Have you thought about talking to the moon? Or visiting world class museums from the comforts of home? And then made these ideas into reality? Tea Uglow has.
Tea Uglow is known for her brilliant ideas. She is the pioneer of visionary and award-winning projects that combine technology like generative AI and blockchain with human-centred design.
But brilliance doesn’t guarantee acceptance.
I've had 20 years in big tech and have moved from a position of complete conventional privilege of being a straight, white, well educated, over educated CIS guy… to kind of the boundaries of the new acceptable. You don't ever go, 'Oh now I'm going to be autistic, trans, disabled, mental woman'. But I'm more that than I ever was any of the other things.Tea Uglow
In this episode of SEEN, Yumi Stynes and Tea Uglow discuss what true inclusion means, how labels can be used against you, and the danger of data models that don’t reflect reality.
LISTEN TO
Tea Uglow: Inclusion in tech and beyond
SBS Audio
08/04/202432:24
Hosted by Yumi Stynes, SEEN is a podcast series about the trailblazers who persist and succeed without positive role models in mainstream culture. You’ll hear from the likes of leading tech creative Tea Uglow, activist Tarang Chawla, academic and writer Dr Amy Thunig, and more as they share their stories of resilience and courage.
Follow SEEN on the SBS Audio website or app, Spotify and Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
Host: Yumi Stynes
Producers: Mandy Yuan, Laura Brierley Newton, Marcus Costello
Sound Design and Mix: Ravi Gupta
Executive Producer: Kate Montague
Theme Music: Yeo
Art: Evi O Studios
SBS Team: Caroline Gates, Max Gosford, Joel Supple, Micky Grossman
Original concept by: Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn
Transcript
Yumi STYNES (Voiceover): I'm Yumi Stynes and this is SEEN, a podcast celebrating trailblazers who persist and succeed despite having no role models to guide their way.
We start by acknowledging the Traditional Owners of the land on which we record, the Cammeraygal people and Gadigal people, and their Elders past and present.
(Theme music)
Today’s guest was at one of those classic Aussie barbeque afternoons. Classic Aussie, in that it was gender segregated: Men on one side, doing “man” things, and women on the other. At that moment, the lie they were living was clearer than ever…
Tea UGLOW: I found myself at one end of a garden barbecuing meat. And I'm vegetarian, and pretending to drink a beer. I'm teetotal, and talking about the traffic. I don't drive. Like, nothing about this was real.
STYNES (Voiceover): On this special episode of SEEN, I’m talking to Tea Uglow, who has gone through more transitions in one lifetime than most of us could imagine.
UGLOW: I've had 20 years in, in big tech and have moved from, a position of complete kind of conventional privilege of being a straight, white, well educated, over educated CIS guy… with a family and a mortgage and all those things, to kind of the boundaries of the new acceptable. Now, you don't ever sort of go, “Oh, now I'm going to be autistic, trans, um, disabled, mental woman.”
But, like it turns out that I'm more that than I ever was any of the other things.
STYNES (Voiceover): Tea Uglow is a big deal. She has led creative teams at the most powerful tech company in the world. She explores the intersection between art, technology and humanity, has hosted TED talks, and is well-known inside and outside of tech as a truly innovative leader and… as well the word gets overused, but as a “genius”!
Today on SEEN, we’re going to find out what it’s like to have outward success, while inwardly grappling with identity - and what we can learn from someone who’s been seen as both a man and a woman.
UGLOW: Growing up in Kent in the 70s and 80s, you're not trans because trans isn't a thing. Transgender doesn't exist.
STYNES (Voiceover): Tea grew up in a world where everything about her didn’t exist.
UGLOW: You're not autistic because we weren't autistic. Like, it wasn't a kind of acknowledged thing. There was no ADD. There was no, like, none of those diagnoses were there. And then all of my mental health problems come from really trying to deal with what happens with not being able to be seen, to be yourself, to be anything. As a small child, all you really learn to do is lie, like, and to mask and to, to hide because you've got to survive.
STYNES (Voiceover): This whole podcast, now in its second season, is about how important it is to be seen.
And through the lived experience of today’s guest Tea Uglow, we’re going to get a better understanding of the price you pay to find yourself, and how much it costs to mask, and how gender itself is a spectrum and where we sit on that spectrum is almost entirely… up to us.
(Playful music)
STYNES (Voiceover): As a child, Tea was curious, extremely bright and learnt early that technology was something she could actively interact with.
UGLOW: When I was six, it was 1981, and my dad brought home a computer, and he plugged it into a television, and I had no idea what… No one else knew what a computer was, and he did say, don't touch the computer! So, obviously, the very first thing my friend and I did was to type our names in on the keyboard over and over again. But nothing happened, so we're like, okay, um, uh, computer. Ran off and played, and he comes and goes, you went and typed your name on the computer!
And I was like, I didn't do it, I didn't do it, I didn't touch it. And he brings me down, points at the television, which made no sense to me, and there's my name. So it just goes, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom, Tom. And I'm like, oh okay, yeah, that's bad. But how did it get from the black plastic thing onto the television?
That was completely wild to me, that you could make something appear on the television. Just, you know, all these things that we now completely take for granted. The idea that you'd... that something could appear on the television that was yours. And I would just copy out, like, you'd copy the code from the magazines.
So, um, I've always been interested in finding out what things can do. And then once I've worked out what things can do, I tend to lose interest and go and do something else.
STYNES (Voiceover): This courage to influence technology — not just use it, but actually interfere with it, led her to Google's front door.
UGLOW: When I arrived at Google, I went in to do three weeks' work, making PowerPoint slides. I'd just been fired. I was at a really low ebb.
STYNES: Right.
UGLOW: I was like, my friend was like, “Why don't you come in and do some three days a week?” And he's like, “It's 20 pounds an hour.”
I was like “Alright!”
STYNES: (Laughs) So is that how you got started?
UGLOW: That’s how I did- I went in to do three weeks work and stayed for 17 years.
STYNES: That's incredible. How was your talent spotted in that three weeks?
UGLOW: It was less spotted. It was more that, when I'm interested in things, I'm very aggressive with it. Like, I'm very proactive, I'm very overly interested in what can come next and what's going to happen and what we would do.
And at that time, Google was like this astonishingly forward-looking, wide open space, and they had no creative team working at all in any of it. And it was just sort of an open playing field and whenever I'm given an open playing field, I have lots of fun.
STYNES (Voiceover): Within this culture, Tea experimented with what tech could do.
She was a founding member of Google’s Creative Lab and through it worked on groundbreaking projects that pushed the limits of how technology can change the interface of art: from an AI orchestra, to Shakespeare reimagined through social media, to creating a whole project that imagined what it would be like if kindness were treated as currency.
UGLOW: Technology is really fascinating because there is always technology. Technology is not new. Technology is forever. It's sort of confronting and giving us new challenges.
STYNES (Voiceover): And those challenges also include — inclusion. Tea was one of the first people to sound the alarm about AI.
UGLOW: In 2015 we were talking about LLMs, these large language models, how artificial intelligence works, and pointing out that there were no women in this data.
(Sounds of computers whirring and clicking, robotic sounds)
There were no queer people in this data, and there was a lovely example with shoes where we got people to draw shoes over and over again. And, you know, to begin with, that's fine. The computer learns to recognise a shoe.
So stilettos was my particular favourite. After a while, so many people drew shoes, and they draw a lazy shoe shape. Not many people draw stilettos. So after a while, the computer realised it was wrong about stilettos, and it just started ignoring them. They're not shoes anymore.
STYNES (Voiceover): So even though I think we all agree that stilettos are shoes, AI will deny this, and can’t be argued with. A recent analysis conducted by tech publication Rest of World, where an AI generator was asked 100 times to show an Indian person, resulted in 99 images of an old “Indian” man with a beard. No one else. An Indian person, according to AI, is not a woman, not a young person — they are resoundingly old, brown-skinned, bearded and male.
UGLOW: What you end up with is an incredibly normative version of the world. Um, and so, you begin to exclude the outliers. Then that's actually about 5 percent top and bottom. You exclude these outliers and, and none of my labels sit within the 5 percent top and bottom. Um, so we are genuinely- it's kind of data genocide. We're genuinely not seen in any of that information. And you can't bake us back into it because that's not how AI works.. Like, we can't even see how they're making the decisions. So the problems of bias in data is not something that's about to go away soon.
(Funky music)
STYNES (Voiceover): Working at Google for 17 years meant that Tea had a unique insight into some of the most impactful decision-making in the world. I was curious about how that kid, dazzled by the wonder of a box connected to the TV, experienced the company’s evolution.
UGLOW: The work that I was able to do there was, um, was really special. It meant an awful lot to me, like, the people we got to work with all around the world. Google in the early days, was very much a kind of… a place where magic could happen.
(Music fades)
I think a lot of the ideas and the idealism of the early years in the internet, certainly, the more radical ideas got consumed by lawyers and money. We actually even said it, it's like that whole don't be evil thing at Google, was very much, you don't have to be evil to make money.
And I always used to say, yeah, it's okay to make money in order to organise the world's information, and make it freely accessible to all, which was literally the mission statement of the company. And then there came a point where it's like, oh, we're organising the world's information in order to make money, and then we're just making money, and at that point, like, you lose heart…?
The more people you hire, the less time you have to inculcate that sense of it being about something. And you, and people tend to bring their idea that it's a job and …there's no one there whose job it is to say, “do the right thing”. So you need very visionary founders who are willing to push back and eventually they all buckle.
So there was just sort of a buckling and it became a very normal company.
STYNES (Voiceover): It’s depressing but unsurprising to think of capitalism as economic room temperature. No matter how hot companies run with idealism at the start, eventually they sink back to room temperature.
(Gentle cautious music)
For people who experience gender as a place of personal upheaval, there’s a lot of reflection about when they began to feel that the cloak of gender didn’t fit.
UGLOW: I mean one of the funny things is that like, I knew... I knew when I was tiny. I knew because there was going to be, in my head, there had to be a “Switch Over Day”. Um, you know how, like, you believe in Father Christmas, and you believe in Easter Bunny? It's like, I believed in the “Switch Over Day”, which is when all the little boys became little girls, and all the little girls became little boys, because that clearly had to happen soon!
And it seems stupid to think now, but like, it's just a thing that I believed. I mean, believing in Father Christmas seems stupid. That's how I thought this was going to get resolved, and then it sort of slowly became apparent that was not how it's going to get resolved, and suddenly I'm not doing ballet anymore, I'm playing rugby and you get channelled into being this thing. However much you, you feel you shouldn't. And certainly maybe it's easier now.
STYNES (Voiceover): It may actually be easier now but when “Switch Over Day” failed to happen and Tea tried to proceed in life without it, there were no positive role models who were trans.
(Music fades)
UGLOW: There weren't avenues. There was nowhere to go. You didn't see anything. Like, the only people who were trans were freaks on tabloid front pages. It was not a thing that you could be. And the only times you ever heard the idea was on like sitcoms and TV shows where it was like absolutely the lowest kind of basest joke that would be made. And so when, when it would come up, you'd kind of fight and push it back and, and you'd be, become other things.
You just learn to not be that thing.
STYNES (Voiceover): And the way smart kids do, Tea learned to fit in and survive. She held a stable job in a male-dominated industry. She got married, had a mortgage, and two terrific kids.
But throughout it all, there was a sense... that it wasn't authentic.
UGLOW: When you are a parent, like, you have all of the pressure of all of the other parents immediately around you, and you have this incredibly kind of normative thing.
(Sounds of a barbeque - sizzling, kids running around)
So I did find myself at one end of a garden barbecuing meat. And I'm vegetarian, and pretending to drink a beer. I'm teetotal, and talking about the traffic. I don't drive. Like, nothing about this was real. It was all completely, all this, all the sports and things, and I was like, this is all a fantasy. And then looking at the other end where, like, my babies were playing on a rug, in the shade, in dappled shade, with, with the mums, and the mums were all sitting there.
And I know that, like, that, that sounds incredibly gendered and normative, but is incredibly gendered and normative. That's what the world is like for, like, vast amount of people. And we are maybe moving, this is 15 years ago, like moving to a place where we get to… choose.
(Gentle music)
I remember having a moment of complete realisation. And I was… 38? So quite late! And it was almost something that had never occurred to me. I mean, and now, you know, decades on, like you look back and you go, of course it didn’t occur to you.
And it's sort of strangely affirming because when those, when you find yourself dealing with ideas about yourself that you've repressed for your whole life, there's a huge kind of conscious guilt about the fact that you're lying. You're lying to yourself, you're lying to those around you, and also that you're kind of destroying their reality as much as you were stuck in a very difficult situation, like “Whose reality matters most?” And I had this conversation, with pretty much everyone who mattered to me, where it's like, how bad is it to kind of change reality and to make everything that we did think of as kind of truth, into kind of uneasy falsity.
STYNES (Voiceover): It’s an idea I’ve never really understood until this conversation — that to become Tea, Tea had to burn down a lot of what came before. Not just for herself but for those who loved her.
(Music fades)
So, the first thing was that sense of destruction, and I was not happy about my revelation at all. Like, the first therapist I went to said, “Oh, well, you know, this won't solve everything.”
And I was like, “I don't want it to solve everything. I want you to fix this. I want it to go back to how it was!” But once that, that sort of elastic band that holds your reality together snaps, you can't hold it together.
And then to tell everyone in the world, it's not an easy moment.
I did a TED talk at the Sydney Opera House. It was several months after I'd come out to myself, but, um, I remember wanting desperately to be myself, first of all, I was going to like acknowledge it, and then eventually I was like, no, I'm just going to wear a t shirt that said trans, and in the end I did none of those things — because I was still really scared.
STYNES: I watched your TED Talk.
UGLOW: Oh, did you?
STYNES: Yeah, you were wearing a nice shirt and-
UGLOW: That’s it.
STYNES: And you presented as a man.
UGLOW: Yeah. That was the other problem, it's like, I'm all over the internet — as a guy.
STYNES: (Laughs) As a guy.
UGLOW: You can't take that away. I had a career, like, I was a very well known person, I was doing a TED talk, not because I was queer or trans — no, I was doing a TED talk about my work.
And unfortunately like, it's really hard with people who knew you as one person, because you died to them. Like you really, it’s- you're not them. And it's not fair to ask me to be the person that they remember. Um, and it's not fair on them to kind of have to pretend that I'm the same person.
STYNES (Voiceover): It’s more evidence of Tea Uglow’s inherent kindness, that in one of the most fraught times of upheaval in her life, she is still considering, and being considerate of, the other person’s struggle to reconcile the old person with the new.
But it’s undoubtedly hard.
UGLOW: I would, say that I've, I've learned to not rely on people, you know, like I'd love to say hey, you know what people, be yourself, come out, like, find your truth. Um, I do believe in it, I wouldn't be here if I didn't believe in it. I think that, think that we can romanticise how simple it is. It's easy to romanticise, it's nicer to romanticise, or on the contrast, to make it incredibly hard, when it's always a kind of messy blur of in between.
(Gentle music)
STYNES (Voiceover): From working in the tech world as a CIS man, and transitioning publicly, Tea remained in that space as a trans woman. So if work is the constant and the variable in this equation is gender, Tea has a unique insight into the difference between working and living as a man versus working and living as a woman.
UGLOW: One of the strangest things I find as a trans person is how rarely trans people are asked to talk about the distinctions between the two existences.
STYNES: Totally, because it's fascinating. You've had insight into both!
UGLOW: Oh boy, plenty! (Laughs)
STYNES: So Tea, tell us, spill the tea please, Tea.
UGLOW: There's a world of information. I mean, it's an- it's like privilege. So male privilege is a thing that I find completely fascinating. To be honest, whilst I was a guy, I just thought it was the easiest thing in the world. It's like, it just felt very, very easy. So, like, you could play the boy card and not do the washing up.
I don't think I understood the idea of privilege as a guy and I definitely understand it as a woman partly because you see, a restriction on privileges that previously were just normal. I mean I got sanctioned at work for behaviour that as a guy I would never have been sanctioned for.
STYNES: Is that right?
UGLOW: Yeah.
STYNES: What sort of behaviour?
UGLOW: Um, generally, generally how I approached interpersonal things. So meetings being, I don't like the word aggressive because it's not aggressive. It was just firm.
As a trans person is you see all of the, balance differences. Because it's not like you're different, you're just adjusting balances, you're just adjusting certain codes of behaviour, what you do but unless you've lived both those roles, it's actually incredibly hard to see. You have to experience it. And the only people who have experienced it are trans. And boy, have they experienced it. (Laughs) And you've got a much better experiential understanding, of what it means and why privilege exists and how we can resolve it and, and who's fault it is? Because it's a two way street.
STYNES: What do you mean by that?
UGLOW: Well there are certain points where, again, whenever you have any normal, any kind of like, agreed upon code of behaviour, everyone enforces that. And women police women just as much as men police men. Like, the idea of having a male role model.
My two boys don't have a male role model. This is a cause of some concern, because how are they gonna learn to be men? It's like, fascinating concept! (Laughs) How are they gonna learn to be men? Like, maybe TV. Computer games. Social, social media, who knows? Um, I'm quite confident in my boys growing up to be well rounded human beings, and I think we'd be much happier if they were well rounded human beings than growing up to be men.
STYNES: What did it feel like to, to feel your male privilege kind of being, I don't know if it was chipped away at or if it was suddenly completely-
UGLOW: Um, I did eventually... My career sort of plateaued. And like I said, you suddenly find yourself being the inclusion person rather than the tech person or the future creativity person or like your identity, your box. You think you've escaped a box, but actually you just arrived in a slightly different box.
All of these labels that again, we reinforce, who people are. That became a different challenge. I felt really uncomfortable, especially early on, appearing in any kind of, um, as representative of a woman in any way, because it felt like, well, I've only just stopped lying about this side of my life. I don't think I can lie about my experiences as a woman. I don't, that's not fair. And I do think that the only reason we need that is because we keep insisting on a dichotomy between men and women.
There isn't really. Like, if it's a binary, then it's a really weird binary where the clusters are at either end. And no one's absolutely one or the other.
So if it's a spectrum, then it's a spectrum from a centre point. So everyone starts in the centre and then moves to the edges, right? And I think if we can move to a world where we see it more of a spectrum, where everyone starts as humans, little babies, very hard to tell what's what, and at the end of your life you're generally kind of back in the same place. (Laughs)
STYNES: That’s true.
UGLOW: Um. And then you move to the edges and you might want to, like, perform hyper masculinity or hyper femininity and that's fine. But they're, they're flexible and you can move between them and, and that's what gender is. That's why there's this, sex doesn't make you perform in a certain way. Your sex is not important.
STYNES (Voiceover): And this is what I hope to take from today’s conversation. People like Tea, and others we talk to in this season of the podcast, from Kween Kong to Darcy Vescio, who explore this spectrum, roam around it and take up spaces we didn’t know existed.
(Gentle music)
They free the rest of us to take up space, explore where we exist, and refuse to apologise for not sitting within neat binaries. They lead by example. And we all get to benefit.
As Tea inhabited her trans identity, she started to understand there were other parts of her official identity that included autism.
(Music fades)
UGLOW: The danger of labels is a thing that I've found. When I got diagnosed with autism, you realise it the most because you tell people you're autistic and then suddenly, you know, there are conversations which previously, it would have been like, “Well, it's a weird idea, but maybe we should try it!”
And now it's like, “Oh, well, they're autistic.” And then the idea gets shelved. It's just, ”They're just autistic.”
STYNES: It invalidates your-
UGLOW: It totally invalidates you. No one's there going, “They're autistic, we should get them in!”
Even though it's a really good idea by the way, you should definitely get autistic people in, they're the ones thinking outside the box. All this thinking outside the box, there's people who already think outside the box. Can't help but think outside the box, but they don't ask us, they ask people inside the box to think outside of it!
STYNES: (Laughs)
STYNES (Voiceover): Being an untapped resource would be endlessly frustrating but Tea has leveraged her out-of-the-box thinking with a consultancy focused on future-trends, innovation and that crucial intersection where humans get involved. An autism diagnosis hasn’t slowed her down.
And as it is for a lot of adults who receive a diagnosis like autism, it’s not bad — it’s a relief.
UGLOW: I think my understanding of it has been understanding all the bits of me that I knew weren't right and then giving them a place to live. There was a whole world of me that I didn't know where to put it and people would put it, go, “Oh, you know, they're very quirky. They're quite odd.”
When I got my diagnosis, it's like, great, I'm not quirky, I'm autistic. And, unfortunately, to a lot of people that's like, oh yeah, no, they're not quirky, they're autistic...
And it's not a positive.
And I don't understand why, because all the autistic and neurodiverse people I know. They're the people I love. They're the people with the most interesting, challenging, rich, and they're the people that bring the world to life for me. Everyone else, I don't understand what they're doing.
STYNES: (Laughs) It’s being boring. What do people not understand about autism?
UGLOW: Um, I think they genuinely think that it's like an illness, or that it can be fixed. “Oh yeah, we're hunting for the gene for autism.” It's like, why? Like, are you hunting for the gene for for blue eyes, and are you going to eradicate it once you find it? What's your point in looking for it? Is it really so life changing, so debilitating?
It's a terrible thing to think that people are worried their children might be like you. I spend a lot of time wanting to let people know that it's okay to be like me but I also have to acknowledge that you can't openly be like me.
STYNES: Do you feel like you would have achieved the same success if you'd transitioned or spoken openly about your autism earlier?
UGLOW: No, and I genuinely think it's really important for people to kind of bear in mind.
And anyone who's been through this will understand that like, if you come out, there's a moment within your family where you suddenly realise who's on side and who's not on side. And then at work, it's never as clear cut as that because you don't have family rows over the dinner table. You won't see the limitations that are placed upon you.
And actually what you tend to happen is you tend to be smothered in, in, like, smothered in goodwill, really. People want to make your life easier so they don't include you in things. Or they don't add you to things, or they don't want to put you in a challenging position. Especially the autistic stuff. And you find yourself excluded. Like, I feel like the corporate version of inclusion is really just wrapping you in a fire blanket and sitting on you. Like, you can't be hurt, and you're definitely part of it, because we're sitting on top of you.
STYNES: (Laughs) That's amazing. And you can't also rock the boat. You can't call out bad behaviour.
UGLOW: Nah… once you’re a woman, no way!
(Gentle music)
STYNES (Voiceover): Okay, there’s at least one more layer of Tea to explore today. Alongside her transition to womanhood and her autism diagnosis, there's something rarer and even more misunderstood.
UGLOW: It's one thing to talk about ideas that people understand more now, like, autism in women, trans identities, queer culture, even disability, and even mental health, but like it's very hard to tell the story of, of dissociative identity disorder, is also known as DID.
STYNES (Voiceover): DID is a disorder characterised by the presence of two or more distinct personality states. It used to be known as multiple personality disorder.
(Music fades)
STYNES: What don't people understand about DID?
UGLOW: I think they don't understand that it exists and is real and isn't a kind of Hollywood trope. There's no good role models. In Hollywood terms, trans autistic multiple personality is basically like, a perverted serial killer who's really good at math. That's pretty much, like, how we get seen, how we get presented. So it's very hard to be seen when you don't work within a framework that can be seen.
And also, it almost invariably means that, like, well, it does mean that people have suffered during their childhood. Like just the plasticity of the brain and how the brain is able to twist itself into a place where you can literally compartmentalise and just make that another person. And then unfortunately, once you've learned that skill as a child, you keep repeating it every time there's trauma, every time there's something you don't want to deal with. You basically kind of jettison that person, and then you start again. It's a survival tactic. It's an incredibly powerful, potent survival tactic that I wish I'd got to the end of my life without ever knowing I had.
STYNES: How does DID affect your day to day, Tea?
UGLOW: Um, very hard to say. Dissociative identity disorder is incredibly challenging because you don't really know. You're not in control of it and it's very much in control of you. And I have days, or weeks, like, where you are not the same, you're in a different place. So you're, you're there, you're physically there, but like you're really not there, or your priorities are massively different. And it's a great challenge, because often people have asked you to do things, and it's important, and then you don't even know that they've asked you to do those things.
STYNES: Wow.
UGLOW: And it's all in good- I've got millions of notebooks. I just don't remember to look in the notebooks, you know, and you don't get a sense of people say who's in charge? Who's in fronting? It's like, I don't know. It's much more like the really boring housewives of Surry Hills.
STYNES (Voiceover): In the context of DID, “fronting" refers to the process by which different identities, also known as alters or parts, take control of a person's behaviour and consciousness.
UGLOW: It's always presented like it's like, I don't know, the A team that there's a Mr. T and there's like, you know, a Faceman and things and that there's a wild one and like there's a radical crazy lunatic, psycho amongst you. It's just not like that. It's just that there are different priorities and more importantly that we don't talk clearly to ourselves about the things that we know. So we don't have access to this, to the, to memories and that's fine if it's long distance memories. Like we don't know when we went where or who we did what with, or we don't know.
STYNES: That's really interesting the way that you put it about priorities, that you have different priorities. Because I'm one person and my priorities don't shift, so I'm always attacking those priorities on a daily basis and trying to nail stuff.
UGLOW: They really shift quite wildly. Sometimes they're massively in contradiction. I mean, and then there's sort of really annoying stupid things like I bought my brother the same Christmas present three years in a row, and at the end he was not amused. But also, like, my family will buy, buy, they buy you presents, and you're like, I don't even know who this is for. Why would you buy me this? And they're like, you like those things. It's like... I don't even know why you would buy me this.
STYNES: You don't know me at all!
UGLOW: Like who is this?
(Hopeful music)
STYNES (Voiceover): It feels like it’s been a long time, several lifetimes even, since that little kid was eagerly waiting for “Switch Over Day” when all little kids would switch genders… and slowly, heartbreakingly realising that wasn’t going to happen. Or that person onstage wearing a white shirt for her TED talk. Understanding she had autism and living with Dissociative Identity Disorder...
In a world where she could see no representation of someone like her, Tea has had to blaze the trail herself.
It can be lonely out there!
So I asked Tea who she feels seen by…
UGLOW: I feel seen by my partner. I think she's quite remarkable.
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And she says the same to me. I mean, we're both autistic. We're both face blind, funnily enough. So when we met, we spent our first date arguing about who was actually face blind. Because it's quite an unusual condition. It turned out we were both faceblind and both autistic. Um, it's a very autistic argument to have on your first date.
And she's incredible and she's a writer. And, when she writes about me, I feel seen. When I find myself being described, whether it's, just as a friend, sometimes it's as their partner, which is almost always for comedic effect, like, I feel really seen, and, and the thing that I really, really strongly believe is that, it's important to see people and to make them visible and to say, I see you, I am like you and to be seen.
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STYNES (Voiceover): This has been SEEN, hosted by me, Yumi Stynes. If you liked this episode, please like and share it with the people around you who you think will love it, because every share helps our show to grow.
From Audiocraft, Season 2 of SEEN was produced by Mandy Yuan, and Laura
Brierley-Newton. Sound design and mix is done by Ravi Gupta, and Executive Producer is Kate Montague.
The SBS team are Caroline Gates, Joel Supple, Max Gosford and Micky Grossman.
Our podcast artwork is created by Evi-O Studios.
And music is by Yeo.
SEEN's original concept was by Bernadette Phương Nam Nguyễn.
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