thanks for pointing this out—I think this is a key point AND I think it is inflected by gender. My guess (not being an expert on autism, but being somewhat of an expert on gender) is that women who are autistic are more likely to learn, over time, how to display and react to emotion “like normal people”, because women build social capital through relational and emotional actions. Personal experience (I am a woman, to a first degree approximation): as a child I did not really understand emotion / generally felt aversive when other people expressed it. Over time I learned how to feel / respond to others’ emotions in a socially normative way, through observation and self-reflection and learning.
This is not to say that those of us in EA who are naturally different w.r.t. our emotional processing should feel bad/abnormal, but to say that EA would be a more welcoming community, especially to women, if people in EA learned how to process and respond to “normative” emotional expressions. Someone above said that EAs see debate as an expression of caring, and I (a) am the same way and (b) understand that most people are not! I’ve learned to ask “are you looking for discussion and finding solutions together, or are you not ready for that yet?” (Similarly, people with more normative emotional expression entering EA should learn to ask/adapt to the person they’re talking to.) I’ve been in spaces that I think are very good at this and have a cultural norm of it.
thanks for pointing this out—I think this is a key point AND I think it is inflected by gender. My guess (not being an expert on autism, but being somewhat of an expert on gender) is that women who are autistic are more likely to learn, over time, how to display and react to emotion “like normal people”, because women build social capital through relational and emotional actions. Personal experience (I am a woman, to a first degree approximation): as a child I did not really understand emotion / generally felt aversive when other people expressed it. Over time I learned how to feel / respond to others’ emotions in a socially normative way, through observation and self-reflection and learning.
This is not to say that those of us in EA who are naturally different w.r.t. our emotional processing should feel bad/abnormal, but to say that EA would be a more welcoming community, especially to women, if people in EA learned how to process and respond to “normative” emotional expressions. Someone above said that EAs see debate as an expression of caring, and I (a) am the same way and (b) understand that most people are not! I’ve learned to ask “are you looking for discussion and finding solutions together, or are you not ready for that yet?” (Similarly, people with more normative emotional expression entering EA should learn to ask/adapt to the person they’re talking to.) I’ve been in spaces that I think are very good at this and have a cultural norm of it.
This is an important consideration, thanks for bringing it up! I pretty much agree with all of it.