Placeholder/Intro Post

The purpose of this blog is to explore different aspects of my identity, how they apply to me personally, how the same kinds of identities affect other people, and how one's identity is perceived shapes how people perceive other aspects of that person.

This is a personal Thinking Blog. It's not my aim to present myself as any more intellectual than I actually am, but simply to present the intellectual aspect of my indentity, and the intellectual aspects of other aspects of my identity.

I am a 26-year-old person with a female body, but I identify as "genderqueer" for several reasons, which I shall try to explore and explain in further entries. I do not see myself as exclusively male, female, or neuter, but as bits and pieces of all three, and inconsistently at that. I do not consider myself to be merely a tomboy or butch, although I respect the right of other people to identify themselves as such.

I am also a person who is on the autism spectrum. I am not open to sharing diagnostic particulars, and will not do so on this blog, but I will explore how being autistic affects my identity. I choose to label myself simply "autistic" rather than a specific diagnostic or functioning label because the criteria for those labels are inconsistent and arbitrary. People are not unchanging absolutes, and they should not have to conform to a notion of a particular type of neurological functioning from birth to death simply to satisfy the labeling needs of an outside entity.

I am also a blind person. I have some functional vision but I generally prefer to see myself as a blind person with some sight rather than as a sighted person with impaired vision. I believe in using the most effective tools and techniques for *me* rather than committing myself to completely nonvisual techniques or trying to do everything visually.

I like to create things, either in my mind or in physical space. In the past few years I have not had the resources (time, money, space, energy) to create as much as I would like to, but I am working on changing that.

I like to absorb information and ideas, through reading, listening, and observing, to think about those things, and to express my thoughts about those things. I have not been doing as much expressing as I would like to, and that is part of why I have started this blog, to share how I think about the world with others.