People are angry at me because I contradict them?

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Oddly enough I often get into those exact same problems with other autistic people. Because I have language issues that people who are hyper-precise about language don't have, and that makes my language imprecise in areas that are different both from the hyper-precise sort of autistic people, and from nonautistic people. And when it becomes a conversation about precision of language rather than about anything real, it sometimes makes me want to give up and not use language at all (and you'll note me saying as much occasionally on the forum when especially frustrated).

Usually when I end up correcting people, it's not that kind of situation at all. As in, it's not just about the words used, it's about something different that I don't even know how to define. (Of course I do have very serious language comprehension issues that can lead to misunderstandings, but that's a whole different area of problems, and the comprehension issues go much deeper than taking words literally (although that can happen too). My ability to express myself in words, at my best anyway, is way way way ahead of my comprehension. A lot of people don't understand that, or forget it even if they do understand, and therefore have unrealistic expectations of what I'll be able to understand, and that can cause a lot of problems. Most days in person, for routine interactions anyway, I am literally relying 95%-100% on a person's actions, and only climb up to words as a last resort.)

I have a friend who is the hyper-verbal hyper-rational sort of person, and it clashes so thoroughly with my way of processing the world that things get agitated between us at least once or twice for every hour we interact. I had a really difficult interaction with him recently, where he kept trying to analyze things to such a level that my head started spinning and I had to tell him to stop it because I was having trouble telling which way was up. And it was exactly as you described, things kept going in circles. And with my other friends, that sort of thing rarely happens. And if it does happen, we stop it as soon as we see it happening. And then we move on. This guy on the other hand has to analyze why it goes wrong. Not just why, but precisely why. In enormous amounts of detail. Going back to the exact moment one of us got agitated and dissecting our every move. It literally makes my head hurt. It's way easier for me to just say "Okay this is going nowhere" and drop it (regardless of what side I'm on) than it is for me to analyze the thing to death.

The situations that get me into trouble rarely work like that though. It's less about being hyper-verbal and pedantic, and more about thinking that I'm just adding more facts into the discussion. I rarely even view it at the time as correcting them. It's not about crossing out what they do and adding my own ideas in its place, it's more about simply adding my own ideas into the discussion and seeing where it goes. There's usually no anger or irritation towards the other person at all, neither obvious nor hidden. It's only in retrospect that I can even tell I would be perceived as doing any of that.

Other times, it's something that's really important to me, and I do say something on the order of "Hey, what you're saying, it doesn't match up with how things work." But even then, there's rarely any irritation or anger involved in what I'm saying. No desire to see the person hurt in any way. Sometimes, when I'm actually aware how it could be taken, I go out of my way to say "Hey, this is totally not personal, but I feel like I need to say this because it's {something really important to me / something that affects people in the real world when people believe things like that / etc.}." But that rarely works either.

One thing I've noticed is that nonautistic people get away with these things more often than I do. I do get away with these things most of the time, it seems to be a minority of people who perceive hostility in what I'm saying. But boy when they do perceive hostility, you should see how hostile they get in return, often escalating things no matter how profusely and sincerely I apologize. Whereas when I watch nonautistic people in these situations, they can often say the exact same thing I did, sometimes to that same person who became so hostile in response to me, and they can get away with it. My only guess has been that there's a particular set of signals people send out to signal they're "nice people", and that people who send out those signals can get away even with a shocking degree of true crueltty (as well as getting away with all the things I can't get away with), whereas I don't send those signals and often can't get away with things that have no cruelty attached at all. It's weird.

For many reasons, I really needed to read that right now. It's made several things "click into place" for me all at once. I've had some online social drama directed at me, to the point where my actions are characterized in negative ways that seem to match how people are treating me and talking about me. I mean, people are saying that my behavior indicates certain negative things are true about me because they can know my true intentions and thoughts behind those actions, while I am confused about what I really meant and can't possibly know without someone else to interpret my actions for me. However, their behavior toward me is actually somewhat explicitly what they say I'm doing implicitly - that is, they are trying to manipulate me into accepting a falsehood about myself as true (whether or not they believe this falsehood), and they expect me to support this falsehood to the point of insisting that I should put time and energy into it and waste my therapy on it, when there is nothing of the sort to be found.

I think one of those centrally involved in this does his best to portray himself as a "nice person," such as suggest at strategic moments that it's wrong to stigmatize people for mental illness, or that his goal in life is to help people (he's studying psychiatry), but at the same time I can see that he is being manipulative and nasty toward other people, having said when he didn't realize others might see later that autistic people are not really people and rather forceful attempts to convince me that I am wrong about everything about myself and that I need to listen to what he has to say because only he is rational and educated enough to interpret my life, whereas I myself am too emotional and too invested in particular diagnoses to be properly objective and cannot possibly understand what is going on. But no one seems to notice his behavior, and when I point it out, it's suggested he must really have benign reasons and that I just misunderstand his high pressure attempts to sell me his version of my reality.

This has been in the recent past, and I've probably referenced these same people in other ways, but this particular person has been on my mind a lot because of the downright unethical ways in which he's tried to convince me to interfere in my own mental health care, and his apparent belief that I am unable to see what he's doing. I've already seen him manipulate someone else (who is diagnosed with borderline personality disorder) into a full-blown ... I'm not sure what to call it, but there was a lot of anger and drama involved ... while claiming to be compassionate toward her situation, and yet no one else even acknowledges his role in what happened.

This is relevant to this thread as a lot of the trouble I've been catching is based on a couple of people (including the guy I mentioned above) interpreting my actions in a particular context and circulating this information for the past two months or more to continue compounding the impression that their perceptions of my actions are far more accurate than anything I may report about my actions (but never actually allowing me to clarify my actions, by keeping these rumors hidden). Further, the nature of these rumors is such that any denial or explanation on my part is seen to reinforce and confirm what they have been saying about me. It is also relevant because the starting point for these rumors was when something I said was misunderstood, I tried to clarify it, and was then characterized as deeply defensive because according to them, they had seen my true motives and I wanted to hide them.

Everything I say or do is interpreted as having nothing but subtext that I personally cannot even see. What you said about giving off the signals of a nice person while doing cruel things is one element that I've been trying to properly put into words. Further, I've seen others in this same social group do exactly the same things I have done, down to using the exact same phrases in the same situations, and no one comments or seems to even realize.

Opinions. The trick is to not confuse an opinion with a fact.

I find this is more a problem with NTs. I have had arguments (pointlessly, but I tend to get stubborn at times) over the fact that opinions can be factually wrong.