Ardyne [It/Its]

Basically Bi

Practically Pan

Legally Lesbian

Generally Gay

Truthfully Trans

Absolutely Asexual

Definitely Demisexual

Questionably Queer

Surely Sapphic

Mainly Monosexual

Pretty Polysexual

Teachers across Spain have joined the Clothes Have No Gender movement (#laropanotienegenero), which was born when 15-year-old Mikel Gómez was punished for wearing a skirt at school in October last year.

Pink News reports:

In a now-viral TikTok video, the teen explained that he wore the skirt to challenge gender norms and support women’s liberation, but was promptly pulled out of class and taken to a psychologist who grilled him on whether he identified as a woman.

Hundreds of boys turned up to school wearing skirts on 4 November, now known as “Wear a Skirt to School Day”.

Manuel Ortega and Borja Velúquez, who teach at the Virgen de Sacedón primary school in Valladolid, decided to wear skirts every day of the month of May in support of one of their own students who was bullied with homophobic slurs.

Borja Veláquez wrote over at twitter:

A school that teaches respect, diversity, co-education and tolerance. Look no further! We join the initiative #clotheshavenogender.

“I always remember having this fight with a random dude who claimed that ‘straight white men’ were the only true innovators. His prime example for this was the computer… the computer… THE COMPUTER!!! THE COM-PU-TER!!!

Alan Turing - Gay man and ‘father of computing’ Wren operating Bombe - The code cracking computers of the 2nd world war were entirely run by women Katherine Johnson - African American NASA mathematician and ‘Human computer’ Ada Lovelace - arguably the 1st computer programmer”

- Sacha Coward

Also Margaret Hamilton - NASA computer scientist who put the first man on the moon - an as-yet-unmatched feet of software engineering, here pictured beside the full source of that computer programme. #myhero

Grace Hopper - the woman that coined the term “bug”  

also computing was typically a job for women (many of whom were black women that made incredible contributions) back in the day, so it’s absolutely fucking wild that straight white men think they are the foundation of computer innovation. men PUSHED women out and took the credit.

Sure! Let’s go! I’m always up to stretch both my lgbt history muscles. Sorry if it took awhile but I am passionate about this stuff and wanted to do some good writing and find some really great sources for you! 😊

In 1869 a humanitarian and journalist named Karl-Maria Kertbeny published pamphlets to oppose the sodomy law in Prussia. In these pamphlet he is widely regarded as beginning the terms “homosexual” and “heterosexual” in the academic mainstream; though, it is likely these were lgbt terms used long before that time. In this same pamphlet advocating explicitly for gay rights, Kertbeny refers to those who engage only in masturbation and not in sex with others as seperate from straight people, coining an entirely different term: “monosexual.” Now, this term is outdated and widely used the m-spec sub community to refer to straight, gay, and lesbian folks lacking multi-gender attraction, but he states very explicitly in all his work that this term is meant to refer to people we would now understand to be asexual.

A little later, in the 1890’s we have sexologist, founder of the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee, and an openly gay man himself, Magnus Hirschfeld. He published his work “Sappho and Sokrates”: a pamphlet he wrote with the task of explaining the lgbt community to straight people. He makes multiple references to and defences of what he called “anesthesia sexuals.” Again, an outdated term, but as you can see, both gay advocates and straight allies referenced us as being part of the community like it was nothing.

Meanwhile, we have the lovely Emma Trosse, an academic peer to Hirschfeld. She discussed gay rights—especially the rights of lesbians and non-binary people—very openly and wrote multiple papers on the subject. But at her heart, Trosse was a researcher, and so her most famous work, naturally, was an indepth study of what she referred to as “counter-sexualities” as stand in for what we now know as the broader lgbt community. In this work she coins the phrase Asensuality, stating “the author has the courage to admit to this category” officially coming out in her own study! Damn lady! We love her. The Schwules Museum (literally the Gay Museum), a famous German LGBTQ+ museum dedicated to collections focusing on the history of lgbt research, features her work prominently. She also holds the distinction of having been banned as a “degenerate” author in Austria-Hungary, the German Empire, and Russia for that very work. On top of that, she was the first woman on record to have a treatise in defense of lgbt people and our community published in 1895, even before her colleague Hirschfeld had his first works published.

As you can see 19th century Germany was a hub of lgbt theory, research, and activism still studied by lgbt historians today. It is widely credited as being a period of time that brought our history into print and the mainstream. And ace people, as I noted before, have been involved both in mention and in activism from the beginning according to both prominent allies, gay folks, and ace folks who were scholars during this period.

But, now lets move over with a bigger hop to the sexual revolution in America; which mirrored the German one in many ways! This is the period of time a lot of people, especially americans, think of as the start of our mainstream history—which as you can see a very americancentric idea, but I digress. Even here we have asexuals represented among the community by diverse members of the community.

You’ve probably heard of the Asexual Manifesto, written by Lisa Orlando and published by the New York Radical Feminists. A very important document to ace-spec people, it defines us as a sexuality seperate and distinct from straight; but you aren’t interested in what we have to say about ourselves and our experiences so lets move on to other lgbt people validating us.

Kinsey—himself an m-spec or multisexual person—recognized us in his research, which he picked up from at the point our lovely Hirschfeld left off, basically. This was later expanded on by Michael D Storm, author of Theories of Sexual Orientation. He reimagined the Kinsey Scale as a two dimensional map, which became the beginnings of the modern Kinsey Scale used in the lgbt community today. He posited it was better able to distinguish asexuals from m-spec people as it defined them less based on sexual preferences, or lack their of, based in gender (which would put both sexualities squarely in the centre of the 1D scale), and more on their self described experiences of attraction. So that’s right, you read correctly; the latest rendition of the Kinsey Scale was created in response to a piece that was published after Kinsey’s original studies specifically to better include asexuals who were already featured in the study and scale.

Then we move to the “The Sexually Oppressed.” Published in 1977, it was a book that did exactly what it set out to do: describe people who were oppressed by heteronormative society and their struggles. It was published by social worker, Harvey L. Gochros and featured the work of Myra T. Johnson in a piece describing the way in which mainstream culture affected asexual women specifically, and how straight feminists often shamed and gatekept them from liberating movements, while straight men continued to be an omnipresent threat via corrective assault and forced institutionalization. It was actually a text book in my college, very good read—goes into the ableism present in sexual oppression as well. I highly recommend it.

Also, just as a bonus, I’ve included an extra link below to “On the Racialization of Asexuality” by Ianna Hawkins Owen. She goes into depths about how the allosexual vs asexual discourse we see starting in America in the 70's—which has turned into the modern global “ace discourse” of today—started with nationalist discussions that have their roots in white supremacy, the white construction of binary womanhood, and chattel slavery. An offering from my university days.

Anyways, I hope you and any other lovely readers who come across this enjoy and educate yourselves a bit. Knowledge is power!

P.S. I could not find “The Sexually Oppressed” available online for some reason (but mind you, I am very bad at computers) so I linked a website that should show you the nearest library in your area that carries it. It’s a very popular social work read.

https://slate.com/human-interest/2020/03/asexuality-history-internet-identity-queer-archive.html

http://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/Asexual-Manifesto-Lisa-Orlando.pdf

https://books.google.ca/books?id=XbgTAwAAQBAJ&pg=PT113&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false

https://books.google.ca/books?id=IH2GCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA122&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false