Empowering womxn to speak out and be heard.

By Sally Patterson

It’s been almost 80 years since Austrian-American psychiatrist and physician Leo Kanner first diagnosed someone with autism, yet prejudices and misconceptions about ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorder) continue to prevail.

Autistic artist and advocate Mahlia Amatina is working hard to challenge the narrative. She’s determined to counter age-old notions about autism.

“It’s still characterised in the media as being male, like if you’re female you’re not going to be autistic,” she explained. “This nerdy, geeky stereotype, someone who has loads of collections, who isn’t able to make eye contact or make friends, who can’t be in a relationship. These are the stereotypes that come to mind, which are just wrong. I’m not a typical, white nerdy guy, so I’m hoping to raise awareness.”

By Phoebe Stevenson

Every LGBTQ+ person has their own unique story to tell about their journey to self-acceptance in a world where homophobia, and homophobia’s more subtle friend, heteronormativity, are ingrained into us from day one. As a young teenager questioning my sexuality, I was desperate for any information from adult LGBTQ+ people about their own journeys, to prove that my own feelings and drawbacks about my sexuality were valid. Sadly, I could never find anything that really put my mind to rest, so I want to share my journey as a resource for anybody searching for these stories now!

By Miriam Mona Müller and Husna Chhoangalia

Feminist Foreign Policy (FFP) is centred around the needs of the most marginalised in International Relations. In 2014, Sweden was the first government to officially launch a Feminist Foreign Policy. Like Foreign Policy in general, the Feminist Foreign Policy sphere is so white. And Whiteness is identified as the norm. This makes it quite challenging for Black, Indigenous and Womxn of Color (BIWoC) to raise their voice. Too often we have witnessed how white feminists silenced BIWoC by tone policing and imposing their views on feminism. In this opinion piece, we share our self-care strategies to survive in a political environment that wasn’t made for us. 

By Brianna Désir

Code-switching is a very important topic in the black community because it’s something we do regularly. We have our own way of speaking, which causes arguments on the legitimacy of the language and questions on where it can be used. Full disclosure, AAVE (African American Vernacular English) is a language and, despite the plentiful arguments that it is not, pretending that something doesn’t exist will not take away from the legitimacy of it. AAVE is often stigmatised because it is not seen as an official language and to many, since it’s such a broken-down version of English, it sounds ‘uneducated’. Words like ‘finna’, ‘gon’, ‘yo’, etc. are commonly used across the US by people of every race, creed, and kind. While it has been in the black community forever, it has grown increasingly popular in today’s culture.

By Anabel Barnston

I’d just got back from a year travelling. I had no money, no permanent job, and I was about to launch back into full time education. This was when I found out I was 5 weeks pregnant.

The ‘guy’ was not someone I was intending to be with forever and, more to the point, he lived on the other side of the world. So, if there were a hypothetical tick list for reasons to get an abortion, my list would be well and truly ticked. But equally, so what if it wasn’t? My body. My choice.

The situation was very much - in the wise words of Rachel Green from Friends, “Everyone can wear everything they’re supposed to wear and one of those little guys just gets through”. So, I booked an appointment and went to the clinic with my best friend.

By Chloe de Lullington

When you encounter the name Chloe de Lullington, what or who do you picture? Perhaps she’s a horsey, sunkissed blonde in a Barbour jacket, or a devastatingly high-cheekboned French actress on the shore of Cannes, or, at the very least, a bit of a Tory with some family money behind her. No shade to any of those people (except maybe the last one) but that couldn’t be further from the truth. 
Raised in a council house on government benefits, I went to a fairly unremarkable comprehensive school and found myself regularly pursued down its corridors by a persistently disagreeable boy with spiky hair and a snotty nose, who shouted “is that your real name? What’s your real name?” at me.

By Aaminah Hafezi

I was underweight with excessive hair growth, something quite common in the South Asian community. However, for women with Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, it's more likely that you’ll be overweight, so I continued to sit under the radar. The crazy thing is, that once I was diagnosed, I felt so much relief that I, myself, wasn't the problem that I was almost happy that I had a condition, these cysts on my ovaries. Thank God I had PCOS, right?

Unfortunately, it wasn’t long before I realised that this condition challenges most societal views of beauty... Overweight, excessive hair, issues with fertility, no periods... The list goes on.

By Izzie Clough

There are so many things I could say about the UK government’s new ‘anti-obesity’ policies. However, what I really want to talk about is what this means for people in the eating disorder recovery community.

This is partly because I can call myself an expert-by-experience when it comes to eating disorders in a way that I can’t with those other criticisms; I was diagnosed with anorexia in 2017, after developing an eating disorder in my mid-teens. But mainly, I’m writing this because I feel that, as often happens when mental health meets the media, the issue is being oversimplified. And that affects how others see people with eating disorders, which affects how we see ourselves.

So I want to set the record straight…

By Hannah Costley

On the second day of my training contract I shadowed a solicitor at a police station interview and, when we arrived, she went in with the Officer to receive disclosure while I waited for our client at the front desk. A young man walked in and he was on the phone. “Is she an Asian girl?”, I heard him say, and for a split second I looked around the station before realising he was speaking about me. It felt weird; the air of incredulity in his voice, as though he didn’t quite believe that an Asian woman could be his solicitor, hurt. Little did I know that this encounter was going to be one of many.

By Sacha Dhabalia

Yet, ever since the end of my first year at University, I had become fascinated by something many people, both around me and culturally, seemed to overlook. This was a couple of years before ‘Januhairy’ and razor-ads finally starting to show body hair being shaved off. It all started with my female flatmates getting involved in a ‘Movember’ of their own. Not wanting to miss out, we collectively decided to grow out our underarm hair. It turned out that I was the only one who couldn’t go the whole month. As I watched the girls take pictures with their fists pointed to the sky and their underarms looking a little warmer on the 1st December, a seed had been planted in my mind. Why couldn’t I just not shave? Why did it make me feel so uncomfortable?

By Aara Syed

Even by my late teens, I had been “randomly” chosen for additional checks enough for it not to be random. My stories are in no way unique and I know people who have been taken into the border security interview rooms, the rooms that I was so afraid of in Rome.

I guess part of the reason why I wanted to write this is because I wanted to tell all of the border patrol workers, airport security staff, airport police and all the staring bystanders that didn‘t question the behaviour of the airport staff, that I am not a terrorist.

By Sabrina Simpson

I had been crystallising and pondering the initial idea for Hear Her Speak for about six months when I first read Mary Beard’s lecture on ‘The Public Voice of Women’. It was a eureka moment. I remember turning to my partner, who was in fact the one who gave me the book that contained the transcript of the lecture, and saying, “this piece articulates exactly why I want to establish Hear Her Speak”. Womxn in today’s society are still living and internalising the historical precedents and cultural norms that have silenced womxn for millennia.