9 ms·

It's like this, I've spent a lifetime learning a rulebook by trial and error that everyone else just seems to know. It's absolutely maddening when the rules su

by Aloha 6y ago

It's like this, I've spent a lifetime learning a rulebook by trial and error that everyone else just seems to know. It's absolutely maddening when the rules suddenly change for no discernible reason, often with little warning and grave consequences with no second chances for screwing it up. I see people clamoring for a safe spaces and I wonder where I can find such a thing? (To an extent I can find one at sci-fi, anime and furry conventions are mostly safe spaces for people like me, it's just jarring when I need to leave)

sterlind 6y ago
I relate because I've been there, I think. Before I transitioned I had pretty strong ASD and couldn't figure out how to answer simple questions like "what's up?" or if I should wave to someone I've met twice if they're 15 feet away walking towards me. Transitioning did something to my brain chemistry and let me read social cues nearly overnight, but I got friends by delving into the LGBT community. Maybe furry cons is a good approach?
- Aloha 6y ago
  I'm pretty sure you'd find yourself at home there, we also have a large trans/gender non-conforming contingent in the community.
- exikyut 6y ago
  Wh...a. Transitioning fixed your social cue perception?! That is incredibly fascinating. I'm not even sure how to classify that... pragmatic psychological function (oookay that's probably not a thing), neurobiology, or what else. IMO this is a gigantic breadcrumb for Something™. The question is what the axis point was, and what got fixed as a result. Cooool. I am very curious what else shifted that you'd be happy to share.
  - Aloha 6y ago
    Not the poster, but I too am curious about their thoughts, however I have some of my own. Men and Women experience socialization in fundamentally different ways, because of this I suspect the changing hormonal balance reawakens pathways not used normally, basically. In addition, you basically have a chance while transitioning to relearn socialization from scratch basically, with those new pathways awakened.
    - exikyut 6y ago
      Hm, that honestly sounds about 90% of the way to a reasonable explanation. In my own experience I've found as that as a majority of my own marbles have figured out "OH, that's which way is up", my own pragmatic learning capacity has transformed from "transmutation ray that turns everything into indecipherable, unmovable rubble" and... what almost feels like a happy grid of FPGAs that bustle about classifying and organizing without me really having to make much effort. After leaving ideas and subjects for long enough (10+ years in some cases) that old broken memories/associations have just about completely died out, yeah, I definitely can look at things with new eyes. Discovering that HRT can trigger or you might even say accelerate this process is very fascinating, because it sort of maybe points in the direction of the root causes that break everything in the first place.
  - chousuke 6y ago
    Intuitively, it makes sense for something like this to be possible, though I wonder what the trigger is. Drastic change in hormonal balance caused by the transitioning process activating / connecting parts of the brain that were "malfunctioning" previously? Or "just" a result of increased happiness stemming from having dealt with a large problem?Sounds hideously difficult to replicate.
    - exikyut 6y ago
      Oh yeah... the dismorphia effect and similar anxieties. Of course. Never experienced any of it myself, didn't realize how big of a potential factor it could be until reading your comment. I was mostly considering the fact that the female hormone, uh, configuration is naturally pro-social, and that dumping that set of hormone balances on the brain promptly elicits the associated responses - ie, that the response (or rather the tendency for those responses to function properly) becomes a partial function of hormone state. But those sort of general factors (including elevated mood) would definitely be a part of the end result.
      - chousuke 6y ago
        I'm wary of making assumptions about "natural" differences between males and females, since it's easy to confuse them with cultural stereotypes, ie. what you've learned to think of as "normal" vs. what actually is "normal". It may well be be that some component that's typically more prevalent in females plays a key role in the development of prosocial tendencies. If such a component were identified, it would be interesting to study its involvement in the development of both males and females.
  - novok 6y ago
    Autistic MtF programmers is something that happens enough to be a trope, joke or meme.
    - orthoxerox 6y ago
      This usually doesn't fix their issues beyond dysphoria, though.
      - novok 6y ago
        Somewhere in the comments here, one of them said "estrogen fixed my social autism". That is really surprising.
    - dgellow 6y ago
      What is an MtF programmer? I read it as Microsoft programmer but that doesn't really make that much sense in the context.
      - cpach 6y ago
        MtF = Male to Female
    - roflc0ptic 6y ago
      No citation in this, but being trans correlates with being autistic
      - owl57 6y ago
        Would seem logical. I was alien enough to boys to land at the "girls table" in school canteen when I was 11. Pieces of experience like this could probably help to start considering the possibility.
        lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        This is an extremely dangerous and absolutely insane line of reasoning that is causing incredible harm to young people. You don’t have gender dysphoria because you hung out with girls as an 11 year old.
  - sterlind 6y ago
    I have no idea why it happened, I'm just so grateful it did. It was like suddenly seeing color for the first time. When I looked at someone, I could read their intentions and actually feel their feelings. I wasn't a sociopath before or anything, but I couldn't feel empathy. This definitely does not happen to every aspie trans woman, but I've heard of it happening to one or two others. I was worried about losing my intelligence, since I attributed a lot of that to ASD, but actually all my major breakthroughs came after transitioning. My first algorithm that got me noticed was like, 6 months in. The only real downside was that switching to estrogen unmasked my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and I've become physically disabled. I'm still able to work and think and feel so it's a good trade for me!
    - Aloha 6y ago
      The only thing ASD gives me is a measure of clarity - because all of the hidden rules of society are not hidden to me, they're things I need to learn with intent, it gives me a measure of clarity into which rules are required, and which ones are not, when they can be broken and when they can't be. I'm not gonna say I'd like to be normal, because I have no real construct of what normal would be like - but ASD also gives me one more insight, normality is an illusion foisted on people by society - all humans are some measure of weird, its just a question of how much, and in what way. Ehlers-Danlos may have shown up anyhow, so that doesnt strike me as a downside even, if that makes sense, if anything you got a benefit by finding it sooner.
      - restalis 6y ago
        "all humans are some measure of weird, its just a question of how much, and in what way" This is true. However, from a similar (mild form, partially dealt with) ASD observer point of view, I also noticed that the said peculiarities in one's character are like food ingredients. It's about the way one manages to blend them in a recipe and to cook them into something tasteful (for others) that makes or breaks the social connections. Having ASD is like having no smell or taste of your own and you have to rely on the observed reactions in others for measurements. Obviously, it's a challenge to be a cook in such circumstance and the best strategy (if you care) then probably is just to assume damage and operate in damage control mode all the time.
- paganel 6y ago
  > or if I should wave to someone I've met twice if they're 15 feet away walking towards me. To be honest, nobody knows for sure. I call these "Seinfeld moments", as in you could make an entire Seinfeld episode out of talking about it: should I have waived? If yes, I did waive, why didn't the other person waive back? Was it because he/she didn't see me? Was it because he/she did in fact see me but didn't like me? etc.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - mkl 6y ago
    "Wave". "Waive" is something entirely different: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/waive https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/waive But maybe Seinfeld could have made an episode about your version too.
    - paganel 6y ago
      Thanks for that correction, non-native English speaker commenting before my usual morning coffee.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
exikyut 6y ago
What's both practically sad and scientifically ridiculously fascinating is that the cognitive dissonance goes both ways. See also, furry culture representation in general.
- Aloha 6y ago
  I'm perfectly okay with us being presented as weird, it keeps the normal people away. ;-) Did you mean something else?
  - exikyut 6y ago
    I remember reading someone come to roughly the same conclusion on /r/furry a while back, it was nice. So yeah, I do mostly mean that. But the reason there was a bit of extra hesitancy there is that I straddle the line on socialization to the extent that while half my brain would probably love going to a con, the other half would basically be cognitive-dissonance-BSODing the entire time. And I'm not sure if repeating "surrealism is art, surrealism is art" would be enough to get me through; I'd probably end up deciding those three specific people over there were safe and hiding behind them the entire time, while simultaneously responding mostly neurotypically to all the social-cue whooshes as I watched them happen. (The missed cues would be what I was hiding from.)
    - Aloha 6y ago
      Fandom interactions have their own well defined rules and norms. I apply one rulebook for fandom, another one for work, another one for non fandom friendly social interactions, just pondering it lightly, I can identify 6 or so unique rulebooks I use for different kinds of social interactions. I suspect I have even more.
louhike 6y ago
I don't think there can be a real safe space. Toxic things for some might not be for others, reassuring things for some might be violent for others. It does not mean we should not try to improve how we behave, but it's important to understand it's impossible to have a generic rulebook we can apply everywhere to be safe with everyone. As an example, some swearwords might really violent to hear for some people, but disallowing their use will be quite hard for those who lived in an environment where it was important part of communication. And it's often use as a distinction between rich and poor people (at least in France).
- biztos 6y ago
  Do the rich swear more in France, or the poor?
  - yoz-y 6y ago
    I too wonder. One thing that I found quite interesting when moving to France was how casual everybody, even high school teachers, was with swearwords.
    - mpweiher 6y ago
      Not sure where you are from originally, but the US is fairly unique in the world when it comes to these things.
      - DubiousPusher 6y ago
        I'm getting on aside note on a side note already but this bumps into something I've been thinking about for days now so I can't resist. I'm beginning to think the swearing thing in the U.S. has to do with a perception of the concept of "innocence". Because I've noticed a lot of people only begin to have a problem with swearing here when it involves children. For sure, there are people who are just generally against swearing for religious or etiquette reasons. However, having kids really seems to change a large number of people into prudes regarding swears. I'll admit, when I first heard my 4 year old swear it was jarring. But I thought it through and was like, "my wife and I swear all the time, why can't the kid swear? I can either cave to this uncomfortable feeling or extend my kid the same privallege I extend myself." At one point, my brother came to stay with us. He swears like a sailor yet when my kid swore, he was shocked. Not 10 minutes before he was cursing in front of the kid. I also have friends who swore often when we were at college together and they started forbidding swears when they didn't like hearing it coming from their 3 year old. American culture still has a partial obsession with virginity and the concept of innocence and my best guess is that this subconsciously extends to people's expectations for their children.
dale_glass 6y ago
A safe space is simply a space you control, or one moderated in your favor. So for instance, your house is a safe space if you own it and decide who comes and goes, or if your parents are on your side and kick out people that cross your lines.
jedimastert 6y ago
I will once again say that this is why I don't have a Twitter
imwillofficial 6y ago
Kids being harmed is always a no no.
WindyLakeReturn 6y ago
>To an extent I can find one at sci-fi, anime and furry conventions are mostly safe spaces for people like me Is it a safe space when what you say can be video taped and then used against you by all the other areas of life?
silver-machine 6y ago
Aloha, yeah, I hear you. The world has changed a lot in my 49 years and some of it is unrecognizable to me. however, this is an imperfect world that needs a lot of change, and it's not going to stop changing, so you're going to have to figure this out. I assume you're a technologist, you are already dealing with constant change? How is this any different? Think about it this way: Would you hire an SDE who told you they coded down to Java 1.4 standards because that's where their comfort zone is? Java 1.4 is not where the world is in 2021, just like being creepy to your colleagues is not where 2021 is.
silver-machine 6y ago
One more thing: back in the nineties and oughties furries were a punchline in my crowd. Furries were hilarious. You could make any joke funnier by putting a furry in it. They were like Nickleback that way. Things changed -- or at least I changed. I don't use furries as a punchline anymore, and none of my friends do, and I'm like "c'mon please don't do that" if anyone does. Sure, it makes it harder to tell jokes sometimes, but who cares about that?

by Aloha 6y ago

sterlind 6y ago

I relate because I've been there, I think. Before I transitioned I had pretty strong ASD and couldn't figure out how to answer simple questions like "what's up?" or if I should wave to someone I've met twice if they're 15 feet away walking towards me. Transitioning did something to my brain chemistry and let me read social cues nearly overnight, but I got friends by delving into the LGBT community. Maybe furry cons is a good approach?

Aloha 6y ago
I'm pretty sure you'd find yourself at home there, we also have a large trans/gender non-conforming contingent in the community.
exikyut 6y ago
Wh...a. Transitioning fixed your social cue perception?! That is incredibly fascinating. I'm not even sure how to classify that... pragmatic psychological function (oookay that's probably not a thing), neurobiology, or what else. IMO this is a gigantic breadcrumb for Something™. The question is what the axis point was, and what got fixed as a result. Cooool. I am very curious what else shifted that you'd be happy to share.
- Aloha 6y ago
  Not the poster, but I too am curious about their thoughts, however I have some of my own. Men and Women experience socialization in fundamentally different ways, because of this I suspect the changing hormonal balance reawakens pathways not used normally, basically. In addition, you basically have a chance while transitioning to relearn socialization from scratch basically, with those new pathways awakened.
  - exikyut 6y ago
    Hm, that honestly sounds about 90% of the way to a reasonable explanation. In my own experience I've found as that as a majority of my own marbles have figured out "OH, that's which way is up", my own pragmatic learning capacity has transformed from "transmutation ray that turns everything into indecipherable, unmovable rubble" and... what almost feels like a happy grid of FPGAs that bustle about classifying and organizing without me really having to make much effort. After leaving ideas and subjects for long enough (10+ years in some cases) that old broken memories/associations have just about completely died out, yeah, I definitely can look at things with new eyes. Discovering that HRT can trigger or you might even say accelerate this process is very fascinating, because it sort of maybe points in the direction of the root causes that break everything in the first place.
- chousuke 6y ago
  Intuitively, it makes sense for something like this to be possible, though I wonder what the trigger is. Drastic change in hormonal balance caused by the transitioning process activating / connecting parts of the brain that were "malfunctioning" previously? Or "just" a result of increased happiness stemming from having dealt with a large problem?Sounds hideously difficult to replicate.
  - exikyut 6y ago
    Oh yeah... the dismorphia effect and similar anxieties. Of course. Never experienced any of it myself, didn't realize how big of a potential factor it could be until reading your comment. I was mostly considering the fact that the female hormone, uh, configuration is naturally pro-social, and that dumping that set of hormone balances on the brain promptly elicits the associated responses - ie, that the response (or rather the tendency for those responses to function properly) becomes a partial function of hormone state. But those sort of general factors (including elevated mood) would definitely be a part of the end result.
    - chousuke 6y ago
      I'm wary of making assumptions about "natural" differences between males and females, since it's easy to confuse them with cultural stereotypes, ie. what you've learned to think of as "normal" vs. what actually is "normal". It may well be be that some component that's typically more prevalent in females plays a key role in the development of prosocial tendencies. If such a component were identified, it would be interesting to study its involvement in the development of both males and females.
- novok 6y ago
  Autistic MtF programmers is something that happens enough to be a trope, joke or meme.
  - orthoxerox 6y ago
    This usually doesn't fix their issues beyond dysphoria, though.
    - novok 6y ago
      Somewhere in the comments here, one of them said "estrogen fixed my social autism". That is really surprising.
  - dgellow 6y ago
    What is an MtF programmer? I read it as Microsoft programmer but that doesn't really make that much sense in the context.
    - cpach 6y ago
      MtF = Male to Female
  - roflc0ptic 6y ago
    No citation in this, but being trans correlates with being autistic
    - owl57 6y ago
      Would seem logical. I was alien enough to boys to land at the "girls table" in school canteen when I was 11. Pieces of experience like this could probably help to start considering the possibility.
      - lawnchair_larry 6y ago
        This is an extremely dangerous and absolutely insane line of reasoning that is causing incredible harm to young people. You don’t have gender dysphoria because you hung out with girls as an 11 year old.
- sterlind 6y ago
  I have no idea why it happened, I'm just so grateful it did. It was like suddenly seeing color for the first time. When I looked at someone, I could read their intentions and actually feel their feelings. I wasn't a sociopath before or anything, but I couldn't feel empathy. This definitely does not happen to every aspie trans woman, but I've heard of it happening to one or two others. I was worried about losing my intelligence, since I attributed a lot of that to ASD, but actually all my major breakthroughs came after transitioning. My first algorithm that got me noticed was like, 6 months in. The only real downside was that switching to estrogen unmasked my Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome, and I've become physically disabled. I'm still able to work and think and feel so it's a good trade for me!
  - Aloha 6y ago
    The only thing ASD gives me is a measure of clarity - because all of the hidden rules of society are not hidden to me, they're things I need to learn with intent, it gives me a measure of clarity into which rules are required, and which ones are not, when they can be broken and when they can't be. I'm not gonna say I'd like to be normal, because I have no real construct of what normal would be like - but ASD also gives me one more insight, normality is an illusion foisted on people by society - all humans are some measure of weird, its just a question of how much, and in what way. Ehlers-Danlos may have shown up anyhow, so that doesnt strike me as a downside even, if that makes sense, if anything you got a benefit by finding it sooner.
    - restalis 6y ago
      "all humans are some measure of weird, its just a question of how much, and in what way" This is true. However, from a similar (mild form, partially dealt with) ASD observer point of view, I also noticed that the said peculiarities in one's character are like food ingredients. It's about the way one manages to blend them in a recipe and to cook them into something tasteful (for others) that makes or breaks the social connections. Having ASD is like having no smell or taste of your own and you have to rely on the observed reactions in others for measurements. Obviously, it's a challenge to be a cook in such circumstance and the best strategy (if you care) then probably is just to assume damage and operate in damage control mode all the time.
paganel 6y ago
> or if I should wave to someone I've met twice if they're 15 feet away walking towards me. To be honest, nobody knows for sure. I call these "Seinfeld moments", as in you could make an entire Seinfeld episode out of talking about it: should I have waived? If yes, I did waive, why didn't the other person waive back? Was it because he/she didn't see me? Was it because he/she did in fact see me but didn't like me? etc.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- mkl 6y ago
  "Wave". "Waive" is something entirely different: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/waive https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/waive But maybe Seinfeld could have made an episode about your version too.
  - paganel 6y ago
    Thanks for that correction, non-native English speaker commenting before my usual morning coffee.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

exikyut 6y ago

What's both practically sad and scientifically ridiculously fascinating is that the cognitive dissonance goes both ways. See also, furry culture representation in general.

Aloha 6y ago
I'm perfectly okay with us being presented as weird, it keeps the normal people away. ;-) Did you mean something else?
- exikyut 6y ago
  I remember reading someone come to roughly the same conclusion on /r/furry a while back, it was nice. So yeah, I do mostly mean that. But the reason there was a bit of extra hesitancy there is that I straddle the line on socialization to the extent that while half my brain would probably love going to a con, the other half would basically be cognitive-dissonance-BSODing the entire time. And I'm not sure if repeating "surrealism is art, surrealism is art" would be enough to get me through; I'd probably end up deciding those three specific people over there were safe and hiding behind them the entire time, while simultaneously responding mostly neurotypically to all the social-cue whooshes as I watched them happen. (The missed cues would be what I was hiding from.)
  - Aloha 6y ago
    Fandom interactions have their own well defined rules and norms. I apply one rulebook for fandom, another one for work, another one for non fandom friendly social interactions, just pondering it lightly, I can identify 6 or so unique rulebooks I use for different kinds of social interactions. I suspect I have even more.

louhike 6y ago

I don't think there can be a real safe space. Toxic things for some might not be for others, reassuring things for some might be violent for others. It does not mean we should not try to improve how we behave, but it's important to understand it's impossible to have a generic rulebook we can apply everywhere to be safe with everyone. As an example, some swearwords might really violent to hear for some people, but disallowing their use will be quite hard for those who lived in an environment where it was important part of communication. And it's often use as a distinction between rich and poor people (at least in France).

biztos 6y ago
Do the rich swear more in France, or the poor?
- yoz-y 6y ago
  I too wonder. One thing that I found quite interesting when moving to France was how casual everybody, even high school teachers, was with swearwords.
  - mpweiher 6y ago
    Not sure where you are from originally, but the US is fairly unique in the world when it comes to these things.
    - DubiousPusher 6y ago
      I'm getting on aside note on a side note already but this bumps into something I've been thinking about for days now so I can't resist. I'm beginning to think the swearing thing in the U.S. has to do with a perception of the concept of "innocence". Because I've noticed a lot of people only begin to have a problem with swearing here when it involves children. For sure, there are people who are just generally against swearing for religious or etiquette reasons. However, having kids really seems to change a large number of people into prudes regarding swears. I'll admit, when I first heard my 4 year old swear it was jarring. But I thought it through and was like, "my wife and I swear all the time, why can't the kid swear? I can either cave to this uncomfortable feeling or extend my kid the same privallege I extend myself." At one point, my brother came to stay with us. He swears like a sailor yet when my kid swore, he was shocked. Not 10 minutes before he was cursing in front of the kid. I also have friends who swore often when we were at college together and they started forbidding swears when they didn't like hearing it coming from their 3 year old. American culture still has a partial obsession with virginity and the concept of innocence and my best guess is that this subconsciously extends to people's expectations for their children.

dale_glass 6y ago

A safe space is simply a space you control, or one moderated in your favor. So for instance, your house is a safe space if you own it and decide who comes and goes, or if your parents are on your side and kick out people that cross your lines.

jedimastert 6y ago

I will once again say that this is why I don't have a Twitter

imwillofficial 6y ago

Kids being harmed is always a no no.

WindyLakeReturn 6y ago

>To an extent I can find one at sci-fi, anime and furry conventions are mostly safe spaces for people like me Is it a safe space when what you say can be video taped and then used against you by all the other areas of life?

silver-machine 6y ago

Aloha, yeah, I hear you. The world has changed a lot in my 49 years and some of it is unrecognizable to me. however, this is an imperfect world that needs a lot of change, and it's not going to stop changing, so you're going to have to figure this out. I assume you're a technologist, you are already dealing with constant change? How is this any different? Think about it this way: Would you hire an SDE who told you they coded down to Java 1.4 standards because that's where their comfort zone is? Java 1.4 is not where the world is in 2021, just like being creepy to your colleagues is not where 2021 is.

silver-machine 6y ago

One more thing: back in the nineties and oughties furries were a punchline in my crowd. Furries were hilarious. You could make any joke funnier by putting a furry in it. They were like Nickleback that way. Things changed -- or at least I changed. I don't use furries as a punchline anymore, and none of my friends do, and I'm like "c'mon please don't do that" if anyone does. Sure, it makes it harder to tell jokes sometimes, but who cares about that?