The AutSide Podcast

I came to functional literacy in my late thirties. Now I can write about how meaning becomes words, what phonics can do in a learner’s hands, and who gets to decide what counts as knowledge about minds like mine. Come on in.

I keep trying to write a book, and the book keeps developing another side. In this recording, I begin with So You Think Differently, the perpetually developing outline for my field guide to gestalt minds and still one of the most popular pieces on The AutSide. It’s a map you can enter from several directions, which seems fitting for a book about a mind that comes to know things by returning to them.

Then I turn to The Speed of Dark, which began when Cathy sent me seven perfectly reasonable questions and I came back with seven essays. Some people would have sent bullet points. I needed time to find words for what had already arrived whole, and the writing let me discover how much of what I knew was still waiting for a way to be said.

Those two collections are open and free to read. Follow the links and you’ll find millions of words across more than four years of scholarship. There’s no journal route through which I could have published that body of work on the timescale of the conversations that gave rise to it. On The AutSide, somebody can question a claim, send me a source, or tell me where my account loses them, and I can follow that correction whilst we’re still talking about the thing itself. You can disagree with me for free. I consider that quite a generous subscription tier.

Then there’s phonics. In Phonics, If You Must, I answer a practical question about when I’d introduce it to a gestalt language processor and what I’d actually do. In Resistant, Non-Compliant, Whole, I ask what happens when the same tool becomes a gate a child has to pass through before they can get on with their peers. There’s a history to the authority of parts-first teaching in the Global North, and it helps explain how a system can get very good at recording what a child does on cue whilst overlooking what that child is already doing with language.

And then, a wee quarter turn into Breaking News. I have a bit of fun with the conferences and professional bodies that can find room for an autistic person’s story on the programme and still reserve the right to tell the room what it meant. When we say you’ve misdescribed what happened, can we change the account? Can we change the practice? There is, alas, no billing code for understanding.

I’ve been writing in this space for more than four years. I’ve been living in it my entire life. I came to functional literacy in my late thirties, and it took longer still for writing to become something I could use as I do now. I have words I can use to speak up for myself, and to stand alongside spellers, non-speakers, and other gestalt language processors when their ways of communicating are called into question. It took me a lifetime to get to these words. They’re mine. And I’m using them.

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What might happen when a wee school teacher reaches back through time to create the education she would have needed when she was a wee school girl?

That is the question behind The Mathematics That Was Allowed to Become Meaning, my latest Sensual Residue series.

I began with an imagined classroom. One where an autistic child did not have to fail before someone recognised that her way of making meaning might be different. Where silence was not mistaken for ignorance, and belonging was not something earned through compliance.

Then I followed that child through seven years of mathematics.

In Grade 6, she discovers numbers in shared bread, measurement, and rhythm. In Grade 7, equivalence offers something trustworthy: the pieces can change without losing the relationship. In Grade 8, she watches water rise and discovers that slope gives a name to something she already recognises.

Algebra becomes a language rather than a barrier. Geometry becomes a place where someone takes her unfinished thinking seriously enough to help her prove it. Complexity brings uncertainty, but not the familiar terror of having missed something.

And by Grade 12, standing before slope and the derivative, she recognises the relationship connecting them.

The mathematics remembers her.

The accompanying presentation follows a blue thread through these years: wonder, trust, recognition, ownership, being understood, courage, and agency. Eventually, the thread leaves the classroom altogether.

An adult stands in a garden, working out measurements and quantities. No examination. No rubric. Just a familiar mathematical relationship appearing in an unfamiliar place.

I cannot give my younger self that education. There is grief in imagining what might have been different.

But I can teach. I can write. And I can imagine something better for the children who come after me.

Perhaps the most enduring lesson is not a formula at all.

No child should have to learn to fear her own way of understanding in order to learn mathematics.

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In today’s episode, our virtual hosts outline a series of articles by Dr. Jaime Hoerricks investigating why many students struggle with advanced mathematics despite successfully passing foundational courses. Her essays distinguish between genuine mathematical understanding, the mathematical language used for representation, and the mathematical performance required by schools. She argues that traditional instruction often teaches students to memorise symbols and execute procedures without grasping the underlying relationships and quantities. By examining maths progression from early counting to calculus, she highlights the challenges faced by gestalt language processors who learn wholes before parts. Ultimately, her series of essays challenge educators to ensure that passing grades reflect true conceptual comprehension rather than merely the ability to mimic classroom tasks.

The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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.

The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

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.

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What does ‘gestalt’ mean across fields, and what evidence supports each use? This video introduces my developing paper’s floor-and-sense map. Subscribers are invited to examine the draft and help refine its distinctions.

An explanation can sound settled long before the argument it explains is ready. That is one reason I generate these video explainers during research: I want to hear what happens when my developing work is compressed into a sequence that promises to make it clear.

This video was generated in Google’s NotebookLM, using Gemini, from the rough draft of my upcoming paper, What ‘Gestalt’ Can Mean, and at Which Floor. It offers an early look at the work, and another layer of examination. An explainer has particular demands: it selects a route, establishes an order, decides what needs introducing, and moves the listener towards a conclusion. Listening to that sequence helps me examine whether the relationships I intended have survived.

Where does a distinction become an absolute? Where does a provisional map become a settled taxonomy? Where does the system supply certainty that my sources, or my argument, do not support?

This one is imperfect. It sometimes describes entire fields in sweeping terms, narrows perception to the visual, and presents the difficulty of a unifying definition as though its impossibility had been established. Those are places to return to the draft—to check whether my wording invited the interpretation, whether a boundary needs strengthening, or whether the system has added something of its own.

Its errors become questions for my work. They do not become my conclusions.

There are also quirks that are difficult to miss. It absolutely butchers the pronunciation of my name, finding several inventive ways to get it wrong. In my experience, names outside its familiar English naming patterns also require explicit pronoun instructions, or the system defaults to he/him. I specified she/her here; the narrator obligingly reads that instruction aloud in the introduction.

These details matter. A tool can help make someone’s work available whilst still failing to recognise the person whose work it is.

For me, as an autistic researcher with communication and language difficulties, this process provides another way to check what I have managed to communicate. I generate the research, the analysis, and the argument. The system returns an interpretation that I can listen to, question, and compare with what I meant. Understanding and language do not always become available together for me; hearing the work organised externally can help me locate what still needs expression.

That is part of what I want to make visible by sharing this video: how a tool can support participation, and how much active judgement that support requires.

The paper responds to a recent call for a clear definition of ‘gestalt’ by examining more than a century of its documented use. Across perceptual psychology, linguistics, developmental research, and communication practice, the term has described related forms of organisation without consistently describing the same object.

My purpose is to help stakeholders specify which sense they mean and what kind of claim they are making.

A floor identifies whether the claim concerns architecture, a developmental framework, or intervention. A sense identifies what is being described as whole within that claim. Those distinctions help us ask whether the evidence offered addresses the organisation proposed, and what further evidence would be needed to connect one level with another.

Programming several words onto one AAC button, for example, establishes an externally unified selection. How the person perceives, remembers, understands, or processes those words remains a further question. The relationship can be investigated once it has been stated clearly.

The paper proposes a specification standard to support that clarity. It leaves substantive questions about developmental stages, processor classification, and particular communication arrangements open, so that further research and practice can address them with greater precision.

I welcome readers into the draft whilst it is developing. Consider this an invitation to open, crowdsourced critical review: identify missing sources, question the distinctions, challenge an inference, or show me where the language carries more certainty than the evidence permits.

Where does the map help? Where does it need redrawing?

The video is one interpretation of the work. Your reading can help me strengthen the work itself. If you wish to participate, feel free to reply to the email copy of this post with your contact information.

The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.

My developing paper traces over a century of ‘gestalt’ across fields, asking how its different senses can support a shared language for research and practice. Read the draft and help refine it through critical review.

Sometimes I need to hear my argument returned to me before I can hear where it has become vulnerable—where a distinction I thought I had established remains exposed to another reading, where a connection has been supplied rather than supported by the text, or where the language has not yet caught up with the work.

The audio shared here was generated by Google’s NotebookLM, using Gemini, from the outline of a paper I’m developing, What ‘Gestalt’ Can Mean, and at Which Floor. This is an early look at work in progress. The generated ‘hosts’ make sweeping claims that my outline does not warrant, and those errors are part of why I use this process.

I listen for what survives and what changes. Does the argument remain recognisable? Do its distinctions hold? Where does a carefully bounded proposition become a declaration about an entire field? When the system overreaches, I return to my own work and ask why—whether something in my wording invited that reading, whether an important boundary needs to become more explicit, or whether the system has supplied an argument of its own.

An error does not automatically identify a fault in my paper. It gives me a place to examine.

I am sharing this episode partly to offer a view into that recursive research process, and partly because the paper has implications across several fields. I also want to show how these tools can help someone with communication and language difficulties, like me, participate in the world. I generate the work—the research, the analysis, the argument. The system gives me another way to check what I have communicated, to hear what has become available to a reader and what remains insufficiently carried by the language.

That access matters. I have paid hundreds of dollars for an editor to examine an academic paper, only to find evidence that my work had been run through Claude and returned to me at the human editorial rate. In trying to find a human editor for my academic work, I encountered an economic problem as well as an accessibility problem: the human attention I was seeking had become difficult to obtain in a market where editors are expected to compete with Claude’s speed and cost.

Using the tool directly gives me quick and timely access to a checking process I can repeat, question, and inspect. For someone whose language does not reliably arrive at the same time as her understanding, that can help an argument reach the world.

The paper itself responds to a recent discussion of the need for a clear definition of ‘gestalt’. My response begins with the term’s documented history across more than a century—a history in which it has acquired several related, but distinct, uses. Perceptual organisation, linguistic structure, developmental direction, an inferred organisation within a learner, and an arrangement programmed into a communication system can all be described using this word. Each use asks something different of the evidence.

My purpose is to trace those uses and help stakeholders specify which one they mean. A single unifying definition risks concealing distinctions that research and practice need to preserve.

Two working terms organise the paper. A floor identifies the kind of claim being made: architecture, a developmental framework, or intervention. A sense identifies what ‘gestalt’ denotes within that claim—what, specifically, is being treated as a whole. Naming both helps us ask whether the evidence offered addresses the organisation claimed, and what further evidence would be needed to connect one level with another.

This is a contribution towards a shared language. The paper leaves substantive questions about developmental stages, processor classification, and particular communication arrangements open. Its examples examine the relationship between claims and evidence, including the language of my own earlier work. The generated hosts sometimes turn that examination into a critique broader than the one I am making. Their confidence should not be mistaken for my conclusion.

I am opening the draft to readers whilst it is still developing. Consider this an invitation to a form of crowdsourced peer review: read, comment, question the distinctions, identify omissions, and show me where a source or a claim needs closer attention. This is open critical reading, with responsibility for the final argument remaining mine.

Where does the paper help you understand what is being claimed? Where does it leave you uncertain? Where have I failed to preserve a distinction that matters?

Those are comments I welcome. They are part of how the work becomes more precise.

For subscribers who want to take part in the review, please reply to the email copy of this with your contact information.

The AutSide is a reader-supported publication. To support my work, consider becoming a paid subscriber.