a lot of people put "autistic person overexplains something" in the same bucket as mansplaining because they don't really care to differentiate and it's amazingly efficient at being both ableist and triple shitty to autistic trans women
not to mention trans women really get a lot of "if you're autistic, you aren't *really* a woman" medical gatekeeping going in and people casually acting like autism makes you male really twists the knife on that one
on the plus side trans women are all really used to people power sliding in and deciding whether we're male or not by their own irritating arbitrary bullshit standards so at least it's not new
TLDR if you treat "autistic trans person who wants to help but might not know what you already know" the same as "man who thinks you're stupid" then you're being kind of an awful shitty person hope that helps
done posting about this because anyone who needs to hear it wouldn't listen anyway
@kat heckin preach
@kat This shit kept me in the closet for years, *thank you* for managing to put it better than I ever have.
@kat as bad as it is to be treated like an idiot, would be super fucking fantastic if there were a hint of good faith around "you asked for help and I didn't know your knowledge level" or "I made a comment on something I know some about not realizing you're an expert"
or just, like, not every interaction with a stranger of indeterminate gender is mansplaining
@xenophora @kat as someone who's been actually gaslit as part of an abusive relationship and has ongoing problems reminding myself I am capable of interacting with reality, sweet motherfucking same
@xenophora @nisima @kat not relevant to the original thread, but "parasocial" is another word on that list now
You've got me curious, because I don't think that one was even on my radar until a couple of years ago. How is it being misapplied compared to when it first became known? (Thanks.)
@xenophora There's a couple of parallel things going on with it, where 1) the definition has been broadened to *all* situations where one person pays attention to someone else in a familiar-but-not-personal way, and 2) it's Been Decided that all parasocial relationships are inherently bad/toxic and not that "parasocial" is just an adjective that refers to a kind of one-way relationship that folks need to be more mindful of.
Belated thanks for the links and comment. (Work is kicking my ass right now or I would've responded sooner.)
@kat how in the fuck could someone say that out loud and think it makes any sense at all??
@ItsJenNotGabby apparently by having a medical degree
@kat wow. That's gross and just reinforces the misogyny/ transmisogyny already rampant in medicine when the more likely culprit is that autism is underdiagnosed in women just like ADHD bc we present differently.
gah I hate this
@ItsJenNotGabby trans people get way too much bullshit to deal with
@kat the fun part here being, of course, is that trans men are gatekept when theyre autistic but for completely other bullshit reasons
@kat somehow they use pretzel logic to also apply that to autistic trans men, from what I've seen
@kat I am extremely glad that I didn’t get my autism diagnosis until I was 13 years post-transition and the medcops couldn’t touch me any more.
@kat
Totally agreed. It's also horribly ableist because they're missing that mainsplaining tends to be ignorant and wrong, whereas autistic infodumps are fascinating treasure troves of deep analysis and experience.
@kat yeah "mansplaining" has kinda semantic drifted hard from "man explaining something a woman already knows" to "anyone that i can get away with calling a man explaining anything in a way I don't like" and i really hate it
@kat Wait is that kind of infodump an autistic thing? Like, how are people supposed to know what others do or don't already know???
@hazelnot @kat there are literally, grammatically, two questions in this post
to the first, yes it's typically associated with being autistic
to the second, people just kinda assume the other person has the relevant background and that contributes to an enormous amount of misunderstandings and we just kinda live with that somehow
@carcinopithecus @kat I do that sometimes and I sometimes suspect I might be autistic but also sometimes it seems really unlikely so uh,
@kat that sounds like throwing manspreading and wheelchair access in the same bucket because they both take up extra room
The french equivalent (mecspliquer) is about a dude condescently "explaining" something to a woman about something he rather obviously doesn't knows shit about. (ie. contraception)
@lanodan i get where you're coming from but also the whole "men obviously can't know about birth control" thing kinda excludes trans dudes i think
@lanodan iunno if it's a super okay dichotomy to make regardless of whether it applies in the specific circumstance tbh
feels like this is by far the most common release valve for leftists to be acceptably bigoted tbh