intersection

Oppression Olympics

The competitive ranking of suffering that keeps marginalized communities divided

A term from coalition-building theory, not currently classified as a neurodivergent condition, included here because the dynamic it names recurs in neurodivergent and disability communities.

Intersection: This entry covers a topic not currently classified as neurodivergence within this compendium. It appears here because the competitive-suffering dynamic Oppression Olympics names operates within neurodivergent spaces in ways that affect coalition-building and access to community support.

What This Is

Martínez coined the term in 1993, during a dialogue with Angela Y. Davis about building coalitions across difference. Her point was practical: groups that should be building power together were spending energy arguing about whose suffering counts more (Martínez & Davis, 1993). The term names a dynamic, not a deliberate position. It tends to emerge from real pain, real history, and real competition for resources in a world that offers too little of both. Nobody decides to play the Oppression Olympics. The dynamic plays them.

Why It Intersects

The Oppression Olympics pattern appears in specific forms inside neurodivergent communities: debates about which diagnoses represent “real” neurodivergence, arguments that some conditions are not disabled enough to warrant accommodation, hierarchies between Autistic people based on support needs. These are the same competitive-ranking logic Martínez named, wearing different clothes.

Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality framework explains why that logic breaks down. Oppressions do not stack in a hierarchy waiting to be ranked. They interlock and reinforce each other. A person who is both disabled and Black is not navigating two separate, weighable oppressions; each shapes the experience of the other in ways neither can account for alone (Crenshaw, 1989). Once that is clear, competitive ranking stops making sense.

Disability justice advocates arrived at the same place from within disability movements. The framework developed by Sins Invalid explicitly rejects internal hierarchies as incompatible with liberation (Sins Invalid, 2019). Ryan Boren at Stimpunks Foundation draws this into neurodivergent community organizing: in a rhizomatic model, no group has to earn a place at the top of a hierarchy to contribute or be counted (Boren, 2023). Power and ideas move laterally.

When neurodivergent communities argue internally about who counts, the conditions producing inaccessibility do not change. Nobody is arguing with the systems doing the harm. Note: “Oppression Olympics” was coined by Elizabeth Martínez as a critique, not a neutral description of a fixed behavioral category. It names a dynamic that can emerge in any marginalized community, often driven by genuine pain, real resource scarcity, or political frustration rather than bad faith. The term originates in cross-community coalition organizing, not specifically in neurodivergent spaces. This compendium does not classify Oppression Olympics as a neurodivergent condition or experience. It appears here because neurodivergent and disability communities encounter this dynamic and benefit from having language for it.

For Further Reading