Rule 4 - Be Nice

I certainly identify as a Mod and i'm wearing the clobber to prove it.

if the mods are volunteers cant they just find more volunteers then if that happens? im sure many would want to be mods.... hell most of you are already identifying as a mod anyway lol

One word of warning with regard to acrimony on this forum and criticism of NAS and the mods.

This happened on the Shutterstock forum + the moderator left and Shutterstock's solution was to shut the forum down.

No forum, no acrimony, no hassle for Shutterstock. Solution!

As NAS is a charity, I think we are lucky to have this forum, shouldn't take it for granted, and should treasure it.

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

its probably intentionally high in cyclists as they ride out on red lights and get run over. that kinda counts as suicide. their suicide is in their lack of road knowledge and how to use the road but yet they go on the road and put themselves in danger due to having no idea how to use the road, predict other users or understand whats happening.

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.

You've never been shy about giving your own views of politics here. I think it would be damn right impossible to police all political speech here, as we all live in the world and politics effects us all.

What's the suicide rate like for your average cyclist?  For Trans folk it is extremely high. Also for Autistics it is extremely high.  Why is that? Why is it that Autistics and/or trans folk are different to some NT with a pushbike?

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

the government and rich elite are a minority group though.

we call the rich the top 1% or something.... thats a minority... if free speech cant be used against minorities then the rich elite are protected.

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.

I Sperg said:

how respectful is it to clutter up an AUTISM forum with these issues

I Sperg said:

This is NOT a sexual politics or trans support forum, there are plenty of places which support those issues, so can we please get back to the Autism,

I don't think that because this is a forum for people with autism, we should only talk about autism.

I mean really, that does make it look as though autism defines us, and we are more than that, and have more than that to talk about surely?

Some of your own threads are not about autism.

This subject offends you and you actually brought it up yourself recently in the thread about 'are there things you just don't get'.

I respect the views of others and I try to behave with respect towards those people if they have different views + life experience to me and I think that is true of others on this forum.

I Sperg said:

And if you insist on attaching invented labels like "cis-gendered" when there is already a perfectly good word to describe us. 

We are NORMAL or STRAIGHT. Label yourselves by all means, and we normal people will even use your labels, but don't label us if you don't want US to label YOU. 

You are conflating gender identity and sexuality here.

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.