Jaime Hoerricks, PhD

Liminal Echoes Bonus Chapter: The Observer at the Meeting A District Meeting, The Observer, and the Slow Work of Reassembling Self

Maybe that’s what these “Liminal Echoes” are, really. Not stories to impress or persuade. Just records of the in-between—the threshold between overwhelm and understanding, between silence and speech.

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Episode 384: Consensus Without Consent in Autism Research Today’s episode provides a rigorous critique of institutional power and the “myth of democracy” within autism research, arguing that the language of “consensus” and “community involvement” is often a ...

This episode provides a rigorous critique of institutional power and the “myth of democracy” within autism research, arguing that the language of “consensus” and “community involvement” is often a performance that masks deep-seated inequity and colonial structures.

open.substack.com/pub/autside/...

Sure. But not now. Jays are on. 😊🙃

Send emails. We’re human. Just ask questions.

Alt text:
Text on a rainbow-striped background reads:
“‘I keep forgetting your pronouns.’ 🙄
No, you don’t.
You remember passwords, birthdays, and Netflix logins.
You just don’t care enough to practice.”
The message calls out excuses for misgendering, asserting that remembering someone’s pronouns is a matter of care and respect, not memory. Commentary: There’s a particular ache that comes when someone refuses to learn your name or your pronouns. It isn’t the small sting of forgetfulness—it’s the slow burn of being told that your self is too inconvenient to remember. Language is the bridge between worlds; when someone won’t cross it, they’re choosing distance. They’re saying, you will do the labour of existing here alone. When public figures—men like Adam Curry—turn that refusal into performance, it becomes something colder. A sport of cruelty, where mockery masquerades as principle. “If I have to learn your pronouns, then I won’t ever refer to you in the third person,” he says, as though erasure were a clever punchline. What he really means is: I will not see you. I will not risk changing the shape of my speech to make room for you. But for me, there’s a strange clarity in that. Each refusal marks itself as warning. I no longer waste energy wondering whether someone is safe—language tells me. The ones who take the time to learn, to listen, to practice until it feels natural—those are the people I can exhale around. The rest, I know to keep at a distance. Pronouns, names—they are not courtesies. They are small acts of care, the first gestures of safety. And when someone can’t be bothered to make them, I believe them.

Find me in the alt text

Consensus Without Consent: The Myth of Democracy in Autism Research On the illusion of democracy in autism research—and the quiet, stubborn work of autistic scholars reclaiming the right to define our own existence.

A critique of “consensus” in autism research—how inclusion becomes performance, power remains untouched, and cure rhetoric persists. Yet amid it all, autistic-led scholarship rises—quiet, defiant, building truth brick by brick

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Episode 383: Autistic Strengths and the Silence of the Archive Today’s episode critiques the historical bias within autism research toward deficit and pathology rather than genuine understanding of strengths.

Today’s episode critiques the historical bias within autism research toward deficit and pathology rather than genuine understanding of strengths.

open.substack.com/pub/autside/...

Listening for the Absent Record: Autistic Strengths and the Silence of the Archive Not a Lack of Strength, a Lack of Listening—Autism Research’s Hidden Deficit

When autistic people define our own strengths, the record goes quiet. Not because we are voiceless, but because the research tradition still listens only for lack.

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Episode 382: Refusing Their Lexicon—Autism Research, Morality, and Control Today’s episode examines a critical essay refuting the methodology and underlying assumptions of a 2024 Cambridge study on the moral foundations of autistic people, particularly focusing on research b...

Today’s episode examines a critical essay refuting the methodology and underlying assumptions of a 2024 Cambridge study on the moral foundations of autistic people, particularly focusing on research by the Baron-Cohen cohort.

open.substack.com/pub/autside/...

Decolonising Language Education How can educators transform language education to empower multilingual and neurodiverse learners while respecting their identities? Jaime Hoerricks challenges the colonial mindset that promotes "Stand...

Today is release day for my latest book from Lived Places Publishing - Decolonising Language Education. So happy to finally be able to share this with you all.

livedplacespublishing.com/book/isbn/97...

Sage Journals: Discover world-class research Subscription and open access journals from Sage, the world's leading independent academic publisher.

Hurrah!
Bruno, G. et al (2025)Decolonizing autism research Integrating indigenous ways of knowing, being & doing journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Prioritize Indigenous & Autistic co/leadership
Develop framewks of ethical space & relational accountability
Foster cross-cultural & interdisc collab

Refusing Their Lexicon: How Cambridge’s Autism Research Retools Fairness, Care, and Control Autism, morality, and the quiet machinery of control.

Cambridge calls it fairness; we call it fidelity. This new “moral foundations” study from the Baron-Cohen cohort isn’t science—it’s soft eugenics in academic dress. Simon says be fair. We are—but not in their language.

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Episode 381: Autism's Two Shadows—Gatekeeping and Genetics Today’s episode critically reviews a new Nature study, led by researchers associated with Cambridge and Simon Baron-Cohen, which proposes two polygenic factors for autism based on the age of diagnosis...

Today’s episode critically reviews a new Nature study, led by researchers associated with Cambridge and Simon Baron-Cohen, which proposes two polygenic factors for autism based on the age of diagnosis.

open.substack.com/pub/autside/...

Alt text: A close-up photo of an open book showing a passage from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams. The dialogue features Arthur and Ford discussing a planet where the leaders are lizards and the people, who hate the lizards, still vote for them. Ford explains that it’s a democracy, but people keep voting for lizards because otherwise “the wrong lizard might get in.” The page number 597 appears at the top right. Commentary: They’ve always been lizards, haven’t they? Different colours, different slogans, same cold scales. Watching them trade soundbites about people like me—autistic, trans, inconvenient—I see the same choreography Ford described: a performance of opposition masking total consensus. One side frames me as threat, the other as symbol, both feeding on the spectacle of my existence. It doesn’t matter which lizard wins; the outcome is prewritten in the machinery that keeps them on the podium and us under the lights. Every election season feels like déjà vu—another round of promises to protect or to purge, neither of which ever meant care. They call it democracy, but to me it feels more like a rotating spotlight trained on the same cage.

Find me in the alt text

Simon Says: Two Shadows of Autism How Cambridge’s new “two-factor” autism study repackages exclusion as genetics—and turns late-diagnosed women’s hard-won recognition into a fresh round of erasure.

Cambridge dresses old prejudice in genetic clothing—calling the late-diagnosed autistic “co-morbid,” not “core.” But we were never invisible, only unseen. Simon says divide; we say we were whole all along.

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Episode 380: Autistic Empathy, Stone-Borne Continuity, and the Counter-Canon Today’s episode presents a powerful argument challenging the prevailing narrative that autistic people lack empathy.

Today’s episode presents a powerful argument challenging the prevailing narrative that autistic people lack empathy.

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The 'After' They Cannot Imagine: Autism, Empathy, and the Counter-Canon Not Deficit but Continuity: An Autistic Response to Philosophy’s Theft

Autistic empathy was never absent—it was stolen, misread, weaponised. From Stone-Borne patience to lion defiance, this counter-canon refuses deficit and declares our continuity, our after.

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Episode 379: The Morality of Scripts—Justice Spoken in Fragments Today’s episode provides a critical analysis of how the speech patterns of Gestalt Language Processors (GLPs), particularly those who are AuDHD, are frequently misread as deficits rather than a comple...

Today’s episode provides a critical analysis of how the speech patterns of GLPs, particularly those who are AuDHD, are frequently misread as deficits rather than a complete form of communication, focusing specifically on expressions of morality and justification.

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The Morality of Scripts—Justice Spoken in Fragments Echoes as Ethics: Reclaiming GLP Fragments as Whole Speech

For GLPs, fragments aren’t deficits but full containers of meaning—justice, memory, and truth held intact. This piece reclaims echoes as moral speech, resisting the systems that erase our ways of knowing.

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Episode 378: Autism Research Misheard Moral Expression—Gestalt Language Processing and Echoes Today’s episode critically examines how traditional autism research has misinterpreted the moral reasoning of autistic children.

Today’s episode critically examines how traditional autism research has misinterpreted the moral reasoning of autistic children.

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The Evidence Was Already There: How Autism Research Misheard Moral Expression When Repetition Speaks: Re-reading Autistic Children’s Moral Reasoning Through Gestalt Language Processing

Autistic children make moral judgments just like peers—but often voice them through echoes, not abstractions. To honour them, we must hear justice in borrowed words, not mistake fidelity for absence.

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Episode 377: Autistic Cognition, Aging, and the Cognitive Test Trap Today’s episode provides a detailed, first-person narrative and analysis of the challenges faced by an AuDHD gestalt language processor (GLP) during routine cognitive health screening for aging.

Today’s episode provides a detailed, first-person narrative and analysis of the challenges faced by an AuDHD gestalt language processor (GLP) during routine cognitive health screening for aging.

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When the test is the trap—ageing, cognition, and an autistic brain that thinks in wholes A milestone check becomes a minefield—standard cognitive screening meets AuDHD gestalt language processing. What these tests measure, what they miss, and why the encounter itself can injure.

A first-person account of navigating cognitive health screening as an AuDHD gestalt processor—why standard tests fail us, what better care could look like, and how I’m reclaiming the space on my terms.

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Episode 376: Evidence, Ethics, and Harm in Gestalt Language Processing Today’s episode argues that demanding Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) for Gestalt Language Processing (GLP) is ethically flawed because it would require withholding necessary support from GLP childre...

Today’s episode argues that demanding Randomised Control Trials (RCTs) for Gestalt Language Processing (GLP) is ethically flawed because it would require withholding necessary support from GLP children, thereby demanding harm as a precondition for evidence.

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Latest waiting times for gender identity clinics in the UK Revealed waiting times of all GICs in UK: Most Trans+ people in the UK will wait more than a third of their adult life to get an appointment, and some will never receive care

This amazing article from @vic-parsons.bsky.social via @wearequeeraf.com shows the absolute criminal state of trans healthcare in the UK.

Scotland has a 224 year wait for a first appointment. Yes, you read that right.

www.wearequeeraf.com/gender-clini...

When “Evidence” Requires Harm: GLP Beyond the Gold Standard Reframing proof through lived trajectories, ethical research, and the refusal to sacrifice autistic children for corporate science.

What ABA calls “no evidence” is really refusal to look. To demand RCTs for GLP is to demand harm. Our scripts, mitigations, and lived literacy are already the proof—evidence sung, not manufactured.

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Episode 375: Hyperlexia and Gestalt Language Processing: Meaning's Delayed Flood Today’s episode provides a critical re-examination of hyperlexia, arguing it should be understood not as a deficit but as a manifestation of Gestalt Language Processing (GLP).

Today’s episode provides a critical re-examination of hyperlexia, arguing it should be understood not as a deficit but as a manifestation of Gestalt Language Processing (GLP).

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that's what I'm sayin!

Alt text: A LEGO Ideas set box for Adventure Time, number 21308, with 495 pieces. The front shows blocky LEGO versions of Finn, Jake, Princess Bubblegum, Marceline, Lady Rainicorn, the Ice King, BMO, and Gunter the penguin against a grassy cartoon landscape. The Cartoon Network logo and LEGO Ideas branding appear in the lower right corner. Commentary: Lego has always been one of my longest-held stims, a constant companion for emotional regulation. There’s something about the click of the bricks, the rhythm of sorting, the tactile precision of fitting pieces together that anchors me in the present. Building lets my body find its own steady beat, my mind a gentle order against the chaos outside. This Adventure Time set in particular remains a favourite—the bright angles of Finn and Jake, the joy of Lady Rainicorn’s streaked body, the absurdity of the Ice King’s bulk made in plastic. It’s a cartoon world re-assembled in my hands, a reminder that play is serious work when it comes to staying whole. Much has been said about Adventure Time and shows like it being queer-coded, though honestly—who cares whether we stamp a label on it or not? The resonance is there, in the fluid identities, the unconventional loves, the irreverent refusal to fit into neat boxes. It’s the same resonance that makes it a refuge for those of us who never quite matched the scripts handed down to us. Which is why it’s so exhausting to see figures like Musk and his imitators pushing culture-war tantrums, demanding trans characters be scrubbed from platforms like Netflix. As if joy, play, or complexity could be legislated out of existence. As if our stories were theirs to police. The stupidity of it is staggering, but also predictable: empire always panics at what it cannot contain. In the meantime, I’ll keep clicking bricks together, building worlds where no one gets erased.

Find me in the alt text:

autside.substack.com/p/the-well-a...

#lego #adventuretime

When the Words Don’t Land: Hyperlexia, Gestalt Language Processing, and the Long Road to Meaning Reframing hyperlexia as a gestalt pathway—beyond deficit narratives, toward mentorship, patience, and the delayed flood of meaning.

Hyperlexia isn’t a contradiction—it’s a GLP pathway. Fluency comes first, meaning later. Misread as failure, it fuels shame and burnout. Reframed, it becomes promise: an archive waiting to flood with comprehension in its own time.

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