Oo, yeah, I remember disliking the over-the-top praise.

Arch

I asked my parents what names they were thinking of before the genital reveal and just picked one. I think the limited choices helped me actually commit to one.

Let’s reframe that. Instead of thinking “I don’t have much dysphoria so maybe I’m not trans” you should ask yourself “what do I think I can do to have the most enjoyable life possible?”.

You’re allowed to change your mind, you’re allowed to make suboptimal decisions, and most decisions are reversible so for those you don’t really have to consider long-term consequences. If you want to identify some way, even just to test it out, go for it! You can change that later if it doesn’t fit, and there’s not much harm to it. Even if you’re mistaken, it usually just means you ended up experiencing more awkward time than necessary, not much of a consequence.

The hardest part is probably gonna be getting over the fear of being wrong, of feeling like you lied to people. You didn’t, there’s nothing wrong with being mistaken. But I know the brain gets anxious over it 🫂. I hope you have a wonderful life wherever it takes you.

I’d love to be able to ask directly, but my fear is they’ll treat me differently after I ask. It’s already happened once to me; a friend stopped hanging out with me for a while (I think that’s fixed now, but it lasted months). I feel a bit safer about it around autistic people though, because I’m pretty sure a rejection would be just a “no” and then we proceed like nothing happened.

Sometimes the true answer is “idk” and I’d rather hear that than false and contradictory rationalizations for why they’re mad.

Given the demographics of Linux devs, it probably would be the latter.

And you can’t just ask because, like measuring a quantum system, measurement perturbs the system.

“Bazinga”

Biology, such as how much the body responds to hormones and how that destroys the idea of binary sex.

I get colder more easily now but my heat tolerance hasn’t changed :(

Eldritch horror beyond mortal comprehension

Overwhelming emotions all the time that she cannot explain or process… the only answer she comes to is IDK.

Open-ended questions can be hard. Perhaps you can ask a series of simpler questions, such as “are you feeling good/bad/neutral/idk?” with follow ups for emotions like happy, sad, excited (can be good/bad/neutral), tired, etc. If you’re asking to gauge her response to something, consider asking something like “is this a good/bad/neutral/idk thing” and digging deeper into what aspects are good/bad; then you can ask about concrete plans like “should we seek/avoid that?” or “should I stop/continue that?” and elaborate further on how you should try to achieve those.

Of course, there is a risk of overwhelming her with questions, so you should probably monitor for symptoms and behaviors that indicate she’s getting more overwhelmed, or even just ask.

Jumping off of what you said: I feel a lot more comfortable when people are very clear and direct about expectations. I hate the feeling that I might be doing something wrong but I’m unsure.

People: hey you should think about this a bit and consider changing it to have a small positive impact

You: 🤬

Nobody’s forcing you to, nobody’s yelling at you, if you don’t do it it’s not a massive deal, you’re just yelling at clouds. Actually that’s not entirely true; I’m yelling at you because of your absurd overreaction to the mere idea of being a little thoughtful.

I don’t know if you got it from media, or you heard about this movement and for some reason immediately jumped to “they’re forcing us!”, but you really need to do some self reflection on why you got it so wrong and why you were so quick to do this outburst.

I see mostly people defending master starting arguments. I’ve never seen anyone pushing for main get even half as mad as some of the people coming up with a reason why it’s stupid. Like, holy shit guys, just don’t change it and move on, why be so mad about it?

Maybe you can tell them how they’re making you feel? It’s plausible they could be trying to accommodate you but in a way where they make bad assumptions rather than asking you. If so, maybe they’ll listen.

At the very least, even if asking burns the friendship even more, you’ll have some data to predict how someone might think in another/future friendship.

That doesn’t negate the good times. I remember when I struggled to make friends, and most of my “friends” weren’t really friends, but it was still better than nothing.

My type of person! Same!

tbf, most of my stuff also felt like not a huge deal at the time, I just had no point of reference to see how bad it really was. Now that I have a reference, I see that the gap between being fine and being very not fine is much smaller than I’d thought for most of my life, it’s not like it’s gatekept behind suffering Enough™. I guess the same sentiment goes for gender, autism, and a bunch of other things.