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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

I know many social progressives would argue this is due to socialization...but the effect seems too strong at too early an age to blame solely on socialization to me.

On a related note, I recently read an article about trans men where one noted that they seemed to have become more conversationally impatient, and blamed it on the different hormones: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2018/07/20/feat...

> "The hormones made me more impatient. I had lots of female friends and one of the qualities they loved about me was that I was a great listener. After being on testosterone, they informed me that my listening skills weren’t what they used to be. Here’s an example: I’m driving with one of my best friends, Beth, and I ask her “Is your sister meeting us for dinner?” Ten minutes later she’s still talking and I still have no idea if her sister is coming. So finally, I couldn’t take it anymore, and I snapped and said, “IS SHE COMING OR NOT?” And Beth was like, “You know, you used to like hearing all the backstory and how I’d get around to the answer. A lot of us have noticed you’ve become very impatient lately and we think it’s that damn testosterone!” It’s definitely true that some male behavior is governed by hormones. Instead of listening to a woman’s problem and being empathetic and nodding along, I would do the stereotypical guy thing — interrupt and provide a solution to cut the conversation short and move on. I’m trying to be better about this."

You said:

> You may have issues with specific things that were said (or how they were said), but that isn't clear from your response. Perhaps you could add that, so the author can learn.

I addressed those specifics, as far as I can tell all of the specifics of substance. I was engaging your suggestion in good faith. I did take and accept it as helpful. I’m open to the possibility there’s some nuance I’m missing?

The nuance that I think you are missing is that the OP is talking about how the experience shouldn't be generalised and turned into a rule: The person responded to said that sitting at the girl's table should be an indicator that starts consideration of "maybe this is gender dysphoria". The OP thinks this is dangerous and harmful to children in it's proposed form.

I'm missing a lot of cultural context here (What is a "girl's table"?), but I can definitely see the point OP is trying to make. I'll agree with you it was worded problematically.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

But maybe Seinfeld could have made an episode about your version too.

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.

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).

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.

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?

Did you mean something else?

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.)

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.

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?