musings of an aro

Can I add about people who are on the aro spectrum but aren’t fully aromantic? That’s another different type of romantic attraction that I think needs recognising.

Aspec Suggestion: Support trans aros!

Support neurodivergent aces and aros please and thank you.

Yall ever just…think about how amazing all arospecs with neopronouns/xenogenders are? 

a lot of whats clearly supposed to be general aspec content doesnt actually support the identities it tries to. if a post is about aspec people and then only lists asexual by name, its lost all impact on non-sam aros like me, alloaros, and aroaces who prioritize their aro identity. its incredibly disheartening in a community that supposedly embraces us. im pretty sure this isnt done maliciously, but its something to keep in mind when you make supportive aspec posts

So I thought aspec was specifically asexual spectrum identities. And that arospec was aromantic spectrum.

Well, it’s frequently been used that way, in the same way that for a while a lot of people frequently used “asexual” as an umbrella term to cover all ace and aro identities. Since that’s not really the clearest or fairest way of catagorization, there’s been a bit of a shift lately to use “aspec” to cover both aces and aros, with “acespec” and “arospec” being used to further specify. (Now, the distinction between aspec and acespec almost totally disappears when you say them out loud, but in writing it does provide some clarity)

aspec as a term inclusive of both arospecs and acespecs isn’t even a recent thing, i knew the difference as a baby aro (ace) in 2016, three years ago. it’s only in the past year or half that i’ve seen aspec used to mean acespec (and i used to scroll through the ace tags quite frequently before). i can’t help but feel like this assumption is the result of posts that means to support all aspecs but only mention asexual by name, since the way they’re formulated makes aspec and acespec seem like synonyms.

yes! this is why i made this post in the first place, because the posts i was talking about only perpetuate the belief that aspec means asexual spectrum or that asexual is all there is

a lot of whats clearly supposed to be general aspec content doesnt actually support the identities it tries to. if a post is about aspec people and then only lists asexual by name, its lost all impact on non-sam aros like me, alloaros, and aroaces who prioritize their aro identity. its incredibly disheartening in a community that supposedly embraces us. im pretty sure this isnt done maliciously, but its something to keep in mind when you make supportive aspec posts

So I thought aspec was specifically asexual spectrum identities. And that arospec was aromantic spectrum.

aspec is a term that encompasses both acespec and arospec identities! it is designed to represent both aro and ace spectrums, but its so common for people to say aspec to mean acespec now that theres a fair bit of (understandable) confusion