transponderings

  • Are you Aprilness-aware?

    Are you Aprilness-aware?

    It is, thankfully, nearly the end of another month with Aprilness. Another Autism Awareness Month – or as the ever-so-slightly-more enlightened have started to call it, Autism Acceptance Month. These are not labels chosen by the Autistic community (and I use a capital A here intentionally). This month of awareness- or acceptance-raising isn’t something any… Read more

  • Welcome to the Fediverse

    This is a very short post to check that the ActivityPub plugin I’ve just installed is working properly, and to invite you to follow my rambling blog from the comfort of your home in the Fediverse (for example, a Mastodon instance). It’ll be good to see you – and my hope is that this will… Read more

  • Self-preservation

    Self-preservation

    My blog is a little tired, so I hope to refresh it soon with better organisation, a new look (using WordPress’s Full Site Editing) and perhaps a more regular content schedule (but that’s probably just wishful thinking!). I’m also a little tired, so I’m coming back to the unpost format, to dump some fairly disorganised… Read more

  • Lonely and bored

    Well it was either that or stay on Twitter and be anxious and depressed instead. I decided to take a few days off Twitter, and here I am just before bedtime, writing an unpost. I’m going to try and be even more stream-of-consciousness than usual, by dictating this to my phone and hoping it comes… Read more

  • Daniel Geschwind on autism

    This is my transcript of Dr Daniel Geschwind’s opening speech at a hearing of the US House of Representatives Foreign Affairs Committee on 25 June this year. Daniel Geschwind (UCLA) is co-principal investigator, alongside Simon Baron-Cohen (Cambridge) and Matthew Hurles (Wellcome Sanger), of Spectrum 10K, a hugely problematic study of the genetics of autism in… Read more

  • Transmisogynistic framing in BBC interview with Lorna Slater

    Following the announcement of a draft power-sharing deal between the Scottish Green Party and the Scottish Government, Lorna Slater was interviewed by Justin Webb for BBC Radio 4’s Today programme on 21 August 2021. The first half of the four-minute interview introduced the topic, and covered three very broad questions: how close are the Greens… Read more

  • Five years of Pride

    Today, 8 August 2021, is the culmination of the week of the first Neuro Pride Ireland, fittingly ending on 8/8, which with a little imagination can be read as ∞/∞, the infinity sign being a symbol of the neurodiversity movement. (Also 8/8 = 1, and we come together as one.) But as important as Neuro… Read more

  • Add title (an unpost)

    You can tell that I can’t be bothered to choose a catchy title for this unpost: since WordPress prompts with the text ‘Add title’, that seemed like as good a start as any to me. It’s been a while since I’ve written one of these. (I’ve actually written a ‘proper’ blog post recently, but it’s… Read more

  • This is so hard (2020 edition)

    By this, I might simply mean writing this blog post, but I could be talking more generally about writing anything, or communicating with people in any way, or doing anything much … or even just existing. It’s been that kind of year. *sigh* It’s been a year when I haven’t managed to blog much at… Read more