Jaime Hoerricks, PhD
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jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Jaime Hoerricks, PhD
@jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
350 followers 200 following 1.3K posts
Educator, Writer, System Disruptor | No Place for Autism, Holistic Language Instruction, Decolonising Language Education, Liminal Echoes, In the Stillness of Chaos | AuDHD & Trans | Teaching & writing as resistance

Read more on AutSide.Substack.com
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jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Find me in the alt text
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.
October 12, 2025 at 7:00 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Find me in the alt text
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.
October 9, 2025 at 10:17 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Find me in the alt text:

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

#lego #adventuretime
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.
October 3, 2025 at 4:58 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Alt text: A screenshot of a tweet by a user named Tsakane (@tsakihyp). The tweet reads: “An honest question: Why would Satan burn you in hell for disobeying a God he also disobeyed?” The background is black with white text, and the user’s profile picture shows a smiling woman. Commentary: Honestly—it’s a sharp question because it exposes how mixed the imagery around hell is. In Christian scripture, Satan isn’t actually the one in charge of hell. He doesn’t sit on a throne handing out punishments. In the Bible, hell (or “the lake of fire”) is prepared for Satan and his angels as their own judgment, not as their kingdom to rule. The popular image of Satan burning people comes more from medieval art, literature, and pop culture than from theology. So if you take the scriptural line, Satan wouldn’t burn you for disobeying God—he’s condemned alongside everyone else. If you take the folklore line, then yeah, it doesn’t make sense: why would a fellow rebel punish other rebels for doing the same thing? It reveals how contradictory the mythos can get once you start mixing Bible, Dante, Milton, and horror movies into one picture. But, as I’m autistic and trans, the American far-right believes I’ll be there, in their make believe place, along with everyone else not emotionally invested in their cult.
October 2, 2025 at 12:43 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Alt text: A four-panel political cartoon by Sophie Labelle, titled “This government shutdown didn’t happen by accident. It happened by design.” Top left panel: A drawing of Russell Vought, bald with glasses and a beard, in a suit and tie. Text explains that he is the director of the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, the key architect of Project 2025, and was called “the man behind Trump’s push for an all-powerful presidency.” Top right panel: A woman with glasses and long hair sits in a chair, looking stern. Text explains that Project 2025 includes a roadmap based on Curtis Yarvin’s “Butterfly Revolution,” which advocates replacing non-partisan government employees with loyalists, seizing public assets, and centralising power in a small elite. Bottom left panel: Another image of Vought gesturing while speaking. Text says he aimed to create conditions to “strip bare” what he calls the “unelected fourth branch of government.” In February, he instructed agencies to prepare for mass layoffs on September 30. Bottom right panel: Illustration of the White House against a blue sky with green trees. Text explains the shutdown will let Trump bypass congressional oversight by declaring which areas are “essential” and ignoring a 1974 law against withholding federal dollars. Caption concludes: “This shutdown was the goal all along.” Signature in the corner: Sophie Labelle. Commentary: Every move by this regime must be read through the twin lenses of Project 2025 and Agenda 47. These aren’t random stumbles but coordinated steps in a strategy to dismantle oversight, strip protections, and consolidate power. What looks like chaos is design—layoffs, shutdowns, attacks on rights—all aimed at clearing the field for loyalists, centralising authority, and locking in minority rule. To mistake this for incompetence is to miss the architecture of authoritarian capture.
October 2, 2025 at 11:32 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Alt text: A composite image split in two. The top half shows Kamala Harris and Barack Obama standing close together, smiling warmly, against a backdrop of golden drapery—symbols of establishment power and respectability. The word “Choose.” is written boldly across the centre. The bottom half shows Assata Shakur reclining in sunlight, her expression calm and assured, wearing patterned blue clothing, large earrings, and a silver bracelet—an image of grounded defiance and liberation. The juxtaposition frames a stark decision between assimilation into empire and the path of revolutionary freedom. Commentary: When I see this image, I don’t see a neutral choice. I see what the system wants me to see—representation within empire dressed up as progress—and I see what it fears, the possibility of refusal. On one side, the polished smiles of leaders who presided over cages, drones, and the steady expansion of mass incarceration. On the other, Assata, carrying the truth that freedom cannot be legislated into existence through the same structures built on slavery’s continuation. The word “Choose” lands heavy because the choice is not about individuals but about orientation: do we bend toward survival within empire, or do we align ourselves with those who fought to dismantle it altogether?
September 27, 2025 at 12:52 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Find me in the alt text.

Find the book here: livedplacespublishing.com/book/isbn/97...
The Solitary Forager Hypothesis reminds us that autism is not some accident of modern chemistry but a system honed through millennia. Our wandering, our capacity to step outside the collective rhythm, to notice patterns others miss, to sustain solitude and persist in focused inquiry—these are not deficits. They are adaptations, forged in the long arc of survival. Natural selection did not discard the autistic neurotype because it proved too costly; it preserved us precisely because these traits were useful to the whole of humanity. In bands of early humans, the solitary forager ensured new ground was explored, new food sources uncovered, new dangers detected. What looks like “difference” from a modern vantage point was, in evolutionary context, indispensable. Yet evolutionary utility alone does not dictate experience. Place identity—the where of our being—shapes both how we understand ourselves as autistic and how others name or misname us. In some contexts, our wandering is celebrated as exploration; in others, punished as defiance. A trait that once sustained a community’s survival can, under capitalism’s gaze, be reframed as pathology. Geography, culture, and economy interact with neurology to determine whether we are seen as gifted, eccentric, disabled, or dangerous. The autistic neurotype is constant; its meaning shifts with place. To explore autism in light of place identity, then, is to recognise a double truth: we are here because our systems worked, evolutionarily and genetically. And we are here differently depending on where “here” happens to be. In a supportive ecology, our foraging becomes contribution; in a hostile one, it becomes liability. To write this book was to insist that context matters—that the autistic system is not broken but often misread, its long-preserved utility hidden beneath layers of cultural prejudice and misplaced fear.
September 25, 2025 at 3:23 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
You can find my commentary on the whole Tylenol autism stupidity in the alt text.

You can find my book here: livedplacespublishing.com/content/iden...
The contrast could not be clearer. My 2023 book, No Place for Autism?, was written with care—hundreds of references, a weaving of evolutionary anthropology with lived experience, and a systemic critique that situates autism not as pathology but as a longstanding, genetically heritable neurotype. It places us in deep time—fifty thousand years of natural selection shaping systems that endure, survive, and adapt. My work does not chase cures or toxins; it shows how autistic life has always been part of the human story, transmitted through families, encoded in our very survival. Meanwhile, the current regime clings to the tired refrain of “environmental poison,” recycling panic narratives that were already discredited decades ago. No references, no coherent science—just grift, distraction, and the same eugenic undertones that have long stalked autism discourse. To hear them, you’d think autism fell from the sky with a pill bottle, rather than flowing through generations like any other inheritable trait. This regime’s fixation on Tylenol as culprit reveals less about medicine and more about control: a refusal to acknowledge autistic people as we are, and a willingness to sacrifice truth for power. https://livedplacespublishing.com/content/identifier/9781915271815
September 25, 2025 at 3:03 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Alt text: Cartoon character from Recess wearing a brown beanie and looking exhausted with half-lidded eyes. Caption reads: “the vibe i bring when the adhd energy runs out & i’m running on autism.” Commentary: The meme lands because it captures something core to the AuDHD condition—the constant toggling between two incompatible energy systems. ADHD offers that flash-bang momentum: ideas sparking, body in motion, the world lit up with possibility. But when that fuel burns out, the autistic system is what carries us forward—structured, patterned, drained yet still holding on through sheer rhythm and repetition. It isn’t graceful, but it’s real. Spinelli’s flat stare says it all: survival mode, no sparkle, only the pulse of persistence. And against the backdrop of this political moment in the U.S., that drained endurance resonates even more. RFK Jr.—the lesser—casually proposing that autistic people should be institutionalised is not some harmless gaffe. It’s the return of eugenic logic in broad daylight, a reminder that we are always being watched as problems to be contained, not people to be cherished. For those of us who are AuDHD, already managing the collisions of executive dysfunction, overstimulation, and the weight of systemic ableism, hearing these threats is exhausting to the bone. It loops us back into the same survival stance Spinelli embodies—eyes heavy, affect flat, running on nothing but the stubborn core of our autistic being. What others might dismiss as “just politics” lands in our bodies as a trigger, pulling us back through generational trauma and daily micro-erasure. The meme becomes less a joke than a truth-telling: when the ADHD fire fades and the world feels hostile, we are left carrying ourselves the only way we know how—autistically, insistently, on the last scraps of energy the system hasn’t yet stolen.
September 23, 2025 at 12:54 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Alt text: A text post reads: “RFK Jr is set to announce Tylenol causes autism. And then he’ll push the ‘cure’: leucovorin (folinic acid). Who sells folinic acid? Dr. Oz’s supplement company, iHerb. The same Dr. Oz who is now the Administrator of the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) in Trump’s administration. Think about that: A government health official tied to the very supplement company that benefits from RFK Jr’s bogus ‘cure.’” Commentary: The grift is the culture—an empire that sells miracle cures for wounds it invents. Trump, RFK the lesser, and Oz orbit one another in a carnival of hucksterism, each sniffing out a new opportunity to monetise desperation. The ‘cures’ movement has always been built on grief and fear, but in their hands it becomes a machine for laundering ideology into supplements, fear into profit, pseudoscience into state policy. And the claims themselves—so insultingly flimsy—collapse with even the slightest historical glance. Autism was carefully documented by Grunya Sukhareva in the 1920s, decades before Tylenol’s release in the 1950s. The timeline alone exposes the lie. But this is not about truth; it is about the political utility of lies, the endless conjuring of enemies and crises to be solved at a price. In the hands of these men, even children’s neurology becomes a marketplace.
September 23, 2025 at 11:53 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Alt text: Meme of a man tapping his finger to his temple with a knowing look. Text above reads, “How to not get diagnosed with autism.” Text below reads, “Get good grades in school and people please your entire life, then no one will notice.” Commentary: What this meme captures—though half in jest, half in despair—is how profoundly system-facing the whole apparatus of diagnosis and IEPs really is. Recognition doesn’t arrive because a person is struggling in themselves, or because they are quietly drowning. It arrives only when their difference interrupts the machinery—when they move too slowly, take up too much space, or otherwise trouble the smooth surface of institutional time. Autism, in this framing, is never simply about being; it is about being inconvenient to the order of things. Those of us who managed good grades, who learnt the art of people-pleasing and camouflage, slipped through precisely because we kept the system untroubled. Our suffering could be immense, but it didn’t “cost” the school, so it remained unseen. The logic is brutal: supports are offered not because we are worthy of care, but because our presence without them destabilises the institution. That’s what it means to live inside a diagnostic regime designed to protect systems, not people.
September 22, 2025 at 6:12 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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It’s hard to even put words to the way America feels right now for trans people—hard, but necessary. The truth is that it feels like living under permanent siege. Safety is not just absent; it’s actively denied. Every corner of life is shadowed by threat—politicians debating whether you should exist, neighbours emboldened to glare or worse, state systems designing new ways to erase your autonomy. It’s not simply unsafe—it’s a state of constant exhaustion, like trying to rest in a world where the monsters are always nearby. And then there is the grief beneath the fear: the realisation that home has once again become hostile, that I might have to uproot and move yet again. I have already carried the weight of displacement—geographic, cultural, gendered—and the thought of doing so once more is crushing. No one should have to leave their community, their routines, their small daily joys just to survive. But that’s the terrible calculus being forced on me: stay and risk annihilation, or flee and grieve yet another severed belonging. The sadness is immense. Not only because of what I may lose, but because of what it reveals—an America that has never truly been safe for people like me, and that now declares it openly. The tragedy is not just personal; it is systemic, woven into a nation that treats my life as negotiable. And so I sit with the heaviness of it, knowing that safety should not mean exile, and yet here I am, weighing exile again. https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/why-you-wont-find-selfies-hereand Alt text: A black background with white text. At the top, bold words read: “How it feels to be trans right now.” Below, the same phrase is repeated many times in a pixelated video-game style font: “You may not rest now, there are monsters nearby.” The repetition fills the screen, evoking a sense of relentless danger and exhaustion.
September 22, 2025 at 10:48 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Find me in the alt text
Alt text: A split-screen graphic compares Republicans and Democrats using stylised fasces (bundles of rods with an axe). On the left, under the label “Republicans,” is a traditional fascist-style fasces: yellow rods tied with red, white, and green bands, with a silver axe blade. On the right, under the label “Democrats,” is a cartoonish, brightly coloured fasces: pink rods tied with pink bands, with a pink axe blade. The background is cheerful with blue sky, white clouds, colourful heart-shaped balloons, and a rainbow, giving it a playful, childlike appearance. Commentary: They tell us the Democrats are the party of inclusion—but history says otherwise. I remember Barney Frank saying it wasn’t the right time for trans rights, the Human Rights Campaign walking away when we were inconvenient, Newsom smiling into right-wing microphones to soothe fears about our existence. Always the same refrain: not now, not you. And now, under the rising fascist regime, it’s starker: we’re named as enemies of the state, “extremists” for living at all. They’ve dropped the polite hedges and said the quiet part out loud. Meanwhile, me? I’m just here deciding what to wear for school tomorrow. Something cute, something comfortable. The ordinariness of my life colliding with the enormity of their hatred. The fact that my existence is political only because they make it so.
September 21, 2025 at 12:28 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Find me in the alt text.
Alt text: Black-and-white portrait of a man in a suit holding a hat in front of him. He has short curly grey hair, a trimmed beard, and glasses, and looks directly at the camera with a calm, serious expression. Below, in white text, is the quote: “If their absence brings you peace, you did not lose anything.” Commentary: They keep saying “we didn’t know” as if ignorance absolves intent—yet the project names and policy blueprints sat on the table like maps to a future that erases me. I do not read bodies as riddles; I read ballots, statements, manifestos—Agenda47, Project2025—lines drawn in ink that tell me who is wanted and who is disposable. To call someone “a friend” whilst they vote for policies that make my existence precarious is to live inside contradiction. As a trans femme I have learned the arithmetic of survival: every cheer for a policy that narrows rights, every shrug at the slow removal of protections, compounds into new barriers—into fewer places I can show up, fewer jobs that will keep me fed, fewer clinics that will treat me with respect. If your choices put me in danger, your absence from my life is not a loss; it is a boundary I must draw to breathe. When people insist they “didn’t know,” I hear a refusal to reckon—the same historic pattern that lets harm unspool whilst respectable hands look away. I will not hold space for that convenient amnesia. Calling it out is not cruelty; it is clarity—an act of self-protection and of political accounting. Blocking someone who cast a ballot for my erasure is not punishment so much as refusing to co-operate with the forces that make me less safe; it is reclaiming the small sovereignties I can control. Their absence brings me peace because it removes the pretense that neutrality still exists—because the policies were spelled out, the plans were public, and the cost of inaction was always mine to pay.
September 21, 2025 at 12:16 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Alt text: A two-panel meme compares Republicans and Democrats using an album cover. The top panel is labelled “Republicans” and shows the Dead Kennedys’ album art with the song title “Kill the Poor.” The bottom panel is labelled “Democrats” and shows the same album cover, but the song title reads “Kill the Poor [Clean].” The joke implies both parties support harmful policies toward the poor, with Democrats presenting a “sanitised” version. https://autside.substack.com/p/what-if-we-had-chosen-the-commons It’s hard not to see the brutal absurdity here. The U.S. economy has become a maze of extraction—SaaS models that turn once-stable tools into endless subscriptions, surge pricing that makes basic needs into bidding wars, inflation cooked down into palatable fictions, “ghost jobs” that keep labour markets docile, corporate monopolies tightening their grip on meat production and every other staple of survival. Ordinary people are squeezed from all sides, bled by rentiers and middlemen. And yet, with all of this urgency, the U.S. Congress finds its centre of gravity not in addressing economic precarity but in punishing trans people connected to the military. It’s a gesture of scapegoating, a reminder of how power works in this country: not by solving crises, but by inventing new enemies. When people can’t afford groceries or housing, when work is a mirage, the state distracts by sharpening its knives against the most vulnerable. The cruelty is not a sideshow—it’s the point.
September 16, 2025 at 12:25 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Being visible as a trans woman in the U.S. right now feels like living inside that caption—trying to stay in the moment, but the moment sucks. The danger isn’t just personal; it’s systemic, cultivated. I’ve been watching how the far-right seizes on the murder of a minor agitator, elevating him into martyrdom through sheer repetition and rhetorical inflation. The leap from one man’s death to a wholesale indictment of trans existence is no accident—it’s strategy. Every headline stretched, every narrative pinned to us, is another attempt to make our lives disposable while theirs are framed as sacred sacrifice. It’s a chilling calculus: their grief is politicised into fuel, while our survival is criminalised into threat. https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/the-cailleach-returns-trans-femininity Alt text: Vintage-style illustration of two smiling women chatting over a white picket fence. One wears a pink blouse and holds a striped bag; the other wears a patterned blouse with a yellow apron. Superimposed text reads: “I’m trying to stay in the moment but the moment sucks.”
September 16, 2025 at 11:13 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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That comic captures it so well—the AuDHD GLP struggle of not having the words for what level of suck you’re in, or why you feel that way, and not having the spoons to explain it even if you could. The relief isn’t in fixing it but in someone gently checking in, showing they want to help, without pressing too much. That small gesture of care can hold more joy than words ever could. https://autside.substack.com/p/ein-augenblick-a-theatre-of-gestalts Alt text: A four-panel cartoon shows two rabbits under a sunny sky. In the first panel, an orange rabbit asks a grey rabbit, “are you okay?” The grey rabbit replies, “no, not really.” In the second panel, the orange rabbit holds out a carrot and asks, “can I help?” The grey rabbit again replies, “no, not really.” In the third panel, the grey rabbit, now looking a bit softer, says, “but hey, it helps to know you want to help.” The orange rabbit leaves the carrot on the ground. In the fourth panel, the orange rabbit looks back with a small heart between them and asks, “really?” The grey rabbit, now smiling slightly, says, “yes, really.”
September 16, 2025 at 11:06 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Ungovernable softness scares the powerful.

open.substack.com/pub/autside/...
Alt text: A small plush care bear with lavender fur and white bunny ears sits against the inside of a car window. The bear, Lily, has embroidered eyes, a purple heart-shaped nose, and two balloon hearts on its belly—one pink and one blue. Its footpads are purple hearts. In the foreground, a hand with short nails painted a matching shade of purple is held up near the car’s air vent, echoing the colour of the plush. Sunlight streams through the window, casting a soft glow on both the toy and the hand. It’s almost absurd, isn’t it? The sight of purple nails beside a purple Care Bear—softness, colour, childhood comfort—recast through the state’s paranoid lens as something dangerous. A plush toy and painted fingertips become suspicious, not because they hold any threat, but because joy itself is destabilising to systems built on fear, compliance, and grey conformity. To laugh, to match your nails to your bear, to insist on tenderness in public—that’s what unsettles power. They don’t know what to do with ungovernable softness, so they call it a threat.
September 16, 2025 at 10:58 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Alt text: White background with pastel text and characters. At the top, pink text reads “I bring home 6 figures a month. The figures:”. Below is a large blue outline drawing of Sanrio’s Cinnamoroll, sitting with a paw against its cheek, blushing. Along the bottom are six small toy figures: a sheep-costumed doll, a small pink-haired doll, My Melody in a nurse outfit, a pale green figure holding a laptop, a pink bunny-suited keychain figure, and Hatsune Miku with teal twin-tails holding a small Cinnamoroll plush. At my age, I still find joy in my plushies. The world tells us that such attachments should be left behind with childhood, folded away like outgrown clothes. But autistic life teaches something different: that joy and safety are not bound to age, but to need. A plushie is not just a toy—it is a vessel of memory, a companion for regulation, a soft anchor in a world that often feels sharp and unyielding. When I share this joy with other autistics, I see how our plushies become bridges between us. They carry our scripts, our comfort, our laughter. They remind us that connection doesn’t always come through words or performance, but through presence—the steady weight of something soft in our arms, the quiet exchange of recognising another who understands. For us, plushies are not frivolous. They are part of the ecology of care that keeps us alive in systems built to grind us down. They are the gentle counterpoint to a culture obsessed with productivity, proof that regulation and delight matter more than efficiency. In their silence, they speak: you are safe, you are held, you are not alone.
September 13, 2025 at 1:07 PM
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Alt text: Screenshot of a headline and commentary. The headline reads: “Microsoft mandates return to office — claims Teams and all remote work solutions are inferior. Story by Sean Endicott • 8h.” Below, a satirical caption says: “Imagine being on the Teams team and getting a team Teams call that your team needs to work on Teams onsite because working on Teams on Teams isn’t a good way to work in teams.” The humour highlights the irony of Microsoft dismissing its own remote work platform. I can’t help but read this with a bitter kind of clarity. So many jobs—coding, documentation, analysis, even whole swathes of education—could be done remotely with no real loss of quality. For autistic people, especially gestalt language processors like me, asynchronous remote work is often not just preferable but life-sustaining. It allows time for our language to settle, for scripts to be prepared, for overstimulation to be managed without the punishing demands of open-plan offices and daily commutes. The push to haul us back onsite isn’t about collaboration or productivity—it’s about real estate and sunk costs. Companies own buildings, hold long leases, invest in campuses, and they need bodies in chairs to justify those numbers. But what gets sacrificed in that calculus are the bodies themselves: disabled workers who lose access, neurodivergent staff who burn out, parents and carers whose fragile equilibrium is shattered. It’s not about better work. It’s about propping up property values at our expense.
September 13, 2025 at 12:50 PM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Alt text: White background with black text that reads: “HRT has been wild. I can’t believe my body was hiding these features behind a paywall.” Commentary: From my point of view as a very tall, strikingly stunning, athletic trans woman, this lands with irony. Reactionaries and the far right always scream their bio-essentialist hate, as though transition is some trick against nature. But all HRT does is reveal what was written in my body all along—features encoded in my genes, waiting behind a paywall only capitalism and gatekeeping put there.
September 12, 2025 at 10:52 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
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Being a very tall trans woman in the US means living in a culture that has caged “woman” into a narrow silhouette—5’2” to 5’6”, petite, compliant, made to fit in the frame. My body, my height, my presence fall outside that box, and so to many I become unimaginable. That disbelief is political; it feeds into how transness itself is legislated, policed, erased. And yet—there’s a particular, platonic joy when I meet another trans woman as tall as me, or taller still. It is recognition, not in the gaze of the state or the measuring tape of patriarchy, but in each other. To see her, to be seen, is to remember that we exist beyond the cage. We are not too much; we are simply here. And in those moments, it feels like love. https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/shethey-possibly-appearing-time-permitting Alt text: Pastel anime-style drawing of two schoolgirls. The shorter girl, labelled “Me a tall trans girl,” reaches up on tiptoe toward the taller girl with closed eyes and lips pursed, thinking “Kiss me ♥.” The taller girl, labelled “An even taller trans girl,” stands composed, holding a red book, looking down at her.
September 12, 2025 at 10:28 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Find me in the alt text.

autside.substack.com/p/what-if-we...
What we are seeing in US cities right now—the quiet creep of militarised police units, checkpoints, ICE raids dressed in the language of “safety”—is the same sleight of hand this meme warns against. Occupation is normalised through repetition, until the sight of armoured vehicles on residential streets is as unremarkable as the morning bus. The state insists that the uniformed presence is protection; for those of us marked by difference, it is surveillance. As an autistic gestalt language processor, this reality is layered with another danger: street interrogations demand immediate, fluent scripts that I cannot always summon. A soldier or officer’s “where are you going?” is not just a question—it is a trapdoor. If I pause too long, echo the wrong phrase, or reach for a line that doesn’t fit their frame, the silence becomes suspicion. My neurology becomes criminalised. As a trans person, the precarity deepens. My body may not “match” the bureaucratic fiction of my identification documents. My voice, my name, my face—all can be judged against a paper standard that was never written for me. To survive such an encounter is to gamble that the officer in front of me will not weaponise the discrepancy. Occupation hides itself in words like order, safety, security. But to us—for whom scripts fracture under pressure, for whom documents are written in another’s hand—it is terror made mundane. To resist, as the image urges, is not abstract: it is to name the fear, to refuse its normalisation, and to insist that our lives, in all their divergence, are not collateral for empire’s performance of safety. Alt text: A digitally rendered character with long pale pink hair and silver armour leans forward with a fierce, determined expression. The character’s mouth is slightly open as if speaking. Bold white subtitle text at the bottom of the image reads: “Resist the normalization of military occupation.” The background is blurred, suggesting a tense or action-filled scene.
September 12, 2025 at 10:19 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Find me in the alt text
Alt text: A digitally edited image of Kirby, the round pink video game character, standing in the middle of a library aisle with bookshelves on either side and a staircase in the background. Kirby looks upward with a thoughtful expression. White caption text at the bottom reads: “Why are people so insecure about their appearance but not their character?” Commentary: We are taught from the youngest age to monitor our surfaces—body, face, voice, clothing—as if worth is something to be displayed rather than lived. Capital demands it, patriarchy polices it, and ableism enforces it. That’s why people are trained to be insecure about their appearance—because their value is made contingent on being legible to systems of power. But our character, our ways of being, our ethical spine? Those are rarely examined with the same urgency. For me, as an autistic and trans person, this is not accidental. Systems would rather I contort myself to “look right” than insist on the deeper integrity of who I am. My scripts, my gestalts, my gender—all of these are treated as surfaces to correct rather than truths to honour. The question Kirby poses reminds me that insecurity is not neutral—it is cultivated. What would it mean if we were taught to hold ourselves accountable not to the mirror, but to the communities we belong to? To measure our character not against compliance, but against solidarity and care? For autistic and trans life, this shift is survival. I cannot and will not polish myself into a palatable shape. My character is the measure that matters—and it asks not for perfection, but for justice, reciprocity, and truth.
September 12, 2025 at 10:11 AM
jaimehoerricks.bsky.social
Find me in the alt text
Alt text: A video game–style scene with cartoon characters standing in a reddish-brown outdoor area with tall grass and wooden buildings in the background. A purple figure faces a mushroom-like character with a red-and-white striped cap. A large white speech bubble above them reads: “This ultra violent country demands that we mourn the very people who want us dead.” Commentary: In America, the rituals around violence are almost liturgical. We are told who to grieve, when to stand in silence, when to drape ourselves in flags. These ceremonies of mourning are not for us—they are for power. They demand that we shed tears for the very institutions and people who have inflicted harm, while silencing the grief we carry for our own dead. This is not empathy—it is control. It is the choreography of gaslighting at a national scale, where violence is recast as honour, where those killed by the state are forgotten, and where those who wield that violence are sanctified. The epic manipulation is not only in the blood spilled, but in the stories told about it afterward.
September 12, 2025 at 9:52 AM