still me

Seriously. That shit is so entrenched that even otherwise progressive states like Vermont require a marriage be consummated for it to be considered legal/not fraud.

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If I remember correctly, the big push to keep it in the DSM came from the pharmaceutical companies who need this diagnosis to exist so that they can market a drug they are currently working on to treat “female sexual interest/arousal disorder”. 

This diagnosis is so fucked up. It not only pathologizes Asexuals, it also pathologizes non-asexual women for having less interest in sex than men. This disorder literally used to be called “Frigidity” and feminist psychologists had to fight like hell to get the DSM to clarify that simply having a lower sex drive than one’s husband was not sufficient for a diagnosis. 

The APA throws in that little disclaimer about being a “self-identified asexual” and the diagnostic criteria of distress, but they did the same thing before they removed homosexuality from the DSM. 

A lot of people think that psychologists stopped considering homosexuality a disorder in the 1970s, but that’s not entirely true. They kept it in the DSM with a slightly changed name and a criteria that the person experience distress about being gay. This was used to justify “reparative therapy” for decades. 

Walking your neighbour’s dog? Aro activism!

Texting a friend to check in? 100% aro activism!

Getting a ride from someone in your mutual aid group? Mutual aid groups are def aro activism

Bringing in baked good for your coworkers? both delicious and aro activism!

Learning and teaching at your local makerspace/hackspace? makes you very cool and is also aro activism!

Working with Food not Bombs? both wonderful anarchist and aro activism!

Comforting a friend when they’re having a rough time? Aro activism!

I am asexual, aromantic, and agender.  While a lot of people would say that being nonbinary/agender doesn’t count as trans, but for the sake of theory let’s say it does.  By supposed exclusionist theory, one of these identities allows me to be included in queer spaces–my gender identity.  By their logic this should mean I have nothing to worry about, right?

Except I can’t check my asexual and aromantic identities at the door.  I may have three separate words to define myself, but in reality they’re so intertwined I can barely tell where one ends and where another begins.  I was best able to explore being agender when around other aromantic and asexual people, who had similar experiences as me.  I can’t put into words how beneficial this was in a very dark time in my life.

LGBT aces are not accepted by exclusionists in any real sense of the word.  We constantly see your mockery and your ace cringe compilation posts, we constantly see the “I hope ace people have a bad day–gays and lesbians only!” shitposts.  We’re told that half of our identity is embarrassing and childish and humiliating, don’t talk about it, pretend it away, only hype the attraction we do have (if any).  If you’re a trans aroace person like myself, you’re completely out of luck–it’s difficult enough for the community to remember that trans people exist and don’t also need to justify their place in the community with LGB attraction.  Hell, I remember seeing some using the term “queer trans people” to separate them out from straight and aroace trans people, to make sure the rest of us know we’re not welcome.

It erases the extremely important space to talk about the intersection of being ace and LGBT.  People shouldn’t have to talk about their sexuality while bottling up how being ace or aro affects it.  People shouldn’t be made to think that being ace or aro makes them a diluted form of queerness.  I shouldn’t have to untangle the jumble that is my identity, peel away and discard the threads of asexuality and aromanticism and how those have affected my life, and somehow try to talk about and relate to my gender as a stand-alone thing.  

This is NOT “acceptance.”  This is NOT “oh we’re just trying to keep straight people out.”  

When I first started considering I may not be straight, the first resources I found were LGBT blogs that said that asexuality was just people with so much internalized homophobia that they couldn’t accept their own attraction.  I tried forcing myself to have attraction, training myself to warm up to the idea of having sex, and just traumatized myself further.  I still don’t think I’ve recovered from this almost ten years later, and I think the extent of my sex repulsion came from these self-corrective behaviors.  While I’ve seen people who formerly identified as asexual later decide a different identity fits them better, stating this is fact for everyone who doesn’t experience attraction is unspeakably harmful.

I’ve been in this game for a long time, well before the backlash that caused aspec resources to vanish, back before “discourse” was even a commonly used word.  I used to try to play along with what everyone told me to do to be a Good Little Ace.  Avoided calling myself “queer” because only people with attraction can call themselves that, right?  So if I made a post about the struggles I had with self-worth and suicide ideation as an asexual person, in hopes to reaching other asexual people with similar struggles as me, I was still staying within the lines!  No mention of being part of any community or calling myself “queer” or “LGBT” or anything!  It didn’t prevent me from getting so much harassment I had to deactivate my blog, half of involved accusations of “you’re just pretending to be oppressed so you can infiltrate the LGBT community!” even though I hadn’t said a word about it in my posts!