I know first-hand how much it hurts to have set something up and then nobody else attends. I wouldn't wish that experience on anybody. I felt like a speck of dust that everybody else had trod into the ground.

I'm a female but experienced embarrassment on my own part, and disgust and shaming from others, about being a virgin until I was 30. But it's so important not to have sex just to have it. Your first experience so often shapes how you view sex, and yourself, for a long time. One example is young gay males whose first experience is something empty and anonymous, and they come to think real love is never possible for them. They end up thinking the "cruising" life is all they deserve, and engage in some really risky behaviors, all because their first guy dictated the terms of the encounter and made it about his own gratification. Straight women can be that nasty to straight men too, so please be careful.

The people you have heard those horrible messages from were not speaking any version of truth, Lundi. Please don't believe them, and please don't think that all people are like that. They feel small and insecure and handle it by going on the attack rather than tackling their own brokenness. A quote may help you here: "Genuine goodness is threatening to those at the opposite of the moral spectrum." I forget who said that one.

It hurts the worst when you hear those messages from family members, especially if you feel you're outnumbered, or that it would be wrong to speak back to them. I have no advice to give on that one, save to hold to your own truth no matter what they say. A lot of people in these modern, unstable times are feeling lost and insecure, that the world is shifting beneath our feet and we have so little to hold onto anymore. Ripping other people apart is how some people boost their own egos. It sucks, but it's about them, not about the targets of their aggression. That's a lesson that took a long time to sink in with me, and I absorbed a lot of the negative messages I heard from other people. Not only that, but I repeated them to myself and smashed apart my own self-esteem. Please don't repeat my mistake! You're an awesome person and deserve to tell yourself that.

You're certainly right that it's hard to compare different people's particular difficulties. The arm or leg amputation is a very apt analogy. Everybody, no matter their specific struggle, would do well to remember that suffering is universal, no matter what form it takes. We can't fall to arguments about which group of people has suffered the most. That only invalidates everybody's pain.

You're certainly right that just because someone is a scientist, does not mean they live by reason or good character. Mengele and Ishii are not the only ones of their line, nor will they be the last. Intelligence, education, and training are all nothing more than tools, and it depends on the person's integrity whether those tools are used to improve people's lives or to destroy them.

It might be good to do some searches for conferences and such for people with ASD. I can't think of any specific names right now. FB probably has something, but I don't know, I'm not on that platform. Meetup.com is, as we have discussed, designed for the over-the-top extroverted NTs. Some people who consider themselves super open-minded have their own specific biases that they refuse to acknowledge. I see this first-hand all the time. I work as a custodian at a university and see how professors behave who consider themselves open-minded and free of bias. They'll be perfectly friendly to a black or Hispanic custodian, but rude to one who is white or Asian unless that person is an immigrant. That shows their racism: they consider the job appropriate for someone black or brown or an immigrant, but a native-born white or Asian person is supposed to have achieved more, and if they "failed" to do so, it's because they're lazy/stupid/etc. And some display open disgust and contempt to anyone in a working-class position there, as do the middle-class white students.

ASD is highly stigmatized in a culture that demands effortless, tip-top social skills as a measure of human worth. STEM careers are usually touted as a good path for those on the spectrum, but that discrimination exists in those fields too. All I can suggest is to find your niche, and don't listen to those trying to rip you down. You're going through a rough time right now and they're only making it harder. I really think you will flourish once you find your place of belonging. That's something we all need. Keep looking forward to your further schooling! You could find your right people and environment there.