I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17
It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.
All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.
I’ve met new aces who know nothing about ace culture. We had rings, black for ace, white for aro. We had dragons and space and cake and all of it. All of it got mocked and erased and bullied so completely that it’s not on the site anymore. I still follow the aro/ace positivity tags and sometimes someone brings them up again and I flinch. I honest to god flinch.
Hell, I came out as aroace at the same time as that discourse - and AVEN got so thoroughly smeared that I’ve never gone looking for it. There’s culture I don’t know. It kills me.
I used to run a blog for ace rep in books, I deleted it out of fear that I was going to get harassed.
When ace folk talk about being forced back into the closet we are not joking. Anyone on the ace spectrum were so violently harrassed that it was legitmately safer for them to not ID as ace publicly. Literally anything would get you death threats.
Anti-ace folks were in bed with terfs and I'm sorry if that upsets people but yall really gotta understand that literally every anti-ace talking point was the exact same that is given to bisexuals, pansexuals, and trans women.
They talked about how we were "stealing resources", about how we were "predators" because we "sexualized children" with our identities as being asexual, about how we are "invading LGBT spaces".
There were multiple anti-ace "memes" that were just straight up death threats. "Take the shot Jessica" followed up with "Target Sighted" is one that still haunts me to this day.
Some of the biggest "exclusionist" discourse blogs all ended up being white women, several of whom race faked. One even claimed to be a Half-black half-jewish intersex trans woman who would become half of whatever race she was arguing with. It took a massive amount of people all pouring evidence into what she was doing for her to finally get dropped because oh yea, maybe its a bad look to have the white christian perisex girl be the "face" after all of this.
Ace people were routinely told that their sexual assaults didn't happen. People routinely told us that we can't have words to describe our oppression because it "groups gay people with straights". Ace people were routinely told that because we aren't sent to conversion therapy that we weren't "actually LGBT", and the people who did let it clear that they were sent to conversion therapy because they're asexual? "Oh that didn't happen." "Actually that was homophobia, not aphobia"
The "exclusionists" likewise, would REFUSE to not tie anything into conversion therapy. They'd literally use conversion therapy doctrine to dictate if you're gay enough.
The Acecourse was also around the time "queer is a slur" really started to gain traction, and guess what the exclusionists were doing? They were calling aces and our allies "Radikweers" without a fucking hint of irony while screaming about how queer is a slur and you need to tag everything with Q Slur
There was a DEDICATED sect of "exclusionists" who were lesbians obsessed with the idea of making the existence of asexual women a lesbophoic problem. I'm not even fucking joking. Same group of people would then claim that if you didn't have sex with them then you're abusive because you're "Witholding sex, which is an emotional need".
Exclusionists were by and large, white gays that were pissed off that they couldn't do assimilation and respectability politics because the rest of us were too weird rocked the boats too much to be able to slot neatly into the whole 2 kids white picket fence.
^nailed it. “Piss your pants” replaced “kys” and “up the road not cross the street” but we all knew what it meant. Most of the people targeted were like me - 18 and under who dared to like being aroace, ace, or aro. Almost all of us weren’t even “straight” (as in heterosexual or heteromantic). All trying to defend ourselves and our orientations while being attacked by people who proudly called us “kweer”s and “mogai trash” and told us to die. Told us we should be put in concentration camps, once. That we weren’t hurt or struggling or erased, we were just white kids trying to be different and quirky.
Edit: by the by, the reason they changed to piss your pants was because we were mass reporting their blogs for harassment for telling aces and aros to kill themselves. They changed it to piss your pants specifically because you can’t really report that to tumblr and expect a takedown. But again. We knew what it meant.
And these same people to this day are pretending like it's absurd to make that conncection.
This is why I block everyone with any variation of "discourse" in their URL on sight. Aphobes made "discourse" blogs specifically for the purpose of harassing aspec people, so that their main blog was kept nice and clean and none of their followers had to see them telling people to kill themselves because they didn't want to date anyone.
I very vividly remember a post from what I thought was a nice person, that read something along the lines of, "It's important to tell kids it's okay to be gay, but it's pedophilic to tell kids it's okay to be ace".
These people literally fucking thought that being ace meant you were a pedophile, because it meant you were sexualizing all other orientations, and therefore telling kids they could be aspec meant you were sexualizing kids.
Every single fucking argument these people leveled against aspec people was not only blatantly recycled homophobia, absurd ammounts of it relied entirely upon ableism and racism, because these people were pretending that only white people were aspec, and the identity was, and I fucking quote, "A white supremacist's wet dream". They literally went around saying that everyone who was aspec was white, completely speaking over the black and brown people who were proudly aspec whose existance proved that what they were claiming was absolute bullshit.
These aphobes would claim to support all other LGBT people, especially trans people...unless the aspec person they were targeting was trans. Then not being a transphobe flew out the fucking window. Aphobes would claim that if you were trans and ace, that meant you weren't really trans, you were just pretending to be so you could invade the LGBT community.
Aphobes equated ace and aro identities as all "asexy cringiness" but they attacked both communities with equal viciousness, just under the same words.
This is why I block blogs with any variaiton of the word "discourse" in their url on sight. This is why whenever I see a new blog I want to follow, or get a new follower, I search the word "ace" and "aro" along with "trans" and "nonbinary" and "pan" and whatever other specific fucking keywords apply at the moment.
And the worst part is?
The aphobes who spent years harassing and attacking and traumatizing aspec people on this site are still here, with friends and tons of followers, like nothing ever happened. They'll claim they're no longer "terminally online" about aspec identities, mocking themselves for "caring too much" instead of actually doing anything to make amends for the literal hate crimes they committed. They'll fucking downplay and make light of the Literal Hate Crimes they spent years committing because now it's no longer socially acceptable to stalk and sexually harass people over being aspec.
Anyways, block foulserpent, then known as snakegay. Do not let these fucking people get away with this shit and pretend it never happened.
Edit: Oh and how the fuck could I forget all their ableism towards autistic people???? These fuckers were claiming that "aspec" was a shortened version of "autistic spectrum" and that you were ableist if you used it to refer to the "disgustingly pedophilic fake identity" of being aspec.
Even though literally too many gods damned people to count, including me and my twin and literally too mnay people to count, who were aspec, who used the term aspec, were also literally autistic and told these people over and over again that that's literally not true, stop fucking speaking for autistic people (because, to be crystal fucking clear, no one making this aphobic claim was autistic. It was literally just allistic people infantilizing us and not only speaking for us, but beating us down when we contradicted them!).
Literally the most ableist fucking post I've ever seen on this site that claimed to support autistic people was written by an ableist as shit fucking aphobe who was. Gods even just remembering this fucking post is so fucking infuriating. Everything about it was so fucking infantilizing and ableist. They claimed that aspec people using the term aspec was, and I paraphrase from memory, "trapping autistic people in your posts like nets, unable to understand why everyone is hating on them".
Like. Literally. So much of this fucking hate spree was ableist it's fucking absurd. Allistic people really just fucking hate autistic people and try to use us as a bludgeon //against ourselves// whenever they think they can get away with it. And let's not forget that if you were openly autistic and proud to be aspec, they'd then come in and claim you were faking being autistic (the same way they'd claim you were faking being black or brown or trans or gay) to invade the community and "steal resources from real LGBT people".
And again. Cannot stress enough how these people screamed and cried about how the word queer is a slur and always has been and always will be, then immediately turned around to hurl the word kweer AS A SLUR. With no fucking irony. Literally using a slur they claim to hate as a slur and thinking they're the good guys. I guess they thought changing the spelling would make it okay for them to /literally use it as a slur/??? they literally just made it into a slur again and used it as such and then acted like they were the heroes for...calling queer people slurs that are apparenly unforgivable >.>
And lets not forget that these people regularly flooded aspec tags with gore and porn despite their own claims that only "misguided children" were identifying as asexual or aromantic...
Go through the notes of this post if you want to learn about the hellscape this was. There are so many people sharing their experiences.
There has been a lot that has struck me about this thread, especially as someone who has been active in this conversation since 2011. But I reblogged this post last week
And two days later, I got a note directly from my personal blog that from my activity preview seems to have been from someone unfamiliar with this entire sphere of discourse.
I saw the note the day after they left it, and there were so many "this really happened?"-style comments that I couldn't easily find their note in my activity.
This has gone from normal, to unheard-of, and back to normal again, at least insofar as young aces coming into our community don't know what we all fought through to make a space for you to feel safe in.
If you'd like to learn more, please feel free to reach out--I've been here since 2007, and I'm glad to fill you in on what I've seen. If not, that's okay too--but please know that a lot of us have bled and hurt and died so that "ace" is something you can put in your bio without fear. I don't begrudge you that; you're the reason I did it. But there was a fight, and this post points to some of the pieces of what that fight looked like.
I started to realize I was ace during this time and fuck was it rough. I had to spend years unpacking internalized aphobia just to come to terms with my identity.
And like I remeber this one post that went around that in retrospect I pray wasn't true, where someone was talking about how they were the president of their college's lgbt+ support club and one day someone who was a cis heteroromantic asexual showed up and they had to pull them outside and tell them they weren't queer and weren't welcome at the club. And like god that post fucking haunts me. Can you imagine being that cruel? The OP was fully painting themselves as a wise community leader who was correcting this misguided straight person and people were fucking patting them on the back for it and talking about how they were so proud of OP for protecting the real queer people from straights like that who want to invade our spaces and steal our resources.
I really, really hope that post was fake because I have spent so much time thinking about that ace person and worrying about them, wishing I could find them and tell them that OP was wrong and cruel and they belonged in that group.
And god forbid you HC a character as ace, that shit was a one way ticket to getting harassed and labeled a homophobe. And that shit hasn't even completely gone away, it wasn't that long ago that people in the MP100 fandom were just being openly and unapologetically aphobic because they didn't like ace Reigen HCs.
I also remember at least one prominent queer youtuber legit saying in a video that they didn't think there was anything queer about being asexual. That shit hurt because I really looked up to that creator, and tbf they have changed, but like that was just par for the course back then. You never knew if another queer person was safe or if they were going to turn out to think ace and aro people were special snowflakes who just wanted to pretend they were queer for funsies and thus should be unpersoned.
And Thomas Sanders basically had his entire internet presence nuked just for saying he thought ace and aro people were queer. Siding with aspecs was legit social suicide back then.
This shit also absolutely went hand in hand with transmedicalism, biphobia, and basically any movement that sought to separate queer people. TERFs have openly admitted that ace discourse was a recruitment tactic, because once they got you to believe one group of queer people was the enemy it was much easier to convince you to hate others. Aspec exclusionism and biphobia were the gateway ideologies, and tbh in some places they still are, that's why it's so important to recognize that TERF rhetoric is more than just hating trans people, they are smart enough when recruiting other queer people to not start with the transphobia.
And god the ace/aro exclusionist stuff really did go right into biphobic monosexual discourse(you can't use monosexual it lumps queer people in with straight people and besides biphobia isn't real it's just misdirected homophobia) those arguments were just copy + pasted from aspec discourse, and then transmedicalism and on and on to the next group. It's always the same arguments, the only thing that changes is the target. This is why anyone who EVER uses the argument that a certain type of bigotry is just a different type that's been misdirected is instantly sus to me. It's always an exclusionist dogwhistle used to try to deny whatever queer person is the enemy of the week a seat at the table.
But yeah, I try not to fault people who got swept up but changed and have put in the work, but it is still heartbreaking to think about how much aspec culture has just been completely lost because of that shit. We had solidarity and symbols and communities, and we've had to start over because half of us are too traumatized to bring back cake and dragons and the black/white rings and the rest just don't know because there's no one left to teach them. And it also sucks to see stuff that was born out of that era still get passed around because the context is gone. It's just...beyond tragic. It really is.
*exhausted laughter*
So.
I could tell a lot of stories about what got aimed at those of us who simply didn't exclude ace people during those years, but the two biggest ones that stick out to me, beyond what's already been cited, are that I had an older ace person who I'd been friends with for a long time who came to Tumblr specifically to provide cultural context and to talk with younger ace ppl. They'd been part of the queer community for decades and are in their mid 50s now.
They got dogpiled so badly that they quit the site in something like 3 days. Just existing as an older ace was so offensive to people that they started making tons of throwaway accounts to bomb this person with the most foul asks.
The other thing is the constant and consistent harassment I and others got for making Ace Pride items. It didn't matter if you also made other items (especially lesbian pride items, which at the time meant using the ugly-as-sin, hard to make stuff with, made by a racist "lipstick pride" flag that was actually just stolen from a joke "cougar pride" flag made by a morning radio show), if you made ace stuff at all, you'd get a constant stream of harassment.
And for me, it wasn't just me. They harassed my kid, too. At the time MK was 14-17, and they didn't give a fuck that they were harassing a trans girl in the process of coming out. They sent her all kinds of really horrible asks about how she was being raised by an abuser who hates lesbians, a pedophile, etc. She's 23 now, and she learned to let it roll off of her, but she never should have had to go through that.
It didn't matter if you were making free art, or if it were your livelihood. People expected me to spend time making "lesbian pride" art that never sold, and they had no intention of buying, and to not make ace pride stuff that sold like hotcakes. To this day, the ace pride section of our site is one of the top 5 flags (along with Rainbow, Progress, Bi, and Trans). When the Steven Universe episode "Change Your Mind" came out, I was watching it over and over a couple weeks later and made header graphics with the lyrics to the song on it in various Pride colors. I made headers for myself, my partners (including my now-wife who I had just started dating), and my kid, in bi, ace, trans, Rainbow and NBi colors, and put a note on it saying "I made these for me and my partners, I'm going to bed, I'll make some more flags once I get some sleep".
I woke up to a pile of notes yelling at me for not immediately making this free art with the "lesbian flag," even though at that time there were like 8 competing flags, and for making one for "cishet aces". Even though it was in the post that I'd made these with my family's flags and was planning on making others after I, you know, slept. Even though my wife is a trans lesbian. Even though...
It's impossible to underline enough how fucking entitled and cruel many young LGBT+ people were, and how a lot of those people have simply shed their "discourse blogs" like hermit crabs dropping old shells and slid right back into community on here when the ace discourse was "over." None of them have to my knowledge ever apologized, and some of the old bullshit that started during those days still circulates, just metastasized into other, newer bullshit.
A lot of them just turned their ire onto non-binary people or bi people next, when it was no longer "fashionable" to hate ace people.
