Much of the information I have the privilege of listening to over the next three years is community-based. This knowledge, and the stories it intermingles with, is community knowledge, it had been produced and curated by trans Autistic people and our communities.

These stories of lived experience, including elements of my own reflected back at me, are the core of my work. Therefore, I want to honour, care for, love and protect them. I also have to reckon with the place in which I do this. Ultimately, I will have to repackage these stories for the academy. Choosing what elements to include, what stories to omit, what parts of myself I am willing to weave into the analysis. What I share with participants and co-researchers is not what I will share in papers, posters and in other academic spaces and outputs. Similarly, their stories will not make it to paper in full. There will be a simple (but very important) check of transcripts and how participants feel about sharing these pieces of themselves. We do not owe everything to the “discourse” surrounding our community, our lived experiences and our embodiments. Outside of our own storytelling and history-making, we owe nothing of ourselves to others.

Trans and/or Autistic lives have been politicised for too long. More recently this intersection has been intellectualised. To what end remains to be seen but in the current political climate in many places across the world, it doesn’t feel safe.

Currently, I’m less interested in the research methods used to share our stories, and more interested in how we can share our stories safely on our terms. There is an ever-present question of what knowledge the academy should/nt have. What is useful to our community; what is useful for trans Autistic individuals; what is useful for my lived life as a queer, trans, Autistic person?

These questions also hit on issues of vulnerability vs autonomy and silence vs liberation, and many more “dicotomies” that are actually a messy continuum. A constellation of pushing, pulling, swerving, stopping, and whirling. My brain goes through these movements as I try to work out where I belong in all this. Do participants, co-researchers, and researchers sit squarely in that vortex or do we shuffle outside and do things grassroots? Is the academy the right place for me to sit? Is it the right place for these stories to be woven together?

I may never have the answer to these questions and I have to reconcile with that. What is important is that I never stop asking them. In the years to come I aim to become more critical, not less.