@lavabendingthot @lunarsolareclipse @homoelitism
Hey, instead of being a giant piles of garbage, try reading up:
āAces donāt face oppressionā
Intergroup bias toward āGroup Xā: Evidence of prejudice, dehumanization, avoidance, and discrimination against asexuals
Prejudice against the asexual community
Battling Asexual Discrimination, Sexual Violence And āCorrectiveā Rape
Somewhere on the A-Spectrum: Agender, aromantic and asexual people face misconceptions, aggression
Men, masculinity, asexuality, and rape
Religion and Asexuality Overview
Religious intolerance of asexuality: x,x, x, x, x, x
Asexuality and race/racism: x, x, x, x,x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x
Asexual oppression and all that
Asexuality and Victim Blaming
Why We Need Mental Healthcare Without Asexual Erasure
AAU Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Sexual Misconduct shows that āAsexual/Questioning/Not Listedā report a higher rate of sexual assault/harassment/violence than heterosexuals, regardless of gender
Asexuality was listed in the DSM as HSDD (Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder) until 2013, making it officially a mental illness that would be treated with therapy and medication. It is still in the DSM, except that you can āopt outā if you self-identify as asexual, which is great except that asexuality is still so unknown that there undoubtedly many people who are asexual but donāt know that itās āa thingā. This means that who knows how many asexuals have been sent to therapy and told theyāre sick, then been ātreatedā for their orientation to try and force them to experience sexuality ācorrectlyā.
In short, our orientation has been and continues to be pathologized, and asexuals have been put through corrective therapy: x,x, x, x, x
Why Aro/Ace awareness is important to me
This is an example of acephobia.
Sure, it couldāve happened to anyone. But it happened to an asexual BECAUSE OF THEIR ASEXUALITY.
no one gets to tell me that my objectification is magically āless potentā because itās due to my asexuality.
āI WANT to make the community unsafe for youā
Itās All A Fucking Joke, Right
Posts of people describing the hardship theyāve faced for their asexuality:x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x, x
The blog @acephobia-is-real has so many submissions and examples of hatred, harassment, hostility, and abuse, of aces who have been raped and/or sexually assaulted in an attempt to āfixā them, and made suicidal due to aphobia and/or their own perceived brokenness, that it would be pointless for me to try and link any. Just go and start reading. Try their suicide tag.
There may be dissatisfyingly little research done on asexuality, but there has been enough done to prove that they do face discrimination, no matter how hard some may find that to believe. But guess what? You, an allosexual person, do not get to say shit like āaces donāt get kicked outā or āaces donāt _____ā any more than I as a white person get to say that things I donāt experience must not happen to black people either. Just because you havenāt experienced it personally or witnessed it with your own eyes doesnāt mean it doesnāt happen. You havenāt walked in an aceās shoes, you donāt know what they deal with. Period.
Not even other aces can tell asexuals that their experiences arenāt real or arenāt valid. Different people can deal with different amounts of oppression, that doesnāt mean the lack of oppression is the default ātruthā.
Nobody is trying to say that asexuals have it āas badā or worse than gay or trans people, but we donāt HAVE to āhave it worseā to beincluded and for our experiences to have merit without being compared to anyone elseās. Let me say that again: our experiences have merit without being compared to anyone elseās.
āWe just want to protect our safe spacesā
Repeatedly misgendered and mislabeled people
Informed rape victims that their assaults didnāt happen the way they happened (which is a form of gaslighting)
Made light of their own rape apology
Compared asexuals to pedophiles
Compared asexuals to Nazis
Harassed people who wanted to be left alone
Made jokes about asexuals committing suicide
Told suicidal asexuals to āstop whiningā
Admitted to recycling biphobia
Created a āyourfaveisaphobicā blog
Admitted to hating the ace/aro community
Asserted that asexuality should not be taught in schools (because it āsexualizes minorsā or because gay/bi/pan minors will āmistakenlyā identify as asexual)
Told asexuals to die: x, x, x, x, x (tbh this is only a tiny sample and I donāt have the heart to go digging for more)
Are all aphobes this vile? Maybe not, but this is still the disgusting, hateful attitude festering in the gatekeeping community, and it stinks like shit. The examples I have provided above are only a fraction of the harassment and abuse that is perpetrated on a regular basis.
āHet aces/aroaces are straightā
Some het aces identify as straight. Some het aces donāt identify as straight, they identify as asexual, and itās not your place to label them against their will. There is no world in which aroaces, people who experience no attraction to anyone, are straight.
āStraightā isnāt a sexual orientation, itās a position of power.
A-Spec Identities are Not Secondary.
Invisibility is Not a Privilege.
āpassing privilegeā is not a real thing.
Straight-passing privilege: a myth
Bad arguments against allowing a-spec to identify as queer
Having your identity erased is not a privilege.
asexuality, like bisexuality, is deliberately misunderstood by out groups in order to exclude us.
ace/aro people donāt āonlyā experience attraction to the āopposite genderā or any other. thatās the point. we also experience a lack of attraction, either romantically or sexually, and that lack of attraction is part of our identity.
How many straight people do you know that want to kill themselves because of their orientation?
The closet is not a privilege
āWe accept SGA (same-gender attracted) and trans acesā
Firstly, SGA (same-gender attraction) is a term that was used and is still used in Mormon conversion therapy, so as one can understand,a lot of people are very uncomfortable being labeled with this description. Secondly, it enforces a gender binary of āsameā and āoppositeā gender that leaves a large number of nonbinary people out in the cold. Is a genderfluid person only āsame-gender attractedā if theyāre attracted to other genderfluid people who are genderfluid in exactly the same way? How about agender, intergender, demigirl/boy people? And before the argument āwell theyāre included as transā is made, there are plenty of nonbinary people who do not identify as trans. Iām one of them.
The standard of āSGA and transā as requirement for entry to the LGBTQ community is used nowhere outside of aphobic tumblr, and it seems crafted specifically for the purpose of excluding aces, aros, NBs, intersex people, and others not deemed āgay enoughā.
(SGA did NOT come from āSGLā, same-gender loving. That is a term created by black queer people and not to be appropriated by white people.)
Discussion of the history of the word āqueerā and why itās better than āSGAā: x, x, x, x, x
There are also many āSGA and transā aces who are against the gatekeeping and feel that they are hated by these aphobes.
Youāre not protecting me by being an ace/aro exclusionist.
What we hear when you say āI only support SGA Asexuals/Aromanticsā
my favourite thing is when aphobes try to tell me that their aphobia doesnāt apply to me / affect me because ā[iām] queer for other reasonsā
okay, you wanna know why Iām for including all aces in the LGBT+ community?
Why your acephobia and arophobia is really just bullshit
it really annoys me when I see Discoursers say they support LGBT+ aces, just not cishet ones.
when you say āi accept sga and trans aces and aros but not cishet aces/aros because theyāre straightā
when people āacceptā sga/mga/non-cis aces and aros, but not others, what it actually means is they accept the part of you that isnāt directly tied to your asexuality/aromanticism
if ur gonna fuckin claim those four letters cover them & the whole damn community, they sure as fuck can cover aces as well
āAce discourseā is really a Tumblr-only thing
Iām a lesbian ace and Iāve never felt more worthless and disgusting than this ace discourse
The reason even trans and bi/gay/pan/etc asexuals get defensive when you talk about cishet aces/aros not being part of the LGBT+ community is because youāre erasing a part of our identity??
If you talk shit about aces/aros with the disclaimer ācishetā it still affects all aces. Saying ānotably cishet aces should all go dieā still makes all ace/aro people feel like they are being called out.
Your ādiscourseā is harmful to all asexuals. And PS, your rhetoric is literally indistinguishable from TWERF rhetoric.
āThe LGBT community has always been about fighting homophobia and transphobia/we came together to fight homophobia and transphobiaā
āHomophobia and Transphobiaā: What does the LGBT+ community fight for?
The modern American movement was first known as the āgay communityā when cis gay men refused to even accept lesbians, then the āgay and lesbian communityā. (Good reading on the subject.)
āAfter the elation of change following group action in the Stonewall riots in New York, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, some gays and lesbians became less accepting of bisexual or transgender people. Critics said that transgender people were acting out stereotypes and bisexuals were simply gay men or lesbian women who were afraid to come out and be honest about their identity. Each community has struggled to develop its own identity including whether, and how, to align with other gender and sexuality-based communities, at times excluding other subgroups; these conflicts continue to this day.ā (source)
āFrom about 1988, activists began to use the initialism LGBT in the United States. Not until the 1990s within the movement did gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people gain equal respect.ā (ibid)
These are scans of a gay magazine from 1999 showing that 48% of those surveyed did not believe that trans people should be a part of the gay community.
The communityās boundaries have always been in flux
Insisting that LG people have always been accepting of bi and trans people is incredibly revisionist and does a great deal of injustice to those who have been excluded.
Despite the fact that bisexual and transgender people have always been around, and have done great things for the community, they have faced a great deal of lateral oppression from the LG part of the group that did not want to see them get an equal share of attention, support, or legitimacy. This post is not about proving LG transphobia and biphobia, but itās so rampant that I donāt feel like I need to provide sources whatsoever. Nevertheless, hereās a collection of biphobia, and the blog@terf-calloutdocuments some of the violent transphobia on this site, particularly in the lesbian community. This post is an example.
āThe A stands for Ally so that closeted people can be the community without being outedā
No one is saying that we donāt care about closeted people, but a) even if youāre a closeted L, G, B, or T, you are still a L, G, B, or T. Allies do not need to be part of the acronym to be intrinsically welcomed. As someone said, this is like saying the āBā in BLT stands for ābreadā. We can pretty much safely assume that a sandwich is going to include bread, we donāt have to go of our way to give it a letter. Either you are outing every āallyā as a closeted queer person, or you are giving 100% cis straight people an LGBTQ member card, the very thing you are arguing against by trying to exclude asexuals.
Furthermore, this puts forth the argument āIām willing to let cishet straight people into the community for the sake of a few closeted peopleā while at the same time stating āIām not willing to let the A stand for asexuals because I donāt think letting cis heteroromantic asexuals into the community is worth giving all asexuals representation and supportā. Which says that you consider asexuals less valuable and more of a threat than cis straight people.
Bonus: The History of LGBT(QQIAAP+)
āAces have never been a part of the LGBTQ/queer communityā
Asexuals recorded as āGroup Xā in the 1948 Kinsey Reports
What is asexual history? The 19th and 20th century
From The Westminster Review, a political magazine, in 1907; an essay by Helen Fraser called Womenās Suffrage, on how if women got the vote, butch and ace women were gonna dominate the whole thing and screw it up for all the Real Ladies.
The Spinster Movement, and how they were treated as queer
From āFeminism,ā by Correa Moylan Walsh, 1917
the āaces/aros were part of the bi community until they very recently chose to split off, so stop telling them that they have never been queer or that they donāt belong in āthe LGBT communityāā masterpost
asexuality existed before David Jay and AVEN
āWhere were you whenā¦?ā A History of Asexual Inclusion (Part One)
āWhere were you whenā¦?ā A History of Asexual Inclusion (Part Two)
āStop tokenizing bi and trans people/stop comparing bi/trans and ace experiencesā
Weāre not the ones doing it. They are comparing them, themselves.
Bisexual person discussing the similarities of anti-bi and anti-ace arguments
Pansexual person discussing the similarities in treatment (Follow up post)
Bisexual person recalling ace inclusion and discussing the similarities
Bisexual person discussing āSGA discourseā
Panromantic genderfluid person discussing lateral aggression
This Blog Explicitly Welcomes All Ace/Aro Folks As Part Of LGBTQIA
Bisexual trans person discussing the nature of asexuality
Trans lesbian discusses the identical nature of TWERF and aphobe rethoric
Pansexual person tells you to Cut It Out
Bisexual person discussing how the unifying common point of the community is deviation from the cisheteronormative norm
Bisexual genderqueer person says that the bi community and the a-spec community have a deep history together and have always been allies
Bisexual trans person discusses how we can relate to each other
Trans lesbian TAKES. YOU. DOWN.
Bisexual person arguing that all asexuals are queer
āI have proof of an asexual being homophobic/transphobic/racist/a terrible personā
Of course there are asexuals who are terrible people. There are legions of gays and lesbians who are racist and transphobic. Does that make them not gay/lesbian? Does their bigotry invalidate their sexual orientation, or remove the L and G from the acronym? No, I donāt think so. Some asexuals being bad people doesnāt justify you trying to invalidate all of us.
āāAllosexualā is a bad word because ____ā
I actually have an āallosexualā tag just for posts about why āallosexualā is a perfectly fine word: x, x, x, x, x. x
āThe split-attraction model is homophobicā
What we call the split-attraction model was first described by Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, a gay advocate from the 1800s, as ādisjunctive uranodioningā. (source) (credit to this post)
āThe term ācorrective rapeā was coined by South African lesbians and should only be used by lesbiansā
No one means any disrespect to lesbians or other victims of corrective rape, but this is not a correct statement.
āWeāll Show You Youāre a Womanā describes the violence directed towards LGBT people in South Africa, stating, āNegative public attitudes towards homosexuality go hand in hand with a broader pattern of discrimination, violence, hatred, and extreme prejudice against people known or assumed to be lesbian, gay, and transgender, or those who violate gender and sexual norms in appearance or conduct (such as women playing soccer, dressing in a masculine manner, and refusing to date men).ā It goes on to say, āMuch of the recent media coverage of violence against lesbians and transgender men has been characterized by a focus on ācorrective rape,ā a phenomenon in which men rape people they presume or know to be lesbians in order to āconvertā them to heterosexuality.ā
The Wikipedia article on corrective rape in South Africa states that, āA study conducted by OUT LGBT Well-being and the University of South Africa Centre for Applied Psychology (UCAP) showed that āthe percentage of black gay men who said they have experienced corrective rape matched that of the black lesbians who partook in the studyā.ā
It is not only lesbians, but also bisexual women, transgender men, gay men, and gender non-conforming people in South Africa who experience corrective rape. This is not in any way meant to minimize the horror of the epidemic or shift attention away from lesbians, but other victims, including asexuals, deserve attention as well. Do not silence or speak over victims of rape by policing their language.
āAces are valid, theyāre just not queer/LGBTQā
You cannot in one breath say āAsexuals are validā and in the next deny their experiences. Spend five minutes in the community and you will see testimony after testimony from aces describing their abuse, their sexual assault(s), the countless times people have called them confused, broken, wrong, mentally ill, inhuman, sinful, and how these experiences have left them feeling hopeless, alone, alienated, subhuman, depressed, and suicidal. Almost every asexual out there will tell you a story of how their orientation has caused them pain and struggle, and you canāt call them valid while at the same time calling these experiences invalid and nonexistent.
Bonus: This is a list of all the mainstream LGBTQ groups that include asexuals.
āForm your own community!ā
a) We do have our own community, because every letter in the acronym has its own communityand yet is still part of the acronym, b) you fucking shits wonāt stop sending us hate and bombarding us with shit meant to trigger and harass us.
āAces take resources from other LGBTQ who need themā
Iāve seen some pretty wild claims about this one, insisting that asexuals āstealā things such as scholarships, beds at homeless shelters, food and space at pride events, suicide hotlines, and so on, yet I have never seen any actual proof that any āstealingā has ever taken place. For one thing, I thought āyouāll never get kicked out or fired for being aceā, āno one is suicidal because theyāre asexualā, so why would you think aces need these resources? Either we donāt need them or we donāt use them, you canāt have it both ways.
For another, how heartless do you have to be to tell asexuals that they canāt use suicide hotlines? Do you realize that youāre saying that asexuals should be denied life-saving services? That, in essence, asexuals are suicidal due to their orientation, but you think theyāre not āqueer enoughā so they deserve to die? Because that is the logical progression of refusing someone suicide prevention, and thatās the message aces receive when you tell them they are āstealingā suicide prevention.
LGBTQ resources offer them to asexuals, andbenefit from us using them.
Lastly, do you not realize we are alsoPROVIDING resources? We are bringing bodies and minds to the community, we are here to be voices, to volunteer, to bring encouragement, information, and support. We earn our keep. You just have to admit that you donāt WANT us here.
Corrective rape against asexuals is a real thing
Asexuals do face discrimination in the workplace
We had to lobby for our sexuality not to be diagnosed as a mental illness
Asexual people are often afraid to come out to their friends and families, and for good reason
People will literally think of someone as being less human if they are asexual
These issues have the potential to affect ALL asexuals
(Thanks to @livebloggingmydescentintomadness for these)
Living in a world where the media is overflowing with sexual imagery and where society constantly puts value on sexual intercourse, virginity, and related topics - who can forget the phrase āsex sellsā? - men and women who do not experience sexual attraction (the definition of asexuality) and who are sex-repulsed or masturbation-repulsed (as many asexuals, myself included, are) feel alienated and ābrokenā. We also face erasure in terms of representation, being either grossly underrepresented or represented as cold, harsh, and āsynonymous with celibateā people. Letās not forget erasure from LGBT spaces - I have many times been told that asexuals do not belong in the acronym or in āour spacesā, even though asexuals have the capacity to be homoromantic, biromantic, panromantic, etc, as well as transgender or nonbinary. And, if we donāt belong in LGBT spaces, and we clearly arenāt heterosexual, what do we belong? Nowhere, it seems. Of course, the argument also drifts to āasexuals donāt experience oppressionā, which is false.
Examples of asexual oppression:
http://autumndiesirae.tumblr.com/post/118710018295/aces-dont-face-discrimination
Asexuals are the highest targets for corrective rape:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/06/20/asexual-discrimination_n_3380551.html
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