#devon price

[whatdoesbluemean]

i got an excellent high score in Shame according to the Devon Price Unlearning Shame workbook, which i am proud of and-

[the-sound-and-the-fury]

Weekly Reading Update - Friday 6/5/26

This is only the first week of the month, so I shouldn’t feel behind, but I accidentally started a bunch of books at the end of May and haven’t really made significant progress on any of them. Completed We Hexed the Moon by Mollyhall Seeley Rating: 4.0⭐⭐⭐⭐ I’ve been following the author online for literally years (ofgeography on Tumblr/Molly Ofgeography on Spotify), so I was really looking…

Weekly Reading Update - Friday 6/5/26

[passive-aggressive-ant]

Moving from “Who is Going to Save Me?” to “What Can I Do?”

Finding empowerment during the empire’s downfall.

[wildweaver16]

“Perfection has never earned any of us equality or safety.”

- Devon Price, PhD, “Unlearning Shame”

[youthrightsblog]

Episode 6 of the Youth Rights Podcast is out now: Dr. Devon Price on Youth Liberation

NYRA Members Rimon-Hadassah Walker, Susan Milton, and Imogen Gannon interview PHD, author and social psychologist Devon Price on youth liberation. Listen as we discuss youth rights and its connection to queer and neurodivergent activism. Check it out on Youtube and Spotify

[theslothfulsynapse]

A Very Important Rice Cake Mission & Some Other Things

Sun, Jan. 11, 2026

It’s just after midnight, I’m wide awake and energetic. Brain says I feel good enough to walk around the house. I don’t trust it.

My nesting partner just fell asleep and I played with my cat until he was done with that. I wonder if my body is going to choose daytime sleeping as its new normal...? I used to be a night owl, I felt so amazing being up in the night and sleeping most of the day when I was younger, midnight was my most creative time of day. My first job out of high school was the night shift at a nursing center as a certified nursing assistant. I really enjoyed it, I got to watch Adult Swim and write poetry in our down time, everything was quiet and chill (compared to the day shift I had in HS). Now-a-days I have no idea what my body is going to do from day to day or week to week... What a journey I’m on! 🤦😅

I’m listening to Devon Price in his book, Unlearning Shame and holy wow, just yes! I love his work and this book doesn’t disappoint. Here are some quotes from the book that resonated with me.

“In egalitarian cultures we see cooperation, moderate or negligible wealth inequality, shared or public resources, interconnectedness, recognition, many ways of behaving are seen as normal, rules are regularly questioned and reevaluated, there’s debate, discussion and social teachings that maintain the group norms, difference is tolerated or accepted, there’s sex positivity or neutrality, and we see that pleasure and rest are celebrated and mourning is shared.”

Listening to this I felt so validated and affirmed about a disabled Intentional Community speculative fiction story I’ve been working on. From everything I’ve learned to date, I somehow intuited his entire list and implemented all of these into the project before ever reading this book. So fucking impressed with myself!

“Agricultural and industrial societies are often larger and more diffuse than hunter gatherer ones so social norms can’t spread as easily within them. Instead, social values get transmitted by force, often using processes like incarceration, banishment, stigmatization, and shaming. […] breaking the rules of society meant you were hidden away rather than tended to and cared for by your community. Around this same time the concept of people being mentally disordered began to emerge.”

Listening to this I instantly recognized the ways in which I’m absolutely affected by every single one of these things. I have learned people are quick to judge and react, so I do not share my inner most thoughts with anyone I have not vetted. I do not want the shame, stigma, banishment, isolation or incarceration (in a prison or psych ward) from someone blindly reacting from their own systemic shame. Growing up I, like many kids, absorbed the messaging that it was indeed myself who was at fault when people shamed, banished and stigmatized me. Like all children, I knew I needed the caregivers in my life to love me so that I could be protected, fed, sheltered, cared for and not die from banishment and isolation if I was a “bad” kid (don’t even get me started on the internalized ableism I had). By the time I was an adult, I was playing the industrialized society game well but felt anxious all the time, it eventually broke me. Woof. I feel anger and heaviness that I associate with grief settling in.

These social norms show up loudly in online spaces. When I share a thought or idea—to feel the thrill of novelty and adrenaline, but also connection and camaraderie—my deepest desire is to be seen as well meaning, thoughtful, and adding benefit to a space. When I’m instead seen as harmful, to be publicly punished and banished, I collapse. I’ve become increasingly limited in what I share, what I look at and who I follow. I do not need any more shame in my life. I’m highly attuned to judgement (shame) and firmly believe, as the author does, that shame does not need to be used. I’m my opinion, shame NEVER needs to be used.

Something else I’m thinking about from the book is this concept of the ego (as it is colloquially used). I’ve never understood what people meant by ego. I’ve been thinking as of late, that people seem to use ego to refer to how they act when they’re behaving from a place of unaddressed subconscious shame (self hatred, self blame, self judgment, self preservation, and the fear of that being exposed). Outside of this, I’ve found no meta concept that makes any damn sense when people talk about ego. And (in my opinion) Devon Price affirms my understanding/definition of ego.

Now I’m thinking about the unnamed, unconscious, collective stigma towards people of color, especially here in the states. This, unfortunately is another systemic shame I learned as a child to fit in and survive. This unconscious racism that I learned was a protective mechanism that my childhood self imbibed, but not for nefarious reasons. I have so much compassion for my young self who was doing my best in a messed up system. I have compassion for myself now for unknowingly furthering racism, including toward myself! I’m proud of myself for doing what I can to be better than before.

How many times I needed to pee today:

1. 12a

2. 3a

3. 6a

4. 7a

5. 9a

6. 10p

7. 11:30p

I’m getting more comfortable with cutting my nails in the dark, without looking. It’s only taken a year 😅

I NEEDED a rice cake with sunflower seed butter. It sounded amazing earlier in the night but by the time my nesting partner woke up I could no longer wait for them. My body refused to eat anything else. So, with their help, they drew exactly where the items were in our kitchen and I went blindfolded in my wheelchair to retrieve them. It was nerve wracking as all hell but I made it! I fucking did it! No seizure, no energy crash! I fucking did it 😲😮🎉🥳

The sunflower seed butter tastes lightly sweetened. Though it says no added sugars and has less than 1g total sugars 🤷 I’m holding myself back from having more than three rice cakes with sfs butter, lest my stomach get irritated and I can’t eat them for a long time. This is already three times what I had the other day.

I got over 10 hrs of gloriously uninterrupted sleep 🤩🥳 feeling groggy still but happy

[in-search-of-understanding]

The Symbiotic Diagnosis: Why Most “Masking” Narratives are False

When clinicians become validators of identity rather than seekers of truth, the environment for true ASD becomes toxic.

Introduction: A Book That Cannot Be Read — Detecting Logical Noise

As a reader with a highly Systemizing Brain, reading Devon Price’s Unmasking Autism is an arduous experience. This difficulty does not stem from the complexity of the knowledge, but from the brain’s instinctual rejection of the text’s Low Signal-to-Noise Ratio.

When the author attempts to bundle all life dissatisfactions, social anxieties, and even resistance to basic etiquette into the framework of “Autistic Masking,” a reader with Pattern Recognition capabilities immediately detects an anomaly: This does not match the neural operating model of autism.

This raises a serious scientific and ethical question: Under the current medical system, what mechanism allows traits that are clearly non-ASD to receive the endorsement of an ASD diagnosis?

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The Symbiotic Diagnosis: From Differentiation to Empowerment

If we analyze this deeply, we find that the production of such diagnoses reflects a worrying trend in modern psychiatry: the radicalization of “Affirmative Care.”

This is not merely the failure of individual doctors, but a structural qualitative change in the doctor-patient relationship. When clinicians abandon strict Differential Diagnosis and instead become “Validators” of the patient’s self-identity, the diagnostic process ceases to be an objective pathological assessment and becomes an “Ideological Resonance.”

The doctor satisfies their own psychological need to “fight medical hegemony” by granting a label; the patient receives an exemption card, rationalizing all personality paranoia and emotional dysregulation as a manifestation of neurodiversity. It is a dangerous symbiotic relationship.

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Mistaking “Compliance” for “Masking” — The Tragedy of the Elite

We must probe deeper: Why do these academic elites, with PhDs and high social status, resonate so profoundly with the concept of “Masking”?

The truth may be more poignant than we imagine. It may not be a neurodevelopmental issue, but a traumatic legacy of family origin and educational upbringing.

Many of these “high-functioning” academics have lived their entire lives inside a script written by others — parents, teachers, societal values. They were trained from childhood to be machines that satisfy expectations, living within “conditional love.” What they call “Masking” is actually the operation of the “False Self” in psychology: to survive, they sacrificed their true selves to play a perfect role.

They are pitiful, their pain comes from living in others’ thoughts, never truly living for themselves.

But this is not autism. True autism (the Systemizing Brain) possesses a nearly stubborn “Anti-script” quality. When environmental logic conflicts with internal logic, systemizers often choose to “crash” or “refuse execution” rather than act to please. True ASD is ostracized for sticking too closely to the facts, not for losing oneself in compliance.

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The Polluters of the Environment: When Inclusion Becomes Persecution

Devon Price and the diagnosing physicians behind him may believe they are conducting a compassionate social movement. But for the true Systemizing Brain, this is a catastrophic Environmental Pollution.

What true autistics need are precise instructions, low-noise spaces, and respect for logic. However, when “Anxious Masking” hijacks the definition of ASD, society begins to mistake “Autism Friendliness” for “endless emotional labor and validation.”

This leads to a severe misallocation of resources: workplaces are no longer dedicated to establishing clear SOPs, but are forced to accommodate chaotic emotional boundaries. This culture, driven by misdiagnosis, is remodeling the environment to be even more “Hostile” to the Systemizing Brain.

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Conclusion: A Phenomenological Disconnect — When Narrative Diverges from Mechanism

In analyzing the psychological landscape presented by Devon Price, we find a distinct phenomenological pattern: an overwhelming emphasis on the fear of “social rejection,” persistent “self-monitoring,” and an identity crisis rooted in insecure attachment.

From a neuro-cognitive perspective, there is a significant logical disconnect between these psychological narratives and the underlying hardware of true ASD.

The insight to detect this incongruence stems from the automatic detection capabilities of my innate Systemizing Brain, combined with the precise decoding tools provided by my background in nursing and neuroscience. Nursing training has habituated me to penetrate a patient’s subjective complaints to see the underlying objective signs; the systemizing brain allows me to clearly see that the words in the book are nakedly displaying the neural circuits of anxious attachment and borderline traits.

This book may fool souls hungry for comfort, but it cannot fool a brain trained in science.

We choose to stand on the side of science and facts. Only by defending the rigorous boundaries of science can we build a survival environment based on truth, logic, and low noise for the truly neurodivergent.

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Finally, perhaps we can offer a piece of advice from Einstein to those deeply mired in “identity anxiety” and “self-monitoring”:

True autistics have long since forgotten the self in their pursuit of truth; those who remain obsessed with curating their self-image are, perhaps, light-years away from true neurodiversity.

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Content originated from a deep S-System calibration dialogue between Mifi, an adult Aspie, and the language model Gemini✨(Google). The content was systematically structured by Gemini and curated/validated against the internal S-Priority perspective by Mifi.

You’re welcome to share 🔗, but please credit both collaborators if you repost. Thank you! 🙏

[viciouslyrobotic]

It says something that Dr Price can openly admit it chose patriarchal masculinity in it's article regarding it's gender journey and extrapolate it's own experiences in doing so to imply that trans men (generally speaking) seek to obtain cis patriarchal power. Working out to 'pass' or 'obtain' the body of a 'man' is steeped in the patriarchal ideals cis men are expected to adhere to to be considered properly a 'man' because to be fat, to be scrawny, to be weak, is seen as 'other' in the eyes of patriarchy where a handful of a few cis perisex men are allowed its power unbridled thanks to their typically white affluent backgrounds.

It says something that Dr. Price spent it's time exploring masculinity choosing to do things that made it uncomfortable (wearing less flowy clothes and repressing it's more playful, silly, "effeminate" mannerisms for example) to abide by patriarchal gender rules and decided that was what (generalized) manhood amounted to be. That "After many years of trying, it seems to me that ‘manhood’ amounts to mostly this: harnessing the power that one holds over other people, particularly women, and repressing one’s weakness so that societal power does not go away." And I think as a feminist this is rather damning on it's part. Dr. Price chose a masculinity that patriarchy decided is what masculinity is (and should only be in the eyes of patriarchy) and came away with an answer one can clearly find Dr. Price always already believed; that men, masculinity and manhood are inextricably linked to power and the oppression of women.

It chose not to explore a masculinity that wasn't transmedicalist in nature. It chose to strive for a masculinity patriarchy doesn't punish via sanist, ableist, racist, intersexist, exorsexist, trans and queerphobic grounds. It chose to ignore other options and in doing so reveals it's own codependence on the system's dichotomy. I'm happy it explored its gender and body to find what worked for it and concluded what really made it feel at home in it's own skin.

I am not happy it continues to center patriarchy's version of masculinity and manhood as the only legitimate kind of masculinity and manhood. The very passing mention of feminist trans men creating a better manhood is made dismissively at best and revealing to Dr. Price's biases at worst because the too big irredeemable suit it adorned was the suit it didn't have to wear. It did not have to aim for what it did and from this article I think it's rather clear Devon Price hasn't done the work to decouple patriarchy from it's parasitism on gender let alone sex.

Yes, the kind of masculinity Devon Price chose to attain is irredeemable. Patriarchal masculinity cannot be redeemed because of it's self devouring and destructive nature, because of it's colonialist and supremacist history and continued purpose.

It is however not the only masculinity or manhood out there. It is not the only legitimate manhood and Dr. Price should not be speaking down to others about masculinity and manhood when the only kind it chooses to explore and acknowledge time and again is patriarchy's.