I’m gonna ignore all of this and talk to you directly as an autistic to an autistic. There are so many times I asked a friend of mine “Hey, I forgot mutual friend X’s gender, what were their pronouns again” but what they heard was “Oh no the trans-genders and the pronouns are so confusing, they should stick with what on their birth certificate” and then I wake up the next day with no friends because that friend told all their friends I was being a transphobe.
Now, let’s think about this from their perspective. If you saw a friend of yours being a bigot to another one of your friends, would you still hang out with them? I wouldn’t. If I heard one of my friends was homophobic or transphobic or racist or any other kind of bigot, I would instantly block and shun them. I do not want bigots of any kind around me or my friends. There is a reason that cults practice shunning, and that is because it fucking works.
Continuing this, lets say our hypothetical ex-friend had been accused of being transphobic to one of your trans friends. What would they need to do to be either forgiven or absolved of guilt? Even if they were in fact transphobic, they can admit they are wrong. And if the accusation was wrong, what proof would you need? What sort of behavior would you need to see from them to forgive them?
I am positive that you as an elder queer have had many, many, many experiences where someone you thought you could trust turned out to be a homophobe. It really hurts. After a while, you start only seeing the worst in people.
As an autistic, it was really rough learning what would come across as a microaggression. Can’t ask to be reminded of the pronouns, because it might be interpreted as passive-aggressive transphobic whinging about pronouns. When I do fuck up, I can’t give the big apology that I think misgendering someone deserves because my autistic RBF will make it come across as sarcastic. You just have to quickly correct yourself and move on without drawing attention to it. It feels like blowing a red light and hitting someone because I was just plopped behind the wheel of a car without being taught how to drive.
Your tantrum here was very cathartic for me, because it really is fucking terrible trying navigate a world full of traumatized people. I don’t like accidentally triggering people. I want people to feel safe around me! But if I had thought I’d seen a person doing a microaggression, and then I saw them throwing a tantrum about how them getting shunned was because everyone else is a pee pee piss piss boy and this is why the cishets hate us, I would be inclined to think they were at least regressive, if not one of the republican gays who think that we need to chop off everything past the B in LGBTQ+.
Just to be clear, I don’t think you’re transphobic. I have experienced the same sort of things as you. It’s rough restraining myself from flailing around in response to being accused of stuff. It is humiliating to prostrate myself and beg forgiveness of things I know I did not do. But we live in a fucking society full of bigots and people traumatized by those fucking bigots, and these are the rituals that keep our corner of society even a little bit sane.
Girl. Read your comment again. Please. It reads like a grandma in the nursing home ranting about how all the kids these days are all premarital hand-holding and being publicly indecent.
Look, I’m poly. I’m in a monogamous relationship, but just because I’m not currenly performing poly-ness doesn’t mean I don’t think and see the world like a poly person. My wife-to-be isn’t poly and I’m not gonna push her. I’m sorry that your friends seem to have pushed you, and I can sympathize since so many poly people seem to use it as a crutch for being a bad partner, but you don’t get to be a dick about it.
Back when I used to live in the rust belt, I had a lesbian coworker who was a big trump supporter as well as a born-again Christian who thinks that gay and trans people are all going to hell. She only does couple stuff with her wife (how she got a wife I will never know) behind closed doors because she doesn’t want to “indoctrinate the children”. That’s our real enemy, if you can call it that: gay people oppressing themselves and dragging each other down with them.
I was a daycare teacher for a while. You know what I do when a kid throws a temper tantrum? I leave them alone until they calm down, and then I treat them like the tantrum didn’t happen. Sometimes they want to tell me what made them upset after, and we can fix it. Sometimes they just need it out of their system. I’m of the opinion that adults are just toddlers with manners. Let the tantrum happen, don’t judge them for it, move tf on.