Finally, I Can Say It
AI didn't give me anything I didn't already have. It gave me a way to get it out of my head and onto the page - past the memory that drops things, the words that won't come, and the bluntness that costs...
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Take Me As I Am
An open letter, written to everybody who ever decided what I was. About what it actually means to think differently - and, it turns out, to feel differently - what it cost to hide both - and why "I'm only protecting them" is almost never true.
Continue readingRights You Have to Ask For: Autistic Adults and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
In 2017 Simon Baron-Cohen told the United Nations that autistic people were still falling outside their human rights. He was right, and he was mostly talking about children. These pages do the same job for adults and reach a different conclusion: the...
Continue readingThe Loneliness Snowball: How Autistic Isolation Feeds Itself
Autistic loneliness is usually explained as a preference, and it is rarely about the empty room. It is about the full one - being present and still outside. It is also a loop: you are excluded before you have done anything, you...
Continue readingUnmasked at Midlife: Making Sense of a Late Autism Diagnosis
The written version of a talk I gave at the Sydney Disability Expo in August 2026. Adults are being diagnosed autistic in their forties, fifties and sixties - not because autism is spreading, but because the lens that could see them was...
Continue readingEveryone Masks: What Makes the Autistic Version Different
"Everyone masks" is usually said to end the conversation. It should start it. The claim is true - impression management is universal, and the research now confirms that neurotypical adults mask at work for the same reasons autistic adults do. What differs...
Continue readingOvershadowed: Does ADHD Explain Late-Diagnosed Autism?
Late diagnosis of autism in adulthood is rising, and AuDHD - co-occurring autism and ADHD - is common enough that pooled estimates put it around two in five autistic people, with individual studies ranging far wider than that pooled figure suggests. Is...
Continue readingNot Worth It: Procedural Fairness and Autistic Withdrawal from Competition
In the laboratory, competition suits autistic people rather well. Put an autistic child in a competitive game and their performance improves. Embed a false-belief task inside a contest with a prize and the proportion passing rises from thirteen per cent to seventy-four....
Continue readingThe Second Person in the Room: Late Diagnosis and Relationship Outcomes
Autism and ADHD are now routinely diagnosed in adults in their thirties, forties and fifties. At those ages most people are partnered, and have been for some time. A late diagnosis therefore does not arrive into a life. It arrives into a...
Continue readingThe Hunger Signal: GLP-1 Drugs and Autistic Interoception
Weight-loss drugs like semaglutide (a.k.a., GLP-1's) work by changing how the body senses hunger and fullness. Many autistic people sense hunger and fullness differently. Does the drug therefore work differently for us - better, worse, or simply strangely?
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