uwu

I’m massively bored and massively annoyed at people circulating images of radfems to support their arguments. So here’s another ace discourse post. 

A fringe argument in ace discourse has been “Asexuals have always been considered LGBT!” even though there has never been any noted reference to cisgender, straight aces in LGBT spaces prior to like… 2010. And the LGBT spaces prior to 2010 that let in cisgender, straight aces were just GSAs (which already let in cishets) in high schools or colleges.

And there is a reason for it.

Part of the reason is the changing definition of asexual. The AVEN triangle is based on the Kinsey “Group X” definition where Group X meant just… not having sex. Kinsey (who should not be cited with adoration for coming up with asexuality, as he was an awful person) did not create the “scale” to address who is or is not LGBT.

Then, radical feminists (ie also not an LGBT group) defined asexuality as viewing sex as nonessential to relationships. This bore an iconic image used to defend aces as LGBT to this day:

The image is from “off our backs” which is a radical feminist publication. This particular group was “Lesbians Activists at Barnard (College).” This was not listing LGBT identities (thus why straight was up there) but was listing identities you could have as a radical feminist. Similarly, the “Asexual Manifesto” was published by radical feminist Lisa Orlando who published it through New York Radical Feminists. And talks about asexuality being a choice, not an identity.

At the same time, asexual was referenced by a trans liberation mag, as we can see from ANOTHER image used by inclusionists:

This is an image just saying that all trans people should be liberated no matter if they are straight, gay, or anything else. It should be noted that since this was published in 1970, it was functioning under the same understanding of asexual as used by the radical feminists who defined asexual as seeing “ sex as nonessential to a satisfying relationship.” Not at all our modern definition of asexual.

So, we’re into 1970 and no one is considering ace to be LGBT. And yet it exists as DISTINCT from bisexual, so all of you fuckers can stop with the “actual cishet aces were considered to be bisexual” cause… no they weren’t.

Skip to the first proto ace community as listed by aven itself, Zoe O’Reilly’s “My Life as an Amoeba.” Which speaks of envy towards LGBT people, boasts of asexuality being about not fucking or dating and how that makes them better than teen moms, and defines asexuality how we would aroace. So, different ace definition than today… still not considered LGBT.

AVEN’s creation is messy as fuck and struggles to define asexuality but decides that basically any person who relates to non-sexuality belongs there. Neato.

May 2003 on AVEN: “Let’s change LGBT to LGBTA.” David Jay, founder of AVEN, says, actually, he’s already done so by making his universitys acronym “ LGBTTQQPFAGIBDSM “ (spot the slur, look hard at the inclusion of BDSM). People make “LOL SO MANY LETTERS” jokes that homophobes make about LGBT to this day. Then:

“The ace is for ally bro” and Aven guy says, “Actually, allies are queer.”

So, 2003… aces aren’t LGBT. And David Jay is a fucking freak. Also, someone brought the thread back 8 yaers later to say “Ew aces aren’t LGBT like those sinners.” Oops.

In 2010, aces decided to make their own flag. Some like stripes because it’s “Very LGBT” and well… here are some responses:

So, already an acknowledgment that they might not be LGBT. But calls LGBt people “Alternate sexualities” which… die.

“The gays get a lot of guff, right? Because of their rainbow flag” not OUR rainbow flag, lol. Also, wtf and then someone else points out the a is for ally anyways

In 2010.

In 2015, aces started the #GiveItBack campaign after GLAAD (and then HRC in 2016) said the A is for Ally. You can go on twitter and see aces tweeting about the #GiveItBack campaign if you don’t believe me, lol.

So, if aces want to claim that aces have always been LGBT… I gotta say… history is not on your side and, “No, no, I swear they were actually considered bisexual” doesn’t work because your own images include people listing out bisexual and asexual as separate identities.

Anyways, this post is long as fuck but only took 20 minutes. And will ONLY take me 20 minutes because I’m not arguing with people who want to defend an image of a radfem, an out of context image about trans liberation, or Kinsey lmao. Anyone who wants to argue will be laughed at and/or blocked.

shut the fuck up yes they do. if straight people can be attracted to nonbinary people, that doesn't magically make them Not Straight, right? so why apply that to gay, lesbian, and bi?

nonbinary isn't some other special gender that needs another special label. nonbinary lesbians, gays and bis exist and do not need to have a special label because of being nonbinary.

every sexuality inherently 'includes' being attracted to nonbinary people because being nonbinary is a varied and complex experience between many, many people, and you have no way of knowing if that the person you thought was hot just now is nonbinary.

For same-gender couples and single non-heterosexuals, here’s no way for real-life strangers to distinguish between “gay” and “bisexual” unless we explicitly come out. Even then, bigots don’t care about who we’re not attracted to—any same-gender attraction bisexuals express renders us “gay” in other people’s eyes. It’s really funny how gay people insist that biphobia is just homophobia and yet we can’t… reclaim homophobic slurs that target and traumatize us.

Nobody looks at a single butch woman and goes, “just so you know, if I saw you with your girlfriend but I thought you were also into men, I would totally not call you the d-slur.” No homophobe sees two men holding hands or a man being flamboyant and thinks to themselves, “I’m going to call them f-slurs because I think they’re not attracted to women.” 

Homophobic violence doesn’t occur because we ~lack attraction to the opposite gender~. It’s because we have attraction towards the same gender (and our society assumes that if you like the same gender then you don’t like any other gender; thanks bi erasure!). If this weren’t the case, bisexuals could escape homophobia by coming out, which is ridiculous. I wish we could do that.

Homophobic violence also has plenty to do with gender-nonconformity, which is to be expected when it’s such a staple of gay/bi culture and non-heterosexuality is a marker of “failing” to adhere to gender roles. As Laverne Cox puts it: 

When kids are bullied and called anti-gay slurs… [i]t’s because the child did not conform to gender expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth. The bullies might yell ‘gay,’ but it’s about gender expression.

I know bisexuals who’ve been called these slurs while single or in different-gender relationships. I know people who’ve been called the d- or f-slur in response to coming out as bisexual. And did we all just collectively forget the whole “love the sinner hate the sin,” “it’s fine if you’re gay as long as you don’t ‘act on it’” crap?

I hear the “counterargument” that “bisexuals can tell homophobes they’re attracted to the opposite gender while gay people can’t,” but:

They can. That’s what being in the closet is. Gay and bi people can and do lie about their sexualities to avoid violence all the time.

Our different-gender attraction doesn’t eliminate the “problem” of our same gender attraction.

Again, do you really believe that if someone calls me the f-slur, I could just go, “I’m bisexual, actually,” and they’d apologize?

“Before doing this research, we had assumed that the war’s major influence was to allow more lesbians to be self-supporting by opening up more and higher paying jobs for women. But according to narrators, jobs for lesbians were not a result of the war. They and their friends had been working since their teens in offices, shops, and factories, and had never doubted that they could find work. In their minds the important effect of the war was to give more independence to all women, thereby making lesbians more like other women and less easy to identify. Women working in defense industries were out on the street going to work, alone or in groups, at all hours of the day and night. In addition, it was no longer unusual for women to have money to spend or for women to go out to bars or restaurants alone. Many women even went out to gay bars for an evening of fun; some became regulars at the bars and entered lesbian relationships until their husbands returned. Leslie remembers wisecracking, “Here come the war brides,” when groups of straight women would come into Ralph Martin’s, a popular bar of the period.

Finally, and in narrators’ minds most importantly, the dress code for women changed, allowing lesbians to more openly express their erotic interest in women through their clothing. Since all women were now able to wear pants to work and to purchase them in stores off the rack, butches who only wore pants in the privacy of their homes in the 1930s could now wear them on the street. Arden recalls how when she used to work the afternoon shift during the war, she would go into Ralph Martin’s after work. “A woman used to come in who worked on the railroads. She would come in her work clothes, with her lantern, her overalls, and cap. She would look real cute. Some of the girls would go out of their way to come into the bars with their work clothes on.”

Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy. “Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of a Lesbian Community” Chapter 2, section title “The Flowering of Lesbian Bar Culture in the 1940s.” (emphasis is my own) 

Even if you argue that butch/femme identities go beyond fashion (which they do, as someone who’s gender is butch i agree), that’s not a legitimate reason to claim bi women can’t use the terms. 

1. It’s just blatantly biphobic and insulting to claim that bi women just aren’t capable of understanding the meaning beyond what you wear. No, bi women are not inherently more shallow and superficial than you, and they can understand anything you can understand.

But the only place I’ve had someone physically try to remove me from a bathroom was in London.

Some random middle aged woman thought that she had the right to put her hands on me simply because I don’t match her ideas of what femininity is, and I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this happened in a place where transphobia is running rampant. Of all the weird stuff that’s happened to me in pretty conservative parts of the US, they simply are not as emboldened here as they currently are in the UK; but don’t think for a moment that they don’t intend to get there.

Trans people are reason enough to fight these bigots. It’s a good enough reason. Trans people deserve respect, dignity, compassion, and protection. But if you think they’ll be satisfied with only pushing trans people back into the closet, you’re utterly deluded. They want absolute conformity, simple as that, and they’re increasing their push here too.

When we insist every identity under the LGBT umbrella is incredibly unique and different from every other identity, there is a deep artificial divide created between bi women + lesbians, bi men + gay men, etc. there’s so much biphobia in the community and i think its rlly due to people focusing way too hard on making sure Every Identity Feels Secure and not enough on solidarity.

you guys add stone butch blues to your reading lists but i don’t think any of you actually read it considering the way you’re treating bi women like they aren’t real wlw or transhet men like they can’t resonate with lesbian experiences. I’m sure this is a fucking newsflash for you, but we’re all the same to cishets. no single sexuality under the LGBT umbrella- yes, this ABSOLUTELY includes hets, as long as they’re trans- oppresses another. “appropriating other sexualities” just isn’t a thing unless you’re cishet.

Obviously, it doesn’t have to be comic books if you haven’t bought those. It could be anything that you bought even though you didn’t need it. A new piece of clothing maybe that you just thought was pretty but you actually didn’t desperately need it because you have enough to dress already, for example.

Or maybe you ordered a self indulgent pizza sometime during the last year, even if you could’ve eaten something less expensive at home and have used the spare money for donations. Yes, food is a basic need. But Pizza? Not so much.

I also, more importantly, want you to know that this post here that you made will likely contribute to people donating to AO3.

I’ll let you know that if you really care about where donations go and not in fact just care about getting good old call-out-culture validation to evaluate yourself via fake morality - you should post something with resources to where people can donate.

You could say something along the lines of “AO3 got this much money and already surpassed their goal, if you considered to donate, please consider donating to one of these things instead”. With a post like this you could’ve actually made a difference! You could’ve helped people you think deserve it!!

But instead you made a post as negative as can be and it will inevitably drive some people to donate to AO3 out of spite.

But in the end, do you actually care how your own actions influence things like that, or are you just here to make yourself feel morally superior without having any right or reason to?

“The Archive of Our Own is a place for fanworks. Content may not be uploaded to OTW’s servers if it contains or links to child pornography (images of real children); […]. Uploading such Content is a violation of the ToS.

[…]

If you believe Content violates a specific law, you may report it to us. […]”

As you can see, AO3 does not “actively host child porn”. AO3 does not host child porn at all, and “actively” is an especially strange claim that would need them to, well, actively and explicitly invite people to upload said content.

AO3, as an archive, simply allows everything that is legal.

You need to understand that if you think something with the content they allow is wrong, you are attacking the wrong target. If you have a problem with sexual fiction about underage characters you have to address the laws that make it legal, not an archive and especially not the userbase of said archive of which the majority have done nothing harmful. And of which the majority also belong to at least two minorities at once, often more.

And “donating to a child porn site“ would be wrong not only during a pandemic, but under any circumstances. Luckily AO3 is not a child porn site & as I said up there at the end - if you just want to talk about the fact you don’t like their policy, then you don’t have to act as if it is about the people in need. It obviously isn’t about them, you all just use that as a means for validation.

Women can wear pants. Men cannot wear skirts.

Women can go without makeup. Men cannot wear makeup. 

Women can wear men’s clothes and be fashionable. Men cannot wear women’s clothes and be seen as fashionable. 

A lack of high heels is generally acceptable for a woman. Wearing high heels is not appropriate for a man.