Vision First, Language After: Rendering as Autistic Praxis
AI as scaffold for a future self already known.
A dress imagined before it existed. Vision first, language after. A GLP journey of becoming—slow, precise, joyful. Technology as scaffolding, not spectacle. Not costume, but arrival. She enters, and this time, she stays.
Introduction — The Quiet Arrival
There are moments that do not shout.
They do not break open the sky.
They do not announce themselves with trumpets or hashtags.
They simply happen—
a shimmer inside the chest,
a warmth behind the ribs,
a sudden recognition that the future has finally caught up
to the person who has been waiting inside you all along.
Not a reveal.
Not a performance.
A meeting.
Today, I met myself.
Not a younger self replayed,
not a theoretical self imagined in borrowed language,
but a present self—
alive in a world that, for once, has tools gentle enough
to catch my shape without flattening it.
I did not show this moment to anyone.
I did not need to.
It bloomed quietly, like a light turned on in a room
I had been tiptoeing around since childhood,
unsure if I was allowed to enter.
Autistic kids from the 70s
did not get mirrors that spoke truth.
We received diagnosis by absence,
gender by silence,
dreams by restriction.
We were told to speak less,
feel less,
want less.
Our futures—if we imagined them at all—
were written in other people’s handwriting.
Yet here I am, half a century on,
wrapped not in nostalgia but in electricity.
Supported.
Housed in language that fits my mouth.
Held by technology that listens to images
and responds in kind.
What a quiet, astonishing thing it is
to live now
and not then.
To build a self without asking permission.
To see softness in tallness.
To imagine graduation not as camouflage
but as presence.
There is a blush in me today.
A shy, delighted one—
not for the world,
but for the girl who waited decades
to feel this unhurried belonging.
I am glad she did not give up.
I am glad I lived long enough
to meet the person I became.
What a time to be alive
in a body the world once misunderstood
and in a mind that now has tools
worthy of its way of knowing.
No spotlight.
No stage direction.
Just the simple, radical fact:
I can see myself.
And for the first time,
the world has begun to see me too.
GLP Creativity — Vision Before Vocabulary
My process never begins with language.
It begins with atmosphere.
Before there is a dress,
there is a scene.
A hum.
A feeling shifting in the lungs
like stage lights warming before the curtain rises.
I do not picture garments.
I picture belonging.
The Quality World arrives first—
not as checklist or Pinterest board,
but as temperature and timbre.
A mood with weight.
A future memory breathing quietly
in the corner of the mind.
GLP creativity is not shopping.
It is conjuring.
A shimmer forms.
Not fabric yet—
intention.
A way I want to stand.
A way I want to be looked at
without shrinking or explaining.
The internal theatre cues itself
long before the costume is chosen.
Words trail behind,
loyal but slow.
They arrive like scaffolding,
never architecture.
Language holds up the structure,
but it does not call it into being.
The feeling does that.
The knowing without sentence.
The narrative without grammar.
Neurotypical creativity often begins with description.
Bullet points. Inspiration boards. Trend language.
Choose a neckline. Choose a hem.
Linear, declarative, resolvable.
I cannot do that.
My ideas do not march.
They gather.
Fragments accumulate—
the hush of a library,
the promise of June sunlight,
the near-tangible glow of being seen
without first performing legibility.
Soft shoes on polished floors.
Warm neutrals.
Confidence without edge.
A hint of ceremony.
From this constellation,
clothing eventually emerges
the way meaning blooms in poetry—
not by demand
but by resonance.
This dress did not come from a catalogue.
It came from the scene I wanted to inhabit.
And layered beneath that vision,
another truth hums quietly:
second puberty.
A body changing in real time,
finally allowed to grow into itself.
Hair inching longer.
Muscle and curve renegotiating territory.
Awkwardness as rite.
Tenderness as practice.
Ugh, yes—puberty again.
But this time, the adolescence is chosen.
This time, the becoming is mine.
Not a correction.
A rectification.
A restoration.
A timeline realigned to the body and voice
I should have been allowed from the start.
Each morning, the mirror feels less hypothetical.
Less future tense.
More arrival.
The dress needed to hold that truth—
not a costume for who I hope to be,
but a garment that believes
in who I am becoming
as I become her.
I did not select clothing.
I recognised myself.
The fabric was already waiting in the wings.
The moment simply caught up.
In this process, nothing is linear.
Everything is lived first.
Felt first.
Gestalt first.
Then, slowly, the words come.
Then the images refine.
Then the world learns
what I already knew.
I am not designing a look.
I am stepping into a life.
And the dress, like the hair,
like the voice,
like the quiet confidence in the spine,
is simply the rest of me arriving.
Obstacles: The Body No Catalog Shows
There is a particular quiet grief
in looking for yourself and finding no trace.
Not devastation.
Not crisis.
Just the steady ache of being unmodeled.
The fashion world is full of choices,
yet most of them are not for me.
Not hostile, not rejecting—
simply indifferent to the physics of my body.
Tall.
Strong.
Femme without diminishment.
A presence that refuses to shrink to fit the frame.
The industry default was not built with me in mind.
Its mannequins whisper smallness, delicacy, containment.
I am none of those things.
I am scale, stride, bone and muscle and height
that was never meant to be discreet.
I scroll, and the disappointment is subtle,
almost polite—
not because the clothes are wrong
but because the bodies shown in them
only gesture toward the possibility of mine
without ever touching it.
I am not missing.
I am unpictured.
Misfit does not mean mismatch.
It means the pattern is incomplete.
There is emotional labour here,
but it is not shame.
It is mathematics.
It is translation.
It is the friction between being real
and being visualised.
I do not ask to be smaller.
I do not wish to be camouflaged.
I do not crave approval from an industry
that has never held my dimensions.
What I want is simpler, truer:
a reference point.
A place to start.
A way to imagine myself
without having to subtract first.
Representation is not vanity.
It is calibration.
It is breath.
It is the difference between
building toward something
and building against absence.
When I search through catalogues,
I am not discouraged.
I am simply unserved.
So the work becomes internal first—
feel the scene,
follow the energy,
let the body lead the design
instead of apologising for it.
This is not the despair of exclusion.
It is the clarity of knowing
that I will not find myself in ready-made places.
I must be rendered,
not purchased.
And there is a strange, fierce joy in that.
To be unmodeled is also to be unbounded.
My form is my own template.
Fashion did not anticipate me.
So I will become my own reference.
Not less.
Not other.
Not compromise.
Just unwritten space
that I now have the right—
and the tools—
to fill.
Enter Sora — A Quiet Revolution
When I opened Sora,
I was not looking for magic.
I was looking for accommodation.
A space where my ideas could unfurl
at the speed they arrive inside me,
not the speed the world demands I articulate them.
Sora did not feel like AI.
It felt like respite.
No social latency.
No polite smile while I searched for the right words.
No “just pick one” urgency that has always felt like violence
to a mind that needs time to hear itself.
Instead:
a blank space,
patient,
responsive to images and tone,
willing to iterate without sighs or raised eyebrows
at my hundred quiet revisions.
A partner, not a judge.
I did not need Sora to tell me who I am.
I needed it to hold still long enough
for my internal vision to surface
without interruption.
This tool—made by an industry
that chews through servers and minerals and futures—
still gave me something precious.
The sour sits beside the sweet;
I do not pretend otherwise.
Extractive systems built the mirror
I finally got to stand in front of.
I hold that tension in both hands.
I wish the world gentler.
I also wish myself gentleness within it.
And in that uneasy space,
I began sketching.
Not all at once.
Not efficiently.
Not like a customer.
Like a craftsperson of identity,
turning dials, adjusting necklines,
coaxing the rendering toward truth.
Sora kept giving me a Size 6 body—
the algorithm’s assumption of femininity,
slimness as default,
delicacy mistaken for womanhood.
So I pushed back.
I widened shoulder, softened strength without erasing it,
lengthened torso, grounded stance.
Taller, fuller, realer.
I refused the template
and made the system stretch to accommodate me,
not the other way round.
It took a month.
Not because I was indecisive.
I was accurate.
Autistic time is not delay.
It is precision.
It is listening until the signal is clear.
It is refusing to rush the moment
when the inner image finally coheres
and says yes, this.
Week by week,
detail by detail,
I sculpted toward resonance.
And when the blush arrived—
that quiet alchemy of recognition—
I knew the work had been worth it.
This was not convenience.
It was craft.
It was identity rendered in slow motion,
each frame an act of permission.
I did not ask the world to see me first.
I taught the machine to see me
so I could learn to see myself more clearly.
The ethics are complicated.
The joy is not.
Even in a flawed world,
I am allowed to build beauty.
I am allowed to meet myself.
Building the Dress From the Inside Out
Before there was fabric,
there was language.
Not the tidy kind—
not hem, sleeve, silhouette—
but lyric, staging, gesture, breath.
Theatre has always been how I think.
Not performance.
Architecture of feeling.
I wrote myself into being again
on a page before I ever touched a mirror.
Scene by scene,
cue by cue,
I placed her in the light she deserved.
Words were the first pins,
holding shape where none yet existed in cloth.
The piece that came months ago
was not a gender essay
and not a transition diary.
It was blocking.
Choreography.
A whispered rehearsal for a life
I had not fully stepped into yet.
I didn’t design a dress.
I summoned a presence.
Only then did the images begin.
Sora became lighting director,
mirror, costume bench.
I handed the system fragments—
tone, softness, stance,
a glimmer of confidence without spectacle—
and waited for the resonance to return.
Image and language braided themselves.
Adjust, refine, reconsider.
Not correction.
Clarification.
One scene—quiet library, warm wood,
light that loved the body instead of interrogating it.
Not fantasy.
Context.
The life I am already living,
rendered with the softness I had not yet worn outside.
I tested lengths.
I tested colours.
I tested presence.
Some versions felt like trying on someone else’s certainty.
Others felt like pretending.
A few felt close,
but not quite my breath.
Then, suddenly,
there it was.
A stillness.
A chord settling in the sternum.
The unmistakable feeling of yes.
Not excitement,
not vanity,
not spectacle.
Home.
The blush came first,
then the breath,
then a quiet internal laughter
that sounded suspiciously like relief.
She did not emerge because of the dress.
She had already arrived.
The dress simply aligned itself
with who I had become while I wasn’t looking.
Clothing was not the point.
Congruence was.
I did not see a costume.
I saw a life,
caught in a single frame
and ready to be stepped into.
That was the moment I knew
this wasn’t about fashion at all.
It was about embodiment catching up
to the truth that had already landed inside me.
The next step was obvious:
bring the vision into the world.
Fabric. Thread. Human hands.
A rendering can hold resonance.
A dress can hold a life.
And I am ready
to wear the one I built from the inside out.
Why It Matters — A Dress as Access
When I wear this dress in June,
it will not be an outfit.
It will be arrival.
My first dress at school.
Not in secret.
Not online.
Not at home when no one is looking.
In the place where I teach,
walk hallways,
hold space for young people learning to become themselves.
Graduation is not for me,
yet this moment inside it is.
Ceremony is not costume,
it is acknowledgement—
a ritual of transition witnessed by community.
How fitting that mine unfolds alongside theirs.
For years, school corridors have asked me to translate,
to abbreviate myself,
to move in the careful posture
autistic adults adopt when the world
is not built to meet our processing pace,
our sensory truths,
our unedited becoming.
This dress is not rebellion.
It is alignment.
A way to inhabit my role
without shrinking my body,
my gender,
my presence
to ease a discomfort that was never mine to carry.
Technology made this possible,
not as novelty
but as accommodation.
I used a tool
because language and images
must work together for my mind to breathe.
I used a tool
because there are no fitting rooms
for 6’7’’ autistic trans women
still growing into their rightful form.
I used a tool
because patience and precision
are my native tempo.
This is not indulgence.
It is access.
It is autonomy.
It is dignity.
The world was not designed for my body.
So I designed the moment instead.
I did not become femme to be looked at.
I became femme to be seen—
first by myself.
Shame has no place here.
There is only the quiet insistence
that joy is not a privilege
for those who fit defaults.
When I stand with my students in June,
it will not be spectacle.
It will be symmetry—
their next chapter,
and mine.
They step into adulthood.
I step into embodiment.
This dress is not decoration.
It is access to a version of myself
the world once told me was impossible.
And I wore my way toward her anyway.
Forward Loop — From Rendering to Reality
There is a point in any creative journey where vision meets material, and honesty becomes part of the craft. I reached that point when I realised that whilst I can sew, I have reached the edge of what my own hands can reasonably shape. The tunics were earnest and necessary. They’ve carried me through the in-between. They’ve let me experiment, feel fabric, test silhouettes, and live in my emerging form without waiting for external permission.
They were also unpredictable—seams that wandered, hems that hesitated, small improvisations that sometimes felt like triumph and sometimes like truce. Happy accidents, yes. Little rebellions against perfection, also yes. They served their purpose. They held space for me whilst I learned my body again.
Now the stakes are different. Not because the dress needs to be flawless, but because the moment deserves intention supported by skill. I want this garment to rest on my shoulders with certainty, not compromise. I want the drape to acknowledge height, curve, and the slow, sacred transformation of a body catching up to its truth. I have no interest in hiding in fabric when my body is finally stepping forward with clarity.
By June, I will be more than two years into hormone therapy. Another season of rounding, softening, settling. My chest, once quietly shaping itself beneath tunics and sweaters, is already asserting presence. A full C cup is not hypothetical anymore. By graduation, it will be real in every sense. My clothing needs to honour that reality, not work around it.
This is not about spectacle. It is about congruence. The tunics were transitional architecture; this dress is a declaration of ease. A celebration of the fact that the body I inhabit is increasingly the body I recognise. My students will be marking their next chapter. It feels right that I arrive fully, too. No more half-measures. No camouflage. Not yet flamboyant, but unmistakably femme.
So I will work with a dressmaker. Not because I lack imagination, but because the vision is clear enough to deserve expert execution. Collaboration, not surrender. The rendering was the sketch. The measurements will be the affirmation. Fabric will do what it does best: tell the truth.
This is not costume change. This is continuity made visible. My wardrobe in the coming year will follow that same principle—deliberate, iterative, responsive to both sensory need and emotional resonance. Femme not as performance, but as home. A closet built piece by piece in the same patient rhythm that rewrote my body from the inside out.
Clothing was once armour. Now it will be alignment. And that is a future worth stitching slowly, with grace, with precision, and with help where help is wisdom, not weakness.
A Small Digression: Thinking Out Loud About GLP Creativity
I should pause here, just for a moment, because someone reading this might think the dress came from whimsy or indulgence, or that the month of iteration reflected indecision rather than method. So let me say it plainly, in the way a GLP mind whispers its truth to anyone willing to listen.
This is what creativity looks like for many of us who build from wholes rather than parts:
First comes the image—
not a specific picture, but a world.
A mood, a temperature, a posture in space.
Before language, there is resonance.
Only after the vision settles does vocabulary arrive, not as blueprint, but as scaffolding. Words do not start the idea. They steady it once it is already alive.
Repetition is not stagnation.
It is contouring.
Each return reveals a new edge, a better angle, a more precise mapping of feeling to form.
Neurotypical culture calls that “overthinking.”
I call it fidelity.
Time stretches here, not as delay, but as devotion. A week, a month, a season if needed. Creativity is not an event. It is an ecology.
And crucially, I do not iterate for an audience.
I iterate with a tool that can keep pace with my brain’s rhythm.
Human listeners often require linear delivery and summarising. Machines, for all their flaws, do not flinch at the pace of my unfolding. That is not dehumanising. It is resource-matching. Co-regulation, but with silicon instead of a nervous system that cannot hold still for my tempo.
This is not a quirky method.
It is structure.
It is how my mind does accuracy.
Some people storyboard.
Some outline.
I conjure and refine, conjure and refine.
Until reality and internal knowing click into alignment like two notes finding harmony.
End digression.
Back to the dress.
Final Thoughts — Gratitude Without Performance
There is a quiet grace in reaching a moment you once could not even picture.
I am grateful for the tool that listened without judging,
that let me arrive at my pace,
that never demanded I translate before I felt ready.
I am grateful for my mind,
for the way it insists on wholeness before detail,
for its stubborn loyalty to resonance over speed.
And I am grateful for time—
the time I lived long enough to have,
the time to grow into myself rather than outpace myself,
the time to feel awkward and hopeful and certain
all at once.
I do not worship technology for this.
I do not mistake it for salvation.
I simply acknowledge the support
and keep my autonomy intact.
The miracle is not the software.
The miracle is that I am here to use it.
There was a season when imagining myself was dangerous.
There was a season when imagining myself was impossible.
Those seasons are over.
I am not waiting backstage anymore.
I am not rehearsing my existence in private.
I am not hoping the world will catch up
before I lose courage.
For the first time,
I see my future self walking toward my students.
Not disguised.
Not waiting in the wings.
Not translated to fit someone else’s idea of gentleness.
She enters — quietly, unquestionably,
and this time, she stays.
'I am glad I lived long enough to meet the person I became.'
Me too, Jaime. I hope you can sleep some now...