#and blaming ace people for all the problems that allos caused

[redysetdare]

I keep seeing posts where people are saying "Valentines doesn't effect asexuals!" "romantic relationships have nothing to do with asexuality!" And while i understand the point they are making is to stop conflating Aromanticism with Asexuality, it is still extremely annoying to find people don't understand the nuance that comes with asexualities connection to romance - because it DOES have a connection to it. It DOES have problems in relation to romance. To say it doesn't is ignoring a huge set is experiences that ace people face.

One of the most common experiences for asexuals is the struggle to be in romantic relationships because they are asexual. a lot of romantic relationships expect you to have sex. if you're someone who doesn't have sex then unfortunately that causes a lot of people to lose interest in you romantically as well.

There's also non-sam aces, and let me tell you it's so very strange to hear someone bring up non-sam aros but then ignore the existence of non-sam aces in order to prove some point of it somehow being ace peoples fault that aro and ace are viewed as the same. Some non-sam aces do not date either. they are still ace and they can still face similar problems to aromantic people because of that. they are still effected my amatonormativity.

Aces DO have connection to romance. Asexual DID have a reason to trend on valentines day along with Aro and Aroace. Asexuality is effected my romance and amatonormativity. Sop acting like it isn't. stop acting like aros and aces have absolutely nothing in common. We can work together and have similar experiences and still be seen as separate identities. there is overlap. stop treating this as black and white where one identity can only be effected by one kind of problem. It's naive at best and down right hateful at worse.

#text #aro #ace #aromantic #asexual #aroace #aspec #i might get hate for this one but as an aroace who for a while was a non-sam ace (before i found out about aro) #romance DOES effect aces #not in the same way that it effects aros but #treating aces as if they can never know or understand amatonormativity and have never faced similar issues? idk it's ignorant to me #some of the way ppl in the aro community talk about asexuality and aroace identities is just...idk frustrating #i understand the frustration on their end but also i need you all to not fall down the rabbit hole of becoming acephobic #and blaming ace people for all the problems that allos caused #and understand there is nuance to identities and just because someone is asexual alloromantic #doesn't mean they aren't effected by amatonormativity or that they have no issues related to romance at all #asexual and Aromantic are not the same thing but also stop acting like they have no overlap at all period #we used to help each other man. stop throwing some of us under the bus to try and make a point #romantic expectations are not an aro only problem

[thecommunityoftrustworthysinks]

the older i get the more i look back at ace discourse and wonder what the hell that was on. “aces are valid but not lgbt” what does that MEAN? what does “being lgbt” even MEAN? it’s not like there’s some lgbt center that you go to and officially register as LGBT™️.

the conception of “lgbt” as a consistent defined thing is even murky at best, especially those supposedly “formed to combat homophobia and transphobia.” where? when?

i understand we lost a generation to the aids epidemic and that is such a tragedy and makes us disconnected from our history, but records still exist. read them. the community wasn’t some official thing with well defined borders and subcategories. everything was in motion! things overlapped all the time! communities, identities, people. gay men and trans women. bi women and lesbians. gay men and bi men. bi people and ace people (yeah they were there). trans people and gay people. trans men and lesbians. lesbians and ace women. genderqueer people and drag performers. even straight people who participated in the community or had friends in it were around! what they had in common was they didn’t perform gender and sex congruence and heteronormativity the way allocishet people did. that’s what they had in common. and there were still exclusionary movements. radical feminism and its desire to wipe out trans people and bi women from the community is a HUGE one, so the idea that The Community was “founded to combat homophobia and transphobia” is just so laughably wrong on that note alone!

and so when people today try to say The Community is for one thing in particular, no not you we don’t have “room” for you, no not like that you’re ruining our image, no you can’t be that that’s contradictory, etc etc, i just....please read some history. open your head and heart a little bit. trying to force people to designate themselves by particular things has never been helpful. trying to bar people from help they need is never good.

so what if bisexual and pansexual mean about the same thing. if someone isn’t picking one over the other because of a particularly hateful reason, who cares? so what if someone is trans masc and a lesbian? maybe that’s how they understand themself best. i don’t get it, and i don’t have to. it’s not my identity. so what if someone calls themself a bi lesbian? do you know lesbians and bi women share such a rich history and maybe they just don’t want to choose one, maybe they don’t know, maybe they’re more comfortable with that than wlw for whatever their reason. any “problem” these people may even cause is going to be FAR paled by, y’know, the actual oppression from allocisheteronormative society.

“but they’re Xphobic-“ are they? or are they just defining their sexuality as they understand themselves best? and if an individual is truly hateful of something and that’s fueling their labels then that’ll be handled on its own. individuals across identities are hateful of something sometimes. it doesn’t condemn the identity itself.

“but straight people will see and-“ and what? seriously, what? take queer people less seriously? come on. no one who is a real ally is gonna see any of this and go “this is the last straw im homophobic now.” it’s not going to happen. the people who comment on things about asexuality or being nonbinary or anything else with things like “and this is the latest definition from Those People, i could accept the gays but not this!!” were not, until that point, sitting at home being allies and supporting gay people. they weren’t gonna vote for better rights for gay people. they were already homophobic. no guy who doesn’t already think he’s entitled to lesbians’ bodies is gonna see a “bi lesbian” and think “oh all lesbians are open to me then!” it’s not going to happen. don’t blame other queer people for the bigotry of allo/cis/het people.

and are those really the people you want to align yourself with anyway? are those the people you want to accept and welcome you, as they push out others? assuming they would even genuinely welcome you, which they wouldn’t? where they only tolerate people based on whatever is considered acceptable to them? until you cross a line into “too weird” “too flamboyant” or this or that? is that who you want to stand alongside?

so what do you gain? what do you gain?

solidarity costs nothing, but exclusionism always causes strife and pain and people to not get the help they need. we are always stronger together.

tl;dr - the queer community was never a place with rigidly defined edges and subcategories. bigotry from society is not caused by microlabels or “confusing” identities. solidarity costs you nothing, but exclusionism always does.

#x #inclusionist #queer #queer community #lgbtqia+ #lgbtq

[theheroheart]

[I’m putting this in a separate post to not bog down the OP.]

@actuallyclintbarton:

I love you and know that you are not a dick, and I’m not trying to be unnecessarily dickish, but consider this:

I will stop having a problem with the ace discourse (especially cishet aces) at large when it stops being deeply homophobic.  I will stop having a problem with it when it stops painting ace people’s relationships as somehow “more pure”, when it stops acting like all non-ace people think about nothing but sex, when it stops contributing hugely to the trend of making young lesbians feel predatory for their attraction to women, when it stops sending hateful anons and suicide baits to people who think that cishet people don’t belong in lgbt spaces even if they ~don’t want sex~, as if that makes them less cishet.  

Until that day, I’m gonna have a problem with it.  It’s fine and dandy to be concerned about a post that *might* be ~secretly anti-ace~, but consider if a post has absolutely no mention of asexuals, it’s probably not about asexuals, and making a public fuss about it is probably not going to go over well with the people it was for and about.

I love you too and know you are also not a dick.

I absolutely understand having a problem with the ace discourse, and all the things you mentioned. There’s a lot of ridiculous, gross shit being said on all sides. But in THAT PARTICULAR POST, I feel like my point still stands...?

(Also, for the record, I haven’t gone through either of their blogs, I’m going based on that post alone, not past history.)

Basically saying “all historical figures who never got married or had relationships were inevitably gay” IS discounting the possibility they were ace.

If you said “all historical figures who never got married were all just straight loners” or something - sure you don’t mention gay people, but can you REALLY say it’s not at all about gay people? 

And I feel like that concern was brought up in a civil manner, whereas the response was anything but civil. (I can understand how one can get a knee-jerk reaction to that reply though, because we’ve probably all scene these same arguments presented in waaaay shittier ways.)

I mean, you could fix that post SO EASILY by changing “gay” to “queer”, just as an example? (It also excludes bi people, but they had the “option”, so to speak, of marrying someone of different gender, so they’d probably be a much smaller group than aces.)

Or, I mean really, would it have been SO HARD to go “no, this post wasn’t about aces” without getting that aggressive? Stuff like that only serves to fuel the queer-allo vs ace hatred, and it makes me so sad.

So I feel like the “fuss” was started by the angry OP reply, not the person asking in a fairly non-confrontational way, even if it was public. Like, you might argue it was passive-aggressive, and maybe there was better ways to handle it, but...

Idk I feel like I’m saying the same thing over now....

Also yeah, just so it’s said -- all the things you mentioned that crops up in ace discourse? Gross, short-sighted, ridiculous, destructive, and absolutely homophobic. No doubt.

Like, I don’t actually blame you for hating the ace discourse - or rather, yanno, the parts of “conversations had by ace people” that are led by those (loud) horrible aces, which has now become known as ace discourse.  (Which upsets me, cause those fuckheads are giving aces a bad name.)

I do have a problem with the term “cishet aces” (you could argue that it means cis-heteroromantic, but cishet is in my experience generally used for cis+heterosexual(+heteroromantic), which aces are not), and also with boiling asexuality down to “not wanting to have sex”. Like, that genuinely upsets me that you say that.

(However, being an asshole to those who disagree with me on those points is not going to get us anywhere, so while I understand people being hurt/angry at people excluding those aces from queer communities, I 100% disapprove of their actions. Like, wtf people, why would you EVER send someone suicide baits???)

But I think I’m too tired to elaborate/explain why I have a problem with those things. I can link this? But for now I guess from my side, I’ll agree to disagree, or talk about it some other time.

Also idk, I think we actually mostly agree, we’re just coming at it with different baggage, making us react differently?

#actuallyclintbarton #conversations for ts