I somehow seem to be late today.

equinox here! i wanted to make a masterpost for my zines! if you haven't checked them out already, we write zines about queer history with some resources and statistics within, as well as anecdotes from my 32 years being a genderqueer transsexual butch dyke. i am also intersex and speak about my experience with medical intersexism and prejudice toward androgynous and gender vague people.

if you are interested, the help would go a long way, as i deal with psoriatic arthritis, hypermobile ehlers danlos syndrome, degenerative disc disease, GI issues, schizophrenia, DID and other health issues. i'm currently applying for disability but it takes quite a while to get approved in the US. all proceeds go towards my monthly rent, bills, and necessities. thank you for your support!

Hey italiani!! There's an official ministry of justice referendum to get same sex couples the same rights as heterosexual couple in being actually married and not just "uniti civilmente". This will grant them the same rights in adoption and stepchild adoption.

Of course the big news arent talking about it so the only way to let it circulate is through spreading the info ourselves.

It needs 500k signatures in 3 months and while that alone will not automatically grant equal rights it will be a HUUUGE step forward in italy, lately quite discriminatory politic.

Here's the link to the referendum! Se siete italiani e potete entrare con lo SPID firmate!

a zine about being loveless. my experiences may not reflect your experiences ect ect. id in alt and under the cut.

[ID: Four panel comic with crudely drawn stick people.

Panel 1: A grayscale person with a t-shirt featuring a flag with red, green, blue and black stripes is dramatically holding their hand out at a different grayscale person.

Ally: "Halt, bigot! On behalf of the RGBA community I question your politeness!"

Grayscale: "The fuck is 'RGBA'? I have reasonable concerns about chromos but what's the A for"

Panel 2: Striking a haughty pose, the ally explains. "PFHAH. Your ignorance is as expected. The A in RGBA… stands for allies, such as myself."

Panel 3: In the foreground, a person whose outline is shown with a PNG transparency grid rather than a color watches the 'ally' gloat.

Ally: "Tremble at my overwhelming allyship. I respect green people's hexadecimal identification!"

Grayscale: "I'm going to go harass a greenie now, bye."

Panel 4: The achromatic person catches up to the 'ally'.

Achromatic: "…You know the A is for "achromatic", right?"

Ally: "Why are you lecturing me on chromatic issues? You're grayscale."

Achromatic: "…

Sigh."

End ID.]

POLYAMOROUS AROMANTIC ALLOSEXUAL FLAGS (polyam aroallo)

ID in ALT

Aromantic versions of my two favorite polyamory flags

using this <2 symbol

my own adapted version of the polyamory infinity heart that uses the <2

without symbol, feel free to edit your own! (credit appreciated but not needed)

links below cut

I remember a LOT of ace content back when I first started engaging with the community was like “Aces aren’t just late bloomers!” “Stop assuming aces will change their minds one day!” “Stop telling them they just need to find the right person!” And I’m not disagreeing with any of that, it’s still rude to tell someone they’re wrong about who they are. I just want to talk about what happens when you do change your mind, because I’m not the only person I know who stopped identifying with asexuality at some point in early adulthood.

Personally, as a teenager I found the ace community extremely helpful and validating. I was so sex repulsed, I was practically terrified of sex. All I had ever heard about sex growing up was that supposedly it was morally reprehensible in all contexts other than marriage, and also because I was AFAB random men I didn’t know would want to have sex with me and could potentially violently assault me to accomplish this. So of course I deeply and unknowingly repressed any and all sexual feelings until I started to be exposed to some sex positivity and slowly began to unlearn almost two decades worth of guilt, shame, and fear. However, at the time all I knew was I didn’t want sex at all, and the asexual community gave me permission to not want sex under any circumstances. Which I desperately needed.

However, once I got older, things got a little weird. I reached a point where I was having feelings that were unmistakably sexual, but I was by no means ready to give up my identity as an asexual person. I had worked so hard to accept and assert my lack of sexual attraction, how could I now confront the possibility that I was no longer what I thought I was? To be fair, the ace community that I participated in was almost as full of “it’s okay to change your mind about your orientation!” as it was of “aces aren’t just late bloomers”, but I’d never met anyone who had identified as ace and changed their mind. Not directly anyway. I didn’t know any stories about what it was like to discover your sexuality after discovering you didn’t have one. I was alone in a whole new way I had never considered before, even though I knew that theoretically this change could happen. I just never thought it would happen to me.

So, I basically just spent a few years in this awkward limbo between asexuality and allosexuality, trying on different ace umbrella terms like grey-ace, demisexual, etc. Not really feeling a connection to any of them, not really feeling a whole lot of sexual attraction either. I’m still kind of in that limbo, and that may or may not change in the next several years. I’ll have to wait and see. I do know that identifying as a lesbian, first as an oriented aroace but increasingly as a possible sexual orientation, has definitely led to some significantly faster-paced developments recently. So maybe I was just gay the entire time (I mean I was gay the entire time anyways, but maybe my lack of interest in sex was actually a lack of interest in sex with men).

As it turns out, I’m still figuring out my relationship to sexuality, but some other, tangential things have become more clear in the years since I made this post.

First of all, I’m not disinterested in sex with men lol. It took me a long time to come to terms with my gender for reasons which deserve their own post, but as a trans man I find myself preferring attention from men who see me as a man. My interest in lesbianism was mostly motivated by my unresolved gender feelings I think. I still resonate strongly with the butch label, but I’m not a lesbian. I’m a gay* man (*I like men a lot but gender is wobbly and “"exceptions”“ happen a lot).

Second of all, I still haven’t decided if I’m ace or not. I can tell I still have a lot of unresolved trauma around the concepts of sex and desire, and I can tell that I would really like to participate in sex and desire in ways I’m not currently capable of. I haven’t decided yet what that means for my orientation, or whether it affects it at all. I consider myself vaguely allosexual for now, but functionally it doesn’t make much difference.

My issue was that I have pretty much 0 drive to pursue sex/sexual relationships, and for a long time I confused that as my sexual attraction being weak and rare. Turns out I actually experience plenty of strong sexual attraction, and that lack of drive stems from a combo of being deeply introverted and both aromantic and aplatonic (and specifically strictly nonpartnering with no interest in having friends). Pretty hard to seek out a sexual relationship when I don’t want a partner or friends and also have absolutely 0 interest in spending enough time with a stranger or acquaintance to develop that kind of relationship with them.

I was also definitely influenced by the common misconception that if you’re aro you must also be ace. I figured out my aromanticism sometime in 2013 or 2014, and alloaros were nigh unheard of back then. Alloaro wasn’t even a term yet, and despite being incredibly active in online queer communities and especially aspec communities, I don’t remember ever coming across a single space for non-ace aros until like 2020. So that combined with having no desire to actively seek out sex made me think I must obviously be acespec.