Doing trans+ Autistic research is exhausting. There is so much hate directed towards trans+ people and Autistic people in the US and UK. I was about to add “at the moment” but we have a long history of being medicalised, pathologised and institutionalised. This violence is not new, it’s just louder, and through social media, it is inescapable.

A lot of my time is spent online for work, research, socialising and ADHD doom-scrolling. I get a lot of regulation from my phone. My timeline and my mind is crowded with anti-vaccine rhetoric, bio-essentialism, trans exclusion, and misogyny. I cannot take another picture of a certain person smoking a cigar smugly on a yacht. When things that hurt me and my community are constantly on social media my social life and regulation are effected.

My research work has also been effected. I’ve not done much PhD work since the Supreme Court ruling. I cannot find solace in my work because it is too close to this violence and hatred. I’m been busy doing activist work, carrying on my work with trans+ people, and quite frankly, surviving. I am bone tired. My soul aches.

I was recently on the South Coast Doctoral Training Partnership podcast (available soon!) and was asked what effect the recent Supreme Court ruling might have on my research. It was a good question, asked with my permission appreciating my lived experience. My answer is that it is hard to be trans and Autistic in healthcare, to be in spaces where our pathologisation has been documented, where we are identified medically (see What does the DSM say about autism?) and yet we cannot access the very places that named us. They named us but know very little of our emdodiment, history and culture.

Outside of healthcare we are othered and discarded, isolated and then publicly shamed for “never paying taxes” (See RFK’s speech here) as if that is the only worth any human being has. We are more than production. 

These words and actions are used to hurt Autistic people and our community, not only by treating us as burden but by dividing us into the presumably good Autistics (those who pay taxes) and bad Autistics, those of us who don’t / can’t pay taxes.

I have just over three years left of my course and I know that the Supreme Court ruling and the anti-Autistic policy in the US government, are not going to be the only harmful policy and politics to contend with. I know we will see more of the same violence and hatred. 

What I hold on to now is the love I experience from my trans Autistic community. I hold onto the work I do with other trans+ people at Trans Aware Cancer Care. I hold close my sacred trans+ Autistic researcher friends. I hold onto trans Autistic joy whenever and wherever I can.