madeofpatterns:

mwap:

unknought:

I don’t know all of these things with certainty, but I believe they are all true, and it would be nice if people stopped treating them as contradictory.

• Talking over people, condescending to them, not responding to signs of discomfort, etc., can and do cause harm.
• Autism and autistic traits tend to make people more likely to engage in these behaviors.
• These behaviors can also be made more likely by one person assuming that that the other person can’t have anything worthwhile to say, or by one person treating the other person’s feelings as unimportant. These attitudes, in turn, can be made more likely by certain social privileges including class privilege and male privilege.
• People are often not consciously aware of the ways in which classism and sexism cause them to downplay certain perspectives, so these can be a factor even in the absence of malicious intent.
• Any individual instance of these behaviors might be influenced by multiple factors including the ones given above and others.
• Behaviors associated with autism are typically stigmatized as weird and embarrassing even when they don’t harm other people.
• Some of the stigma associated with the behaviors under discussion is rooted in ableism and the punishment of certain kinds of weirdness.
• Some of the stigma against condescension, ignoring discomfort, and talking over people derives from the actual harm these behaviors cause to other people.

Musings/potential elaboration: Within the subset of “neurodivergent people who talk over others,” I would add that lots of interpersonal and gender differences can probably be attributed to a kind of predictive shame. I’m hesitant to draw any sweeping conclusions, but I’ll say that most people I know who fit into said subset fall into one of two categories: the “I’m just going to embarrass myself so I won’t say anything on the off-chance I’ll be rude” type and the “normies have it out for me, they just don’t get my interests” type. And while I’ll concede that there’s almost definitely a gender-socialization thing going on there, I think it’s interesting that both cases are still grounded in the knowledge/expectation that the behavior is stigmatized and unwanted, not in classic entitlement. 

Another addition is:

There are different cultural norms about how conversations work.

In some cultures, you’re supposed to wait your turn. In others, you’re supposed to jump in and interrupt each other.

Neither is wrong.

Harm is often done when people aren’t playing by the same set of cultural assumptions.