Since her parents sent her to a Catholic school that taught OP to be unassertive and have poor boundaries it is very possible they share this approach, and her father’s response suggests this.
OP is well old enough to deal directly with Barn Manager and trainer without a Mama Bear in her corner.
Also parents responses can be very unpredictable on a scale of dismissal to over reacting or blaming child. It doesn’t sound like a home environment where she will get optimum support and advice.
I think it’s quite commendable that she is taking this head on herself too.
While @eightpondfarm’s comment was ridiculous, she has said many times that she is autistic and has a hard time reading social cues, can we stop piling on her already? I am sure she has figured out by now that was a misstep.
That’s not a defense and it’s abhorrent to suggest it is.
I wrote a letter to my parents when I was 11, I think? Detailing how the barn owner was cornering me in the shed and groping me. Apparently some think I should have told the 50 some odd year old grandfather that groping young women was wrong 
but anyway I wrote it and put it in my mom’s change compartment in her wallet, knowing she would find it very soon. My parents immediately moved the horse into our backyard for a night or 3 while they found somewhere else to board her. That was 1981, I think.
Please write them a letter on paper and give them a chance to hear you, IF you feel safe and supported in doing so. I was scared, so scared I would lose my horse over it for being such trouble. But I took that risk and it was worth it. For you, the letter might be handed to your BM or BO, because saying these things out loud is HARD and it is easy to get nervous and jumbly.
Be strong, youngster. Be strong.
It’s literally a disability that makes it very difficult for the disabled person to know what is OK to say or over the line! I think it’s abhorrent not to have a little grace here for that poster and let it go.
Many threads we question whether a scenario is real. The poster may have a hard time understanding why it is OK in those threads but not this one.
These aren’t social cues. These are words expressing concern about harassment trending toward sexual harassment. She believed the OP then decided maybe it was made up. That’s not the spectrum talking.
Imagine how different the world would be if we taught our sons that women are fully autonomous creatures and not men’s property. Having to say, “No,” to a grown-assed man bordering on a grope means he’s already assumed he’s taking what’s his right up until someone stops him.
Though I’m not at the bottom of the thread yet, I had to respond to the low-key internalized misogyny of this statement.
The patriarchy is seriously bumming me out lately.
What’s happened in a few comments in this thread has a name: internalized misogyny. Sarah Silverman is among the public figures who has been calling it out for decades.
This poster went up in my college freshman dorm, and it was a revelation to me. It didn’t prevent a date-rape five years later by a neighbor boy I’d known for a decade, but I’ve never spent a single second blaming myself for his criminal behavior.
Women who think we women have to change our behavior to accommodate the abominations of the patriarchy have embraced the system and likely benefit from it. See: Ginny Thomas, Phyllis Schlafly, Marsha Blackburn, I could go on.
Glad to know you are an expert on autism and are able to read the poster’s mind and evaluate that it absolutely wasn’t a comment affected by her disability that commonly results in “sometimes do (or say) things that are considered inappropriate, if not downright offensive, simply because they are unaware of how objectionable such things are to most people .” —quote from autism support group website.
I have no such powers myself and prefer to give her the benefit of the doubt.
Maybe some grace from YOU as many of us have horrible triggered reactions to such BS that she doled out. I’ve been date raped, molested, harassed, you name it. I’ve had the friend’s boyfriend griding his junk against me while she was having an asthma attack and when i told him off he told me it wasn’t bothering me. So yeah, for me, i had years and years of mental anguish and more that is not going to get shared here but yeah…i have no qualms about what i posted or concerns about what you think of it.
Giving people the benefit of the doubt for saying absolutely abhorrent things does no-one any good service.
Telling people who say abhorrent things that the thing they said is abhorrent can at least be educational.
How about do your part to shake rape culture, misogyny, and the objecting of people the hell out of our society? Making excuses doesn’t help anyone except to help ensure that crappy things like that get said again and excused again and said again and excused again. Stop the cycle.
I understand your position, but you don’t know if other people here are on the spectrum. Not putting it out on a BB doesn’t mean there’s only one person here who’s autistic. The OP could be autistic for all we know.
OP I hope you find the strength to tell your BO be it in person or through email or whatever. I also agree with @LCDR with finding another barn. Not because of retaliation but because the situation might not be resolved to your satisfaction.
Be safe and you have a whole lot of people here willing to listen and let you scream into the void if it comes to that.
We already did that. It’s been done. We don’t need another 25 posts piling up on her.
I am sorry for OP, sorry for anyone who has been assaulted (and I include myself in that category as I was attacked as a teen in a barn)…but bullying the disabled isn’t a good look for us. Can we just get back to helping OP now?
I’m pretty sure she’s here posting because that option is either not emotionally relevant or available to her.
Is everyone just supposed to automatically know if a poster is autistic? You might know, but before you shared that information, the rest of us obviously didn’t. These aren’t people we see or interact with every day. I’ve been a member, mostly quietly, on this BB for a long time, and while I recognize some posters’ names, I’m not going to remember everyone’s backstory.
It sure doesn’t seem like there was any “piling on” after you informed everyone that the poster is autistic.
How does that make a difference? We know that poster is autistic. Maybe I am defensive because I have a friend who is autistic and sometimes says things out loud that she really shouldn’t. So I explain it to her, she apologizes, and we let it go because there is genuinely no malice involved. And then she knows.
What happens to my friend is that concern about her doing this causes her to have severe anxiety about speaking in public to the extent that society has effectively silenced her. She would never post on COTH for instance, because of bullying over unintended mistakes when she was young. She’s a really smart person, though, and the world would be better off if her voice was in it—even if she had to occasionally apologize for not “getting” social context.
It concerns me when we take one validly vulnerable population and use it to silence another. That is all I am saying.
Maybe they just wanted to ask other horse people who weren’t in their barn
Ford Tractor you do not know that everyone here knows about that poster’s autism.
She has every opportunity available to her in order to apologize to the OP. She can do that.
Holding someone accountable is not the same thing as bullying and piling on. Your friend learns because you correct her/inform her.
Can we please be done with this.
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