If it's not ok to complain about how people hold their cutlery, why is it ok to say it's rude not to meet someone's eye? That's a massive struggle for many of us (autistic/ADHD/shyness/social anxiety).
One rule for one thing and another for another.
I am betting you wouldn't go to Japan and start stabbing into your food with chopsticks and then telling any Japanese person who questioned it that it's FIIIIINE
I said it’s rude to stare at people’s hands INSTEAD of meeting their eye. I didn’t say that it’s rude to be glancing elsewhere in the room (even momentarily at their hands) or looking down at your own plate, for whatever need/choice/reason you have. My point was that, when you are interacting with fellow diners, you should not be fixated on their hands with a mind to judge them for how they hold their cutlery, if differently from you and thus considering your own desire for self-righteous arbitrary judgment of them and social shaming to be far more important than their comfort and, you know, treating them with respect as a valued individual when you interact with them.
I would certainly hope that a person with a medical or social reason for avoiding eye contact would receive and give respect for who they are, rather than feeling the need to ‘justify’ what does not need to be justified in themselves by turning it into criticism of another person’s needs or comforts. "Yes, I may have social anxiety, but at least I'm not left handed." It’s not a social competition.
I am British and speak as a middle-aged Brit with lifelong experience of British culture. I do not presume to speak for any other nations’ cultures and would, of course, fit in with them or, if I felt I couldn’t, not go there in the first place. As a Brit (and I’m assuming that you are as well?), I don’t accept your beliefs or rules on an acceptable way around for you to hold your cutlery as having any more or less worth than mine for me – or anybody else’s – in our own country and culture. Nobody likes obsessively controlling people.
The big difference is that I am not telling anybody else that their way is wrong; however many British people on this thread are presuming to tell me, a fellow Brit, that my way is categorically wrong in British culture/etiquette/judgmental fault-finding missions or whatever!!. It’s like saying that anybody who doesn’t have the exact same name as you doesn’t actually have a proper valid name at all!
Of course I wouldn’t go to Japan and start stabbing with chopsticks, any more than I would hold a knife by the blade and a fork by the tines in my own country and try to bash at the food and spear it with the blunt end of the utensil. What a bizarre conclusion to reach! We’re talking about holding normal hand-held cutlery in your hands to enable normal dining – anybody would think I’d proposed that we use a trowel and fork from the potting shed with a matching Stanley knife….