The AutSide Podcast

A conversation on Boolean logic, gestalt processing, script gardens, Sukhareva, queerness, and the professional humility required when meaning arrives whole before it can be segmented.
Today’s conversation with Cathy began with the true/false Boolean piece, but the real centre of gravity was not Boole himself. It was the assumption Boole inherits: that meaning begins once a proposition can be stated, sorted, tested, declared true or false. What I tried to name is that, for me, this is already too late. The whole has already arrived. The field has already cohered. Meaning has already happened before the sentence can be broken apart and submitted to logic.
That became a conversation about gestalt processing more broadly, and about the professional temptation to treat scripts as objects to decode rather than ecologies to enter. Cathy spoke about a young person whose parent had always understood the script garden growing in her child, even when professionals told her she was reading too much into it. That mattered. The parent was not inventing meaning. She was attuned to it before the official categories could see it. The professionals who helped most were not the ones who defended their training most fiercely, but the ones willing to let the young person’s processing reorganise the room.
From there, we moved into writing, school, and the violence of premature segmentation. A child who writes the same line over and over may not be refusing the assignment. They may be preserving the only whole they have access to. They may not yet be able to break the gestalt apart without losing the meaning it carries. When pressure is added—explain it, justify it, tell me what you mean—the relational field can collapse in seconds. Then the child is called avoidant, defiant, behavioural. The system mistakes protection for refusal.
We also turned toward Sukhareva, not merely as a missing name in autism history, but as evidence of a different premise. What changes when autistic children are approached as people whose participation, development, relationships, and futures matter? What changes when the work is not classification for exclusion, but support for belonging? That question sits uneasily beside the Western histories of patriarchy, capitalism, eugenics, and the long refusal to see autistic girls and women at all.
Queerness entered the conversation there—not as an analogy pasted onto language, but as a method of troubling the box before the box becomes law. Why this role? Why that category? Why this script and not that one? Why must relation, colour, movement, pleasure, cartoon, repetition, brightness, softness, childhood, adulthood, gender, language, and thought obey the same narrow logic of permission? Gestalt processing asks a similar question of language: what if the whole is not an error waiting to be corrected, but the first true form of the meaning?
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Today’s episode explores the intersection of Boolean logic, language development, and gestalt processing, arguing that modern systems prematurely force human thought into binary categories like true or false. Whilst George Boole's mathematical logic created the infrastructure for the digital age, the author of the source article, Dr. Jaime Hoerricks, suggests this framework is often misapplied to gestalt language processors who experience meaning as an unbreakable whole rather than a collection of parts. By comparing the detached nature of English grammar with the relational, embedded structure of Gàidhlig, Dr. Hoerricks illustrates how language can either isolate information or preserve context. She contends that echolalia and scripting are not developmental failures but essential “weather systems” of meaning that carry emotional and sensory history. Ultimately, she advocates for attunement over extraction, urging educators and clinicians to honor the integrity of a child’s communication before attempting to segment it. This perspective reframes neurodivergent expression as a valid, relational form of precision that exists in the vital moment before thought is cooled into a proposition.
Here’s the link to the source article: https://autside.substack.com/publish/post/202976821
Let me know what you think.
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

A conversation with Cathy on my accepted GLP paper, failed assessment tools, cultural bias, literacy, maths, and the evidence already present in classrooms, case notes, and lives the system has not learned to see.
This morning Cathy and I began with the news of my latest paper—not published yet, but accepted, which matters because it has passed the first gate. The paper asks what counts as evidence for Gestalt Language Processing, but underneath that question is another one: what happens when a field insists on measuring a phenomenon with tools that were never built to recognise it? I talked about the rejections, the desk-review failures, the almost comical way those failures proved the argument I was making. The issue is not merely that some people remain unconvinced. The issue is that they are looking through instruments shaped by the wrong assumptions, then treating the absence of recognition as the absence of evidence.
From there, the conversation moved into diagnostic and assessment tools more broadly—the way autism is still missed when the person in front of the clinician does not resemble the narrow cultural image the tool expects. I spoke about girls in high school who are plainly autistic, who need accommodations, who carry sensory overwhelm and language strain and social exhaustion, but who are dismissed because they are friendly, helpful, chatty, enculturated. Eye contact becomes evidence against them. Having a boyfriend becomes evidence against them. Success becomes evidence against them. The system mistakes adaptation for absence, and then weaponises the very survival strategies it taught them to perform.
Cathy and I then circled back to Gestalt Language Processing itself, and to the strange insistence that evidence is lacking when the evidence is everywhere—only not always in the form the gatekeepers have decided to count. There is the older research. There are the clinicians. There are the case notes. There are therapists across countries seeing the same patterns in children who process language, maths, classrooms, relationships, and environments as wholes before parts. And there is my own school data, the students who arrive in high school still stuck around fourth-grade literacy because they have survived on sight-word memory without ever being given functional decoding. I described what happens when I place unfamiliar words in front of them—not because I care whether they can pronounce milieu or macaque, but because I want to see what the task does to their body, their confidence, their emotional field, their sense of being caught out.
That led us into education more generally, especially maths, where the same error repeats. Schools often demand the visible procedure before they understand the thinking. Students who can see the answer, who can perceive the relation whole, are penalised because they do not show their working in the approved sequence. I talked about teaching through story: logarithms through Napier, navigation, earthquakes, pH scales; the unit circle through clocks and quarter-turns; imaginary numbers not as nonsense but as the turn that lets a line become a plane. I came back again to the same pedagogy I keep finding myself defending: give them the whole of it first, let the story hold the structure, and then the parts can begin to make sense.
By the end, the conversation had become less about one paper and more about the larger work it belongs to. This paper is a step in a longer arc: first, establishing that gestalt processors are here; now, challenging whether the tools used to measure us are valid at all; later, perhaps, helping build something better. Cathy’s practice, my classroom, the research record, the patterns in children and adults who were misread for years—all of it points toward the same demand. Evidence is not absent. It has been excluded. And if the field wants to keep asking where the evidence is, then it must first answer for the instruments, assumptions, and hierarchies that taught it not to see.
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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

A parent’s question about GLP opens an old grief script: who would I be if I got what I needed? On access, disability, transition, and the cost of surviving systems built around speech.
A parent’s question about GLP, school, work, college, and love opened an older question in me: Who would I be if I got what I needed as a child? Today’s video follows that question into the places where access is not abstract—surgery scheduling, disability support, legal transition, and the exhausting demand that disabled people accommodate inaccessible systems in order to receive care.
I talk about gestalt processing, my ASD and Level 2 support needs, scripted speech, asynchronous communication, and the difference between capability and access. So much of adult life assumes real-time spoken language: phone calls, callbacks, Zoom appointments, interviews, intake meetings. When those are the required doorway, competence can disappear—not because the person lacks it, but because the interface consumes it.
This is also a reflection on old scripts surfacing as old “nows”—the body recognising familiar weather before the mind has language for it. They took my life, but let me live is not despair. It is witness. It names the difference between surviving childhood and being given the conditions in which a life could unfold.
As summer gives me just enough energy to make scripted videos again, I return to the question that should belong not to grief, but to responsibility: what might a child become if we gave them what they needed now?
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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

A reaction to the DOJ’s disability memo and the renewed threat of reinstitutionalisation, read through the older grammar of autism pathogenesis—where disabled lives become origin problems before they are treated as lives.
In this episode of AutSide After Dark, I return to an older piece I wrote about the word pathogenesis and why it has never felt neutral when placed beside autism. The talk begins with language—not as decoration, not as terminology floating harmlessly above the world, but as infrastructure. I wanted to sit with the way certain words enter a room sounding professional, careful, and medically precise, while already arranging autistic life as a problem of origin, mechanism, prevention, and control.
From there, I move into the present political moment: the renewed threat of institutional thinking in American disability policy, especially around the weakening of protections that have helped disabled people remain in their homes, communities, relationships, and ordinary lives. I do not treat this as a sudden rupture from nowhere. I place it inside a longer history in which disabled and autistic people have repeatedly been framed as burdens, risks, failed developments, preventable outcomes, or lives requiring management before we are recognised as members of the world.
The centre of the talk is the connection between biomedical language and political imagination. When autism is described through pathogenesis, risk, biomarkers, pathophysiology, therapeutic targeting, and prevention, the future being imagined can quietly become a future with fewer autistic people in it. That does not require open hatred. It does not require a cartoon villain. It only requires respectable systems to keep asking why we exist while refusing, with the same urgency and funding, to ask what we need to live safely, freely, and well.
I end from a more personal place: as an autistic woman, a teacher, a writer, a mother, and a disabled person who does not want her diagnosis used as a pretext for removal, containment, or managed existence. The episode is emotional because the stakes are not theoretical. I am talking about the difference between being studied as a mechanism and being met as a life. I am talking about the pathogenesis of neglect—the institutional process by which meaning becomes behaviour, distress becomes noncompliance, testimony becomes anecdote, and disabled people are made to feel as though the world would prefer a future in which we never arrived.


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