Who Gets to Be an Autistic Woman?

Autism Isn’t Binary: A Trans Critique of the 'Female Autism Phenotype'

Autism was never binary—so why is its diagnosis? This piece traces the exclusion of trans women from autism discourse and calls for a future rooted in care, complexity, and liberation beyond diagnostic gatekeeping.

Introduction

Autism has not always been framed as it is today. Whilst much of the Global North attributes its discovery to figures like Leo Kanner or Hans Asperger, the roots of autism research are far older, and far more holistic. In 1925, Soviet psychiatrist Dr. Grunya Sukhareva published detailed clinical descriptions of what we would now recognise as autistic traits in children—both boys and girls. Her observations were nuanced, grounded in care rather than pathology, and attentive to sensory, motor, and emotional experience. But her work was largely ignored in the West, buried beneath Cold War politics and systemic bias. In its place rose a version of autism shaped by eugenics, gender essentialism, and a rigid binary worldview—one which continues to define how autism is diagnosed and discussed today.

Asperger’s work, developed under the shadow of Nazi scientific racism, drew stark lines between those deemed ‘useful’ to society and those who were not. Kanner’s approach, although developed in the United States, shared a similar logic: autism became a narrow clinical category tied to white boys, emotional detachment, and parental blame. Over time, this view was softened only marginally—first to include the idea that some girls might also be autistic, and more recently to suggest that ‘female autism’ might present differently. But even these shifts have occurred within the same binary framework. They have not challenged the assumptions underpinning the diagnostic system, only reshaped them around cis-normative and often classed ideals of femininity.

For trans people, and especially for trans women, this binary framing is not just exclusionary—it is erasure. Our experiences are seldom reflected in research, rarely acknowledged in clinical spaces, and often met with suspicion or outright hostility in peer communities. The term transmisogyny, coined by Julia Serano, refers to the unique discrimination faced by trans women and transfeminine people, combining the prejudices of both transphobia and misogyny. Within autism discourse, transmisogyny manifests in the belief that trans women do not ‘really’ experience autism as women do, or worse, that we are interlopers corrupting a framework designed to support a specific kind of womanhood—cis, white, quiet, and socially palatable.

Today’s article seeks to trace how we arrived at this point: from holistic observation to clinical exclusion; from a diagnostic system that once had the potential to recognise variation and nuance, to one that draws borders around identity and decides who gets to belong. In doing so, it aims to make visible the ways in which trans women have been made invisible—liminal figures in a story that refuses to name us.

Origins of Autism Research: Sukhareva and Holistic Foundations

In 1925, decades before the names Kanner or Asperger would become synonymous with autism, a Jewish woman working in the Soviet Union quietly published what many now recognise as the first clinical description of what we call autism. Grunya Efimovna Sukhareva, writing in a time and place where ideological and scientific boundaries were tightly policed, described a group of children—boys and later girls—whose behaviour, sensory profiles, and relational styles bore striking resemblance to what we would now label as autistic traits. But what stands out in her work, even a century later, is not just its prescience, but its humanity. Where later researchers would speak of deficits and dysfunctions, Sukhareva described difference. Her language was strikingly free of judgment. She noted sensitivities, motor peculiarities, and social awkwardness, yes—but she also described musical talent, honesty, strong memory, and moral reasoning. She saw the whole child, not merely a cluster of symptoms.

Sukhareva’s inclusion of girls was equally groundbreaking. At a time when most medical and psychological literature defaulted to male subjects, her recognition that similar traits occurred in girls—and that these traits could be expressed differently—should have directed the course of autism research. But it did not. Her work, originally published in Russian and later in German, remained obscure for decades, not because it lacked rigour or insight, but because of who she was and where she was. A Jewish woman in the USSR was never going to be celebrated in the Anglo-American psychiatric canon of the mid-20th century. Her identity, combined with the ideological climate of the Cold War and the lingering antisemitism of post-war science, all but ensured her marginalisation. Even now, she is rarely mentioned in mainstream autism histories, despite her clear primacy.

What Dr. Sukhareva offered was a vision of autism not as a tragedy or a medical curiosity, but as a different way of being—an approach grounded in observation, not pathologisation. That her work was eclipsed by figures whose legacies were shaped by eugenics, misogyny, and ableism is telling. It speaks to how much of our understanding of autism was built not on the foundation of care or curiosity, but on systems of exclusion and control. Dr. Sukhareva’s erasure is not accidental; it is a reminder that whose voices we centre has always mattered. Her approach, so relational and open-ended, held space for children to be complex, contradictory, and whole. That she is only now being rediscovered tells us how much we have lost—and how urgently we must reorient ourselves to the truths she tried to tell.

The Eugenic Turn: Asperger, Kanner, and Diagnostic Narrowing

Whilst Dr. Sukhareva’s work offered a relational and nuanced view of difference, the Western lineage of autism research had a far darker start in the mid-twentieth century. In Nazi-occupied Vienna, Hans Asperger developed his theories within a regime that categorised children not by their needs, but by their utility. His clinical framing of what he called “autistic psychopathy” was not an innocent classification—it was diagnostic triage under eugenics. Children deemed capable of being moulded into productive, rule-following citizens were spared, whilst those who required greater support, or whose traits marked them as too far outside social norms, were referred to the so-called “euthanasia” programme. In essence, autism became a mechanism of selection: a tool to distinguish between lives considered worthy and those deemed expendable.

Crucially, Asperger’s vision of autism was deeply gendered. He described boys who struggled socially but could be brilliant in specific intellectual or technical domains—potential assets to the state. Girls, if they were mentioned at all, existed only in passing, and without the same value proposition. Autism, under his influence, became tied to white, male productivity: the logic of extractive capitalism dressed up as science. The clinical eye was turned toward those who might yet be salvaged for use; others were left out of the frame altogether.

In the United States, Leo Kanner developed a different, but equally limiting, model. His 1943 paper codified autism as a condition of boys marked by aloofness, emotional unavailability, and withdrawal from social connection. The blame, famously, was placed on “refrigerator mothers”—a convenient reassertion of patriarchal values, where a mother’s perceived coldness caused her child’s distress. The child was pathologised, yes, but so was the mother—an early sign of how autism research would continue to scapegoat and misunderstand women. Later, Kanner would revise his stance, but the damage was done. Autism had been firmly framed as a male condition rooted in emotional deficiency, with women either blamed or excluded altogether.

What linked both Asperger and Kanner was a shared logic of worthiness: whose life warranted support, and whose did not. This logic found fertile ground in a Western cultural context shaped by Calvinist patriarchy, where women and girls were already positioned as second-class beings—property more than people. In this framework, a boy with autistic traits might one day contribute to science, technology, or the military; a girl was just broken property, and therefore replaceable. Why invest in her? Her future was presumed to consist of domestic service, unpaid care, and silence. Support, in this context, was not only unwarranted—it was wasteful.

This dismissiveness pervades early Western work on autism in women. Girls were either overlooked entirely or treated as anomalous when they did receive attention. Their traits were framed as emotional instability, hysteria, or simply poor behaviour. They were too passive to be recognised as autistic in Kanner’s world, and too irrelevant to be considered at all in Asperger’s. These assumptions filtered directly into the diagnostic frameworks that came to dominate Western psychiatry. The DSM, shaped by these male-centric models, absorbed their binary logics wholesale. Autism was defined against a male norm, measured through male-coded behaviours, and validated by male researchers, largely for male subjects.

In the process, the relational lens offered by Dr. Sukhareva was lost. Autism ceased to be a way of being and became a disorder to be detected, categorised, and managed. And always, at its foundation, lay the question of worth—who is worth diagnosing, supporting, or studying? In this system, trans people were never meant to be seen. Girls were rarely seen. And trans girls—least of all.

The Binary Persists: From “Boys’ Disorder” to “Girls Too”

Even as the field of autism research began to concede that perhaps girls could, in fact, be autistic, it did so through a lens still warped by the same gender essentialism that had long excluded them. The early refusal to diagnose girls was not rooted in evidence, but in the assumption that autism simply didn’t ‘look like’ them. Diagnostic criteria were calibrated to observable behaviours more common in cis, white boys—externalising traits, narrow interests that diverged from social expectations, and overt social withdrawal. Girls who internalised their struggles, or who adapted by mimicking social behaviour, were overlooked. Their differences were dismissed as shyness, anxiety, or immaturity—anything but autism.

Eventually, a shift occurred. The field began to acknowledge that girls and women might, in fact, display autistic traits differently. What emerged was the notion of a “female autism phenotype”—a phrase popularised by studies such as Bargiela et al. (2016), which described women and girls as having higher social motivation, better capacity for traditional friendships, and interests that align more closely with societal expectations. But this apparent progress merely repackaged the problem. Rather than dismantling the binary assumptions underpinning diagnosis, the “female phenotype” entrenched them further. Traits were re-coded as “masculine” or “feminine,” and autism was reframed not as a spectrum of experiences but as a sexed dichotomy: one version for boys, another for girls.

This framework remains deeply cis-normative. It imagines that gender is static, binary, and biologically determined—and that diagnostic experiences neatly follow suit. The ‘female autism phenotype’ is almost exclusively described in relation to cis women and girls. Trans women, non-binary people, and other gender-diverse individuals are absent from this narrative altogether. If we are mentioned, it is as statistical outliers, curiosities to be explained, or noise to be cleaned from the data. Our experiences do not inform the shape of the phenotype; we are not allowed to reshape its borders. Instead, it is weaponised against us—used to deny our womanhood, our authenticity, or our right to diagnosis at all.

The broader narrative of underdiagnosis—whilst undeniably important—has also been flattened into a trope. It is often used to justify expanding awareness for girls and women, but rarely with any intention of reimagining the diagnostic framework itself. Instead, it reinforces a gatekeeping logic: now that we know what ‘female autism’ looks like, we can better find the right kind of girl to diagnose. The right kind, of course, being cis, white, articulate, and softly spoken. This doesn’t correct the historical exclusion of autistic girls; it narrows the aperture through which they’re now permitted to exist.

What’s left unexamined is how these supposedly distinct phenotypes serve to reassert normative ideas of gender rather than disrupt them. By insisting that autistic girls are more socially motivated, or that they camouflage better, or that their interests are more appropriate, the field continues to hold up a cis-feminine ideal as the standard—an ideal many girls, cis or trans, will never meet. And those who fall outside it—those who are messy, angry, disorganised, or loud—remain on the outside looking in.

Cracks in the Binary: Autism and Gender Diversity

Despite the continued dominance of binary thinking in autism discourse, the cracks are beginning to show. A growing body of research has made it increasingly difficult to ignore the intersections between autism and gender diversity—intersections that have long been obvious to those of us living at them. Studies like Warrier et al. (2020) found that autistic traits and diagnoses are significantly more prevalent among transgender and gender-diverse individuals. This isn’t a minor footnote or statistical quirk—it’s a consistent and well-documented pattern that demands a serious reckoning with the assumptions built into diagnostic frameworks.

And yet, this research is often siloed. Rather than informing mainstream autism discourse, it’s treated as a niche concern—a separate conversation for a separate group. Even within emerging studies that explicitly examine this intersection, such as those by Gratton et al. (2023), the emphasis remains on the need for further research, as if acknowledging our existence is itself a radical act. What these studies confirm, again and again, is what trans autistic people already know: we are present in large numbers, we face unique barriers to diagnosis and care, and we are systemically excluded from both the communities we belong to and the services we need.

This dual exclusion is well-articulated in the work of Maroney and Horne (2022), who document how autistic trans people often find themselves estranged from both autistic spaces and trans spaces. In the former, our gender is questioned or dismissed. In the latter, our neurodivergence is misunderstood or ignored. We are expected to split ourselves—to be legible in parts, but never as whole. It is within this fracture that erasure lives. Diagnostic systems still fail to account for how autistic people might understand or express gender differently, or how gender-diverse people might experience or report autistic traits in ways that elude conventional tools.

These intersections are not pathological. The fact that many of us are both trans and autistic is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be understood. And yet, the diagnostic gaze continues to frame our existence as aberration. Camouflaging, already a well-documented phenomenon among autistic people—particularly those socialised as girls—becomes more layered and complex when gender identity is also policed. For trans people, camouflaging isn’t just about masking autistic traits; it’s also about performing gender in ways that feel safe, acceptable, or at least non-threatening. The cost is immense. Mental health outcomes worsen. Access to diagnosis is delayed or denied. And all the while, the system insists on looking for neat categories that were never meant to contain us.

What becomes clear is that the binary cannot hold. It cannot contain the range of ways autism presents, nor the breadth of how gender is lived. But rather than adapt to reflect reality, the system continues to resist, propping up outdated models even as evidence mounts against them. These cracks—these studies, these voices, these truths—will eventually break the structure open. But for now, many of us still live in the spaces in between. Unrecognised, uncounted, and yet very much here.

Transmisogyny and the “Female Autism” Discourse

Within the conversation about “female autism,” a quiet violence persists—one that not only excludes trans women, but frames us as fundamentally illegitimate. We are rarely named, and when we are, it is often with suspicion. The diagnostic category of autism, already tangled in decades of gender essentialism, becomes another tool through which our womanhood is questioned. We are not seen as “real” autistic women. We are cast instead as distortions—too loud, too visible, too confusing. And worse still, as threats.

This perception is rooted in transmisogyny—the layered oppression that trans women face as both trans and as women, a term coined by Julia Serano to describe the unique hostility directed at those of us who fail to perform cis womanhood in a way that is palatable to a patriarchal, cis-normative gaze. In the world of autism diagnosis, transmisogyny functions through absence and invalidation. It appears in the way we are left out of research on “female autism.” It surfaces in the quiet but constant implication that we do not, and cannot, understand misogyny in the same way cis women do. And it echoes through both feminist and autistic spaces when we are treated not as peers, but as interlopers—people who do not belong and are only tentatively tolerated.

This is compounded by the impossible standards placed upon us to “pass.” Passing—as both cis and allistic—becomes a kind of admission ticket to care, to affirmation, to recognition. Trans women are expected to disappear into legibility: to look, sound, and behave in ways that align with a narrow idea of womanhood, and to suppress or mask autistic traits that disrupt social norms. Those who can do this are occasionally granted access. Those who cannot are dismissed, ridiculed, or pathologised. We are told that we are too masculine, too blunt, too rigid, too intense—words that often serve as both gendered and ableist slurs.

Passing, in this context, is not just about safety. It is about survival within systems that only know how to see two things: the cis-normative and the neurotypical. If we fall outside both—and most of us do—we are rendered unintelligible. Our distress is overlooked. Our needs are misread. And our identities are flattened or erased entirely. The diagnostic tools used to assess autism have not been designed with us in mind. They assume binary gender from the outset, asking questions rooted in stereotypes about boys who love trains and girls who love dolls. Clinicians are rarely trained to recognise how gender diversity interacts with neurodivergence, much less how these intersections shape the ways we present, communicate, and cope.

In this system, being an autistic trans woman is to be in a constant state of translation. We must explain ourselves again and again, even to those meant to support us. We are asked to perform, to conform, to fit frames built without us in mind. And still, even if we do all that, we may find ourselves disbelieved—too visibly autistic to be seen as women, too visibly trans to be seen as truly autistic. The category of “female autism” becomes another wall to scale, rather than a space of recognition. It defines who gets to be counted, and it continues to count us out.

A Small Aside: What About Trans Men?

It’s important to note, here, that a parallel form of violence plays out for trans men and other AFAB trans people—one shaped by a different angle of the same patriarchal logic. Where trans women are often framed as interlopers into womanhood, trans men are treated as escapees—as though transition is a rejection not just of gender, but of their assigned role as property. This mindset is deeply rooted in Calvinist-influenced Western cultural norms, where women’s worth has long been tied to their utility in reproduction, domestic labour, and obedience. When an AFAB person asserts autonomy—especially by naming themselves, shaping their gender, or refusing to centre family expectations—it’s seen as a form of betrayal.

The question becomes not only “why don’t you want to be a woman?” but more insidiously, “why is my property expressing an opinion?” The shock that a child might not wish to bear grandchildren, or might not wish to embody the role their parents envisioned, is often framed as selfish, ungrateful, or unnatural. Trans men are frequently met with the denial of their own agency: infantilised, talked over, or reduced to their reproductive potential, as though their bodies exist not for themselves but for lineage and legacy. This is not a lesser violence, but a different one—one that seeks to erase personhood beneath the weight of expectation.

And within masculine-coded spaces, another contradiction emerges: the selective gatekeeping of who gets to be a “bro.” Trans men often find themselves either tokenized or excluded entirely, their manhood policed in ways that mirror and intensify the very masculinity they’re expected to embody. They’re scrutinised not for failing to perform masculinity, but for daring to claim it without being handed it by birthright. This too is a form of property logic: masculinity, in this framing, is something inherited and protected, not something that can be chosen or created.

Whilst this piece centres trans women and the ways we are erased from autism discourse, it must be said: these systems do not only fail us. They fail all of us who live at the edge of their frames. And the erasures may be differently shaped, but they are born of the same logic.

Lived Experience: A Personal Perspective

There’s a particular kind of dissonance that comes from being hyper-visible and invisible at the same time. I move through the world as someone who is six foot seven, unmistakable in stature, yet constantly told I am not what I say I am. In clinical terms, I am often treated as an anomaly—too tall to be a ‘real’ woman, too verbose or articulate to be ‘really’ autistic, too much of everything to be believed. The world has no box for someone like me, and instead of expanding its framework, it simply excludes me. The result is a kind of persistent erasure, not through silence alone, but through the violence of misrecognition.

In autism spaces, I am often greeted with confusion or dismissal. I’ve been told, without hesitation, “You’re not like my cousin’s son, who’s actually autistic”—as though the entirety of autism rests in one boy’s unmet gaze or spinning toy. In those moments, I disappear. Not because I am unseen, but because I am misseen. I become someone to argue with, to correct, to block. Diagnosis, when it finally came, was hard-won, but even that hasn’t translated into full acceptance. I live in a liminal space: not “autistic enough” to count in spaces that have rigid expectations, and too autistic to function smoothly in neurotypical ones. In both, I am asked to justify my presence.

The same is true of gender. My transition was never about “passing.” It was never about disappearing into cis-normative legibility. I’m not trying to be someone else’s idea of a woman. I’m becoming more of who I’ve always been. My inner world—the energy space I live in, the theatre of my mind—has always leaned feminine. Not in a performative or stylised way, but in a way that shaped my thoughts, my cadence, the rhythm of my speech, the way I made sense of emotion. I didn’t transition to impress others or to win visibility. I transitioned because it was the only way to stop erasing myself.

And yet, visibility is never neutral. It comes with risk, scrutiny, and demand. The world wants my transition to make sense on its terms. It wants neat before-and-after photos. It wants hormone timelines and vocal comparisons. It wants apologies for the body I live in. It wants passing—not as survival, but as proof that I belong. That I am worth the resources, the effort, the accommodation. That I have earned womanhood, because I’ve worked to make others comfortable with it.

I do not owe the world passing.

And I do not need to become palatable to be valid.

But in the current framing of “female autism,” palatability is the price of entry. The traits associated with the so-called female autism phenotype—masking, high social motivation, internalising behaviours—are themselves forms of performance. They are traits that make us easier to be around. Traits that don’t interrupt, that don’t demand too much, that blend in. When this becomes the standard for who gets to be diagnosed, to be believed, to be included, it excludes all of us who live outside that narrow script.

I am autistic, but I don’t always camouflage well. I stim visibly. I lose language when overwhelmed. I have panic attacks that dissolve entire nights. I speak in bursts and spirals, as if language is something I must excavate rather than wield. I get obsessed with patterns that no one else sees. And yet, for all that, I’ve had to convince people—both professionals and peers—that I am not faking. That I am not some strange exception to a rule I never agreed to in the first place.

I am also a woman. Not in the way the West defines womanhood—small, contained, soft-spoken—but in the way my ancestors once recognised: through energy, through rhythm, through spirit. My womanhood lives in my poetry, in my care, in my communion with the natural world. It lives in my refusal to dominate, to colonise, to conform. I do not perform womanhood for approval. I inhabit it as truth.

Still, the narrative of “female autism” makes things worse. It claims to expand inclusion, but only does so on narrow, cis-normative terms. It reifies the same binaries that have always failed us. And it leaves those of us who exist at the margins—tall, autistic, trans, visible, verbal, vulnerable—trapped in a no-person’s land, where we are too much for the model, and too little for the diagnosis. Where we must constantly prove we exist.

I exist. Even if the system can’t see me.

Even if every checkbox and diagnostic tool was built without me in mind.

Even if I am the story they haven’t yet learned how to read.

And still, I write.

Reclaiming Autism: Beyond Binary Frameworks

There is a different kind of future possible—one that does not begin with fixing what is broken, but with remembering what was lost. Before autism became a medicalised category sharpened by eugenics and binary logic, it was simply an observation of difference. Dr. Sukhareva’s early work, now barely spoken of outside specialist circles, offered a vision rooted in relationship. She did not see children as defective, but as distinct. She paid attention to how they moved, how they related, what brought them comfort, what caused distress. Her writing held space for nuance. For context. For humanity.

It is this legacy we must return to—not as nostalgia, but as reclamation. Autism does not need to be saved from trans people, or feminised to fit a new mould, or redefined in ways that continue to exclude. It needs to be liberated from the frameworks that narrowed it in the first place. The binary was never a natural container for autistic experience. It was imposed—first to sort lives into worthy and unworthy, then to police femininity, then to sanitise disorder into marketable categories. But autistic life, like gender, has always defied containment. It spills over. It changes shape. It refuses to be fixed, not because it is broken, but because it is alive.

Reclaiming autism means moving beyond the models we’ve inherited from Asperger and Kanner, models shaped not by inclusion but by control. It means interrogating the assumptions embedded in every screening tool and diagnostic rubric—who they were built for, what kinds of bodies and minds they assumed, who they leave out. It means asking not just who gets to be autistic, but who gets to be seen as fully human in the process.

This is not just a call for “better research.” It is a call for trans-led research—for work that does not treat gender variance as a confounding variable, but as a core part of the autistic experience for many. It is a call for diagnostic models that recognise multiplicity, that make space for fluidity, that centre lived experience instead of rigid criteria. It is a call for clinicians who understand that masking is not a sign of social ease, that a monotone voice can hold joy, that emotional expression looks different across cultures, neurotypes, and genders. It is a call for complexity over simplicity, for context over categorisation.

And above all, it is a call to centre those of us who have been pushed to the margins—not as edge cases, not as exceptions, but as essential. The autistic trans woman denied her diagnosis because she doesn’t ‘present like a girl.’ The non-binary teen dismissed because their experience doesn’t map onto a pink-or-blue graph. The elder queer autist who spent decades thinking they were broken before realising they were never alone.

We are not broken. We are not late. We are not outliers.

We are the ones holding the door open for what autism might yet become.

And if the field is brave enough to follow us, there is a future waiting—relational, humanising, and expansive. One that returns to what Dr. Sukhareva knew a century ago: that autism is not a pathology to be feared, but a way of being to be understood. That difference, when held with care, does not diminish humanity. It reveals it.

Final thoughts …

What began as a relational practice—observing difference with care and nuance—was gradually co-opted by systems of control. The arc from Dr. Sukhareva’s holistic understanding to the cold calculus of eugenics, and eventually to the rigid binaries of contemporary diagnostic models, is not simply a history of ideas. It is a story of erasure. Of whose lives were deemed worthy of study, of support, of survival. And of whose were not.

Today, we are told the system is improving. That girls are finally being seen. That autism is more recognised than ever. And yet, the frameworks remain steeped in the same logic that made people like me—trans, autistic, expansive—impossible to see. The category of “female autism” is still defined by its distance from a cis white male norm. The diagnostic process still asks us to conform in order to be recognised. And the discourse still marginalises those who don’t pass, don’t camouflage, don’t comply.

I am not calling for a minor adjustment or a revised set of criteria. I am calling for a foundational shift. Trans inclusion cannot be a late-stage edit, a box to tick after the fact. It must be at the heart of how we understand autism—because to include trans people fully is to break open the binary assumptions that continue to harm everyone. Inclusion, in this context, is not about politeness or representation. It’s about liberation.

But perhaps, more radically still, I want to imagine a world where diagnosis itself is no longer necessary. Where we are not required to prove our pain, our difference, our divergence just to access care or dignity. Where support is not conditional on compliance with a set of criteria written to serve capital, but instead flows from a communal ethic of care. Right now, diagnosis exists as a gate—controlling access to accommodations, to resources, to survival. It is a bureaucratic artefact of a world that demands we be legible before we can be helped.

In the world I dream of—the one glimpsed in the poetry of neuroqueerness, in the sacred threshold of the last person before gender—no one has to justify who they are. Help is not earned, it is given. Difference is not pathologised, it is honoured. We move at our own pace, speak in our own rhythms, and belong by default.

Until that world exists, we push against the edges of this one. We name the harms. We hold space for one another. We rewrite the stories. We refuse the binary. And we remind the field, again and again, that we were never the problem.

We were always the future.