Among many other things, I am a writer, public speaker, educator, trainer, consultant, advocate, community organizer, community builder, activist, scholar, and attorney.
For over a decade, I have worked to address and end interpersonal and state violence targeting disabled people, especially disabled people at the margins of the margins, in our own homes and communities, in movement spaces, in schools, in disability-specific institutions, and in jails and prisons. My work begins at and centers intersections of disability, queerness, race, gender, class, and nation and migration. I have provided trainings and consultations to hundreds of individuals, educational institutions, agencies, companies, and organizations across numerous professional and academic fields on a range of issues impacting disabled, queer, trans, and negatively racialized people.
I founded and lead the Fund for Community Reparations for Autistic People of Color’s Interdependence, Survival, and Empowerment, in partnership with the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network. I created and curate Bearing Witness, Demanding Freedom, the Living Archive and Repository of the Judge Rotenberg Center’s Abuses. Along with Morénike Giwa Onaiwu and E. Ashkenazy, I co-edited the first edition of the anthology All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism. I am one of ten young activist icons featured in Amplifier’s We The Future Campaign. I am also featured in People of Color Productions’ forthcoming documentary I Identify As Me, directed and produced by Tina Colleen and Monick Monell, and HBO Max’s documentary Persona: The Dark Truth Behind Personality Tests. I’m a past Gender+ Justice Initiative Fellow at Georgetown University and a Justice Catalyst Fellow at the Bazelon Center for Mental Health Law.
As an educator, I teach as an adjunct lecturer and core faculty in the Disability Studies Program and the Women’s and Gender Studies Program at Georgetown University, and as an adjunct professorial lecturer in the American Studies Program at American University’s Department of Critical Race, Gender, and Culture Studies. I’m also a faculty member and Self-Advocacy Discipline Coordinator for the Leadership Education in Neurodevelopmental and related Disabilities (LEND) Training Program at Georgetown’s University Center for Excellence in Developmental Disabilities at the Center for Child and Human Development. Previously, I taught as a visiting lecturer in the Experimental College at Tufts University, and as a volunteer instructor in various programs for high school and middle school students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Educational Studies Program.
Professionally, I am a Policy Counsel with the Privacy and Consumer Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, where I focus on algorithmic injustice, bias, and discrimination affecting disabled people. I am also Director of Policy, Advocacy, and External Affairs at the Autistic Women and Nonbinary Network, where I lead policy work with an intersectional approach to disability and neurodiversity.
I provide regular consultations, workshops, and trainings for many other organizations on radical access, care, and justice.
Like all of us, I live at the intersection of many forms of marginality and oppression, and many forms of privilege and power. Some identities and experiences that are important to me are that I am a multiply disabled, queer, and nonbinary Chinese American, East Asian transracial and transnational adoptee of color, working precariously both within and at the margins of academia and the nonprofit industrial complex.
I work on unceded and occupied traditional lands of the Piscataway-Conoy, Nacotchtank, Haudenosaunee, Wôpanâak, Nipmuc, and Kaskaskia (Illiniwek Confederation, now Peouaroua) peoples. (Learn more about Indigenous land acknowledgement and solidarity action plans.)
