Brilliant beginning with the title, "Uncomfortable Labels" is a memoir of the author's overlapping challenges in finding safe and welcoming spaces.

She's autistic, so she has to expend more effort to fit in smoothly with the allistic people around her.

She's English, so fitting in smoothly is of more importance generally. (I should point out that she doesn't speak of being English as a salient challenge, but readers from more gleefully iconoclastic parts of the Anglosphere will project that onto her. I certainly did.)

She's trans, so she missed out on the childhood fun of close female friendships and practical knowledge like sleepover etiquette. And since NHS seems to have zero sense of urgency vis-à-vis the race against the indelible effects of testosterone-dominated puberty (and regards everything but bottom surgery, or 'lower surgery' in UK English, as mere vanity), she's had to make tough choices on a daily basis between what will help her pass (a scarf can keep her safer from transphobes by helping her pass) and what is physically comfortable (a scarf can be sensory hell for an autistic person).

And she's gay, so even on days when she sacrifices enough physical comfort to attain passing privilege as a woman, she's still visibly lesbian if she wants to go out on a date.

What I didn't know about her until after finishing the book is that her beat as a reporter is gamer culture, than which you will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. Jesus Christ, she's got unobtanium ovaries.

I'm autistic and genderqueer (raised as male), so I found this memoir more personally relatable than a lot of readers might. Even with those advantages, I was still astonished by some of the things I learned — for example, that having trouble hearing one particular voice amid background noise is much more common among autistic people. I'd been thinking it might be a hardware problem, but it's probably in my software! A lot of the symptoms of ADHD can apparently also be part of autism (difficulty directing the direction and depth of one's mental focus; opposite-to-normal reactions to central nervous system stimulants). It's little bits of insight like this that delight me most about the book, and make me particularly grateful to the publisher and to NetGalley for allowing me to have a free early copy of Uncomfortable Labels.