Rule 4 - Be Nice

Thank you for this Clare MOD - I appreciate the informative.

Kind regards

Hi online community users,

Thankyou for the points you have raised in relation to this post. 

Sometimes the moderation team may take action that you do not agree with. In some cases we are carrying out investigations on posts that you are not able to see or complaints have been made. We appreciate your patience with this matter. 

If you do have any concerns about the moderation of the online community, particularly if you feel our rule not allowing hate speech has been broken,  please do contact us by email at communitymanager@nas.org.uk 

Kind regards,

Clare Mod

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Ok maybe that’s not the best example. It would be interesting here to talk about the tension between people who see their racial identity as black vs people who would describe themselves as say Nigerian or Ugandan etc. but probably not helpful to this discussion.

my point is anyone can think what they like about your identity but that’s just an opinion and unless you believe that opinion is true, or unless it effects you directly why should you care?

if people tell you not to step on the cracks in the pavement lest you break your mothers back would you care? Yes I suppose if someone’s opinion leads to your whole community rejecting you that might be different. But there is a big gap between that and an intellectual discussion on a forum.

Actually, Rule FIVE is the "be nice" rule...

Rule 4 is the one I'll be invoking next time some heterophobe libels or defames me or one of my kind. 

I am going to start using the report function myself, if this divisive and shrill rubbish continues, I have had enough now.

You "activists" are RUINING this forum for the regular folk, and people are apparently starting to leave in droves, as someone said recently; "this isn't good for my mental heath".

Mods, can we please have an "ignore poster button", if a more elegant alternative cannot be found?

I agree with some of your points, but not number 2. Even with black people - what about an albino black person? They probably suffer this kind of response a lot. Even some mixed race siblings can have such different skin tones people don't believe they have the same parents, which must be difficult for them. Also, I am happy for you that your own autistic identity is so secure or that you have not had people disbelieve it.

1. Being nice to people doesn't extend to not disagreeing with their views. Someone telling you they think you are wrong should not be taken as a personal attack.
2. If your gender identity is so fragile that people disagreeing with your thoughts or feelings on gender identity can invalidate it it's not much of an identity. If I went up to a black person and said 'I don't really think you are black,' they're not going to think or feel they are less black because of it. They would just think it absurd. I would expect trans people to take the same approach.
3. Just because someone doesn't agree with every iota of your philosophy of what it is to be trans or what trans rights is or respect for trans people looks like ... or for that mater if they just happen to think reasonable minds may differ on these topics and its ok to have debates about them ... it doesn't mean these people hate you or are oppressing you.
4. A safe space is a space where it's safe to have a frank exchange of ideas, motivated by a genuine desire for truth rather than malice towards others. If all you want to do is set up a division of 'us and them' and try and censor those you consider to be the them it is you who is preventing this from being a safe space for all.
5. It's possible for people to disagree with your particular views on trans issues and still be sympathetic towards trans peoples difficulties.

Love back at you ️

but that would mean accepting peoples intolerance, grumpiness or negativity as that is who they are too right? lol it would mean accepting everything not just the things you want accepted. it would mean accepting things counter to the things you want to have accepted... which means theres no problem anywhere at all if you accept it, but i accept you dont have to accept it because i accept everything and if you dont accept people not accepting things then i accept you lack of acceptance as that is your free will to not accept things lol

That's OK, I understand. Easy mistake to make. I did wonder if something like that had happened but didn't want to make assumptions! I wonder if one can't delete a post someone has replied to? It would have made my reply look crazy if you had anyway!

Are Time Lords welcome here?  

Seriously though in this day and age we should just accept each other for who we are. Life is too short and all the complaining won't change people's choices... So best to go with the flow. We all belong, we're all united. Love to all my brothers and sisters.

Apologies, I typed that shortly after waking up and to be honest I messed up. I started reading a post by I-Sperg, lost focus as I was still half asleep, and had scrolled too far without realising - into the last part of your post but thinking it was the back end of his. I’m very sorry for giving neither post full and focused concentration or understand and yet commenting anyway. I’m an idiot sometimes. I did try to delete just now what I said above but the forum won’t let me. Not sure why. 

Confused by this response? I said I do not identify with normal. What is normal anyway? I think it's normal to have some traits which are majority traits and some which are minority traits - someone who was in the absolute middle on every trait, while technically being the very definition of normal, would to my mind be quite unusual! Although they would not appear so until it was realised... (and of course it would be culturally dependent, someone who was average in their own culture would stand out in a different culture.)

I never claimed I had any problem with the disambiguating term cis-het, I just said it was somewhat new to me and attempted to provide some clarity on how I understood it, while indicating I was open to being corrected if I was mistaken? I'm always happy to learn a new word!

Yes, the ‘let’s keep it to autism’ would mean that many of the autistic-adjacent topics (eating disorders, anxiety, physical‘Co-morbidities) would be off the table. Since it’s known that the  trans percentage of the autistic population is larger that elsewhere, that’s not something that can be neatly cut off from what can be discussed on here. Not should it be. Also, the forum has no rule that only autism can be discussed. It is a community, and things like the music threads and other miscellaneous topics are part of making us a group of friends and not a symposium of some kind. 

I think the problem with ‘normal’ is that, while you have correctly identified one thing (statistical majority) it can mean - and have assured us that that’s all that you personally mean by it - it has many other connotations too and has countless times been pointedly used to convey those connotations. When you know that there’s room for removing that problem by using a new but helpfully disambiguating term like cis-het, why not just adopt the etiquette. It doesn’t compromise your Christianity to do so. 

Didn’t Shakespeare have to invent words to get sufficient elegance and nuance into his writing? About ways of being that had existed since the dawn of time…

ahh so it was made by a german sexologist/sociologist... it all makes sense now... yeah that just makes me want to have that word banned even more lol

Who are you calling normal?! I take exception to that - I have never identified as normal even if I am straight! :)

I am also new to a lot of this terminology, but I can see that cis =/= straight, because gay people can be cis, cis is the opposite of trans as straight is the opposite of gay. (I am not sure if I am using gay correctly - as I understand it, the word can be used of either men or women, but gay seems to sometimes mean only men or why would there be both L and G in the acronym?) And there are some people not polarised to either end of both of those of course.

I agree that transphobia is not an accurate word, but it is being used in a similar way to homophobia which more generally means people attacking the other, which was presumed to arise from fear. As we tend to be literal, such inaccuracies annoy or confuse us, but I have to accept that most people use words inaccurately and enlarge my definition of the word to include majority use rather than only strictly accurate meaning!

As for "cluttering up an autism forum" with such discussions, it does seem that autists have a significantly greater likelihood of different gender identities than the general population, just as we also have a greater likelihood of digestive issues, yet nobody complains about the number of threads about digestive issues, even if it is not immediately obvious why an autism forum would have so many. So I think these discussions do belong here and people who don't like it can try to avoid those threads or try to gently understand and ask questions, although this can be difficult as we don't always come across well, and our tendency to bluntness can seem impolite especially to people who are understandably sensitive, in that even a gentle touch to an open wound can be painful.

I have never seen not being normal as = being abnormal or broken though, as Beeswarm Sam put it. My physical disability does make me feel broken, but not because of how I think others see it, but because of how it feels compared to how I felt before it happened to me. I would reserve the term abnormal for people who are not normal in a way which damages others, such as mass murderers. I am in several of the minority groups you list in an above post, such as cyclist and Christian, and agree that those can both lead to abuse, but are not what I would call abnormal. I think people who are in a minority which tends to be abused can become defensive as they have been hurt and threatened a lot, although the better response is to respond gently, but that is a difficult path which even us Christians whose book teaches us we must respond this way often fail at.

I sincerely hope nobody takes offence at anything I have written here, I have tried my best and apologise if I have failed or got anything wrong. I probably have, as I have before, but I am going to post anyway.

I see online spaces as a bit like pubs. There are lots of different ones, some are bland, some are rough, some appeal to a particular community. Regardless which pub you walk into you are still a person made up of different parts whether that's your neurodiversity, gender identity, sexuality or ethnicity.

Depending what you say or how you behave in the pub and the other clientele, you may get adverse reactions or possibly kicked out by a landord/landlady or bouncer.  Should you be able to be yourself in the pub? Yes you should without having to hide or mask parts of who you are.  Is it OK for other people to hurt you for who you are? No, it is not.  For me some pubs are best avoided if I can't be sure of my safety or allowed to be myself.

It would be good if this community was for everyone made up of all their constituent parts, one of which is autism intertwined with all our other parts.  I think it's up to us to make this happen.

The existence of trans people is not political.

If it's not something relevant to you, it's perfectly acceptable for you to not open threads that have "trans" in the title. No one will be offended if you don't contribute to an issue you don't know anything about.