My awareness of disparity between my inner sense of personhood and society's definition of boy-man was vivid for me long before I was 18 months of age. Both of my parents observed that I had not gone through the infant-child t transition, or, as my mother sometimes called it, the terrible twos.
Never having made the infant-child transition, there was no way for me to achieve the child-adolescent or adolescent-adult transitions. While inconsequential trivialities tend not to register clearly in my recallable memories, I find I have none of the usual amnesia for early life experiences that seem to me to be ordinary, if not virtually universal, in the lives of people who do the infant-child-adolescent-adult transitions in socially typical ways.
To me, the core issues of personal identity with respect to society arise very early in life, and are not much accessible to people who do the infant---adult transition sequence in the socially approved manner. However, the way and manner in which I find that I am autistic may have allowed me to retain a usefully clear understanding of why, presented with the choices of transitioning (by which I mean both infant---adult and MtFtE), I chose, with very deliberate and conscious will, to avoid
put considerable investment into thought, emotion, cognition, affect and plausible consequences in terms of MtFtE.
The events of my life strongly inform me that the reason for objections arising regarding the minor-themed stories is their tending to remind people who transitioned from infant to child to adolescent to adult by using forms of amnesia (or neurological trauma responses?) to keep secret from self the traumatic aspects of the process of infant---adult transitions.
The usual infant-child-adolescent-adult social stage transitions are obviously not necessary for a person to live a life experienced as decent and well worth living, and this being obvious is demonstrated by my living a life which I experience, and have always experienced, as decent and well worth living. Not only that, but it seems terribly clear to me that, had I done the infant-child transition in any way approximating what appears to me to be commonplace, I surely would have experienced my life as being far less decent and vastly less worth living than has been true for me.
I harbor the notion that a person's awareness of any event is the result of a complex sequence of aspects of biological process. While I allow that it is commonplace to hold that people's perceptions of events are what people attend to, I have a rather different notion which works for me.
To illustrate, suppose there is an event which gets a person's attention. What are the steps involved in the person's observing the event? I find it somewhat useful to parse the process of observation into a neurological process that makes somewhat useful sense to me.
There is the event itself, which, for the person to become aware of it, has to activate sensory neurons. These sensory neurons have to activate afferent (toward the brain) pathways, and t he arrival of such activation (afferent action potentials?) at the brain and the brain's becoming alerted to them is perception. However, observation is usefully, for me if for no one else, found to be made of two main aspects, recognition and noting. If the brain becomes alerted and nothing is noted (no memory or memories formed), then no observation has occurred.
Recognition is, for me, the sequence of event, sensation, action potentials, perception, and interpretation. Interpretations are of denotations (words not needed) and connotations (words required).
For an observation to exist, the memory of the interpretation has to be remembered, and memory is, I observe, invariably reconstructive, and the reconstruction of a memory involves some event activating the brain region holding the memory, this activating event results in that brain region effectively sensing the memory, the sensed memory activating action potentials which are perceived and interpreted; the interpretation of a memory is never identically the interpretation of the original event made during the forming of the initial brain memory pattern.
The MoM is soon to happen. Whether I will be a useful participant at the MoM is yet to be learned. What I do resoundingly know, am very familiar with, and profoundly understand is of the relationship between the minor-themed stories and aspects of social tradition which I find tend to result in devastating forms of brain damage which tend to be concealed within reality-distorting, socially-mandated psychological defenses.
I set out, with conscious intent, to learn what would happen in my life were I to ferret out every psychological defense mechanism I could locate and leave it out of my life and my adaptation to life. Of course, I was emphatically informed that living without psychological defenses was impossible. However, I figured that distortions of reality may be what makes some people experience life as being far more difficult than I have experienced it, and the notion that living without psychological defenses was impossible, I took to be a plausibly testable hypothesis.
It is my observation that psychological defenses are trauma responses; survival responses to life events which are significantly brain damaging, and which are often acquired and developed in consequenc
scientifically-neurologically absurd beliefs which are part and parcel of a supposed social contract.