allopropaganda

Note: This is a submission-based blog for aromantic and asexual people to vent about harassment, erasure, invalidation, and intimidation they've received due to the aphobic "ace discourse" trend on Tumblr. Read our disclaimer.

[redstonedust]

we talk a lot about sex positive asexuals on this site but i never see much discussion about sex repulsed allosexuals. if you find people attractive yet can't enjoy sex for whatever reason, i wish you a happy comfortable life. you're not broken or missing anything. i love you.

[ladydisdain5]

More people need to understand that gender and sexuality can be phases, and that's completely fine, normal even, and doesn't invalidate any part of those phases.

"You'll find the right person eventually" this, and "you're just a late bloomer" that. Yeah, maybe. So what? If I find the right person, that doesn't mean I'm not ace, it's a spectrum for a reason. If I do turn out to be a late bloomer, that doesn't mean I'm not ace now.

And what's the worst that'll happen anyway? You'll gain empathy for and knowledge of the group you were part of? Oh, no, the horror

[moniquill]

[traycakes]

It's not just to have a "do over" that doesn't involve the original cast, it's to cut them out of the royalties. Literally the entire point is to make sure all the money made by Harry Potter goes to transphobes or people willing to work with transphobes.

If you watch it, you are supporting bigotry, hate, and oppression. That's just objective reality. All for a story that you probably have already seen in movie and book form.

[apocalypse-angel]

#the last point is especially true since the old cast receives royalties for anything with their likeness on it#meaning the original trio still gets money for every mug with their 14 year old faces on it#if they stop making those and replace them with the new cast which they will the old cast gets cut off completely#which is again exactly what rowling wants because she cannot stand those 'ungrateful brats' as she would likely put it#and as she has last say in anything that gets made in harry potter paraphernalia this might also explain the decrease in faces on products

via @discipleofkleio

I hate Rowling so much.

[typicallyexceptional]

There's people in the notes saying they're going to watch it anyway, and you know, I understand how you can start feeling so burned out and numb from the world that it may feel too hard to avoid things that will give you a little immediate relief in some way in order to avoid the long-term impact of funding these things.

But. If you can't bring yourself to avoid watching it, you better at least fucking pirate it.

[lord-armitage]

FYI, Rowling posted this today. She is actively queerphobic, do not support this project in anyway.

[justonepurpose]

I know that this was a foundational thing for so many people. I was one of them. Without Harry Potter, I probably wouldn't be the person I am today.

If you're thinking about watching this anyway because you feel all that nostalgia: It's time to grow up. It's time to move on.

Don't even hate watch it. Make it fail.

It is the easiest thing ever to simply not do anything.

[gatheringbones]

isn’t it weird how bi/lesbian and ace/aro discourse uses the exact same arguments about stealing resources and attention and not deserving to be thought of as the most oppressed

[allopropaganda]

am i the only one who doesn't like how quickly we forgot all about the smear campaign that was ace discourse? it's like it was swept under the rug and we've gone to pretending people didn't violently bully and harass asexuals for 2-3 years.

Where are they now. Living peacefully after everything they've done?

[boozye]

"Oh it's not love actually cause there's no sex involved"

Wrong. Storm of knives 🖕

☁️☁️🌩️☁️☁️☁️🌩️☁️🌩️☁️🌩️☁️☁️☁️🌩️🌩️☁️

🔪 ⚡ 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 ⚡ 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪

🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 ⚡ 🔪 🔪 🔪 ⚡ 🔪 🔪

🔪 🔪 ⚡ 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 ⚡

🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 ⚡ 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪

🔪 🔪 ⚡ 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 ⚡ 🔪

⚡ 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪 ⚡ 🔪 🔪 🔪 🔪

💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥💥

[allopropaganda]

Amatonormativity plays its role in keeping domestic violence victims in the grasp of their abuser, too afraid to lose the meaning in their life and letting their only chance at happiness be jailed.

[allopropaganda]

2016

Watching people free of consequence and unprompted do everything in their power to destroy the marginalized for a taste of power was the true face of people that I will never ever forget

[feastofsnakes]

Rip in peice…

[queeranarchism]

The dogwhistle & the response

I think it’s important to understand how groups like TERFs use dogwhistles AND our response to dogwhistles as part of their recruitment. I’ll try to explain how that works.

Remember that a dogwhistle is designed to sound reasonable to someone uninformed on the topic, and absolutely infuriating to someone who recognized its function as a dogwhistle. ‘queer is a slur’ for example, seems perfectly reasonable if you are unfamiliar with the way the phrase is being utilized to push back inclusivity in LGBTIA+ and queer spaces by about 30 years.

So let’s say 10 people unfamiliar with that,  start copying ‘queer is a slur’ because it sounds reasonable and they feel genuine concern for lgbt people who get called slurs. These could be young people, but they could just as easily be middle aged. They could be in any axis of privilege or oppression. Familiarity with dogwhistles isn’t that widespread.

Some of those people may encounter someone who points them in the direction of a good explanation of why queer has been reclaimed decades ago and how vile the hidden agenda of ‘queer is a slur’ is and they’re learn. Some others of those people will meet a queer person who is tired and out of spoons and understandably hurt because they see TERF dogwhistles everywhere, and that person will shout at them. If this takes place on twitter, 50 people will reblog the shouting for performativity points.

Ideally, the person who got shouted at will learn, but that’s rarely how humans work. When someone shouts at us in front of a crowd, most of us just get upset. They’re post something like “All I said was ‘queer is a slur’ and everybody started shouting at me, this is so upsetting.” And THAT’S when the TERF will swoop in. Still not identifying themselves as a TERF, some sweet comforting ‘gender critical’ blogger will tell the upset person that it’s not their fault, that some people are just bullies who want to silence all criticism, that it’s important to be critical of this kind of gender ideology, blah blah blah.

Someone who is upset is very likely to be open-minded towards the point of view of the comforter, so our uninformed person will pick up a few more nuggets of TERF ideology and start parroting them. The already upset queer people will see more confirmation that this is a TERF and get more angry. A cycle will emerge where the increasingly isolated person consistently experiences one side as attackers and TERFs as comforting and supporting. And that’s the perfect setting for a brainwashing.

Now I don’t know what to do about it. It isn’t fair to expect all of us to always politely explain TERF dogwhistles to everyone. We’re allowed to be out of spoons and angry at this constant unsafety. TERFs also create fake accounts that throw dogwhistles everywhere just to push and exhaust us. But like, this process seems important to pick up on because it happens again and again.

[scarlet-rosepetals]

Absolutely fantastic post, but I think it’s worth pointing out that this cycle doesn’t just come from people with no spoons lashing out.

I have absolutely lashed out at people who parrot “queer is a slur” rhetoric. I’ve also attempted to reach out and politely educate people on the subject. Thing is, I’m often met with the exact same results. Some people will perceive any correction no matter how kindly phrased as an attack, and some people are more motivated to engage in performative behavior that makes them look “woke” than to actually help marginalized people (ie, just because the person isn’t a TERF doesn’t mean their motives are pure). There’s also the way TERFs/exclus will pretend to be totally innocent in their use of dogwhistles, to the point where you really can’t tell who’s acting in good faith or not.

Point being, I don’t know what to do about it either, but I think it’s worth explicitly warning people that “just being nice” isn’t going to cut it. You can be a Perfect Advocate who says everything right and never loses their temper and it won’t stop this cycle, so don’t beat yourself up when it happens to you.

[storyweavingspider]

Double reblogging but I’d like to point out that this is how White Supremacists/Fascists work too. Same model.

[queeranarchism]

True. I’ve noticed it’s how antivaxxers work too. There are very valid questions people can ask about vaccines. We should be critical of the mega-corporations that produce our medications. But those that ask critical questions about vaccines are often immediately attacked by a bunch of passionate anti-antivaxxers and that drives when right into the arms of the antivax movement.

I have also noticed that some people respond to polite attempts to educate them with more anger. From my experience, that can be for a lot of different reasons, like:

They’re TERFs pretending to be naive users, throwing dogwhistles around to invite attacks and then play the victim.

They’re performative social media users who see every correction as an attack on their reputation.

They’re someone who is deeply insecure or anxious, in many cases traumatized in some way or struggling with mental illness, and will fall into a full-blown panic attack at the suggestion that they might have done a bad thing because surely that means they’re worthless and all their friends hate them, etc.

They’re simultaneously being viciously attacked by people, possibly in private messages, and they perceive the friendly responses as part of that attack and respond with the same hostility to everyone.

A combination of things.

I wanted to list that variety of reasons to highlight that yes, friendly education doesn’t always work, but there are a lot of reasons why it doesn’t.

And in the cases when it does work, it’s often slow and happens out of sight. The way social media often demands that learning works (someone offers education, the educated person immediately learns, says sorry & thank you and changes their behavior) is very rarely how learning processes actually work.

I should maybe mention that there are also cases where being very harsh, angry and direct with someone can serve as a wake up call and create a change in behavior but that almost always happens offline, in a face to face situation between people who have a longer relationship and can come back to that moment to talk it over. And it’s generally about structural behavior, not an accidental one time copying of a terf dogwhistle.

There is no conclusion to this. I certainly wouldn’t say that you should always be nice. Shit’s complex. “Social media is very bad at creating growth and change for the better, call out culture makes that bad place even worse and actively helps people like terfs, fashos and antivaxxers recruit people” might be the closest I can come to a conclusion.

[a-square-6-28-496]

saw a similar thing about Mormons sending ppl to evangelize at ppl’s doors producing the same effect a couple years back.

[queeranarchism]

Yeah, that’s kinda similar, though not quite the same. In those cases someone is already a member of the group (so already identifies themselves as a Mormon, radfem, whatever) and is deliberately encouraged to go spread the message of the group in a way that doesn’t work well and will invite hostility.

This way, group loyalty is encouraged as they experience again and again that the outside world is hostile and the only support comes from their own community. It’s paired with isolation in other respects, like encouraging people to cut off friends who disagree with them.

Bonus points: groups with generally good opinions can also do this! Social justice twitter and facebook groups actually do this A LOT.

There are sooooo many online (and some offline) social justice communities where you are encouraged to call out people who disagree with you in ways that just never work. Not in a ‘I shout because I’m out of spoons and you really hurt me’ way, but in a ‘I shout because loud aggressive call outs are met with social rewards from my community and being more patient as I help people overcome their prejudices is seen as being a traitor to the cause.’

This creates a dynamic where people consistently experience everyone not in the in-group as hostile and everyone in the in-group as supportive, as long as they loyally reproduce the dogma of the group.

[roach-works]

another thing i’d like to add that constant dogwhistling does is it makes the afflicted parties look crazy, and it destroys their credibility when they protest at their treatment. it makes them look like they’re overly sensitive, or playing the victim, or picking random things to get mad at.

awhile back there was a concerted effort by neonazis to wish anyone they identified as a jew ‘happy hannukah’, any time they identified someone online as jewish. the plan was intended to accomplish a number of things in combination:

-publicly alert everyone to the presence of a jew

-let the jew know they’ve been identified as such by a hater

-do it in a way that looked ‘nice’

-make the jew look pedantic or ungracious if the jew corrected them on the actual date of hannuka

-make the jew look insanely oversensitive if the jew correctly understood “happy hannukah!” as part of a deliberate endangerment and responded with fear and anger

like, this is the kind of thing that happens to jews, online, every day. this is part of the background radiation of antisemitism that jews have to navigate, and this was a couple years ago, even, before everyone got really really comfortable with fully articulated violent ill-wishing under the excuse of antizionism.

one thing i’d like people to consider, beyond just 'being nice to people saying dogwhistles’, is to pay attention to who blows up at an innocuous-seeming provocation, and to be very skeptical when anyone is condemned as 'wanting to play the victim’.

dogwhistling is really effective at pissing targets off in ways that observers can’t hear directly. please remember this aspect of them too.

[allopropaganda]

[leikeliscomet]

Asexual theory 101

Right I keep getting asked on most of my asexual posts 'What does this mean OP? Where's the sources?' so imma make a quick ace theory 101 post so if anyone says they don't get it I can say I tried. Let's go:

'What does being ace have to do with race/racism?/There's racism in the ace community???'

Pretty much everything as people of colour experience various forms of sexualisation and desexualisation at the same time, which is why POC are rarely included in asexual representation:

Asexuals of Color Still Seek to Validate Their Asexuality by Ebony Purks

Stereotypes & media about Black masculinity made it harder to come out as asexual by Tyger Songbird

Your Assumptions About Black Queer Masculinity Are Erasing My Asexual Identity by Timinepre Cole

It's Time To Start Celebrating Black Asexuality in Media By Tyger Songbird

Yasmin Benoit: ‘People had a hard time believing that I could be Black and asexual and at Pride’ by Alastair James

Brown and Gray: An Asexual People of Color Zine

'What do TERFS/transphobia have to do with asexuality?'

There's a growing TERF conspiracy theory that asexuality is the side-effect of transitioning. The LGB movement believes the community is exclusively for 'same-sex attracted persons' and so identities that don't involve attraction e.g. the TQIA should be removed. Most backlash towards Yasmin Benoit, aroace activist, is from white TERFs and conservatives:

Acephobic conspiracy theories have transphobic and fascist roots by Sherronda J Brown

'But how can conservatives hate asexuality if they hate sex?'

Because they don't and never did. If the term 'puritan' was used correctly in modern internet discourse, it would be known Christian puritans believe heterosexual sex for reproduction is a gift from god and mandatory so being asexual doesn't exactly fit with that worldview. Their beef is with any form of sex and sexuality that falls outside of cis heterosexual marriage, including asexuality. They're not anti sex but anti sexual autonomy:

"Anti-Sex" and the Real Sexual Politics of the Right by Lee Cicuta (ButchAnarchy)

The religious right is now targeting sexless marriages as “selfishness.” They Want to Ban Those Too by Tyger Songbird

Asexual people targetted by right-wing pundits following landmark report by Harriet Brewis

'What does being ace have to do with gender?'

It's commonly assumed that because patriarchy shames women's sexualities and considers all men's sexuality as biological and unavoidable, that ace women only and exclusively experience dsexualisation whilst ace men only and exclusively are pressured into being sexual beings. This can true as a broad overview but it can vary based on race, disability, class etc. This also becomes complex for asexuals that exist outside the gender binary. This is known as 'gender detachment'.

Impossible for Men, Unremarkable for Women by Canton Winer

My Work on Gender Detachment and Asexuality Strikes a Nerve by Canton Winer

'There's asexual studies now?'

Yup. On the general experiences of asexual people in the UK, including discrimination in education, the workplace and healthcare:

The National LGBT Survey (2018)

Ace in the UK Report (2023)

Specific names:

Asexual theorists: Ianna Hawkins, Michael Paramo, Julia Sondra Decker, Canton Winer (non-ace), Sherronda J Brown, Angela Chen

Asexual activists: Yasmin Benoit, Tyger Songbird, Marshall Blount (TheGentleAce), Kimberly Butler (TheAsexualGoddess)

And I'm gonna update this with more if they're worth adding. I don't wanna hear any excuses anymore or blame towards aces of colour, gay aces or trans aces for not being specific enough anymore. Read!

[barren-heart]

not romantic partners or bros but a secret third thing where you build a secret tunnel system only you and your partner can access via your bed

[allopropaganda]

Lesbian Wikipedia page Acephobia

I have recently started a talk on the Lesbian page to change the defnition from "A lesbian is a homosexual woman or girl." to "A lesbian is a woman or girl with same sex attraction" (Yeah I know not quite right either, but consider what I'm dealing with right now I don't even want to imagine what that would've looked like). I basically immideatly received harasment from an allo lesbian for even suggesting something like that because apparently lesbian is a scientifically defined term(and not just a label created and used by people with a flexible definition) and was called a revisionist and accused of homosexual erasure(Ironic considering I am Lesbian and still marginally identify with my sexuality). Then a person marked through Shinigami eyes as a transphobe came in(I checked their edit history and they frequently contributed to a psuedo science theory wikipage about trans people though I couldn't definitevely tell if they were a transphobe) and said something about the current definition being Due Weight even though that doesn't descredit changing it in anyway. (I also read a bit throught it and was kinda horified that it literally said as one of the thing that don't count as due weight is "If a viewpoint is held by an extremely small minority, it does not belong on Wikipedia, regardless of whether it is true, or you can prove it, except perhaps in some ancillary article." Like, Wikipedia's point is to record information as accurately as possible, but if one of the terms used literally says "It doesn't matter if something is true if it's held by a very small minority" then doesn't that go against the point of it?) Sorry for the rambling and many tangents, it's just a very frustrating mess. The talk page- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Lesbian Due weight- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Neutral_point_of_view#Due_and_undue_weight P.S.- I don't mind the link to the pages being included, just don't want my name mentioned.

[allopropaganda]

Sending on anon because I'm shy but it's incredible how aphobes always, without a doubt, end up being intersexist or transphobic. Even a web extension that was specifically made to help filter transphobia. I used to be skeptical of the aphobe-to-transphobe pipeline but seeing it happen again and again especially with Shinigami Eyes has definitely convinced me. I'm sorry people were doubtful when you first pointed out SE's aphobia.

The threads connect and we go full circle

[allopropaganda]

It’s really important to remember that “ace discourse” is not generally a term used by the a-spectrum community to discuss and investigate our own experiences. It’s a term used primarily by non-a-spectrum people to silence, derail, marginalize, and demonize us. That term is a weapon whose sole purpose is to seemingly legitimize aphobia by dressing it in terms of social critique, thereby keeping otherwise social-justice-minded people from questioning their own allonormative biases and prejudices.

In other words, the “ace discourse” tag isn’t full of vitriol because aces and aros are bigoted; it’s full of vitriol because never before in history has aphobia been examined—and bringing aromantic and asexual issues to light threatens allonormative understanding, leading some people to react with great hostility to what feels like losing control of their worlds.

-Earth

[allopropaganda]

Just an interesting little factoid - I created the term a-spec in convo with this past mod as a conscious way to inclusively include all of the community especially for discourse - it had become way too confusing otherwise. This is the earliest I've seen the term used (although I expressly shortened it and used "-" to keep an eye on how it traveled) by the person I was bouncing ideas off with.

Thanks to tumblr's terrible terrible keyword/tag system which didn't even work with tags, I can't track down the very first post it was used in, BUT I did narrow the timeline from November 2015-Jan 2016

[allopropaganda]

Far be it for me to exercise my critical deduction skills, you know that it’s not my style to examine underlying themes and exposing motive - but the person who created shinigami eyes seems to be an overt aphobe and we should maybe do something about that.

Now I know what some of you may be saying, ‘Well it’s for TRANS people, so you know, you can’t blame them for drawing a line in the sand.’

But actually, this is how aphobes sidle through, pretending to be ‘neutral and doing just enough to hit a-specs but dodge criticism.

FORTUNATELY, I don’t have to sit here and try to convince you that my experiences of dog whistles and red flags are real and that I’m not ‘just wanting to see things’.

I know its wrong to be a kill joy, challenge authority and ruin everyone’s good time, but here we have the creator stating that the extension IS for anti-lgbt sentiments while explicitly underlining that it is not for aphobia. Asexuals are the only orientation to be singled out in any discussion.

I, for one, do not accept aphobes into our trans community, and at the very least these behaviors warrant attention and questioning.

[allopropaganda]

The Refresh