For those of you who don't remember, around 2017 there was pretty much a hate campaign against asexuality, aromanticism, and related identities on Tumblr. It was related to other attacks on queer people, especially trans people, bisexuals, and pansexuals, and a lot of it revolved around trying to disqualify people as real members of the queer community. It was disruptive because it was about turning parts of the community against each other and making them doubt themselves and one another. Although some of those posts were probably people just being organically prejudiced, others were definitely created or at least spread by bad actors, including TERFs.
I'm starting to see posts that remind me of that time here and on other platforms. So, I need everyone to start specifically looking out for some of these talking points. Obviously, this isn't an exhaustive list, but it hits the high points, particularly the stuff I recognize from the 2017 era.
[Identity] isn't really queer because everyone feels like that: Big one with demisexuality, but I've also seen it applied to bisexuals. If you actually talk to/read about straight people this falls apart pretty quickly, but for people with less knowledge it can plant a seed of doubt.
[Identity] can pass as cis/straight and is therefore not marginalized: Again, this one falls apart with research, because passing in practice is more complicated than this framing makes it seem. Just the fact that queer people are expected to act in a way different from their natural inclination is a type of oppression. Perhaps someone who can appear cis and straight is less likely to be subjected to hate crimes or murder, but the price of this safety is stress and sadness. Less oppression is not the same as no oppression. Also, ultimately, queerness is not about being oppressed, it's about not conforming perfectly to cis-straight-allo-perisex societal norms.
[Identity] is just made up of people who want to be special: Pernicious because a lot of people start figuring out their identity as a teen, which is a time when pretty much everyone wants to feel unique and special. But people generally only question their identity when something about the default doesn't fit. There are outliers who are really in it only for attention, but they're the exceptions, not the rule. In general, if you are worried you might be doing it for attention, you probably aren't.
[Identity] is not inclusive enough: Often, this is an attempt to confuse people by conflating the usually-true statement of "the online [identity] community needs to better acknowledge the range of people's experiences," with the nonsense claim that the identity label itself is not inclusive enough. When in doubt, go looking for the definition of the identity. Also keep in mind that a lot of sexualities are seen as a spectrum. A person who is attracted to men 90% of the time and someone whose attraction to all genders is equal are both bisexual; a person who finds romance uncomfortable and a person who just doesn't care much about it are both aromantic. And with the exception of culture-bound identities like Two-Spirit, queer identities don't have racial or cultural qualifications; the fact that a lot of representations of an identity are white doesn't mean that identity doesn't include POC.
[Identity] is too technical/hard to understand: Usually this is said with the implication that the identity is fabricated. It's a variation of the "I can't learn these" crap every neopronoun user ever has had to deal with. More importantly, it's nonsense because a person doesn't need to understand every aspect of your gender or sexuality unless you are in some way sexually, romantically, or queerplatonically involved with them, and sometimes not even then.
[Identity] doesn't belong at Pride. (note: This is not about cops; cops are a profession not a queer identity and they definitely don't belong at Pride!!) This is an attempt to make people feel reluctant to attend queer events, which isolates them from their community. For the record, all queer people and all allies belong at Pride, unless the event in question has a more specific target audience. This may allow for groups you specifically don't like being in community with or find odd, and that's part of the point. If you aren't comfortable with someone's appearance or behavior at Pride, that's your problem (unless they're harassing you), and if they are violating some sort of event rule, that's a problem for the event organizer. In either case, policing other people is not something you need to be doing.
[Identity] is a white people/colonizer thing. Again, this is undermining people's feelings of belonging to the queer community. There are definitely Western cultural assumptions underpinning a lot of how people view queer identities, and some of those assumptions are not present in the history of non-Western cultures. That said, at this point we can be fairly certain that while not every culture has a recorded history of queerness, the records we have are spread out geographically in such a way that we can assume that queer behavior just generally happens in humans as a species. Queer traditions have been destroyed for religious and political reasons, but modern queer people have been working to rebuild them. There are people in your culture who are queer. They may be closeted, they may do things very differently from Western queer people, but they exist and I believe you can find them.
That's too many identities, so you have to be making some of those up. Again, trying to make people feel out of place. Yes, sometimes people will go a little overboard during the questioning process with different labels, but that's not actually hurting anyone. This one also gets used against POC and disabled people, so if you find yourself agreeing with this one, remember that it's what racists think about your average person from a colonized country and then try unlearning some biases.
The only real trans people are the ones who have medically transitioned. Yet another avenue for invalidating people. Generally, this is related to the hell that was the truscum/tucute debates of the 2010s (if you are trans and don't know those words don't google them unless you enjoy identity discourse). This was already stupid back before the active attacks on access to medical transition for young trans people. The choice to pursue or not pursue medical transition is really complicated and variables like finances, disability, and geographical location are sometimes factors. It's in many ways a personal and individual decision and it's not for other people to judge.
What's the difference between 'bi' and 'pan'? It's 2026, so many people have written so much about this issue, and most of it is still available via web search. Anyone who asks this question publicly on social media is not acting in good faith. The answer is "that's highly contextual and depends on how you define each term and there's been a lot of debate about the best definitions, most of which has been very nasty, so in the end just trust that people are using the label they most prefer, and if you're trying to decide between them, just do research until one starts to appeal more than the other."
Asexuals have relationships too! or Asexuals don't need to be depicted in relationships. and Variations on this theme involving aromantics and aroaces. All of these can be said in good faith, but they're an issue when they're used in response to discussion or depiction of asexuals/aros/aroaces in the opposite situation. It can very quickly turn what was a good-faith effort at talking about ace and aro identities into a situation where people feel the need to defend the validity of their own life choices, which is never a good outcome. Some aces/aros/aroaces enter relationships, others do not, all of them are valid, and depictions/discussions of the opposite experiences are not a problem unless they play into stereotypes about aces and aros or fail to depict aro/ace relationships as any different from alloromantic/allosexual relationships.
Anything related to genital preference and trans people. Again, anyone posting about this on social media in public is probably not posting in good faith. Yes, people can have preferences, but they also have a choice about whether or not to be transphobic about said preferences. Without getting too explicit, there is a difference between saying that you never want to engage in certain types of sex and saying that you'd never want any type of relationship with someone who has the equipment involved in that kind of sex. This is pretty much always coming from TERFs or TERF-adjacent people, and it's also encouraging people to obsess about a hypothetical situation that they may never encounter.
Gold Star Lesbians. If you don't know that this is basically just a TERF thing at this point, I'm sorry. You can be a lesbian who's never been with a man, sure, but the only ones using this term for it are TERFs and people who don't realize they've been listening to TERFs.
[Queer Media] is for fujoshis, not 'real queer people.' Hey, it's the effort to make people feel out of place again! This framing generally demonizes female sexuality by characterizing fujoshis as gross deviants while also ignoring the overlap between the queer community and the fujoshi community. There are people who start out as fujoshi and then figure out that they're trans or bi or otherwise queer. Also in general, using the term for Japanese fans of BL as a pejorative has some orientalist undertones and really shouldn't be a thing. Queer men are allowed to be uncomfortable or unhappy with BL, but they also need to realize that BL is part of the romance genre and the people who read it are perfectly aware that most of it is extremely unrealistic and are not understanding it as perfectly representing real experiences. Also, frankly, men have created and consumed a lot of really awful smut over time, and it's fine for women, both queer and straight, to do the same.
[Queer Media] is problematic because it includes queer people who are morally grey or bad people. This is a symptom of cultural puritanism, yes, but it's also an accusation that only works featuring minorities get. Have you ever seen someone criticize an action movie because the straight cis perisex male protagonist is too amoral? I didn't think so. Holding queer media to impossibly high standards harms both queer creators and the people who engage with their work.
[Queer Media] isn't queer because there is no explicit confirmation of the character's identity/the main couple doesn't end up together/etc. Again, this never happens to media that isn't about minorities. A straight background couple in a romcom can look at each other tenderly once and immediately be understood as a couple. Also, not every narrative and setting allows for this type of explicit confirmation. If queer people feel a work reflects their experiences, that should be enough!
[Queer Character] is a stereotype. This one is sometimes said in good faith and sometimes correct! But other times, it's used to attack a queer character based in whole or in part on a queer creator. Yes, some characters do fit into stereotypes, and some creators probably have internalized queerphobia to unpack. But stereotypes have also been used as a way to code characters as queer in censored works. Before taking a statement like this seriously, ask yourself if the character is actually being used to represent the entire queer community, or if they're one depiction among several that isn't meant to represent everyone of that identity.
Ignore it or shut it down. I'm so serious. You don't have to treat people who bring these things up as genuine or engage with them at all. "We don't need to have this argument again," is a complete sentence. So is "This seems like discourse bait." If the person who posted it was actually acting in good faith, telling them they came off differently is in fact the right thing to do. Like, I feel I'm aging myself here, but sometimes you really do just not have to not feed the trolls.
Obviously, just ignoring bullies and bigots doesn't make them go away. But it does prevent their nonsense from spreading and limit the efficacy of their attacks.
Also, like, just as a caution: posting callouts about this stuff is not the way to go! Putting someone who is spreading anti-queer rhetoric in the position of the victim is more likely to radicalize them than it is to shut them up.
Anyhow, this is my rant for the day, thanks for reading this giant block of text!
