I am leaving Medium for Substack.

Hello everyone,

After years of offering all visitors to the site three “free reads” of any articles of their choosing per month, I am dismayed to learn that Medium.com is now requiring users purchase a $5/month membership in order to access any writing on the platform.

Ensuring that all my work is available to readers for free has always been of paramount importance to me. I write about topics like neurodiversity, transphobia, labor exploitation, trauma recovery, and systemic oppression — the people who benefit from my work most are people who do not have money, and I believe that paywalling information creates a more ignorant and hopelessly despairing public.

I don’t believe in intellectual property. Anything that I know or have created is thanks to the efforts of countless people who have come before me, and by its very nature my writing synthesizes and builds upon the scholarship and labor of thousands of people, many of them disabled, queer, or impoverished.

Though I know that the writing I do is labor that deserves compensation, I know that I can trust my readers to determine for themselves how much they are able to support me, and which kinds of support are warranted. I don’t want to hold information hostage behind a paywall, I don’t ever want to drive readers away, and I don’t want to pretend as if I’m not immensely privileged already as a professor with a full-time job and multiple book deals, including one best-seller that earns royalties.

So from now on, I will be cross-posting all my new essays to Substack and making them completely free to read. I already have multiple months’ worth of new essays queued up on Medium, where I have over 60,000 subscribers, and so for now I will continue to run new work on that site. But that exact same work will be published here, free of the paywall.

I will also begin the tedious work of transferring every single article I’ve ever written on Medium over to Substack, and making them all completely free to access. Unfortunately this import process is not easy. Before Medium instituted its new paywall, transferring posts from that platform to this one was as simple as pasting a link. But now, in large part due to the requirement that readers login to a paid account on Medium, posts have to be manually transferred over and reformatted instead. It will take some time for me to move everything over and fix any broken images, alt text, captions, and links. Please bear with me.

I will begin by transferring my “greatest hits” to the platform, articles like My Autism Checklist, An Autistic Social Butterfly’s Guide to Making Friends, and Laziness Does Not Exist. I want to ensure people can read these articles for free as soon as possible. In the meantime, you can sneak past Medium’s paywall by pasting links to articles from Medium into the website Archive.Is

If you are a Medium member, there is nothing that you have to do. If you like, you can remain subscribed to me on that site, and continue to read articles from me and any other writers you enjoy on the platform. I thank you for your support, it really does make a difference.

But if you cannot afford a Medium membership, follow me on Substack instead. I will never paywall anything on Substack whatsoever. Individuals who feel so moved can choose to support me with a subscription, but this will not grant you access to any additional content. Subscriptions support me in my research and creative work, and helps make it possible for me to continue to make all my writing free to everyone. Thanks for that support, too.

But thanks, most of all, to everyone who has ever read, highlighted, commented upon, or shared my work on Medium. I would not be the writer that I have become without the massive success of pieces like Laziness Does Not Exist and My Autism Checklist that you have each contributed to. Your vocal support of these articles got me a literary agent, secured me three separate book deals so far, bolstered my confidence, connected me to countless people who share many of my experiences and perspectives, and helped me discover a fulfilling life after severe burnout and leaving conventional academic work. I’m beyond lucky that my work has been so well received and encouraged.

It’s sad to have to leave a platform like Medium, because so much of my professional and creative life has been lived out on that site, and I’ve made lots of wonderful friends from it. Of course, I’m not truly leaving — I’m just giving that site far less priority and I won’t be promoting my articles by linking to their Medium versions anymore. But I will still be publishing the exact same new work there that will also be appearing here. At least for now.

It’s frustrating and bothersome to have to spread myself so thin, and I know that these changes will make finding my work and sharing it with other people a lot harder for a while. If you can, please let the staff at Medium know how you feel about this change. All these changes were made without my ever being informed by the Medium company — I only discovered all of it thanks to you. And ultimately everything that I’m doing and have become is thanks to you — not any particular website.

Talk to you soon.

Devon