switches instantly. Even when I was ten I realized that when someone was asking me if I had taken my medicine, they were affecting my true nature (unmedicated me) with an annoyance and a silent statement of You are too much— whether because I was being too loud, too energetic for the environment, too talkative, or not understanding social cues. This question only ever came up when I was in fact not medicated. Was I too much off my medication? Or was the world around me not doing enough to understand who I was? Over the course of a year I internalized the belief that the medicated version of me was the only acceptable version of me and I decided to go back on medication for my ADHD, not taking another break until I got to college. Over these eight years I religiously took my medication–nearly having panic attacks when I forgot or ran out. During this time I only knew the medicated version of myself and I tucked the unmedicated version of myself deep inside.

Alongside the pestering question–have you taken your meds today?– my success on medication also informed me of the value of my medicated self. While medicated my grades were better, my teachers liked me more, my friends liked me more, my siblings liked me more, and I lost weight due to the loss of appetite from the side effects of the medication. However, the positives of taking medication also came with the negative side effects. While on ADHD medication I became rigid and had a very hard time accepting change. The first medication I tried–ritalin–caused me insomnia when I was seven. Switching medications three plus times to find the best one for my body meant that I had to go through withdrawal and new side effects three separate times in the span of one year. It wasn't until I was twenty that I found out that the ADHD medication I took for ten years made my anxiety and Autism worse.

This is an example of a conscious choice to mask my ADHD through medication influenced by temporal affectivity. When I decided to go back on medication in the sixth grade, I chose to do so knowing that I would be treated differently on meds than I was being treated off of them. I chose medication as a tool for masking my ADHD because I subconsciously felt the pressures of the NT world on my individual being, and believed that I needed to align myself with the NT world instead of existing as I was unmedicated.

Masking has a historical and personal temporality that informs the camouflaging. The historical comes into play through the lack of epistemic resources and understanding of neurodivergence as well as the affectively charged terms that circulate the diagnosis and existence of ADHD girls. The personal temporality comes through the interpersonal relationships that ADHD girls have as they navigate and grow in an NT world. Medicating as a way of masking is both historical and personal. It is historical because there has been a push to medicate children with ADHD over the last half-century, which informed and pushed my parents to medicate me (for the first time) at the age of seven. This was a form of masking that was placed onto me, and not one I actively chose. Thus, it can be considered a form of epistemic imperialism in which a specific way of existing becomes the only way one is allowed to exist because dominant discourse and dominantly situated knowers force this upon the epistemically disadvantaged. In this case, medicating children with ADHD was pushed onto parents as the only way of treating ADHD.

Could masking in the classroom be a form of testimonial smothering? While it is probably not what Kristie Dotson had in mind, I do believe masking is a form of smothering one's testimony.

Testimonial smothering is the truncating of one's own testimony in order to ensure that the testimony contains only content for which one's audience demonstrates testimonial competence. Three circumstances identify testimonial smothering in a testimonial exchange: 1) the content of the testimony must be unsafe and risky; 2) the audience must demonstrate testimonial incompetence with respect to the content of the testimony to the speaker; and 3) that testimonial incompetence must follow from, or appear to follow from pernicious ignorance.

If we understand testimony to be both a formal verbal and written statement, but also the physical visual proof of the existence of something, then we can manipulate Dotson's definition of testimonial smothering to fit the visual proof of the existence of something and therefore the smothering of that existence. Masking is done because the ADHD girl has experienced adverse and harmful reactions to her unfiltered neurodivergent behavior–in my case this occurred in the classroom. Thus fitting the first point that the content of the testimony is unsafe or risky, if we are understanding the behavior of an ADHD girl as her testimony. The ADHD girl develops a gut feeling that informs when the mask should be on. This gut feeling has been molded and shaped by the ways people have treated the ADHD girl in the past, showing her they do not have testimonial competence with respect to the content of the ADHD girl's testimony, which in this case is her behavior. This then allows us to meet the third point: the perniciousness of the ignorance held by the audience of the ADHD girl causes her to smother her testimony.

How is testimonial smothering dangerous to the developing self of an ADHD girl? Harm is done to the ADHD girl as a knower of herself when the way she understands herself is not reflected in the way others think or come to know of her. Oftentimes, ADHD girls develop coping mechanisms to disguise their ADHD in public settings. One of which, as already stated, is masking. When led to mask ADHD, one's understanding of themself becomes intertwined with the facade they are putting on for those around them. This act of masking is a performance, a subconscious repositioning of oneself and their behaviors to mimic those who are seemingly cruising through life without fault. Masking is similar to Butler's reframing of Beauvoir's becoming, where Butler asserts that: "Gender is the repeated stylization of the body; a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being." To become a woman is to repeat feminized acts that naturalize gender within the body of the actor. Inspired by Butler's claims I am drawn to understand masking as an act of performing neurotypicality to squeeze one's metaphorical body and neurological state into a personally ill-fitting NT world.

In the case Butler is putting forward, Gender is the social construct that exists and takes shape within the culture/social boundaries. In the case of masking one's ADHD, it is neurotypicality that is the social construct existing and taking shape within cultural and social boundaries. Neurotypicality is the norm of the late-capitalist US and supplies a framework for how the education system is upheld and how information is dispersed. When ADHD girls mask they are becoming chameleons in the NT world. They are tucking away the parts of themselves that would be deemed by others as bothersome or burdensome, and weird among other ableist interpretations of neurodivergent behaviors. In many instances, we as ADHD girls mask because we have been informed by the early education system that who we are, or parts of us, do not belong in specific spaces. It is through shaming or punishment—such as being sent to the principal's office every day for a year— that we adapt to our forced educational environments through masking. While boys are also known to mask, they do so much less frequently and due to gender norms, they are required to do so less often because the way their ADHD manifests is accepted in terms of their gender identity and the norms around such identity.

In the last few months I completed a research project centering on an interview I did with a paraeducator at a Portland public elementary school. She works one-on-one with an ADHD girl who has an IEP and a 504 to accommodate both her neurodivergence and other medical needs. Through conducting the interview I realized that the gender norms applied to boys and girls are still the same as they were when I was in elementary school. When asked how the stigma around behaviors of ADHD came into play in the classroom in relation to gender, the paraeducator said that girls are considered "annoying or weird," whereas boys are just seen as hyper and needing an outlet. The reaction to boys with ADHD having outbursts in the classroom is vastly different from the reaction to girls with ADHD: "It's just kinda more accepted when the boys are doing it [acting out]." This is the same as when I was in elementary and middle school. I found that the boys who were being disruptive were labeled class clowns and their behavior was written off with the phrase many of us know well: boys will be boys. This just the way it is attitude around boys being accepted as disruptive is another example of epistemic imperialism, which goes on to affect the ADHD girl because when she is being disruptive or is understood as acting out she is punished with no questions asked—as seen in the example I gave from when I was in kindergarten.

The performance of the mask through repetition of a NT behavior becomes so naturalized for ADHD girls that often the mask does not come down even when the girl is in a private space. From an early age, I learned that there were parts of myself that did not belong in the classroom setting, and up to this day, I still struggle with the feeling of needing to mask. The education system informs ADHD girls about how they should be acting through punishment and embarrassment. While this may not be a conscious decision made by teachers, peers, or other people in the education system, the ableist structures in place, coupled with sexism, provide a perfect environment for ADHD girls to face epistemic harm. Can the ADHD girl recover the parts of herself she has been masking if it goes on too long? How long is too long to mask?

They Say College is Where You Find Yourself

When I was in high school I didn't have the resources to make sense of what was going on internally. The only thing I could do was compare myself to my NT peers. I had very little information on what ADHD was other than a learning disability stereotyped by impulsivity, hyperactivity, and inattention. This greatly affected my self-knowledge when it came to the way my neurological makeup impacted my sensibilities in relation to the world. Having been under the impression that I was experiencing the world at the same level of severity and intensity that everyone else was, I wrote off the aspects of myself that did not align with how I perceived others to exist in the world as burdensome, too much, weird, or signs that I was broken. This meant continuously putting myself in harmful, stressful, and draining situations and environments. As Bailey pressed: "The harms epistemic injustice produces are not disembodied harms." If I had been afforded epistemic agency in the education system I might not have developed many of the comorbidities that many others with ADHD and Autism also experience. Constantly being in the dark about what was going on in my own mind and lived experience truly did "create public-health precarities and invite mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual illness into [my] being" that I have spent the last four years trying to unlearn.

Much of the work that I have read that clued me into the fact that my lived experiences were not aligned with the dominant discourse came from women of color and queer people of color. Their work rejects mainstream discourse situated in the cishet white male experience and I am thankful that I have come across these thinkers in these last four years of my life. Understanding my lived experience outside of what I was being told allowed me to work through and push beyond narratives fed to me through the K-12 education system and US social structures, which is what inspired and informed this thesis.

Within the last four years–as I have navigated my undergraduate time– I have come across new conceptual resources that have allowed me to construct counter-narratives to my K-12 educational experience. I have had access to accommodations, of which have allowed me to understand that learning does not go hand in hand with anxiety and depression. By separating my mental health from my education and schooling I have been able to connect to parts of myself that I have previously tucked away. In this time I have been diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder, Generalized Anxiety Disorder, Situational Depression Disorder, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, and an eating disorder. All of which were with me during my time in the K-12 school system.

Despite having been epistemically harmed within the education system throughout my life, I have now found access to communities that have conceptualized and articulated the ADHD girl's experience, giving me the ability to understand my lived experience despite being hermeneutically disadvantaged. Further, this access has allowed me to put forth this essay in hopes of continuing the dissemination of knowledge on the ADHD girl's experience. There is solace in knowing that despite the unavailability of resources for our expression and communication by the dominant culture, all inter-colonized peoples have the capacity for an epistemic advantage that sees beyond the dominant framework. In "The Vice of Avoiding Epistemic Friction, Hermeneutical Injustice, and the Problem of 'Meta-Blindness'" José Medina argues that:

the experience of being hermeneutically disadvantaged itself can become an epistemic advantage–or at least the seed or foundation for possible epistemic advantages, the springboard for learning processes that can lead to alternative epistemic perspectives or the expansion of existing ones. Because the hermeneutically privileged (or non-disadvantaged) do not have the experience of being unable to properly conceptualize certain things, they have little opportunity to realize (and little motivation to accept) that there is more to see and talk about than what the culturally available hermeneutical tools enable people to recognize.

Those who are epistemically harmed through a hermeneutical disadvantage have the capacity to see and articulate what the hermeneutically non-disadvantaged cannot conceptualize.

I am thankful for coming to a deeper understanding of myself in this time by cultivating a new understanding of the world and myself. Through access to accommodations, therapy, and finding a community that shares my lived experiences I have been able to achieve testimonial justice despite the narratives I was fed as a child. However, the damage runs deep and working through epistemic harms and learning about myself will be a constant effort that I hope others can begin to do as well. The epistemic harm I faced in the K-12 education system was not a singular case of which it only affected me. Many ADHD girls have similar experiences to mine and I hope that conceptualizing this epistemic harm in the way I have begins to shed philosophical light on the ongoing issue within the US education system. More importantly, I hope to make ADHD girls who have experienced similar harm feel less alone and help them make sense of their lived experiences.