The AutSide Podcast

I didnae need the words to be who I was. I needed the words to make what I had already lived available to language—and, eventually, to other people. I have been thinking about this quite a lot lately, particularly as we approach the US midterm elections, when so much of my ordinary existence—my gender, my sexuality, my neurodivergence, my place in education and public life—somehow becomes a matter for political discussion. There is something deeply unsettling about watching strangers debate who you are, especially when they seem more interested in their account of you than in the person actually living the life.
I am fifty-six years old. I grew up and became an adult before much of the language I now use to describe myself was available to me. Trans. Queer. Pan. AuDHD. Gestalt language processor. These words have different histories, and some existed long before I encountered them, but none was available to me in the ways I can use them now. Yet the experiences were already there. The attractions, the longings, the ways of knowing, the sensory relationships, the gendered experiences that I could neither explain nor safely express. I lived the life before I found the language to describe it.
And this creates a peculiar difficulty when people who knew me years ago encounter more of me now. They remember someone. They have stories, impressions, and an understanding of who I was. But what they knew was the portion of me that could become available under the conditions of that earlier time—the language I possessed, the safety I had, the capacities I had developed, and the expectations I was trying to survive. Sometimes people are surprised. Sometimes they are delighted. And sometimes they insist that their memory of me is more authoritative than my account of myself. But you weren’t like that before. Perhaps what you mean is that you didn’t know.
There is a deeper question here about what has to happen for meaning to become language. As an autistic gestalt processor, I know that meaning does not always arrive in the tidy sequence our educational and clinical frameworks expect. Sometimes the whole of an experience is present long before its components become accessible. Sometimes the words arrive without the meaning. Sometimes the meaning has been accumulating for decades, waiting for enough language, time, and safety to become communicable. And sometimes, even after we find the words, the people listening are unwilling to revise what they thought they knew.
None of this means I have remained unchanged. I have grown, matured, loved, learned, developed new capacities, and become able to inhabit my life in ways that were not possible when I was younger. Coming out changed my life, but it did not create me. Nor am I claiming that my experience is universal. I am an n of one—a person whose development, language acquisition, and opportunities for recognition have unfolded under particular historical and personal conditions. But an n of one is still a life, and that life may reveal something about the limitations of the categories through which we interpret other people.
In this week’s Sunday Morning Musings, I am inviting you to consider the difference between knowing someone and knowing the version of them that was available to you. The words may arrive late. Recognition may arrive later still. And the person standing before you may exceed everything you thought you knew about them. I am not unchanged. But neither did I begin when you first became able to recognise me. So, rather than asking me to fit the image you have carried, perhaps we might begin somewhere else.
Let’s meet the whole of me.
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Cathy and I explore the distance between understanding and having the words available, following a thread through forensic science, the Script Garden, and maths—with fresh bread giving fractions somewhere meaningful to land.
Cathy and I finally managed to sit down for another chat after a few weeks away, and we covered rather a lot of ground: language, learning, forensic science, calculus, and fresh bread. There is usually a thread. Sometimes it takes us a wee while to find out how much is attached to it.
We began with something that can be difficult to explain when you write and speak professionally: having language does not mean having the words available for every situation. I can lecture on a familiar subject and still encounter a moment for which I have no usable response. There is always more growing to do in the Script Garden.
I also talked about how my writing happens. Something sets off a flood of connections, I talk into my voice notes, and then comes the work of finding the threads and giving them somewhere to live. What eventually appears as a tidy series of essays began as rather a lot happening at once.
That brought us to maths, including Cathy’s account of a young person who can calculate what he needs whilst working in a garage but struggles with the questions presented at school. How do we help someone recognise the relationship between what they already understand and the language an examination expects?
Naturally, I brought bread into it. Making a loaf, sharing it fairly, and eating it together gives fractions and proportions somewhere to land. By the time we introduce the mathematical language, we have something to talk about—and hopefully some olive oil and herbs to go with it.
Cathy later observed that I had her with the bread and lost her with the Xs and Ys, which rather helped demonstrate the point. A lovely morning of conversation, a little silliness, and the question that keeps finding its way into everything I do: what has to happen for meaning to become language?
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I supply the life; others claim the authority to explain it. Across womanhood, autism, language, and queerness, I carry the work of correction—and ask what future my children inherit when who we are is treated as up for debate.
I supply the life; someone else is granted the authority to explain it. This Sunday morning, I am thinking about how often that relationship returns across my life—my body, my language, my work, and my queerness—and how lonely it becomes when being the person concerned does not reliably make me the person heard.
I am six feet seven inches tall, athletic, and powerfully built. I am a woman. Yet narrow expectations of womanhood make my body something other people believe they may question. I am autistic and a gestalt processor who struggles mightily with language, working within a system that tolerates my autism whilst largely ignoring the conditions through which speech becomes available. I am queer, living within patriarchal and capitalist arrangements that make recognition conditional upon conformity.
These pressures accumulate in one life. Mine.
The ASHA correspondence gives this relationship a concrete form. I identified discrepancies between claims published about my work and the source cited to support them. The journal reported a review and declared it closed without explaining how those discrepancies were resolved. Its account travels with institutional weight. My correction has to travel with me.
I do not “identify as” autistic, queer, or a woman. I am. When I speak, I am telling you who is here. Yet finding the words does not guarantee that anyone will allow them to change their understanding.
I am getting older, and I worry about the future my children inherit: whose needs will shape support, whose testimony will matter, and how much life they will spend defending their existence.
Self-knowledge cannot perform all the work of belonging. I need others willing to listen, revise their assumptions, and share the labour of understanding. When my life exceeds the norm, there must be room for the norm to change.
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I speak frankly about pain, bullying, identity, and the effort behind the words. My life existed before recognition; my needs persist when I can speak. A personal account of what has been happening behind the recent writing.
I have not had many good days lately, and I wanted to speak about what has been happening before the effort of making a polished account became another thing I could not manage. In this video, I speak without prepared supports for about forty-five minutes—about pain, identity, bullying, language, and the work of navigating institutions when I do not already have the scripts for what they require. The words were available for this recording. That does not mean they are always available, or that speaking comes without cost.
This summer’s legal name and gender marker change was an important point in a much longer history. Being taken from my birth parents, having my identity sealed, and discovering my adoption at seventeen left me with a reality I have spent decades trying to understand. Some pieces have become clearer; others remain contradictory and may never resolve. For me, those unresolved pieces continue to require attention. Not having words for what was happening did not mean nothing was happening. It meant I had to live through it before I could explain it.
That distinction runs through my present circumstances too. The injury to my leg has brought persistent pain, interrupted sleep, uncertainty, and difficult conversations about what happens next. Updating my name across accounts and records has brought another succession of demands—telephone calls, explanations, documents, and procedures whose instructions are sometimes only available after I have managed to ask for them. I can do some of these things. People see that I have done them. They rarely see how much capacity the doing consumed, or what became unavailable afterwards.
This week, a staff training about bullying brought years of experience into the room with me. I was being asked to attend to a story in which teachers protect children from bullying, whilst carrying my own experiences of harassment and repeated misgendering at school—and knowing that queer pupils have also described feeling unsafe. I spoke out. An assistant principal subsequently listened, discussed next steps with me, and asked for a written statement. I was grateful that she took the matter seriously. Producing that statement still required me to find an order for experiences that arrived together, tearfully, under pressure.
My writing is part of how I make that order available to myself. AutSide and Sensual Residue hold scripts, histories, feelings, and ideas that I return to when I need language for my life. What reaches a reader as an essay also serves me as somewhere to put what cannot keep crowding my attention. This is why I keep returning to the difference between an output and the conditions that made it possible—and why I write about witnesses, whose silence can help establish what a room permits. I do not want my own silence to become part of that permission.
I have always been autistic. I have always been a gestalt processor. I have always been a queer trans woman. Recognition, diagnosis, disclosure, and corrected documents mark moments when something became speakable or officially acknowledged; my life was already there. This recording is a moment within that life, and an attempt to share the circumstances behind the recent writing. Thank you to everyone who reads, watches, comments, shares, or subscribes. Your support helps make this work possible, and sometimes helps with the ordinary necessities of living too. I am deeply grateful.
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Cathy and I ask whose testimony counts as evidence. Autistic people describe the load, pain, and preparation behind observable behaviour—yet our accounts are too often dismissed before they enter the record.
Today, Cathy and I returned to a question that runs beneath so much of the argument about autism and gestalt processing: what counts as evidence, and who gets to decide? I can describe what happens inside my own experience—the accumulation of information, the difficulty recognising bodily signals, the labour of rebuilding a plan—and still find that description treated as something outside the evidentiary record. The behaviour is available for somebody else to interpret, whilst my account of what produced it becomes suspect. I am visible as an object of study. My standing as a witness is less secure.
I reached for the language of witness testimony because it makes that imbalance difficult to ignore. A witness’s account need not settle every question to belong in the record; it can be examined, compared with other accounts, and considered alongside other evidence. Autistic testimony deserves that same seriousness. My description cannot, by itself, establish a neurological mechanism or prove that every autistic person processes as I do. But those limits do not make it evidentially empty. There is a consequential difference between asking what an account can establish and deciding, before examining it, that the person giving it has nothing to contribute.
We explored that difference through my childhood difficulties with toileting. From outside, the problem might be framed as a failure to request permission or use the required phrase. From inside, there were questions about whether I could recognise the bodily signal at all, and whether language was accessible when I needed it. Requiring the correct words does not resolve either difficulty; it can make access to a basic bodily need depend upon the very capacity that is unavailable. My testimony brings those conditions into view, including the humiliation and trauma that a record of successful or unsuccessful toilet training might never capture. What an adult counted was not necessarily what the child endured.
Changing plans offered another example. I described how preparing for Saturday establishes a whole arrangement of expectations, language, bodily readiness, and practical decisions; moving the meeting to Sunday does not necessarily dissolve that arrangement. The first remains active whilst I construct the second. What looks like a small alteration from outside can become an accumulation from inside. Cathy recognised related accounts from other autistic adults, and we considered what happens when schools repeatedly change seating, schedules, activities, and meals, then explain a child’s eventual overwhelm through the last sound or disruption. The final event is easy to observe. The load that made it consequential requires a longer record—and attention to the person carrying it.
This also shaped our discussion of my developing paper on what “gestalt” can mean. I want a protocol that makes clear where a claim resides: in a description of cognitive architecture, a framework for understanding, or an intervention. Each raises different questions and requires evidence appropriate to those questions. A change in observable performance cannot automatically establish the architecture that produced it, just as testimony about an experience cannot automatically validate a particular intervention. Precision matters here because an argument against one claim should not quietly become permission to dismiss every other claim sharing its vocabulary—including the experiences people are trying to describe.
We ended with the distance between visible achievement and the support required to sustain it. People can see me teach, publish, and speak; they cannot necessarily see the preparation, unstable access to language, accessibility tools, pain, or narrow margin behind those outcomes. If competence becomes grounds for disbelieving my support needs, then the work of managing disability helps conceal the disability itself. That is why this conversation matters beyond a dispute over terminology. Autistic people are offering accounts of what support does, what demands cost, and what childhood experiences leave behind. Our testimony needs scrutiny, context, and careful interpretation. It also needs to be admitted.
The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.



This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit autside.substack.com/subscribe