Momo

I don’t have to like you just because you are gay. Or trans. Or any race.

I don’t have to like you.

But some people think that’s oppression.

That’s not at all what it is. That’s not me at all. I like to think I am a very accepting person.

I’ve worked very hard to understand what people go through and how to help them.

I’ve worked really hard to be a good person despite my own flaws and biases that my parents attempted to pass down as well as a few of my own I’ve had to overcome.

There’s a difference between someone not liking you and your presence and not liking you because you are a certain race or gender or sexuality.

If you are going to be a dick to me or my friends I don’t care who you are or what you do or what you identify as.

You are not entitled to friendship just because you are the way you are. You don’t get to treat people like shit and then say “she doesn’t like me because she’s transphobic(etc)”.

Honestly I’m getting tired of being called these things just because I don’t like their drama (not about their identities I’m allways okay with someone having a hard time because they are going through something. But when it comes to things like “I was talking to another girl while I was dating my girlfriend and she broke up with me” that’s the kind of drama I don’t want to be a part of.)

Y'all need to understand that not liking you because of the way you act is not oppression. I’ve been called homophobic because I wouldn’t set up a guy with my friend because he was a absolute jerk. I’ve been called homophobic because a friend of mine was faking being gender fluid (which I know sounds sketchy but he was telling one of my gender fluid friends that they weren’t gender fluid because they didn’t have disphoria and I wasn’t going to let him treat them that way)

so. i’ve seen a few romance-repulsed aros making posts against spreading the idea that some aros are romance-favorable, can date non-aros, etc. and i just…its really disheartening to see. are we aros so fucking desperate for acknowledgement that we’re gonna sink as low as to turn on each other for scraps? i understand that the situation is dire, but please believe me when i say that romance-favorable aros are not your enemy. and neither are the people supporting them.

i get it. i know what it looks like. you may think that we’re more palatable for non-aros. that they’re pushing you to the side in favor of us, because we’re easier for them to understand. that non-aros are essentially telling themselves this: “i mean, that romance-favorable lot is basically just doing the whole dating and marriage thing but with slightly different emotions. they can even get with us! they blend in so well, unlike those inhumane romance-repulsed hermits over there, babbling on about romance not being the pinnacle of human emotion and all that crap. i know, let’s push em’ to the side and acknowledge the easier version of aros instead”.

well, you may be surprised to hear. to me, and to other romance-favorable aros i’m sure, it’s the exact opposite. you’re the more palatable ones for non-aros. for us, non-aros sound like this: “romance-repulsed aros won’t date non-aros. they want you to respect that. that’s all there is to it. finally someone who will let us live in fucking peace. not like those romance-favorable pricks who have the nerve to act like they’d make suitable life partners for us, and force us to hear their babbling about romance not being the pinnacle of human emotions/commitment up close and personal. loveless bastards tryna manipulate normal people into loveless marriages. as if their love could ever be worth just as much as ours. i know, let’s push em’ to the side and acknowledge the easier version of aros instead.”

we’re both getting royally screwed over here. and we’re both too busy thinking Those Other Aros™ aren’t getting screwed over as much as Our Group™ to bother getting pissed at what’s screwing us both over: the notion that we’re not worth as much as non-aros, no matter what we do. don’t date? hermit, inhumane, people aren’t islands. try to date? abuser, doomed to failure, how dare you. loveless either way.

us turning against each other? trying to push one another to the margins of our community? wrongly considering our siblings threats, agents of the enemy, out for Our Group’s™ skins? is the best goddamn gift we could give our enemies. listen. the lot of us— you, me, whatever kind of aromantic there is— deserve enough respect and acknowledgement and support to fucking drown in. we shouldn’t have to create a hierarchy of most to least deserving of those essential needs and try to ration our posts based on that. we shouldn’t be playing oppression olympics. we shouldn’t be considering each other enemies when we could be allies, when we are allies. we of all communities should know better than to behave like this.

You are too young to remember that 25 years ago certain people had an absolute fit and fell in it when the 1993 March On Washington official title included bisexuals, or how horrible people were to bi women especially when they tried to participate in lesbian/dyke spaces. I was in the room when the Julia Penelope-inspired Lesbians For Lesbians refused to participate in Northampton, Massachusetts Pride because bi people were being included and held their own picnic in protest. You may even be too young to remember the exact same fight about trans people being added to the term LGBT, or people saying transantagonistic and generally horrible things about trans folks when we tried to join queer groups and Pride events, even those of us who are queer-identified (which especially confused me). So it’s completely exhausting to discover that we are having, literally, the same fight again about some slightly different but basically associated concept in which a sexual minority group that is consistently stigmatized and disempowered is trying to join under the banner of resistance to the heteronormative, cisnormative, allosexual mainstream.

::takes a deep breath and collects myself::

Here’s the thing, Brave Correspondent: at the end of the day, there’s who is privileged and empowered by the dominant culture and then there is everybody else and you, my friend, are the else. You are, along with me and a whole lot of other people for whom “bride and groom” are not now and may never be a thing, for those of who are neither pink nor blue, for everyone who has ever needed to call ahead and ask whether our family group would be welcomed, everyone who has ever needed to take a friend into the public washroom (or wished we could). Along with all the rest of us for whom the primary narrative that’s shoved down little children’s throats from birth (or while they’re still fetal, in some cases, thanks to the fresh new misery of the gender-reveal party in which people start projecting gendered expectations on tiny humans LITERALLY BEFORE THEY TAKE THEIR FIRST BREATH) doesn’t apply.

How many people saying this is it gonna take before people fucking listen? 

General Aphobia: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7) (8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22)

Sexual Violence / Corrective Rape: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Conversion Therapy: (1) (2) (3)

Pathologization: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6)

Religious Intolerance: (1) (2) (3) (4) (5)

Mental Health Problems: (1) (2)

  “A-spec people didn’t even exist before David Jay and AVEN!”

literally, nothing exclusionists do, and nothing you say to an exclusionist, will ever matter. nothing will ever get a response beyond “nuh uh!” they’ll phrase it different ways every time: “aces are cishet. cishets are cishet. they just wanna be oppressed so bad. they’re literally not oppressed in any way. they don’t experience homophobia or transphobia. they benefit from homophobia and transphobia. they are lying. that never happened. 

“you can’t use their tumblr posts as proof. you can’t use studies about them as proof. you can’t use every real-life org including them as proof. you can’t use our community’s own oral history as proof. you can’t use our community’s own written historical documents as proof. 

“lmao i’m not a terf, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao i’m not quoting terf rhetoric, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao i’m not consistently attacking trans women inclusionists, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao our movement isn’t full of terfs, we literally called out a terf once. lmao how dare you show me a blocklist of hundreds of terf exclusionists to call out, I’m literally an nb lesbian.

aces as a group experience 30% more harassment, 221% more sexual assault, 100% more intimate partner violence, and 277% more stalking than straight people.

aces are as likely to be suicidal as gay or bi people, and twice as likely as straight people

aces do, in fact, get sent to conversion therapy specifically for being ace. have to leave schools and jobs specifically for being ace. lose housing because they are ace. get rejected by their families for being ace. get sexually assaulted specifically for being ace, not for “being women” or “declining sex.” 

aces, as a group, consistently experience ALL types of sexual assault and abuse at higher rates than their gay and lesbian peers. only bisexuals consistently experience these things at a higher rate as a group, than aces.

trans people who are also asexual are 25% more likely to have attempted suicide than hetero trans people. (Gay, lesbian, OR bi trans people: 10% more likely than het trans people. LESS likely than ace trans people.) 

Ace trans people are also 50% more likely than het, gay, lesbian, OR bi trans people to have been homeless. And about 33% more likely to have been evicted for being trans.  (Same study: A higher percentage of trans aces are harassed at work than of trans LGBQ people. A much higher percentage of trans aces have had to quit school because of harassment, than of trans LGBQ people. A higher percentage of trans aces have experienced family rejection, than of trans LGBQ people. A higher percentage of trans aces lack health insurance, than of trans LGBQ people.) 

“The first study that gave empirical data about asexuals was published in 1983 by Paula Nurius, concerning the relationship between sexual orientation and mental health.… Results showed that asexuals were more likely to have low self-esteem and more likely to be depressed than members of other sexual orientations”. 

In 2015, Russia took away the rights of asexual, binary trans people, and many groups of nonbinary trans people, to have driver’s licenses. Thanks to the fact that every diagnostic manual for mental illness in the world still considers “lack of sexual desire” to be a mental illness.

And an ace-inclusive Russian LGBTI+ youth site, the only one in that country, was shut down a few years ago thanks to a 2013 law against “propaganda causing minors to form non-traditional sexual predispositions.”

aces were being studied, as well as being trashed as not-actually-oppressed by the mainstream gay community, almost 50 years ago.

ace invisibility and its effects were already being written about in academia almost 20 years ago.

lesbian and gay publications were casually referencing asexuals almost 50 years ago

mainstream publications were casually referencing asexuals as part of the LGBT+ community 40+ years ago

lots of gen x bisexuals considered aces part of the bi community, before there was a strong separate ace community, because they experienced equal attraction across genders (even though it was an equal lack of attraction in their case) and thousands of aces on Tumblr have shared their present-day experiences (in the notes on this link) with initially thinking they must be bi for the same reason

exclusionists have consistently singled out trans converts to Judaism for personal harassment, and going so far as to doxx one and try to get the rabbi to not let them and their family convert

exclusionists consistently both suicide-bait and defend suicide-baiting

exclusionists have faked screenshots to claim that a (non-ace, non-aro, inclusionist) transfem sexual abuse survivor was boasting publicly about sexually abusing children

we need safe spaces for questioning folk where they can ask questions, get answers, think, and then be okay with realizing they aren’t lgbtq without the door hitting them on the way out

we need safe spaces for questioning folk where they can use bad or outdated terminology to refer to themselves or others without the fear of getting their lives ruined forever because of a mistake they made before they knew better

we need safe spaces for questioning folk from all backgrounds. people of color, poor people, religious people, non-english-speaking/ESL people, disabled people, neurodivergent people. they all deserve spaces and resources to question their gender and sexuality without experiencing judgement

we need safe spaces for questioning folk with many labels, many descriptions, many recounts of experience. i don’t care how stupid you may think someone’s label is, if it brings them comfort, maybe it will bring someone else comfort as well

we need safe spaces for questioning folk without pressure to discover their True Self as a teenager or not at all, to allow people to find themselves in their 20s, 30s, 40s, and beyond

we need safe spaces for questioning folk that don’t exile them. that don’t make them feel unwelcome. that don’t make them feel like they have to conform to one rigid idea of what a gender or sexuality is. that let them be wrong the first time and let them come back again later if they need to.

listen. those corny cheesy messages like “why are you so mean to straight people? we are all the same :( love is love” aren’t all coming from Everyman JoeHomophobe. they may be coming from a cishet person who ventured into a lgbtq person'a blog hoping for some kind of clue to see if they’re gay or not, because they don’t know yet.

don’t get me wrong, this isn’t about respectability politics. when you encounter a real homophobe being aggressive and shitty, i hope you tear them a new one. this is about making room for questioning folks, either by making spaces for them, or allowing them into ours even when they still ID as cishet.

can we bring back the cishet ally concept? can we have the internet equivalent of the cishet person sitting in the back of the room listening to the lgbtq people talk and occasionally asking a question, even if it seems kinda stupid?

“Asexual characters are boring” I have traveled across eleven countries and ten states When I was thirteen I had hydrochloric acid dumped down my back and I walked away without a scratch When I was twenty-one I broke into castle ruins with a professor and found out afterwards that they were probably haunted

I once got stranded on a mountain while I was searching for the Cave of Zeus and got rescued by a little old lady who didn’t speak a word of English and the local village’s schoolteacher who did

I’ve learned how to surf on water, to dance with fire, and to bungee jump through the air I’ve walked up mountains, down beaches and through forests

My friends tell me I have the weirdest luck of anyone they’ve ever met and laugh about what mysterious forces must conspire to keep me alive

And yet, according to you a story about my life would be dull and uninteresting simply because I have no interest in sex

I wasn’t aware that that was the sum total of my value That no one cared about what I’d done only who

That every man must get a girl and every girl must be gotten and that to do otherwise is to be banished into obscurity

And yet I’m still here, still writing, still telling stories, and while I have been described as many things boring has yet to be one of them