#community language

autismserenity:

One of the most frequently-repeated bits of exclusionist misinformation is that asexuality didn’t even exist before 1999.

(Why this would be relevant, even if it were true, is beyond me. A lot of the people who make this argument didn’t exist before 1999 either, but that doesn’t seem to mean that they’re imaginary, or don’t belong in the larger community, or aren’t oppressed.)   

There are a lot of counterexamples, like these ace history pieces from Making Queer History, and these 1970s mentions of asexuals in the straight media andLGBT+ media. (And, of course, there are plenty of studies and examples of ace oppression.)

One of the most common examples of people calling themselves asexual, before now-ish, is this 1989 episode of “Sally Jesse Raphael,” above. Where she interviews someone, who uses the alias “Toby,” about being ace. 

Well, my ace, autistic, queer, and genderqueer friend Nat just spoke at the Asexuality Conference in the UK, and showed me “the 2012 conference talk that I made into an excessively detailed blog post [about ace community history online]….” 

andGUESS WHO TOBY IS.  

also,guess how far back the autistic communitywas talking about ace stuff!

(golly gee, come to think of it, we probably didn’t exist as an organized community before about the 90s EITHER, bad news for us, guess we don’t exist and aren’t oppressed)

Here’s an excerpt from that “excessively detailed blog post”: 

———–

A 2017 SIDE NOTE ON TOBY’S IDENTITY:

A few months after this 2012 Asexual WorldPride Conference talk, I finally got to see the Sally Jesse Raphael “Toby” interview, thanks to YouTube account BetamaxBooty, and immediately recognised that xe was Autistic Rights pioneer and co-founder of Autism Network International (ANI), Jim Sinclair,whofeatures heavily in the 2000 “Autreat” short documentary film.

I had just recently been formally diagnosed as autistic myself, and remembered being strongly affected and influenced by Jim’s Don’t Mourn For Us in my earliest days on the internet, 15 years before. But I had never realised that Jim was also the near mythical nonbinary figure that so many described to me as genderqueer community folklaw.

Jim also coined the phrase “self-narrating zoo exhibit” (and watching the Sally Jesse Raphael interview with its amazingly invasive audience Q&A, it’s not hard to see why!) and prominently spoke out against ‘person first’ language.

When I attended the UK Autscape conference a month after the Asexual Conference, many people I met had no problem understanding my gender neutral nonbinary identity or my asexuality, because they knew Jim. Although some were surprised that I was trans rather than intersex. This is where I’d first discovered, via Wikipedia, that in 1997, xe “remain[ed] openly and proudly neuter, both physically and socially.”

Then while reading the 2012 ASAN essay collection ‘Loud Hands: Autistic People Speaking‘, I was astounded to discover that the very first Autistic-run autism conference stream in November 1995 had included a panel on asexuality.

Jim Sinclair is a true pioneer of so many of the communities and identities I was a part of, and influenced so many of us, whether we knew it or not.