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Jaime Hoerricks, PhD

@weejaime74

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Autistic trans woman. Gestalt processor. SpEd & Maths Teacher. Author, researcher, poet, & fiction writer. Find me on Substack.

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1000 pages of preparation and counting… by @weejaime74

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7 months ago

Our L1 (first/home language) is embodied. Foreign languages — in a general sense — are not. This has massive implications when working with gestalt processors for whom English is not their L1.

Hear the whole chat at AutSide.Substack.com by @weejaime74

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7 months ago

For all the new folks here, this is my epic GLP literacy book. Chapter 2 takes on the so-called ‘science of reading’ and why it’s marketing and not science … by @weejaime74

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7 months ago

I began with a small bewilderment: when someone who has only ever known me as Jaime, as a woman, as she, misgenders me and says, “Sorry, I slipped,” where exactly did they slip to? There is no earlier man in our shared history. If he exists in their representation of me, I did not put him there.

What surprised me was where following that question led.

My gestalt-processing students rarely seem to have this difficulty. They encounter the same six-foot-seven teacher, the same voice, shoulders, face, clothes, and movement—and somehow none of those characteristics seems to compete with she. I had expected to be writing about gender, representation, and culturally learned bias. Instead, whole-to-part processing quietly walked into the argument.

Perhaps the children see me before they begin seeing characteristics of me.

Jaime first. Then height belongs to Jaime. Voice belongs to Jaime. Clothes belong to Jaime. She belongs to Jaime. The parts enter a field that already has organisation; they do not have to construct the person from scratch.

That possibility matters far beyond pronouns. When we construct a person from parts, every part becomes an interpretive junction—race, disability, accent, body, class, clothing, age, gender. Culture gets another opportunity to tell us what each fragment supposedly means. Bias needs somewhere to enter, and segmentation may provide insertion points.

I am not suggesting that gestalt processors are somehow immune to prejudice. They are not. I am wondering something narrower, and perhaps more consequential: what changes when recognition precedes categorisation?

Because there may be an enormous difference between encountering a person and assembling one.

And right now, in a world increasingly practised at reducing human beings to characteristics, categories, demographic fragments, diagnostic labels, political identities, bodies, borders, and checkboxes, perhaps that distinction matters rather urgently.

What becomes possible when we meet the whole person before deciding what their parts mean? https://sensualresidue.substack.com/p/i-didnt-arrive-here-as-he by @weejaime74

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9 hours ago

Beals et al. argue that my work contains ideas it does not contain.

That is the problem in its smallest form. In a peer-reviewed Review Article, they cite Holistic Language Instruction to establish positions they then criticise: that I opposed rigorous research into GLP/NLA on ethical grounds, and that I advocated holistic, non-phonics approaches—including word guessing—for gestalt processors. Neither proposition is in the book. More consequentially, the first misattribution becomes part of the architecture of their argument: they construct the position, attribute it to me, declare it unfounded, and use the rebuttal to advance their larger case.

And it survived peer review.

That matters because this is not merely a disagreement about GLP, NLA, literacy, or my theoretical framework. Criticise those. Test them. Find where I have overreached. The simpler question comes first: does the source cited actually support the proposition attached to it?

Now the paper is published, and the question changes.

What does post-publication review look like when the problem is no longer hypothetical? I documented the two citation mismatches, supplied the relevant passages, explained exactly what had changed between source and attribution, and asked the journal to check. More than thirty days later, I have acknowledgement that my correspondence arrived, but no substantive response.

I am not demanding that a journal erase criticism of my work because I dislike it. I am asking what the scholarly system does when evidence of a potentially consequential error arrives after publication.

Because publication changes the stakes. The article is now itself a source. Someone can cite Beals rather than reading Hoerricks. The invented position can travel, accumulate citations, and eventually appear established simply because enough scholarship points downstream rather than returning upstream.

Peer review cannot catch everything. That is not the scandal.

The test of a self-correcting scholarly system begins afterwards: when somebody shows you the error, what happens next? https://autside.substack.com/p/peer-review-please-read-the-things by @weejaime74

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9 hours ago

Today is subtle: a slate-blue skirt beneath a floral top, blue speaking quietly to blue. I like makeup as play and self-care—the small morning ritual of deciding how I want to meet the day—but my skin does not always permit the full performance to survive a school day. So, a touch of red on my lips, a little glow from the tallow that also calms my skin, and I let skin be skin. Care does not have to disappear beneath the aesthetic. It can become part of it.

That negotiation extends far beyond makeup. Histamine issues have kept my diet severely restricted for roughly a decade. Food-centred socialising can therefore be strangely isolating: am I withdrawing when I decline dinner, or do I simply not enjoy sitting through an event organised around pleasures I cannot share? When bodily safety repeatedly costs participation, isolation is not necessarily avoidance.

Yet there is an odd continuity inside all this. I eat roughly 3,600 kcal a day because that is what my TDEE calls for—not because some generic chart has decided what a woman ought to require. I am tall, broad, strong, and active. My body requires what my body requires. Its relative stability also means clothes can remain with me for years, gathering histories and becoming new again in different combinations.

And I feel lovely in them because they are mine.

That matters. So much advice about dressing women—especially large women—quietly treats “flattering” as a synonym for smaller. Narrow the shoulders. Hide the arms. Minimise the waist. Take up less space. For trans women, that demand can become even more absurdly literal, as though authentic femininity waits somewhere inside sufficient physical diminishment.

There is no surgery that will make me a foot shorter and half again as narrow. Nor should there need to be.

I can be tall and soft, broad and floral, powerfully built and femme. These clothes do not disguise my scale; they work at my scale.

I am not shrinking my body towards femininity.

I am allowing femininity to become large enough to contain my body. by @weejaime74

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14 hours ago

There is an irony in House Red that I rather love: I am an autistic woman who has struggled profoundly with language, and yet poetry is one of the places where language sometimes comes most easily.

Perhaps that is not really an irony.

I gained literacy in my mid-thirties. In 2025, House Red appeared in my poetry collection, In the Stillness of Chaos: A Journey in Verse. I remain enormously proud of that—not because literacy difficulty makes poetry miraculous, but because the route from knowing to language has never been straightforward for me. Poetry lets me take another route.

Essays demand decomposition. I have to take something I experience as a whole and explain it sequentially: premise, distinction, evidence, argument, conclusion. Poetry permits more of the whole to remain whole. Wine can be emotion. Tannin can be silence. Pepper can be shame. Jura can be overwhelm. I do not have to translate every relationship into explanatory prose before allowing the reader to encounter it.

That is what House Red does.

It begins with the violence of other people’s translations: I freeze, stim, retreat, and become defiant, disruptive, angry, withdrawn. Their language flattens the experience. Inside, meanwhile, there is an entire tasting list—panic, urgency, sadness, longing, shame, silence. What they call one thing is many things held together.

And I was venting. Poetry gives me room for that too. There is anger in the poem, but also mischief in turning the interpretive gaze back upon the people doing the labelling. They believe they are describing me, yet they have never tasted what they claim to describe.

That final accusation still lands hardest for me:

They sip nothing—
and call me bitter.

Perhaps poetry feels easier precisely because my gestalt-processing brain does not have to dismantle the whole before I am allowed to speak. Metaphor can carry relationships simultaneously. Rhythm can carry what explanation cannot. The poem can hold the field long enough for language to catch up.

For someone who came late to literacy, that feels rather wonderful.

I struggled to acquire language.

Then I discovered I could make it sing. by @weejaime74

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14 hours ago

My writing has a strange relationship with time. I do not experience an essay as finished simply because I published it. The question that produced it can remain alive—sometimes quietly for months or years—until something touches it again. A paper. A conversation. A distinction I did not yet possess. Suddenly, an old piece is no longer behind me. It has become another now.

I used to think of this returning partly through monotropism. Increasingly, I think recursion is closer. I return to the same whole carrying whatever has accumulated since the last encounter, and that accumulation changes the field. The changed field changes what I can perceive in the old work. Then the old work changes what I can understand now. The recursion runs both ways.

This is why my writing sometimes appears to circle the same questions. It does. But circling is not necessarily repetition. Sometimes another pass disturbs an old now sufficiently for something that was always present in the whole to become available as a part. My writing practice is full of these disturbances.

That matters because I rarely experience thought as an argument assembling itself sequentially. The whole tends to arrive first—a field of relationships, sensations, contradictions, memories, questions, and recognitions that belong together before I can say precisely how. Language comes later, requiring that whole to be rendered one word, sentence, section, and essay at a time. Sometimes the first rendering is the best language I have from where I am standing.

And sometimes poetry can hold what prose cannot yet decompose.

So I leave the old nows intact. I do not quietly rewrite an earlier self so that she appears to have known what I know now. I put her beside me. More scholarship enters the field. More experience. More language. Then something shifts, an old now is disturbed, and the whole reorganises.

The writing was not waiting to be corrected.

It was waiting to be read again. https://autside.substack.com/p/architectural-epiloguethey-call-me by @weejaime74

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14 hours ago

There is something queer in allowing loveliness itself to become sufficient reason.

I recently found this blue-green skirt, and this morning I realised it belonged with this blouse—not because they match exactly, but because they speak to one another. The blouse carries all these blues through its flowers, deepening towards the patterned border, and then the skirt picks that colour up and carries it somewhere greener. Beige would have worked. Black would have worked. Both would have been sensible. This feels lovely.

That distinction matters to me.

There are ways of getting dressed that begin with the imagined observer: Will I attract attention? Will someone stare? Will my body be questioned, corrected, or made into somebody else’s problem? What can I wear that will make me easier for the world to process? Defensive dressing turns clothing into negotiation before I have even left the house.

But there is no requirement that femininity minimise itself, that a tall or powerful body dress apologetically, or that getting dressed on an ordinary Monday become camouflage. I can wear flowers because I like flowers. I can choose a long blue-green skirt because something in me settles when those colours meet. Pleasure does not need an argument.

And I keep thinking about softness—because we so often mistake softness for weakness.

Tai Chi is soft. Until it isn’t. Its softness is not passivity but a different relationship to force: yielding without collapsing, receiving without becoming rigid, redirecting rather than simply resisting. Softness can contain extraordinary strength precisely because it does not spend all its energy performing hardness.

I know how to be hard. I know armour. I know what it costs to organise a life around anticipated impact.

Perhaps this is why an ordinary Monday outfit can feel quietly queer to me. I dressed for the pleasure of inhabiting myself rather than defensively for the people who might interpret me.

Softness is not surrender.

Sometimes softness is what strength does when it no longer wishes to spend the whole day proving that it can survive. by @weejaime74

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2 days ago

Part 5 of 5 - A new Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy conversation is here 🎙️

This time Jaime and I are asking a really important question:

Whose testimony counts as evidence?

Autistic people can tell us about the load, pain and preparation that sits behind what somebody else might simply observe from the outside. But what happens when those accounts are dismissed before they’re even considered as part of the evidence?

We talk about autistic testimony, who gets to define what counts as evidence and, importantly, what observation alone might miss.

🎙️ The Witness Does Not Count?

As always, there was SO much to think about in this conversation and I’d love to know what it brings up for you.

You can listen to the full conversation over on Jaime’s Substack…link in my bio ❤️

#thespeechden #gestaltlanguageprocessing #newpodcastepisode #speechandlanguagetherapy taken in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire by @weejaime74

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2 days ago

Part 4 of 5 - A new Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy conversation is here 🎙️

This time Jaime and I are asking a really important question:

Whose testimony counts as evidence?

Autistic people can tell us about the load, pain and preparation that sits behind what somebody else might simply observe from the outside. But what happens when those accounts are dismissed before they’re even considered as part of the evidence?

We talk about autistic testimony, who gets to define what counts as evidence and, importantly, what observation alone might miss.

🎙️ The Witness Does Not Count?

As always, there was SO much to think about in this conversation and I’d love to know what it brings up for you.

You can listen to the full conversation over on Jaime’s Substack…link in my bio ❤️

#thespeechden #gestaltlanguageprocessing #newpodcastepisode #speechandlanguagetherapy taken in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire by @weejaime74

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2 days ago

Part 3 of 5 - A new Sunday Mornings with Jaime & Cathy conversation is here 🎙️

This time Jaime and I are asking a really important question:

Whose testimony counts as evidence?

Autistic people can tell us about the load, pain and preparation that sits behind what somebody else might simply observe from the outside. But what happens when those accounts are dismissed before they’re even considered as part of the evidence?

We talk about autistic testimony, who gets to define what counts as evidence and, importantly, what observation alone might miss.

🎙️ The Witness Does Not Count?

As always, there was SO much to think about in this conversation and I’d love to know what it brings up for you.

You can listen to the full conversation over on Jaime’s Substack…link in my bio ❤️

#thespeechden #gestaltlanguageprocessing #newpodcastepisode #speechandlanguagetherapy taken in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire by @weejaime74

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2 days ago