Hi everyone and welcome to my independent study blog! I am beyond excited to get started on my deep dive into autism with a gender-critical lens (to learn more about the specifics of my blog’s content, please check out my About page) but first, a few things:
Getting Started
1. WordPress
This first week I am mostly getting comfortable with using WordPress—it has been a bit of a struggle but I am slowly but surely getting the hang of this confounding website! I believe I have figured out most of the logistics for creating pages and posts (and hopefully that will become easier as time goes on and I acquire more posts), so my next steps at this point are to try to make my blog as disability-friendly as possible!
I did some quick research on colors for my logo—and did some photoshopping to avoid too much yellow due to potential over-stimulation, as well as blue due to the ableist and sexist history of that color being used with regards to autism (check out my basic info on Language and Symbols for more)—and now I am struggling through the maze of CSS (??) and various WordPress dashboard buttons and confusing google searches to find how to change my font to one that is more conducive to dyslexic, vision-impaired, and other disabled readers. In the future, I am also looking at trying to structure/edit my blog so it is more accessible (possibly through color coding, images, and reduced text?).
2. Research
I am also hoping to find time to listen to a seminar called We’re Not Broken—Changing The Autism Conversation that Ms. Rogers kindly got access to for me (and possibly starting on reading the book)!
Available Content So Far
If you would like to look at some content, I have created two new pages on this blog so far with preliminary information and resources!
This page introduces my independent study and exactly what I will be looking into this year, as well as important context for how I will be attempting to apply a gender-critical lens to my research while hopefully avoiding oppressive binaries that contribute to the erasure of trans and genderqueer autistic folks, as well as perpetuate harmful conversations and exclusionary boxes around identities like “women.”
The rest of my pages seek to provide exactly that—crucial and informatory starting resources and education including vocab, language and symbols, organizations to support and avoid, FAQs (should I get any), etc.—essentially combating any misinformation or lack of knowledge right off the bat (since, unfortunately, there is a ton on the subject of autism). Please check out these pages above and let me know in the comments if you have any follow-up questions or additions/concerns about the info there :). I hope it serves as a helpful resource for starting productive conversations about neurodiversity!
Anyways, that is all for this week—I will continue working on adding to both of those pages, as well as parsing out the maze that is WordPress, and then we will truly get started on this semester’s exploration (very exciting)!
If you would like to follow along as I do my research, and learn more about autism, please consider subscribing—there should be an area to the right to do so if WordPress is cooperating with me.
Thank you for reading, and have a wonderful week!
