This episode of the PROGRESS podcast is hosted by Noah Adams, an autistic and trans researcher and activist. Today we dive into the experience of being autistic and going through bottom surgery. We’ll be talking to Shane, who will be telling us about his experience surgically transitioning as an autistic trans man in Western Europe. As a reminder, within the PROGRESS study, 40% of our participants self described as neurodiverse and 18% of this group identified as autistic. Autistic PROGRESS participants were statistically much more likely to be denied emergency (15%) or urgent (13%) care after surgery. In spite of this, roughly 70% of autistic participants reported that their surgery recovery was not very challenging, and the vast majority were satisfied with surgical outcomes.
Special thanks to Waad Judah for his editing, co-production, research assistance and support on this episode, Leo Rutherford for his co-production and Noah Adams for his co-production, interviewing and hosting. Thank you to our editor and co-producer Nicola Watts for their unwavering support in this project. You can find Noah's book of interviews with trans autistic folks, Trans and Autistic: Stories From Life at the Intersection, online (
https://us.jkp.com/products/trans-and-autistic).
Thank you to CFUV for their support with podcast distribution!
What is PROGRESS?
The PROGRESS podcast is all about sharing results of a research project about phalloplasty and metoidioplasty and giving context to these results by interviewing folks about their experiences with phallo and meta. PROGRESS was a survey about preparing for, recovering from and changes after surgery; there were many topics included and some of these will be featured through this podcast series.
You can check out more about our research, see community-focused content and more on our website, progresscolab.net or follow us on social media @progresscolab.