I’ll say this for social media: national boundaries are feeling increasingly irrelevant.

The people I have connections to through Facebook in particular (but also Twitter) fall into roughly three groups. There are people I’ve met socially in the flesh, people I’ve worked with and, most of all, people with whom I share an aspect of my identity as an autistic trans woman.

Apologies to those in the first two groups, but with a few notable exceptions it is the last group with whom I feel the greatest affinity. The people who know what it means to be autistic or to be trans without me needing to explain myself.

The thing about these overlapping groups of autistics and trans folk is that they include people from a number of countries and ethnicities but that does not form the basis of the community.

Through interacting with and getting to know these people it has become abundantly clear that what we have in common has nothing to do with nationality: we are able to make common cause within a culture that owes nothing to geographic boundaries.

In many respects I see something similar in my work environment. I work for a subsidiary of a US-owned company. The development department that I’m a part of has teams located in the US, UK, Finland and Poland. I’ve had meetings where every participant was in a different physical location.

Whether you agree with it or not, globalization is a fact. It’s here now and with the world becoming ever more connected it’s only going to become more and more widespread. Barriers are coming down. First information and money, then goods and finally people moving more and more freely across the world.

The EU for all its flaws is, I think, a good example of this. The opening up and integration of most of the continent is a prime reason why there has not been any armed conflict between its member states–even the thought of a Europe-wide war has become almost unthinkable. It’s something that transcends nations, a reason to work together. It’s provided stability and shown that the EU as a whole is much stronger than any of its individual constituents.

That stability is facing a serious threat this week as the UK holds a referendum on its continued membership of the EU. Petty nationalistic interests are on the rise, threatening to not just rock the boat but overturn it. They’d leave us all adrift in uncharted waters. It’s telling that people like Putin who would benefit from weakening the EU favor the UK’s withdrawal from the union, while people like Obama and every EU leader have spoken in support of retaining the status quo.