Trust me, I'm a doctor

when I was 14 I worked in a grocery store and one day I got to bag Stephen King’s groceries and of course, being the little horror fiction nerd I am I was completely starstruck

everyone likes to talk about fucked up joke spells like "super brain hemmorage" and "fill lungs with water" but i let my players make spells once theyre a certain level and my sorceror just sent me this text

Me, two glasses of wine in: "yeah so here's an in depth conversation about my identity as a nonbinary person, and my struggles with transphobia in 2023"

Random Guy: "So if you're non binary, and, sorry if this is offensive but I don't know the right words here. Like, is it cross dressing for you if you wear a skirt?"

Guy: "It must have been nice to go to school with other trans people. Like, you must've felt safe."

TIL The Double Empathy Problem theory suggests social difficulties experienced by autistic people when interacting with non-autistic people are due to reciprocal differences, not an inherent deficiency, most autistic people are able to display good social reciprocity with most other autistic people

okay but the BEST part of the first study discussed (conducted by an autistic person!) Is that it shows that while easy, calm, mutual communication and social interaction is often more natural between two autistic people than it is between an autistic person and a non-autistic person, it is ALSO like this when an autistic person encounters a non-autistic person who imitates the autistic individual’s behaviours- neurotypical parents copying autistic children’s play, for example, apparently receive more positive engagement from their child- which is SERIOUSLY FUCKING IMPORTANT and VERY VERY GOOD because it is, once again, scientific evidence that bullshit like aversion therapy and enforced conformance and FUCKING “quiet hands” aren’t “”“”“solutions to the autism problem”“”“” and that “”“”“problems”“”“ with autism don’t stem from BEING autistic, but rather, from how NON AUSTISTIC PEOPLE TREAT AUTISTIC PEOPLE.

As my mom put it when she got sick of listening to acquaintance “A” whine about how autistic person “B” they both knew ‘really lacks communication skills’ and 'doesn’t really understand other people’ (B has excellent but specific communication skills, and merely refuses to engage in 'polite’ but ultimately unhelpful social behavior), and how frustrating it was for A, as a 'professional communications advisior’ and self-described empath, to work with B: