Asexual-Society: You're Valid!!

YOU, THE READER, FROM REAL LIFE

Which has been fascinating, but I also absolutely have to draw all your attention to a passage I found in Robert N. Willson's "The education of the young in sex hygiene: a text-book for parents and teachers" from 1913 (which is conveniently available on the Internet Archive here).

Now this book is, as would be expected, an absolute mess -- heavily Christian AND written at the height of the eugenics era, which means it's ostensibly kind of progressive goals are uh. There's room for improvement, is all I'll say, while still leaving room for the fact that it's complicated. That's just history for you. I also want to stress that I was NOT actually looking for information on asexuality, just skimming the book to get a sense of what sexual education might have looked like for students in the Anglosphere around the relevant time period. So you can imagine my surprise when I came across this passage, on page 86:

I present this condition of affairs, then, as a simple fact and pass on to another phase of interest and difficulty in the sex question. Certain women and an occasional man are peculiar in their entire lack of sex instinct or interest, and in their failure to experience the sex stimulus that is such an important factor in the perpetuation of the race. Were it only the rule for two such similar sexless or sex colorless animals to mate and exhaust one another’s lack of naturalness, the world would be happier by far, and perhaps such a pair might even enjoy the absence of enthusiasm and interest in one another. Such a state of affairs is conceivable. Unfortunately this sort of pairing is never seen in actual life. The mathematician, who has by close, analytical work so worn out his humanness as to be practically impotent, usually consorts with an intense and passionate vixen of an altogether contrasting type. The result in terms of the home is a foregone conclusion. Or a strong, active, inconsiderate ox of a man marries an aesthetic, supercilious orchid of a woman, and in a short time learns that he can cause her and his life-circles to interweave in no possible manner. He is of the earth earthy, she is spiritual, and as far as we have the ability to speculate there will be neither sex passion nor earthly comradeship since there is to be no real marriage either here or in heaven.

Which is hardly a rousing endorsement of asexuality, sure, but it's also a fascinating counterpoint to the idea that a lack of sexual desire or sexual incompatibilites are somehow new, or that asexuality is an identity without any real history. As I said to another friend -- it's almost like it's been an obvious part of the sexuality spectrum to anyone who was paying attention for a long, long time.

Anyway this is why I love doing primary source research. You almost always find something that runs contrary to popular accounts of the past, if you poke around enough. This isn't even my era but I knew the general shape of it, and sure enough, it didn't take much sifting for something really, really interesting to emerge!

[ survey.gendercensus.com ]

The 13th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2026.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

PS: You can see some regularly-updated statistics about incoming data here, with lots of demography and graphs to peruse!

There have been over 55,000 responses so far.

I'll add smth here cos I learned after posting this on IG that people still aren't entirely understanding how scary and dangerous this is. Ppl kept saying to me 'I can still buy your book in shops though' or 'Its okay, I'll order your book into my library!'

I dont give af about my book lol No one outside of Ace ppl ever read it, its yearly sales don't even cover a month of expenses for me.

The thing you should all be concerned about is that a totally benign unheard of book about someone's every day life is being banned. And those laws listed above are passing through US government right now. One of those laws would make it so that any teacher/librarian in the US could lose their job/go to prison for simply sharing 'ideology'- and I don't mean only lgbtq folk, these laws are attacking black history, civil rights history, disability rep in books. Just talking about these things will now legally be considered a 'dangerous ideology'.

And once that's set into law, the US government has backing via law to go ahead and say 'if these books aren't legally allowed in schools, then they shouldn't be allowed in shops, either.' And from there it sets up a great argument for 'The dangerous content in these books is lawfully being removed from public, shouldn't we be lawfully removing the people living out/promoting this ideology too?'

I can see why ppl don't fully understand how dangerous book bannings are, if they're not familiar with the history of fascism. If you're interested, there are plenty of graphic novels that share this history via first hand accounts- Maus, Persepolis, Banned Book Club.

But guess what? You're on limited time to get these via libraries...cos all three of these books are on banned lists too, and they got nothing to do with lgbtq rep, and everything to do with warning ppl about fascism.

And the US government knows it can get away with this, because they are passing these laws as we speak and barely anyone is doing anything about it or talking about it. I've been trying to talk about it for years and no one does anything except say to me 'don't worry, I'll buy your book!' or say its a badge of honour that I have a banned book.

I'm so incredibly frustrated by how hard it is trying to find affirming community online. Especially as a repulsed asexual who doesn't use microlabels and doesn't experience or define my asexuality through attraction but instead because I innately don't desire to have sex ever and because of my natural repulsion to sex.

It often feels like I'm trapped between exclusionist communites who accept how I experience my asexuality (because it falls in line with their definition) but at the price of excluding many other aspec people. Which I'm simply not okay with. Or more inclusive communities, where I actually want to be, but the ways I experience my asexuality (zero desire for sex ever and repulsion to sex) are treated as "a stereotype" that "has nothing to do with asexuality" because "asexuality is ONLY about attraction".

It really sucks because I refuse to be in exclusionist communites because of how other aspecs are treated there but at the same time, so many inclusive ace communities don't hold space for asexuality like mine unless I pretend my repulsion is completely disconnected from my asexuality (it's not), I use attraction definitions and language to describe my asexuality (which does not and has never worked for me), and use microlabels for my absolute zero desire for sex and repulsion to sex (which I've never connected with or comfortably used)

It feels almost hypocritical to me that in the much wider inclusive part of the ace community where asexuality is understood as a spectrum and microlabels are created and used by many community members, that attraction is upheld as the ONLY way that actually matters to being asexual. That asexual indiviuals cannot define their own asexuality as being because they are repulsed/averse/indifferent to sex or even because they don't want to have sex in general without being "um actually"-ied by other aces who, usually with indirect language, treat their fellow ace's asexuality as if it doesn't actually count because it's not defined through attraction.

I'm tired. I don't want to dictate how other members of my community define themselves. I just want to be able to say "I am asexual because I innately don't want to have sex" and "I am asexual because I am repulsed by sex" without having to defend my own asexuality from my own community.

Because, like, okay. It's 2026. There's rising queerphobia of all stripes--which is undeniably one reason I'm thinking about the lateral violence of it all, and we'll circle back to that--but the media environment of today does still makes it more possible than ever before to find and enjoy queer fiction. And this is critical to what I'm about to say next, so I hope those of us that grew up in times where that was not true can sort of table our thoughts on what things were like when we were kids.

My point it, if I'm an adult who isn't in the closet (and even if I am in the closet, plausible deniability is higher than it was pre-2010 or so!), I can go see a gay movie. I can go buy a gay book. There are members of the community, like kids/teens or people in unsafe situations that might not have that freedom, but at the very least, finding the gay media isn't the hard part for anyone. Heated Rivalry is one of the biggest TV shows of the year (and the books that it's based off have since seen a huge jump in popularity, too), queer romantasy is flourishing, and even classic queer media is getting revamped (pun intended) in series like the Interview With the Vampire TV series. And if, for whatever reason, none of the current professional stuff is doing it for you, Ao3 has approximately 8.4 million M/M stories and 1.7 F/F stories--which isn't the greatest ratio for the femslash fans, but is still nothing to sneeze at. And that's not even getting into the many gay podcasts and audio dramas, self-published books, comics (indie and otherwise), and other, nicher options. Long story short, if you only want to watch, read, or listen to media with prominent gay characters in it, you can establish a very healthy media diet, with everything from fun, trashy romance to acclaimed TV miniseries to weird podcasts to RPG actual plays, and everything in-between. This has very much not always been the case, so it's really cool we're here!

As an aro/ace person I... can't do that with stories about people like me. Like I really, seriously can't do that. I guess if I was content to enjoy less media, maybe, but I love stories, which I'm sure a lot of people on this website can relate to. And I love participating in fandom, too, so sometimes I do want to be into something that's big enough for me to chat about it with other people, or get more than a handful of kudos on my fanfic. So at the end of the day I don't limit myself, and that's honestly a good thing! It's great to be into things about characters who don't exactly share your identities, too.

But like. This year I've bought* exactly one book with an actual, canonically aro and/or ace character in it--the short story collection Tales From the Folly, which is a part of the Rivers of London series and features the aro/ace character Thomas Nightingale. (*I say bought, because I'm yet to actually read it--I'm sorry, Thomas!). That's it. I've enjoyed various other stories, but as far as ones with people like me go, I've gotten my hands on exactly one. And it's not for a lack of trying! There just... hasn't been much on my radar. This is a huge reason I've gotten so excited about Project Hail Mary recently--it doesn't have any canonically queer characters, and the original author definitely didn't intend to write the main character in a way that resonated with so many aro/aces. But it's a story without any canonical romance of any kind, where as a result, I can watch a fun movie and pretend for a little bit that Ryland Grace is like me. There are so few aro/ace characters that most of what we get. Playing pretend.

This is where I think some of the wires are getting crossed. When people hear someone like me say "I'm really exhausted by all the emphasis on romance and shipping in fandom," I think what some of you are hearing--because it's historically been true, and we're at a scary time in the world where it feels more and more like it's threatening to become true again--is "I want there to be fewer gay stories." When what I'm really saying is "I want there to be more aro/ace stories--or at least stories where I can pretend the main character is like me." And to even further hamper understanding, when aro and/or ace folks say we want stories about people like us and we hear other, allo queers object, what we aspecs often hear is "I think people like you aren't worth telling stories about"--even though many of you have valid reasons for liking the stories that you do, too.

I think that those of us who belong to older generations (especially millennials and above) can all probably relate to what aspecs are experiencing here on some level. There was a point in time where gay books were extremely limited, and gay characters in TV and movies were unheard of. Even as things crept in a more progressive direction, the Bury Your Gays tropes meant not everyone could enjoy the stories those characters showed up in. That was really hard for a lot of people, and I never, ever want us to go back to that. But I do think it's important to acknowledge that gay media just isn't at that point right now. Media with actual aro/ace characters in it.... kind of still is. It's different, because society is in a very different place, and also cishet people have historically demonized aromantic and asexual people with very different tropes--the heartless villain incapable of love, the cold lover that the protagonist abandons to be happy with someone else, the boring stuck-up prude, etc. And there are people, especially in the indie sphere, who are making some good stuff. But at the end of the day, I have a lot fewer choices than you do. Which is why it really hurts to get told that my headcanons and readings of canon--which are most of what I have--are actually problematic.

Anyway. None of this is groundbreaking. It's been said before, by people more eloquent and more persuasive than me, and it'll probably be said again. It just feels worth reiterating, considering some of the blowback I've been getting to expressing this sentiment. Because I really do think a lot of us want the same thing--for everyone to be able to enjoy whatever kind of stories they like most about people like them. (Without losing sight of the fact that media can be a great way to understand the experiences of people of other experiences, of course). When the scales are so unequally weighted, however, it gets really messy to talk about.

Like, you mentioned PHM as an example of a story that doesn't have romance or sex in it, not because the characters are canonically aroace but because those just weren't parts of the story, and said that it was better than nothing because you could at least pretend that the characters were aspec.

And I think a lot of allo people tend to think that an aro story is just a story that doesn't have romance in it, and an ace story is a story that doesn't have sex in it, and from that viewpoint it seems like you're advocating for taking things away from stories.

But--I'm assuming--a story with actual aro or ace representation is a story that adds something, namely a character who is canonically aro or ace. And--again, I'm assuming--it would not have to be a story about Aroace Alice and Her Aroace Struggle, although it could be that; but it could equally well be just be about Alice and reflect the ways in which being aroace affects her life an an international spy or dinosaur hunter or college professor having a midlife crisis or whatever Alice's story is about. But either way, it's not a story-without, it's a story-with.

I guess the simplest way to put it is like. A story like Ursula K le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness doesn't exactly have trans "representation" (in that transness is a social and cultural phenomenon separate from the speculative gender system she explores in the novel), but it does nonetheless have a lot to say about gender, in a way that definitely resonates with some trans/gnc people. Specifically, it shines a light on gender in a way that is of interest to people who want to have important conversations about the topic, and that makes it important and/or interesting to many queer folks. And in the same way, stories without explicit aromantic representation can absolutely say some very important things about relationships, particularly platonic relationships, especially when they show characters choosing to prioritize and value explicitly or even implied-to-be platonic connections.

So to return to my example above, I liked Project Hail Mary in part because I felt like I could pretend the protagonist was like me. But while the movie doesn't actually have anything explicit to say about aromanticism or the experience of being aro, it does ask another really interesting question -- namely "What if you were someone who was always sort of isolated and didn't have a lot of connections, and then you made a friend (who, it should be noted, already had a bond with a romantic/reproductive partner) who cared about you so deeply that they made it clear they valued you just as much as their partner?"

That's aromantic catnip! And not just because it's sort of a fun wish fulfillment fantasy, but because it raises super important questions about who gets to be significant to you and what it looks like to have friends who also have romantic partners that still value you. And so even though it's not a story with explicit aromantic representation, it's chock full of aromantic resonances.

And this is exactly where things get snarly with fandom. Because aro and/or ace people are in a weird position where there are very, very few characters that represent us, but there are still some stories that feel important to us all the same. So we don't really get to "claim" them as ours, but it still hurts when all the fandom wants to do is to seemingly erase the themes that feel so significant to us by making those stories romantic or sexual after all. To other queer people, it looks like we're getting upset over nothing -- that's not that character's canon identity, so why do we feel like we get to lay claim to them? But what we're really struggling with is watching stories that genuinely have interesting things to say about relationships get interpreted in a way that erases that -- and especially in the absence of actual canon aromantic and asexual characters, that really hurts.

I don't know what the answer to all this is. Obviously it's not particularly kind (or feasible) to tell other queer people they're never allowed to insert queer romance into stories that don't have any. But when the ratios are so skewed in favor of the people who do want to do that, and so skewed against those of us who would rather we talk about the stories as-is, it really starts to feel like nobody cares about us, and that our narratives aren't seen as important, or valid, or even queer -- not just in fiction, but in real life, too.

PRIDE MATTERS BECAUSE:

[ survey.gendercensus.com ]

The 13th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 13th August 2026.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

PS: You can see some regularly-updated statistics about incoming data here, with lots of demography and graphs to peruse!

We're well on the way to 27,000 responses! Only 300 or so until we hit that milestone. :)

I have nerdily added some notes to some graphs so that I can see what affects the numbers:

On the referrers tab of the participation spreadsheet, 16 people arrived at the survey from a flyer/leaflet, and that's right below people who arrived from Twitter (22 people).

I think it would be great and really funny if flyer/leaflet could be above Twitter. That would be so satisfying for me, because Elon Musk is a knobhead and old school hardcopy everything is the best.

So, if everyone could please print out some flyers (PDF, Google Doc) and stick them up in random unisex toilets/changing rooms, or pin them on pinboards, or stack them on tables, or put them in postage-paid envelopes from random junk mail and post them, etc. etc. that could help the cause.

Let's stick it to The Man (Elon "Knobhead" Musk).

Unrelatedly, we're at almost 25,000 responses, whaaaaat!!!

The gap has halved, flyers are catching up to Twitter!

Keep it up! (Flyers: PDF, Google Doc)

So far, countries that are flyering well:

USA - 8

UK - 5

Germany - 2

New Zealand - 2

Prefer not to say - 2

Poland - 1

Switzerland - 1

81% of people who get to the survey with a flyer haven't participated in the survey before, which is particularly good!

I'm going to print some today and put them up on my little town's noticeboards as soon as I can manage it, we're hella queer round here, maybe that will help? I'll make some with the closing date on, and with the survey address, and then I'll put it in the public promo folder so you all can use them too if you want.

(Unrelatedly, we got to 26,000 participants last night! 💜🚀✨)