Get your own water.

Personally, I define my aroaceness not as a lack of romantic or sexual attraction, but as an orientation towards relationships that are neither romantic nor sexual. Redefining my orientation this way has helped me find a lot of peace I didn't have before.

Edit 6 Apr 2026: Wow, it only took ten days before someone decided to be weird on this post and was promptly followed up by two comments addressing the weirdness that completely ignored my original point. And that isn't even counting all the people who originally ignored my point. But as annoyed as I was by the "it's a spectrum!" posters, I would take a thousand more of them before dealing with the repercussions of having one singular uneducated teenager on my post who insists that it's not.

The funny thing is that I didn't even really mind having an uneducated teenager gatekeeping on my post. I don't like it, but I can handle it. I gently but firmly told the kid to knock it off and haven't heard anything since.

So imagine what it feels like to be me, coming back to tumblr after a day long break and seeing two people with a much bigger audience than me dunking on this teenager, on my post, while completely ignoring what I actually said. Like, are you lumping me in with the kid? Are you assuming I hold the same ridiculous opinions? Or do you just not care what I have to say as long as you can dunk on someone?

Anyway, I'm turning reblogs off on this post. Congratulations on finding a quick and easy opportunity to be mean to a child. I hope you're pleased with yourselves.

And to the child who made those gatekeeping comments on my post, if you're reading this, assuming you haven't had a panic response to someone disagreeing with you and blocked me (I understand, I've been there and don't hold it against you even if it is a phase we all need to move past eventually), I truly hope you can internalize some kind of lesson about the community you belong to from all of this, and I hope the lesson isn't that we don't tolerate mistakes.

1. The Revolution Is a Relationship

[…] Something that worries me about social justice communities is that we tend to conceptualize “revolution” as a product, as a place and time that we expend all of our energy and anger to create – often without regard to the toll this takes on individuals and our relationships. [...] In our – often justified – anger and disappointment at the failure of ourselves and our communities to uphold the dream of revolution, we lash out. [...] What if revolution isn’t a product, some distant promised land, but the relationships that we have right now? What if revolution is, in addition to – not instead of – direct action and community organizing, the process of rupture and repair that happens when we fuck up and hold each other accountable and forgive?

2. The Oppressor Lives Within

[…] I’ve started to believe that I can’t engage in authentic activism, I can’t create positive change without recognizing and naming my own participation in the oppressive systems that I’m trying to undo. Coming from this position, I’m forced to have compassion for the people around me who I see also participating in oppression, even as I’m also angry at them. With compassion comes understanding, and with understanding comes belief in the possibility of change. When we become capable of holding that contradiction in our hearts – when we can be angry and compassionate at the same time, at ourselves as well as others – entirely new possibilities for healing and transformation emerge.

3. Accountability Starts in the Heart

[…] I often wonder how different things would look if it were more of a cultural norm to understand accountability as a practice that comes from within the individual, instead of a consequence that must be forced onto someone externally. What if we taught each other to honor the responsibility that comes with holding ourselves accountable, rather than seeing self-accountability as a shameful admission of guilt? What if we could have real conversations with each other about harm, in good faith? In a culture of indispensability, I cannot ignore someone when they tell me I have harmed them – they are precious to me, and I have to try to understand and respond accordingly. […]

4. Perpetrator/Survivor is a False Dichotomy

There is an intense moral dynamic in social justice culture that tends to separate people into binaries of “right” and “wrong.” […] “Perpetrators” are considered evil and unforgivable, while “survivors” are good and pure, yet denied agency to define themselves. Among the many problems of this dynamic is the fact that it obscures the complex reality that many people are both survivors and perpetrators of violence (though violence, of course, exists within a wide spectrum of behaviors). Within a culture of disposability – whether it be the criminal justice system of the state or community practices of exiling people – the perpetrator/survivor dichotomy is useful because it appears to make things easier. It helps us make decisions about who to punish and who to pity.

5. Punishment Isn’t Justice

[…] It isn’t inherently wrong to want someone who hurt you to feel the same pain – to want retribution, or even revenge. But as Schulman also writes, punishment is rarely, if ever, actually an instrument of justice – it is most often an expression of power over those with less. How often do we see the vastly wealthy or politically powerful punished for the enormous harms they do to marginalized communities? How often are marginalized individuals put in prison or killed for minor (or non-existent) offenses? As long as our conception of justice is based on the violent use of power, the powerful will remain unaccountable, while the powerless are scapegoated.

6. Nuance Isn’t an Excuse for Harm

[…] [I]ndispensability means that everyone – especially those have experienced harm – are precious and require justice. In other words, we cannot allow the fact that something is complicated or scary prevent us from trying to stop it. Trapped in the perpetrator/survivor dichotomy of understanding harm, it might seem like we have only two options: to ignore harm or to punish perpetrators. But in fact, there are often other strategies available. They involve taking anyone’s – everyone’s – expressions of pain seriously enough to ask hard questions and have tough conversations. They involve dedicating time and resources to ensuring that anyone who has been harmed has the support they need to heal.

7. Healing Is Both Rage and Forgiveness

If the revolution is a relationship, then the revolution must include room for both rage and forgiveness: We have to be able to tolerate the inevitability that we will be angry at one another, will commit harm against one another. When we are harmed, we must be allowed the space to rage. We need to be able to express the depth of our hurt, our hatred of those who hurt us and those who allowed it to happen – especially when those people are the ones we love. It is up to the community to hold and contain this rage – to hear and validate and give it space, while also preventing it from creating further harm. […]

8. Community Is the Answer

"After they overheard that ICE was at the courthouse to arrest someone, they improperly accessed court databases to determine who was not born in the United States," a DOJ detention filing says. "They then snuck every suspected illegal alien who was at the courthouse out a back door, where ICE, who was waiting in the parking lot for their target to leave the building, could not see them."

I'm going to hold your hand as I say this to you. Those same expectations are placed on trans men. Trans men are also expected to be mothers and wives. Trans men also face misogyny and are harmed by it, in the same ways cisgender women are.

It reads like a lot of people think of trans men as Cis Dudes With Pussies when the vast majority of trans men are living (or have lived) many of the same experiences as cis women, and should be included in these conversations.

Punching down or laterally feels great when punching up at big systemic issues feels pointless so entirely too many of us give in to their unfortunate evolutionary base urges.

See something you don't know. Dislike it, afraid of it, police it.

and then you find out that the Reasons were actually Excuses and being mean was the entire point.