It means that the person you are talking to believes that you're just making polite conversation because you're uncomfortable with silence. They are letting you know that they would prefer you didn't make conversation, because they prefer silence to idle chatter.
I have very good spatial awareness, but it's non visual. I can navigate my way mentally through a spaxe and "feel" where the walls are without seeing them. I have a sense of how big something is compared to something else and where they are relative to each other in space, but all non visually.
And I can rotate objects in my mind and change my perspective around them, but all without any visual elements.
I can sense the mental cube, but I can't see it. It has no colour, no texture etc. Imagine a sort of mental bat sonar?
No, I don't get a sense of awe or beauty from reading things. I can appreciate when the folks I'm reading about experience those emotions, but I don't feel them, because there is nothing to inspire them in me.
Which is why I tend to prefer books that go in to more depth about what people are thinking and feeling than books that go in to lots of visual detail
I'm sorry it played out that way for you, but even so, what you're advocating for hurts people too. Even if that's not your intention, it still does, and I think that's something that should be part of your consideration when approaching this topic.
I'm sorry it hurt you, but I'm not going to ignore stuff that hurts my community
I can think of words, I just don't think I'm words. And when I think of a word I can run them together in a sentence. But they have no "sound". They don't have volume or pitch, they don't sound like anyone, they're just the idea of words. And because the words are after the fact, they don't exist without me willing them in to existence. So no monologue in the way people describe it, and the idea of a conversation in my head doesn't make sense. It would be more like writing a script for a conversation
Like most folk with aphantasia, I thought that people talking about “seeing things in their imagination” were just being dramatic and using common language. It never occurred to me that they could genuinely see things in their minds. And the whole thing where people would be upset when a character in a TV show or movie didn’t look like how they’d imagined they would look, never made sense to me. And shows where people could recall the details of peoples faces for police sketch artists…
Basically, moments like that started adding up over my life, and then about 10 years ago, I read an article from someone who had discovered they had aphantasia through a similar path, and it all just fell in to place.
The first half of your post is you talking about trauma you’ve received from other people, telling you that you’re wrong/evil/broken/perverted etc.
The second half of your post is explaining how you think it’s ok for you to do the same thing to others, because you do it “for the right reasons”
When you confront a bigot with transphobia pushed to the extreme, what you do is add to the trauma that every trans person already has to deal with daily. You don’t magically convert someone from bigotry. Bigots aren’t bigots because they reasons their way in to bigotry, and so you can’t stop them from being bigots by reasoning them out of it.
Folks like you and the hundred other people also "just asking questions" or playing devils advocate" and expecting trans people to engage in a debate as to whether or not we actually deserve equal rights is exactly why this shit never works.
It's interesting to you because it's purely intellectual. To the person having to endlessly argue that they do in fact deserve equal rights, it's a shit fucking experience that we actively seek to disengage from when possible, because it's all around us, all the time.
You see, I’m an anarchist. I trust in the power of people to self-organize, self-regulate, and self-police. I am philosophically opposed to whole instances making the call to defederate from another no matter how Nazi or capitalist that instance is.
That's great, but it's not for everyone. What you're saying here is that when bigots appear, every member of the minorities they target needs to individually block the troll, which they can only do after they've been exposed to the bigotry, and which doesn't help them at all in the future when the troll moves to a new throw away account.
Counter intuitively, what you're asking for is exactly how you create spaces that actively discourage diversity.
I'm on holidays at the moment and on the road today, but I've got some ideas that might be helpful. When we're setup for the evening, I'll reply to you in more detail.
The short version is, that I’m not keen on a bot that just replicates content from reddit (the fediverse has a long history with those, and lots of people have lots of very strong opinions, which overshadow the problem the bot is ostensibly trying to solve).
However, any and all of those groups are welcome here officially or unofficially. It may involve manually posting and pinning a lot of the content and resources from the original subs, but as long as that is done with consent, we’re happy for it to be here.
Honestly, if you want them here, and you have the support of the existing reddit mods, I would suggest creating the groups here and getting them going. You can always add other moderators, and even hand the groups over to someone else if you want to step away.
All I know is that I'd rather be here than not be here. It doesn't get much deeper than that for me.