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!

In this episode, I interview our first guest about the experience of preparing for phalloplasty and metoidioplasty. While talking about the results from the survey about the process of preparing, the guest and I share our thoughts about what helped us and what can change in the future to better prepare folks planning to have surgery. My guest and I both had phallo is 2016, but about half of the PROGRESS participants had surgery in the last two years. Tune in to hear how my guests and my experience differ from and are similar to those who took the PROGRESS survey! Please note we use anatomic language to describe body parts in the episode and cover some aspects of preparation and recovery from surgery that may be challenging to think about.

Through an interview with one of my research supervisors, Dr. Ayden Scheim, this episode shares information about how to understand research as it relates to phalloplasty and metoidioplasty. We discuss the ways in which characteristics of research participants bias or confound research - don't worry we'll explain what that means! The overall goal is for you to walk away from this episode understanding that research results vary and do not always represent the experience of everyone who has phallo or meta. After listening, you'll have a better understanding of how to interpret research about these surgeries; specifically you'll gain more knowledge about how data can't predict what will happen for any given individual but how research results can be useful when thinking about or preparing for surgery.