When my parents believed I was not autistic, they projected a non-autistic child over the top of me and interacted with that psychologically-produced hologram instead of with me: and, as a result, I didn't have the freedom to act autistic.

For example, say my siblings were playing with Christmas jingle bells, and this hurt my ears.

My parents would look at me holding my hands over my ears, trying to get my siblings to stop playing with the bells, and see a neurotypical child doing that. No, the bells didn't hurt my ears! Of course they didn't—Christmas jingle bells don't hurt the ears of a neurotypical child! I simply wanted to ruin my siblings' fun.

"Stop that," they would say to me. "Get your hands off your ears; stop trying to make your siblings feel bad. Why don't you leave, if you can't play nicely?"

My parents looked at me and did not see me.

They created a whole different person in their heads and superimposed that character over who I actually was.

Have you ever been invisible in this way? Surrounded by people who see, not you, but someone you have never been and do not recognize? Have you ever found yourself playing, on the stage of life, a character who is nothing like you?

When people learn how my parents raised me, there's one thing I hear a lot—especially from Christians and Jews.

"Your parents are just evil."

"Your parents are monsters," these people will say. "They wanted to hurt you, and they would've taken any excuse to do so. It's only coincidence that they landed on our holy scriptures: anything would have done for them, because they're monsters who enjoy harming children."

Now, it's true that I don't have a window into my parents' heads—I can't read their minds, see their thoughts, reach into their brains and point at their beliefs and motivations.

But I don't think this claim is an accurate one.

My parents beat me, yes. Almost daily. And they genuinely believed they were doing what was best for me.

Or so they said, and say, and I have reason to believe them, because they explained their reasoning to me. "Whoever spares the rod hates his son," they told me. "Beat him with the rod and you will save his soul from hell."

Solid.

Who was I—who were they—to argue with god-breathed scripture?

I saw my parents struggle with it. Beating your children is painful, when you love them. You're so much bigger and stronger than they are, and they're so afraid; but you can't let them go undisciplined. You can't let them walk into hell, not when you love them. You just have to man up and, uh... hit a child.

Because the scripture says you have to.

Because your holy book, inspired by your all-knowing and all-loving deity (every word of it useful for teaching, correction, and training in righteousness), says that's what you do.

Even if you don't want to, you have to—if you love your child, if you care for him at all!

Or do you want him to burn in hell forever?

No. Beat his temporary physical body with the rod and save the immortal part of him from unending torment, or else you hate him.

—•—•—

I hear this a lot from Christians and Jews: "Your parents are the fundamentally evil ones—not our scriptures! Only a fundamentally evil person would ever interpret our holy scriptures in that way!"

We all know thus is an adverb. It's from the Old English þus, meaning "in this way, as follows, in this manner, to this extent."

You might see a parent hit a child and say "I wouldn't treat a dog thus," meaning you wouldn't treat a dog in the way you just saw that parent treat their child.

Or you might say "I like to describe my sense of humor thus" and follow it with the manner of description you prefer.

You might even say "I am poor; thus I have no medical care," meaning that your lack of medical care follows from (i.e., is a direct result of) your poverty.

"Thus far," we might say, meaning to this extent or point, "things make sense."

Then we encounter thusly.

—

Thusly is a monstrosity. An abomination of idiocy. The -ly ending is clearly meant to turn the word thus into an adjective—but thus is already an adjective!

Here lives stupidity.

My favorite part of the 2018 research article on thus vs thusly that I ran across online was the section where a respondent older than 75 essentially called thusly a stupid word that you use if you want to sound stupid or make fun of stupid people... while a respondent younger than 25 called it an overly formal old word.

Hold onto your hats, everybody. In fifty or so years, the youngsters will be claiming that blorbo is too formal a term to use when describing a fictional character you particularly enjoy.

I leaned away, but it was too late.

Why this coworker seems to think wearing a mask makes me deaf, I don't know. She never gets this close to anyone else.

From past experience, I knew that asking a sick person not to breathe into my face is rude. She'd be insulted if I requested she back off until her contagion cleared. Why it's polite to spread disease, but impolite to ask that you not be infected, I don't know. Are our social mores written by germs?

I steered clear of her the rest of our shift, and hoped for the best.

The next day I woke up with a slightly sore throat. It felt like I'd been snoring again. Though my partner hadn't heard anything, sometimes he does sleep through it.

I masked up and went to work.

Despite the fact that I'd slept well, exhaustion kept creeping up on me. My head started to pound a few hours into the shift, and Nature seemed intent on calling me to the restroom every hour (or less). With two hours left in my shift, I found my supervisor and asked to be released.

"I think Mary gave me whatever she's got, yesterday."

He looked confused (probably because I'd already worked 8 of my 10 hours), but let me go home early without issue. Most of the work was already done.

I hobbled home, washed off, ate dinner, and went to bed.

When I woke up, I was undeniably ill. My throat ached. My nose ran. I had an uncontrollable cough. Fever and chills, too. There are times when I wish I had a normally functioning immune system, and this is definitely one of those times.

you definitely wouldn't be able to just know how someone identifies just by looking at them, as you said. the way I think about it is, you don't have to try and define it one way or another if you arent actively trying to pursue a relationship with this person, if that makes sense. like - acknowledging when you find people you aren't usually attracted to, attractive, doesn't necessarily mean you want to pursue a relationship of some kind with them. and it doesn't mean you aren't a lesbian, bi, straight, etc.

if you are wanting to pursue a relationship I think it is a bit important to have a conversation like that - not so much in a "how do you identify and how often" way, but as in "does my attraction to you as a lesbian make you uncomfortable" ;  if it turns out this person identifies as a man 100% of the time, I think it's time to assess where you both want the relationship to go. if you want to continue to pursue it, then there's thankfully other sapphic labels and identities that encompass this experience !  but if it turns out that you aren't comfortable pursuing a romantic relationship anymore, , that's okay too.

I hope that this helps? if you have more questions I can try my best to answer them !

It does help! Thank you again. Don't worry about the late response, by the way: I was in bed asleep. If I lived in Shizuoka my sleep schedule would make more sense: up at 9 or 10 am, bed around midnight? Sure, that's normal enough. But no. Oh well.

I can certainly see how a man might be uncomfortable with being attractive to lesbians! If he thinks lesbians are never attracted to men—well. It's like they're calling him Not A Man, isn't it.

In my experience, though, people are never attracted to me on the basis of my own internal sense of gender identity!

Straight men are attracted to things about me that they associate with women. Gay men are attracted to things about me that they associate with men. And so on. From there, it's always just been a matter of figuring out what (if anything) they want from me and what (if anything) I want from them—and what each of us actually has.

So I think you're right when you say that being attracted to men doesn't mean someone isn't a lesbian! That lesbian is probably attracted to things in men that said lesbian associates with women.

Pursuing a relationship is trickier.

Once you discover someone's gender, the things that initially attracted you to them don't go away—but it's possible for the gender alone to be an attraction-breaker. Same goes for discovering someone's sex, or build, or tendency to fart.

What breaks the attraction says as much about you as what created it in the first place, I think.

A lesbian and a gay man might be attracted to one another only to mutually lose the attraction once he realizes she's a woman and she realizes he's a man: or the attraction might persist because she's drawn to feminine things she perceives in him and he's drawn to masculine things he perceives in her. Once upon a time, they'd both carry on identifying as a lesbian and a gay man, even as they kissed or slept together. Some still do.

In the end, labels are created things that are only useful if the people who use them know what they mean—and the meanings change too often for me, at least, to get prescriptivist about them.

It's good to know where the next generation is heading with these labels!

As an autistic, my acute senses are a source of dismay for me more often than I'd like. (I'd like "never," thanks.)

One of the trials of my existence is how many people wear cheap fragrances. You can always tell a cheap fragrance—it smells bad. Like chemicals more often than not, yes, but also… just plain wrong.

Every human being produces their own unique odor blend.

You do, you know. You can't exactly help it. Comes with the body. Cheap perfumes and colognes aim to cover this odor, and succeed or fail, the end result makes my head pound and nostrils burn. Overpowering odors are not good for a sensitive nose.

People who make quality fragrances know that their product is only going to be half the final scent—so they chemically engineer something that'll mix well.

When I moved to my new apartment, I bought all my furniture off Amazon. It was cheap. It was convenient. I needed a bed, and didn't have a lot of money or time.

In so doing, I gave money to a man who apparently thinks it's fun to work people so hard they have to pee in bottles.

I funded that.

My money went to support that.

Oh, it didn't need my support. Amazon's doing just fine, and will continue to do so into the foreseeable future whether I buy stuff from them or not.

But I contributed all the same.

I did, frankly, a bad thing. I didn't have to give Jeff Bezos my money. I could have spent extra time sleeping on the floor, earning more money, looking for other places online, maybe giving up sleep to find something in one of the local, physical furniture stores, then spent extra money on more expensive furniture.

I could have done that. But I didn't want to. So I didn't. A teeny tiny fraction of Jeff Bezos' billions came from me. I funded his abuse of workers a little.

Some people would say that makes me just as bad a person as him. I don't think it does.

I didn't want to support him.

I didn't give him money because I wanted him to carry on abusing people. That's not what I paid for. No, what I wanted was furniture. I wanted it cheaply, I wanted it conveniently, I wanted it quickly. That's what I wanted.

I got what I paid for. What he did with my money after I gave it to him—I think that's a reflection of his character, not mine.

My character is this: I'll give money to someone who I'm reasonably certain will use it to hurt others if it's convenient for me. That's not good. But I'm not as bad as he is. In fact, in this instance I think I'm just as moral as very nearly everyone else on earth.