I get accused of playing Devil's advocate a lot...

One of the things that chatacterizes Autism spectrum disorders is difficulty in understanding or accurately reproducing unspoken social rules (e.g. maintaining eye contact, picking up on or displaying gendered body language, intuitively grasping fashion, etc.)

So a very common foundational experience for people on the spectrum is that of accidentally transgressing social norms over and over again, and having their peers punish them for it. Because school age children are very attentive towards those social cues this punishment can extend to physical violence.

What I mean is, the other little boys catch you singing a song from My Little Pony, and they all make fun of you, or maybe they even hit you.

And it really hadn't occurred to you that boys weren't supposed to enjoy My Little Pony.

And that happens again and again as you go through grade school and middle school. Often, even when you try to be cool or normal, it comes off as a Tommy Wiseau-ish parody of coolness, and people make fun of you some more.

But the key is, you don't know when it's coming and, at least at the beginning, you aren't even trying to provoke it. You aren't trying to be different from the squares and the popular kids, you just can't seem to figure out how to be like them.

This can make you very gun-shy once you grow up and get older, because growing up you learned that the reliable way to be safe and secure was to avoid people. Adults would tell you to be more normal, sometimes even how to do it, but it never seemed to work well enough to really get you out of things.

You'd be walking happily along and then suddenly step on a land mine and everything would blow up again.

Anyway, that's how it happened for me.

And so I get extremely skeptical when people start from a premise of, "Of course people know that they're transgressing boundaries, they know better so whatever we do to them is fine."

Last year (the year before?) I was very viscerally frightened of being attacked by the Portlanders protesting against the Proud Boys.

Not because I support the Proud Boys or because I like a bunch of right wingers starting shit in Portland because it will get them on the news, but because of the story of Paul Welch, a guy who carried a US flag to a protest in order to show that right wingers don't own the flag, and got hit in the back of the head by his fellow left wing protestors so hard that he got a concussion.

When I share fears like that with my allistic friends and family, they have trouble understanding where that fear comes from and why.

The worst and scariest response is from the people who say that it was a proportional response. You're being crazy to get so nervous about this because at the end of the day if a bunch of people surround and bludgeon you that's just no big deal compared to the real problems happening in the country.

Less bad, but more common and still upsetting are the people convincing you that you wouldn't make that exact mistake. "You understand how the optics of what Welch did could have been confusing, right?" "Well, yeah..." "And you wouldn't have done that, right?" "No, probably not..." "So why are you afraid?"

What I have trouble getting people to understand is that I'm not afraid of doing that exact thing.

I am trying to probe what the general attitude is towards people who do something wrong in a community.

I'm not going to carry an American flag at a protest. But there's a good chance I might say something that I don't realize is offensive, or do something that I don't realize is offensive, near or during a protest, because I don't have a good grasp on what symbols and ideas do or don't offend people.

Same is true around lots of issues.

I'm not afraid I'll do the exact same thing that I'm confused about or seem to be defending; I'm afraid I'll do some unknown thing that will look similar enough that people will react the same way.

I'm not comfortable in a community that claims to know me so well that they're sure I would never do anything to make them really angry, I'm comfortable in a community that can explicitly say what the big no-nos are and won't justify violence against me if I happen to break some unspoken rule.