Continuing on for whatever the fuck happened with that poll™ yesterday, OP claiming that it was made as a "joke poll" doesn't matter because they were still being arophobic and not at all curbing any aphobia in their replies. It's also apparent that the joke here is the absurdity of the existence of aro men who are also cishet which shows how little OP and other aphobes really know about the aro and ace spectrums and the nuance within them.

Besides, the fact that so many people aren't really taking to it as a "joke" as OP claims, and is just spewing out such rancid hatred for ace and aro people, even wishing for our deaths, is still something to be called out. It still shows how uncaring OP and those other people are.

They really don't give a shit about us.

aro ortega agenda

Sometimes I think about remaking not because I don't wanna use this blog anymore but because I just wanna fuck with everyone who has me blocked

I think I'm annoyed about that post now actually lol.

remembered why i unfollowed someone

the Thing about Mid-2010s Ace Discourse that gets me is that even if you weren't really someone who kept their pulse on the latest news in the lgbt+ community or queer theory or whatever, it'd still make its way onto your dash in a more subtle way as "cringe"

like i think a lot of funny posts at the time being made by the Big Guys were like "34yo 'fandom moms' about to doxx a preteen for not shipping rey-lo" followed by an image of peter griffin photoshopped to have dyed hair, piercings, heavy makeup, and a shirt in the ace flag colors using a laptop with fandom stickers on it. like very much a "gay people i do not respect" strawman but with the label scribbled out and a new one slapped on. and no one really read into it critically

and if someone did actually go "hey what does asexuality have to do with it" they were put on blast by op and their friends for "reading too much into it" and the post would immediately devolve into bullying whoever decided to speak out -- often someone very young and/or with trouble picking up on social cues -- until they wrote up a long emotional thesis trying to stand their ground where inevitably they said something wrong and op got to say something like "ummmm 😳 did you just say lesbianism is aphobic??? 😂" and everyone would reblog the whole miles-long thread going "LMAOOO CRINGE" with the subtle insinuation that All Ace People Are Like This.

like i never saw anyone share around straight up Discourse™ discourse on my dash specifically, even if i knew it was out there/saw it in the wild outside my personal bubble sometimes, but this kinda stuff was Everywhere thanks to the rise of "cringe culture", and i think that was more fundamentally damaging than any 10k word google doc essay with sources trying to make an "intelligent point" for ace exclusion

We need to stop letting people get away with cross-tagging aspec content imo. Posts that only talk about asexual experiences should not be tagged as aromantic. Posts that only talk about aromantic experiences should not be tagged as asexual. Yes, even if the OP is aroace.

It's not fair to make the main tags unusable to non-aroace aspecs. I see so many allo-arospecs and non-SAM arospecs talk about how they gave up on going into the main aromantic tag, because so much of the content is unrelated to aromanticism. About how they stick to microlabel tags or tags like 'safe for aro' or 'actually aromantic' instead. These tags started out as a way to avoid aphobia and gore in the main tags. People are feeling unwelcome enough to retreat to tags that were made in response to aphobic attacks on tumblr aspec communities.

It seems like such a small thing, but it's indicative of a larger problem in aspec spaces imo and it contributes to non-aroace aspecs feeling less welcome in aspec spaces.

.

There’s this otherwise-good post going around about not automatically believing the latest dumb yelling about “x trans woman is a pedo/other hurtful lie” but one of the things on there is “claims that they’re a non-binary exclusionist.” And it’s like. Being any sort of binary trans person doesn’t preclude you from being transphobic. This is true of trans men too. Yes you should always verify anything you hear before acting or publicizing/spreading claims but. You don’t get a free pass on calling people theyfabs just because you’re binary trans, and it’s not really on par with calling people pedos or telling lies about how people are secretly bigots. I feel like a certain subset of messages like “this person consistently makes aphobic jokes/ calls people sock or theyfab/ talks about aggro t-bros” that get discarded because the people affected just aren’t considered queer enough to care about.

ngl my first thought with that is that they're probably referring to the Contrapoints/Natalie Wynn stuff.

And like, without getting too into the weeds about it: she has said and done some stuff that very understandably rubs some people the wrong way. She's also made a huge effort to throw her support behind the nonbinary community, created hours of video content discussing and defending nonbinary identity, and has, after these issues with her were brought up, openly apologized for the things she has said that she agrees were poorly-worded/downright hurtful, or even damaging. And she is still framed as a nonbinary exclusionist, imo in no small part because she's a trans woman who made enough of a mistake that a harassment campaign could take hold.

And you're right, binary trans people can be and often are transphobic- and all of the issues you've outlined in this ask are 100% true and correct and important. I don't know the intentions behind the op, I haven't even seen the op, and I don't even know if op knows who Natalie Wynn is.

But like... my point here is just that I think what you're telling me the op said could also be an extremely valid and relevant point, in the right context.

People will use any number of things as an excuse to harass trans women; to use Natalie as an example again, her mentions were full of people accusing her of transmisogyny after she posted a video in which she spent about 10 minutes (of like 90) explaining the unique struggles with transphobia that trans men face.

And trans women can absolutely be transmisogynistic too! But hopefully you see my point here- i.e., that the veracity of an accusation doesn't depend on how often accusations like it are made to hurt marginalized people.

Okay it’s overshare o’clock. I was going to just not drop the opener until the day before it became relevant, and only ever bring that one up, buuuuut

Man, fuck August

(Death, kinda low-key non-graphic gross stuff re: that, but like that’s not even actually necessarily entirely the POINT AND FUCKING YET)

In the last two weeks

my routine checkup with my neurosurgeon turned into a consult for a third spinal surgery in my neck at the end of September to fix badly broken hardware; as a second attempt at fixing failed fusion, I now get to wear one of those rigid collars for the first 1-2 months, just in time to make prepping for The Cakening™️and all surrounding festivities the biggest goddamn nightmare ever—and this means an entire fresh year of the electromagnetic collar for 4 hours a day for every day, notable for making me completely fucking miserable while wearing in the past because it’s autistic hell

later that same day I got a call from my mother that the cops showed up at her house trying to find her because nobody knew her address locally to her sister (her last remaining family, states away) to let her know she was dead (it was in her sleep, but then the body wasn’t found by a friend for another three days), so we’ve been all jointly processing that after she had to drive up to deal with the banking and the hoarder house and finding what mementos to grab and the cremation. This is the same aunt I adored as a child and had a strained relationship with over the last ~7 years due to turning into a biphobic, aphobic brainrot terf after having been a champion of indigenous cultures in my youth and a professor of mathematics who specialized in decolonizing the topic and looking at other North American spheres of mathematical thinking and concepts, particularly Navajo

In the wake of this, unrelated to it except for the most extremely tangentially, my parents have now spoken to one another 4 times after not doing so after divorcing… like… over half a decade ago??? not like… friendly-like? really but civilly? Which is just idk another weird emotional mindfuck tbh especially since it got dropped on me while in the middle of being completely demeaned by filling out my hospital paperwork and the agreements I now have to abase myself with to get my post-op narcotics

got a text from the kiddo’s counselor about needing to cancel our upcoming visit, the morning of, due to them getting Covid from their new intern studying under them we’d only just met the visit prior

school started back up for the kiddo

but whoops not enough stress yet so last night one of my childhood best friends (we would hang out all the time as families, new years was a standing event alternating homes, I got married in their family’s church despite not being a member or even a christian) lost her dad after he’d been sick for awhile to a sudden brain bleed

Y’all I’m fucking crumbling

cw not quite shipping, but fandom/headcanon discourse

so i recently saw a post with character headcanons for a series I like and it was super cool, op gave everyone diverse body shapes and skin tones that the canon content didn't have, and it listed queer headcanons for them too like 'cis male', 'trans male', 'agender', 'genderfluid', etc.... and it was kind of neat, and they did sexualities too, but it was always.... ''gay'' or ''bi'' or ''pan'' I think there was one single character they headcanoned as straight. and one asexual that I was actually surprised to see at all by that point. it seemed like they didn't really consider the SAM at all except to make the asexual character also gay. wasn't even specified if it was homoromantic or angled/oriented... idk. like I wanna be clear I'm not upset at seeing someone having fun making headcanons for characters they like, I don't think they should be ashamed or anything, and I'm glad they had fun making a thing even if I don't like it, it's just kind of disheartening and sad to see queer headcanon content and feel like headcanoning them as aro or ace is just kind of....an afterthought. and it wouldn't be so bad normally but like... a few of my aro and ace friends in this fandom reblogged this post so I guess I was kind of expecting more from it. it just kind of felt tokenish and reductive to just have the one alloace headcanon, I almost wish they had just all been allo because it felt like they didn't even want to fully commit to an ace headcanon (I'm alloace myself so I know very well that being alloromantic doesn't make you "less" ace, but in only having the one ace headcanon (out of like. 20 characters) it felt like they thought ace was ok to headcanon only if they could be gay as well. like that classic aphobic "it's ok at least you can still feel X type of love so you're not completely worthless!" comment is what I felt upon seeing it).

I don't even think I would call this aphobia?? but it definitely feels like aro/ace ignorance/unawareness at best, maybe internalized passive aphobia at worst, idk. really reminded me how much I treasure people that put aro and ace headcanons into fandoms. ......i think maybe i will go throw some of my own headcanons to the internet fandom void about this. if i feel this way i bet there are other aspecs in the fandom that do as well.

you know what, typically when i see a post that bothers me i don't post about it and instead just send it to my partner and rant abt it but fuck it, i'm posting about it this time, why not

this post bugs me;

and I'm gonna explain why now

so, with the final note being "are you aware that you are responsible for the funniest post on this site" that makes the clear framing of this be that the second commenter is completely ridiculous

and sure, yeah, on the surface, that reblog does seem kinda silly! like "the original post was just a vampire joke, where the hell did you get 'aphobic or possibly terfy' from???" but like.... idk, if you were part of the ace community at that point? it's not entirely bullshit, even if I myself Wouldn't directly assume that the op was making the post as an exclusionist

here's the thing; [@ all my friends who worry they aren't "real vampires":]

exclusionists were, you know, excluding aspec people. insisting they weren't really lgbt.

and exclusionists also liked making fun of aspec people for reassuring each other that their identities were, in fact, valid.

so, like... if you're an aspec person who's on high alert for exclusionists because of how vicious they could be, towards your identity... I can see why this post might raise some red flags. I'm not saying the post was made with that intent! I haven't checked the op bc I don't really care about the actual original post enough to do it, so it's entirely possible that was nowhere near their intention and I'm not assuming it was.

[adding it here because i hadn't mentioned it yet; the "possibly terfy" also comes from the fact that there is, whether people want to admit it or not, an aphobe to terf pipeline built off excluding more and more people from the lgbt community.]

but my problem with this whole thing is that the frame of this popular post is the implication that it's SOOOO funny that someone would ""randomly"" call the og post aphobic; or, underlying that, that it's hilarious when aspec people are wary of aphobic people. that's my problem with it.

and hell, i bet some people would think this post deciding take the time to talk about it is "funny"; after all, it's just a joke, isn't it? it's just a joke, but you had to write a whole bunch of paragraphs about why it Bothers you? that's HILARIOUS! you're so stupid and sensitive for actually caring about this instead of just moving on.

well sorry. i just don't think it's all that funny.

[addition; i'm not angry at people who reblogged the post without thinking about any of this stuff. it is a joke after all, and on the surface it does seem ridiculous, and so i don't think it's a huge moral problem if none of this stuff i've said crossed someone's mind before reblogging. I'm just... elaborating on something that bugged me about it]

no offence to the general tumblr public actually no full offence but yall have an aphobia problem bc of the remnants of all those aphobic parody blogs like crazy-acey-in-spacey. just saw someone say that an asexual person mentioning politely that op was (i didn’t even fully agree but that wasn’t the point) using the word asexual derogatorily and in a grammatically incorrect way was displaying ‘crazy acey behaviour’ and op just. for real agreed. made fun of the person for pointing it out and made fun of the concept of aphobia. Idk bro i think that shits messed up. its so normalised for us to laugh at aphobia when its a genuine real thing

i hate discourse so much but this is just people being assholes lol they don’t gain anything from it so why constantly alienate asexuals

accidentally engaged with aphobic redditor lol im saving my comment here in case it gets removed by mods lolololololololol

Here are some links you can read with data to back up the claims about feeling excluded, harassment and corrective rape, and even conversion therapy: 2020, the Trevor Project - Asexual and Ace Spectrum Youth Also from this, "A larger proportion of asexual youth were transgender or nonbinary compared to the overall sample of LGBTQ youth." So asexuals are also probably experiencing transphobic discrimination as well. Il Grande Colibri - Aphobia: PRejudices and Discrimination again st asexuality Asexuality Handbook - Anti-asexual bias Stonewall - New research: shining a light on 'dehumanising' discrimination faced by ace people This one focuses more on aphobia in the UK. Forbes - Only 1 in 10 asexual people feel comfortable to be out at work Asexual Survivors - On Sexual Abuse, Repulsion, and Aversion in the Asexual Community This entire website is stories and resources by and for people on the asexual spectrum who have faced sexual harassment and/or corrective rape. Sadly, it seems to have not been updated in some time. [Maryland Coalition Against Sexual Assult (MCASA) - Sexual Violence against the Asexual Community, 2022)[https://mcasa.org/newsletters/article/sexual-violence-against-the-asexual-community] John Hopkins University Press Jan/Feb 2023 - Coercive Rape Tactics Perpetrated against Asexual College Students WomensLaw - What forms of abuse are unique to asexual victims? Buzzfeed News (this is from 2018 before Buzzfeed News got weird…) - When you're an asexual assault survivor, it's even harder to be heard Sociologist and Gender/Sexuality Researcher Canton Winer on Substack Much of his recent research is being done on the Asexual and Aromantic communities and he has interesting articles and twitter threads where ace/aro people share their stories of experiencing discrimination. He has a short article about asexuals facing conversion therapy. Slate Op-Ed - It's time to start treating asexual and aromantic people like the adults we are The Maroon Op-Ed (part of Loyola University) - Column: "A" stands for asexuals and not allies Everyday Feminism - Why we need mental healthcare without asexual erasure - and how to get there NLM - Asexual and Non-Asexual Respondents from a US population based study of Sexual Minorities Asexuals.net - Aphobia: understanding the discrimination, and prejudice against aspec individuals Advocate - #21AceStories: including the A in LGBTQIA Carolina Sexual Wellness Center Op-Ed - I am an ally, and it's not about me The Panoptic Op-Ed - A is not for Ally: Spare a thought for invisible identities this pride month The Cataount Op-Ed - A is not for Ally Human Rights Campaign - Understanding the Asexual Community I did also see a comment in this reddit thread asking if the A stands for Ally, that in 70's the A used to stand for ally. However, in the 90's and early 2000's, as more and more asexual and aromantic awareness increased, there was a push for the A to stand for asexual/aromantic and also sometimes agender (although agender also falls under the transgender umbrella). So, it used to be ally, but that is an outdated definition. And again, while cis-het people are appreciated for being allies, they do not and will likely never face the same discrimination and prejudice that people with LGBT+ identities do. They shouldn't be included for doing the bare minimum of human decency. It's like a weird participation trophy that also dilutes the meaning of being LGBT+. People who are questioning or still in the closet are welcome to use the Q as "questioning/queer" or be allies, but it still does not mean that the A is for allies.

this aita doesnt seem to have very many specifically asexual perspectives in the notes, do any of y’all have a take? https://www.tumblr.com/am-i-the-asshole-official/743140228607410176/

Here's that link if people are interested.

I didn't read the notes originally bc I personally probably would've had far less patience than op tbh, but having skimmed the notes just now I didn't notice anthing even close to as aphobic as I expected, which was genuinely a welcome surprise. Seemed like one of those "aita for [something that sounds really bad]" where the actual content of the post is pretty reasonable. Like I don't mean to minimise anyone's experiences or whatever but I was op's age during The Discourse, so expected it to be way worse,, I appreciated them trying to keep ASAW specifically for aros, and for what amounts to high school gsa drama I thought op seemed pretty mature and aware of what they were talking about wrt sex negativity. The kids are alright, y'know?

We're all just doing our best to foster sex positive attitudes in queer spaces and I know that can be difficult for some ace people, especially younger ace people and sex repulsed people, when it feels like no one takes us seriously, but sex negativity hurts all of us, and calling out sex negativity (as gently as possible, but sometimes that's not so easy) is really important, so I don't begrudge op for how they handled the situation at all.

~ mod key

ive followed you for years now, the idea that someone hates you enough to call you a b*tch and even sent a long rant at you is so alien to me. i genuinely wonder why they didnt just block you. youre a bigger person than i am, i wpukd have shown everyone that persons true colors

Okay so this will be the last post on the matter, but anyways idrc if people hate me just get your facts right lol

I'm just some chick, I've always been just some chick, and putting me on a pedestal is just weird. Idk if that person used to like me but I sinned in their eyes or they always hated me from the start but expecting me to be a flawless being is weird

I do delete posts when that person is genuinely harming others, I've deleted posts that I really liked all because the op showed they were aphobic and that was like when I first started this blog 4 years ago. I don't engage with discourse but I'll reblog a callout post on a groomer and if I reblogged their stuff I delete it. This is an archiving blog sure but it's also just my eddsworld sideblog

But anyways I wouldn't have shown their name even if they weren't a kid (at least I suspect so), it's just not right. I block and move on

Anyways TL;DR I am just some chick and this is just some blog