I….genuinely am worried if a ton of twitter users come back to tumblr because of how many of them are exclusionists. I hate the idea of going back to that being the majority here again.
Okay for real though whether this will be a Thing or just ways to slow the spread of exclusionism/protect aspec people’s mental health in general:
- Add a specific tag for people to blacklist if you respond to aphobic or exclusionist content. Having to see that content—even if you’re countering it—can be extremely stressful.
- Actually do your research before boosting criticisms of aspec terms, headcanons, etc. If someone has *never* said a supportive thing about aspec people, chances are it’s not in good faith or may be an outright lie! Remember the bullshit of “you can’t say ‘aspec’ that’s for autistic people only!!” which was flat-out made up but got spread around by anxious aro and ace people?
- I STILL see fake accounts on twitter of people pretending to be ace while yelling the most nonsensical everything-phobic tripe. Fake ace accounts created solely to stir up mockery and hate vs ace people used to be very popular on tumblr. If you see what seems like an ace person spouting something hateful, check to see how old the account is, whether there’s anything BUT that, etc.
- Block, block, block. I don’t care if they make nice art or funny shitposts. “I’ll just ignore their aphobic comments and only reblog their art—“ NO. They don’t need platforms.
- Same goes for those not-so-mysterious ~oh I don’t hate aspec people I just boost every criticism I see of them and have never said a single supportive thing~ sorts.
- Making up false rumors about aspec people/people who support aspec people was a popular tactic too. For the love of all things holy don’t boost callouts unless you do your research, especially if you see giveaways like “and they’re (gasp) INCLUSIONIST” in the call-out list.
- If you’re stressed by your dashboard boosting bad faith takes/engaging with hateful comments a lot, refine it. I had to unfollow a ton of ace blogs back in the day because they switched to ONLY countering the most bottom-of-the-barrel acephobic takes, which meant every time I came online I had to see it. Terrible for mental health.
Even if my fretting over twitter userbase doesn’t come to anything, all of this would be helpful to implement *right now* even if exclusionism and aphobia isn’t as popular here as it used to be.
imagine thinking asexuality is a sexual orientation and not yknow, probably a medical problem or a mental health issue. you’re not gay because you have a hormonal issue lmao what? do you know what most people who havent been roped in by the Internet Culture of pretending you’re gay for no reason do when they think they might be “asexual”? they go to the doctor, ejrbdkkssm are you kidding you probably have some kind of reproductive health disorder or mental trauma or something Wrong with you my guy but it’s easier to ignore that and be homophobic online i guess
Imagine being such a homophobe that you repeat homophobic rhetorix verbatim just because you don’t understand the concept of not experiencing sexual attraction.
im disabled but okay, just because you shouldnt be demonised or whatever for having a disability doesnt mean its like. Good. or healthy. like when the cysts burst and you have to go to the ER and have organs removed because you didnt get your abnormally low sex drive checked out dont blame me compadre
1. You can be disabled and still be ableist, there’s more than one type of disability, and “disabled” is an umbrella term that can cover hugely different things. I’m disabled in multiple ways but it’s still 100% possible for me to be bigoted towards disabilities I don’t have. A Deaf person can be ableist toward autistic people, an autistic person can be ableist toward Deaf people, etc.
2. Whether someone’s lack of desire for interpersonal sex is a health issue is not your business, frankly. It’s their business and their doctor’s business.
Trying to diagnose someone over the internet when you don’t know anything about them beyond the fact that they call themselves asexual, and despite whether or not you’re in any way a professional who is trained and qualified to give this kind of diagnosis, is frankly ableist and not your place.
If asexual people are:
otherwise healthy, or already know the symptoms and reasons they are unhealthy outside of being asexual
are not experiencing distress directly because of their asexuality
Then there’s no reason it cannot be a natural part of human diversity. Many people still consider being gay a mental illness, despite all evidence to the contrary. Desire for sex is naturally not equal in all humans—why can’t there be people who don’t care for sex at all? People who just aren’t interested and persue other things? People who don’t experience attraction to specific people?
There are asexual people who have already checked if there are other reasons for their experience, there are asexual people who have grown to old age and still identify as asexual without immediate harms.
3. Yes, there are some disabilities or medications that can cause decreased sex drive. For the record, cancer is not the most common of these, and the “when the cyst bursts” comment was incredibly unnecessary and inappropriate in any case.
Again, perceived asexuality being a symptom of a health issue is not your business unless you’re the one experiencing it or you’re their doctor.
This is. A bit weird but. Like I’ve mentioned recently, I’m part of a group of people trying to create a local queer collective. And I’ve learnt some time ago, that one of the members of this collective is aphobic. Like “I don’t feel like saying ‘acephobia’ or ‘arophobia’ because they don’t exist” level of aphobic.
Which is bad enough, and honestly it doesn’t make me want to interact with her because, what an asshole lmao. The problem is, she’s a trans woman. So, it doesn’t feel good to outright dismiss her as an asshole, even though I don’t have the energy to educate her. If I see her and it comes up, I’ll just spam her with sources, whatever.*
Another issue arise though: excl/us/ion/ism, as we all know, is pretty popular among…te/rfs. So, while I don’t want to use up my energy for an aphobe, I can’t help knowing having this kind of bullshit in her head is dangerous for her (also, let’s be honest, it’s really fucking dangerous for the aspec people in her life, but it’s apparently not important to care about us so). So, while my actual main goal in wanting to make her change her mind is, the safety of one particular aroace person I know (they’re close), I’m also genuinely worried she might end up hurting herself because of her wrong beliefs. And I don’t know if showing/explaining to her how te/rfs have popularized aphobia and thrive on it would help? Like, trying to appeal to her own interests at first before getting her to care bout other people and trust/believe us?
I have no idea on if this would work or not. I don’t know her that much, we’ve barely met, and I don’t want to put the work into an aphobe with no garanty that they’ll at least change to be respectful of aspec people.
So yeah it’s a bit of a complicated situation. Maybe I just shouldn’t care but like I said, there’s this aroace person I care about in this equation. Thoughts?
*On that, I have some pretty convincing studies/reports about acephobia, but not so much about arophobia? I’m thinking about the GLSEN report that is very good for aces, but they didn’t care enoguh about us to survey aro people
TW depressionAsexuals show overall depression prevalence levels similar to those of queer allosexuals, comparison-wise. Aces seem more at risk than gay people, but less than mspec people (multi attraction spectrum, especially pan- & polysexuals). The comparison below should only give an overall framework to show where asexuals fit within (pansexuals as one example of an high-risk group at one…
IDAHOBITA+ 2022: Der Tag, an dem Acefeindlichkeit unbeachtet bleibt
#IDAHOBITA2022: Der Tag, an dem Acefeindlichkeit unbeachtet bleibt. Weil #Asexualität ebenso Teil queerer Geschichte ist
Inhalts- und Triggerwarnungen: Queerfeindliche medizinische Gewalt, sexualisierte Gewalt, Acefeindlichkeit
Der 17.05.2022 markiert den Internationalen Tag gegen Homo-, Bi-, Inter-, Transfeindlichkeit (IDAHOBIT); ins Leben gerufen, um an die offizielle Depathologisierung von Homosexualität durch die Weltgesundheitsorganisation (WHO) am 17.05.1990 zu erinnern. Das vom WHO verwendete…
What seriously bugs me is y'alls need for ’simple answers to complex problems’ approach on acemisic discrimination! It boils down to your unwillingness to grasp what social invisibility for an entire sexual minority like asexuals entailsin its contextualization!
It’s really too complicated a topic for a medium like Twitter [where I originally posted this] to fully explain what consequences follows and why things are the way they are. But if you’d only start to dig a little deeper into what actually leads to shame, to hide your identity, to not report targeted discrimination, to next to no media coverage on said discrimination (x), to the lack of sufficient support, to undealt severe effects on mental health(x,x,x,x), to no reports on what level of normalized anti asexual “conversion therapy” attempts do we actually have to deal w/, esp. in psychotherapy (x,x),etc It’s all deeply connected to INVISIBILITY - literally omni influential! But all you want is easily glorified suffering on a plate!
1 simplified example: I can spontaneously only recall 1 PinkNews report on when an asexual teen got kicked out by their parents. But I *know* that it truly doesn’t start nor begin w/ this 1 case of REPORTED acemisia.
ALT
Allosexuals see this + think: “Mhm, that seems rare, since I haven’t regularly heard in media on what else asexuals, as a group, are going through (and I’m not making any active attempts to inform myself beyond that), thus acemisia doesn’t exist!”
Asexual inclusion in GALOP’s UK LGBT+ People & Sexual Violence Report 2022
Asexual inclusion in GALOP’s UK LGBT+ People & Sexual Violence Report 2022
TW sexualized violence SA acemisia transmisia corrective rape
Galop,the LGBT+ anti-abuse charity, released the 2022 ‘LGBT+ People & Sexual Violence’ report about queer survivor experiences of sexual violence in the United Kingdom over 16 years of age, including 22.6% asexual respondents.
Focusing on explicit mentions of asexuality:
“Some groups surveyed were more likely to experience sexual…
Statt einer Devaluation oder gar Absprache von Acefeindlichkeit durch “Das ist das Patriarchat, nicht Acemisia” lieber ein Umdenken , was überschneidende Diskriminierungserfahrungen angeht! Warum bloß Der Feminismus™, wenn queerfeministische Perspektive genauer passt?! Als ob Allosexuelle sich von der Existenz von Acefeindlichkeit angegriffen fühlten (which they uphold; das Eingeständnis als pot. Unterdrückende verursacht Defensive) u sich durch Deklarierung “Das ist eine rein feministische Angelegenheit” vor der Verantwortung drücken wollten. Dass ähnliche oder formgleiche Arten von Unterdrückung a) parallel bei unt. Gruppen existieren können, u/o b) Schnittmenge sind, ist doch nichts Neues. Es geht auch ohne die Absprache der Unterdrückung Asexueller!
Asexuelles Leben ist nicht inhärent unglücklich! Es kann so unheimlich schwer sein, in dieser allonormativen Welt zu navigieren, aber bitte lasst Euch nicht einreden, dass wir in irgendeiner Weise zu einer “minderwertigen Existenz” verdammt sind! #AsexualAffirmations
Sexuelle Verwertungslogik (gerade weapoinzed im Spätkapitalismus, wo wir mit derartigen Inhalten dauerüberschüttet werden) spielt eine nicht zu unterschätzende Rolle; ebenso wie #Allonormativität, die selbst in vermeintlichen queeren “safe spaces” lauert. >>“werden künstlich geschaffen, um asexuelle Andersartigkeit zu entblößen („Es wird das Narrativ aufrechterhalten, dass asexuelle Menschen einfach nicht glücklich sein könnten, denn ihre Existenz geht gegen jegliche Vorstellungen nicht-asexueller Menschen eines erfüllten Lebens!„)” aus (1)
Das belastet uns Asexuelle unterbewusst. Wenn dann noch soziale Unsichtbarkeit u. -Machung (Erasure) im Wechsel mit #Acefeindlichkeit konstant vermitteln, dass asexuelle Existenz unmöglich o wertlos/ekelerregend/widernatürlich/unliebenswürdig ist, internalisieren wir dies schnell
Mediale Reproduktion von Stereotypen (+ dem Centern von allosexuellen Partnerschaftspersonen u. deren Bedürfnisbefriedigung) machen’s uns nicht einfacher, wenn wir uns doch einmal repräsentiert sehen.
Brechen wir mit diesen Dingen! Asexuell und glücklich!
Nieder mit den Bildern, die uns die Allonorm aufdrückt! Nieder mit der Pathologisierung! Nieder mit Euren “Heilungsversuchen”, allonormierte Bevormundung! Meine Asexualität ist nicht für Eure Bewertungen und sie ist kein Todesurteil für mein Glücklichsein!
“Asexuelle sind komplette Wesen, völlig vollständig. Stete sexuelle Anziehung missen wir nicht. Aber wir sind absolut wunderbar, einwandfrei, ganz. #AsexualAffirmationsaus (2)
B!: Nieder mit den Bildern, die uns die Allonorm aufdrückt! Nieder mit der Pathologisierung! Nieder mit Euren "Heilungsversuchen”, allonormierte Bevormundung! Meine Asexualität steht nicht zu Eurer Bewertungen und sie ist kein Todesurteil für mein Glücklichsein!
ALT
