#ace acceptance

This month started out the same. But today I finally realised that pride month can be about (the struggle for) self-acceptance too. Which seems pretty logical now, but I guess my brain actively worked against me on this, like it often does.

I made a tiktok for this! I’m drawing one aro character a day for aro awareness week!

Friendly reminder that Alastor is aroace. I personally think you can ship him however much you want, I can’t control that, but it’s disappointing that a majority of the fandom choose to romanticise and hyper sexualise him. It makes it so that he’s only portrayed as aro/ace in a minority of the fandom. A lack of sexual or romantic attraction isn’t boring, it’s not uninteresting. I want it to be normalised. Yes you can ship him but respect his canon sexual orientation, as much as you’d respect any other part of the community 💜

The lack of knowledge on asexuality when I was younger really impacted me negatively. Because I ended up hurting people, by not understanding I was never going to feel sexually attracted to anyone. I also missed opportunities for dating because while I liked certain people, I rarely acted on it because I mistakenly believed I needed sexual attraction to even consider dating someone.

So I hurt people I cared about by not reacting to their interest in me. I missed having certain experiences with people I did feel romantically attracted to because I was waiting for sexual awakening.

And I blame our oversexualized society for that. If everything hadn't been so sex oriented when it talked about relationships(including religious oriented books on relationships) I might have better understood my own sexuality. I might not have been waiting for something that wasn't going to happen. I might not have unintentionally hurt people in my past. I might not have hated myself for something I have no control over. I might have actually dated some of the people in my past and might not feel so lonely and like a romantic failure now.

So yeah we need Asexuality to be better seen. We need more activism on the education of what asexuality means. We need to fight erasure at all costs. Because I can't stand the thought of people younger than me struggling through what I have. Especially when they want to date or a partner because they want/feel they need it.

There are a lot of “positivity” posts circling out there that are worded specifically to be ace and aro exclusionist rhetoric disguised as innocuous solidarity. Here are some things to watch out for if you want to avoid interacting with exclusionist posts. 

Keep in mind, a post having one of these things does not necessarily mean the OP is an exclusionist, but it just means to go back and read the post carefully a second time, and maybe scan the poster’s blog or about page.

Text from screenshot reads:

i rly dont like the mindset that all lgbt people want is to be “accepted” and that all out community is about it “inclusion”. no. we want access to trans health care. we want anti discrimination laws for housing and employment. we want marriage equality. we want to stop trans kids from being forced to go by their dead name at school. we want to abolish the gay/trans panic defense. we want to stop corrective rape. we want black trans women to stop being murdered. being “accepted” by cishets isnt the goal, and neither is being an all-inclusive club. i want to be able to live my life freely as an lgbt person. our community was created out of the need to survive. that has nothing to do with being “valid”. 

1) Constant use of LGBT, but the Q is never added. LGBT on its own can be used as shorthand if the person is cramped for space like on twitter, but if the person consistently never adds the Q, it is reason to suspect they are not forgetting it and are deliberately leaving it out.

2) Use of “cishets” when referring to anyone who is not literally “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual or Transgender”. Exclusionists will refer to anyone who does not fall under those four labels (sometimes they will include pan and nonbinary people if they are feeling generous) as cishet regardless of how that other person self-identifies.

3) “all-inclusive club” “the LGBT community is not a club” “LGBT is not open to anyone” or other framing that there are specific requirements and metrics that one must measure up to in order to be accepted. (by whom? Who is the bouncer? How do we know if we measure up?)

4) “Our community was created out of the need to survive” This is an argument borrowed straight from TERFs, so any exclusionist who claims to hate TERFs is really only paying lip-service to trans-inclusivity. The Queer community was created to uplift and support queer people. Full stop. Yes, survival is part of it, but there is so much more. We celebrate “pride” not just our survival. exclusionists talk about wanting more than just acceptance, but then turn around and harass those who try to celebrate being queer. Exclusionists frame their entire identity around being miserable and it is toxic.

Text from screenshot reads:

2018 is the year we stop derailing various lgbt posts to make them “inclusive”

No more non wlw on wlw posts

No more non mlm on mlm posts

No more non lesbians on lesbian posts

No more “girls are better/just date a girl” on mlm posts

No more cis on trans/nb posts

No more hets on lgbp posts

No more non lgbtpn on lgbtpn posts

This year, we let lesbian, gay, bi, trans, pan, and nonbinary folks have their own things for their own group and respect everyone’s individuality.

5) “inclusive” is weirdly always in quotations marks, as if it is an imaginary or sarcastic idea. Exclusionists write posts that beg the question, you keep mentioning “keep our community safe” and “not a club that just anyone can join” but who, specifically, are they referring to? Why not just outright say pedophiles or white supremacists? It isn’t controversial to not want racists in the queer community.

Because they are not referring to pedophiles or white supremacists. They are referring to aces and aros, the people they want to harass and kick out.

6) The acronym “LGBTPN”. This is not the standard acronym. The standard acronym is LGBTQ or LGBTQ+ or LGBTQIA2S. This acronym deliberately removes the A and Q while seeming to be inclusive. This is an exclusionist signal and if you see this used on a post, block the poster.

There are so many more low-key signals that exclusionists send out that are ripped straight from the TERF playbook. be careful that you are not swallowing TERF ideas and regurgitating them.

|| Ace exclusionists and TERFs do not interact or I’ll come for your kneecaps ||