Dr Emma Sheppard

Thank you for this! Seeing it broken down in a non-UK context too helps me wrap my head around how it's enacted. FWIW my issue is very specifically w a particular segment of my academic field who are either actively doing this, or pretending it isn't 'relevant' - the discourse has always been awful

So let’s break this down a touch more via the Swedish angle because it has been a thing for years (and I’ll admit it’s a bit annoying to see people notice it only now but hey better late than never I suppose).
The exact way this has gotten wielded is psychiatrists pondering statistics aloud

Exactly - autism diagnosis will be another hurdle.

DM me the best email to reach you on?

Right, fuck it. If you want to help write some sort of open letter or an article, do the DM slide.

I have continual brain soup and if you've got an idea please say. If you don't have an idea but want to help also say.

Do let me know what you think!

I'm thinking this, along with some sort of ... template for the public consultation aspect, whenever that comes through. I'm not entirely sure where a letter would go tbh - maybe something aimed at MPs individually might be better. Or an article somewhere rather than a letter.

I know that I'm yelling about this to people who are going to largely agree with me. That's the point. We - the disability studies people who know exactly why this is bad - need to get our collective shit together. This is our are we the baddies moment.

Or: you can't get care because you're autistic and therefore can't understand what trans is.

That's it. That's how it will be used.

You know how this will be used,right? Either you can't get on the wait list for gender-affirming medical care until you've been cleared for autism (but no funding to shorten those adult autism diagnosis wait lists!), good luck with adding a couple of extra years to that waiting time of several years

We - as a field - need to speak up. I know everything is on fucking fire right now. But this is something we actually have expertise in. We have ground to stand on here.

This can absolutely fuck off into the sun for a host of reasons, not least because it comes from the position that being trans is *bad* (and this gets backed up by the position that being autistic is bad too, it doesn't matter which way you come at it). This isn't a fucking neutral position any more

NHS 'to test trans young people for autism and ADHD' Trans young people will allegedly be 'screened' for autism and ADHD according to planned NHS guidance on youth gender clinics.

Hey, disability studies people. We need to talk about this: www.thepinknews.com/2025/04/28/n... - because we know where it's come from, right? You know that research behind this has come from people in our field, right?

Genuinely if I had been outflanked on the left by Tim Martin and Wetherspoons and I considered myself to be a left wing politician, I would resign and spend the rest of my career in a cave reflecting on how I let my brain get so rotted by columnists about who shits where

Pretty much. Or maybe: crip which is only known/understood through being crip.

I have still not decided if I like the blurring enough for a new portmanteau

Ontology is what we know (eg water is wet) and epistemology is the how we know it (eg empirical observation) - or ways of knowing. So cripistemology is crip ways of knowing. Crip-isto-ontology is a sort of ... crips know crip through doing/being crip

💯💯💯

YouTube video by BOPTheatre "Writing from the Groin" video essay by Sandra Alland (BSL with AD and CC)

Crip guests in my essay echo @emmas.bsky.social's "There is joy in the ashes of the future-not-to-be, there is pleasure in their discomfort with our joy and our rejection."

Also online as a BSL video, with captions & audio description - and an embodied Footnote played by Deaf actor Ciaran Stewart.

As both 1 and 3, I'm sort of into this. I would love to persuade Sam to shit in a box, but he would rather hold it for *days*

... this is a magnificent idea (also, thank you!)

Oh no, I meant it in a very ... self-snarky way. I'm glad you liked the paper!

I am a Very Serious Academic

Thank you! 😊

Thank you! I recommend reading it with a biscuit.

I'm moderately proud of it, and very grateful to the editors of Feminist Theory for letting me fuck about with ideas. And whoever reviewed it and didn't call me a fuckwit immediately, they were all ace.

Lads, I am very rubbish at posting here, but: I wrote a thing, and it is now out with Feminist Theory. doi.org/10.1177/1464... - it's called The Necessary Pleasures of the Crip Killjoy and it's about thinking with brain fog and discomfort and violence and joy in refusal.

One thing that I noticed this time around is that the "discussion" of giving racists airtime (as a way to put people off) is apparently eternal.

Students largely horrified at the language, but they're about to be asked for modern-day equivalences...

Ending this week in Social Theory with "It Ain't Half Racist Mum" from Stuart Hall (and Box of Broadcasts) - as rounding up Hall's work on TV discourse, encoding/decoding.