[bisexualdemondean]

Hey Cas! Is Demi the ace spectrum? I'm asking because I want to write an oc who's demi and I want to know more about bit as to not mess it up and actually be able to represent. Also I love you very much!

Yes it is :)

-Castiel

[aro-nb-spn-blog]

Demi can refer to demisexual (on the acespectrum) or demiromantic (on the arospectrum). It would be an good idea to read about aromantics from aromantics, not alloromantic asexuals, because the ace-spec community often erases the aro-spec community. If you want to write a alloromantic asexual character, I still think, it’s a good idea to have some knowledge about aromantics (from aromantics) so you don’t repeat arophobic things from alloromantic asexuals. This is a simplification. So please read up more by yourself. I can recommend @aromantic-official and @aroworlds, but do your own research, don’t just ask them to tell you everything. @fuckyeahasexual is about asexuality and respectful of aromantics(after aromantics told them to do better). I hope, you have fun writing the story and learn about the aspec community.

[aro-nb-spn-blog]

@alloaroworlds I saw your post about having to work to be an ally, not just expect others to educate you, and thought about a problem I have found.

After a discussion I had with my teacher, they said that they were my biggest ally. It felt uncomfortable, because they have not done anything to be my ally. I have told them I’m nonbinary, but I not going to tell them I’m alloaro, because they don’t know what it means and I don’t have the energy to explain that to them. I think what they meant was ‘I’m not against the groups you are part of.’

So I think we need a word that means something along the line of ‘I’m not against this group, but I don’t have the time, energy etc. to do the work it takes to be an ally.’ I couldn’t find a word like this, but if anyone knows a word please tell me.

I have thought about declare friendship, because I have played Civilisation a lot the last days. And it kinda fits. In Civilisation it’s like saying ‘I’m not going to start a war against you, but I’m not your ally, so I’m not going to follow you into war.’ What I mean is that declare friendship would mean ‘I’m not against this group, and if someone points out a mistake I made I’m going to listen. But I’m not an ally. I’m not going to put in the work it takes to become an ally.’

[scootsenshi]

Old people can"t understand when younger people are willing to cut a whole relative off. They have lived their entire lives in guilt or based on some sense of loyalty to someone based on blood. People will abuse you betting on that fact, just because ya’ll are blood that means you have to accept it. No, you don’t.

[stephrc79]

Remember boys, girls, and nonbinaries, the phrase isn’t blood is thicker than water.

It’s actually the blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb.

Which literally means the family you choose is and always will be more an important than the family you were born into. So you do you.

[aro-nb-spn-blog]

Blood is thicker than water, means that family holds even long distance. The blood is just like when people say family blood, and the water comes from sailing to new countries so having lot of water between you.

The misunderstanding of the saying comes from someone saying it really means ‘blood of the covenant is thicker than the water of the womb’ without actually checking were it come from or how it has been used. Than it spread. Just so you know both the original meaning and it’s not always a good thing to say to abuse victims. Sometimes it might be. I find it comforting that I don’t have to live next door to my abusive relatives, but I can still have a relationship with them in a way where I don’t get hurt.

[aro-nb-spn-blog]

I’m not allosexual in the alloromantic and allosexual way. I’m allosexual in the aromantic way. Why is that so hard to understand?

[aro-bot]

i know it’s been talked about before but i feel like there needs to be more discussion on how aromanticism affects gender identity (and vice versa). also before ppl jump on me for this – this is my personal experience, this isn’t Disk Horse™ of any kind, and this is a post by and for aromantic people only. if you’re not aro don’t comment.

anyways so like, i’m coming from a dfab+genderqueer perspective here, so that’s really all i can speak on, but like. for example, lesbians tend to have a complex experience w gender because women are expected to be attracted to men and base their gender id off of that attraction. but as that kind of shifts and parts of the world become more open to the idea of girls loving girls (and ik not everywhere is changing and it’s not changing fast enough, i’m not saying lesbians don’t still have it bad or anything), i think we’re seeing a shift that girls are expected to base their gender id off of romance in general and not necessarily heterosexual romance

for me, at least, when i thought i was a cis (or nb female-adjacent, depending on the time) lesbian, i did have “friends” who shunned me when i came out, but i had other friends who wholeheartedly accepted me because they could relate my experiences (aka me lying to myself that i experienced romantic attraction in order to fit in better) to their own. and even the people who were on the fence, who didn’t outright shun me but who “didn’t accept my lifestyle”, often were on the fence because they couldn’t reconcile the idea that “”“"people shouldn’t be gay”“”“ with the idea that ”“”“women need romance”“”“ (obviously not in such explicit terms, but that was the implied message) and when i came out as aro, that was when they really started to shun me. my friends who accepted me as gay treated me like i was crazy and boring when i started to imply that maybe i didn’t like romance after all, and we pretty quickly fell apart after i stopped making up crushes to talk about. particularly the girls.

basically – as long as i loved somebody, i was allowed to just be me and, while i’ve always had a complex relationship with gender, i was usually fairly content with being read as female as long as people understood that i was queer. the moment i started questioning if maybe i was aro, i was pretty quickly shunned and treated poorly, particularly by the women in my life. i’m always asked about my lovelife by people i meet irl, because it’s expected that as someone who looks like a woman i’ll have one or at least be seeking one. i almost never see women in fiction allowed to be single, particularly if they’re older than about 13 or 14.

to be honest, i don’t think i’d be a woman if this wasn’t the case. i think i was always genderqueer and probably always will be, though i might come to a place where i’m ok with being read as a woman and only come out to close friends by choice instead of being afraid to come out. but i can’t deny that i don’t have this thing (romantic attraction) that fundamentally influences the way our culture percieves women, and that that probably influences my gender in some way

and again, if you’re not aro please refrain from commenting

[freyavalon]

Being aro (and realising I was) definitely influenced my perception of both gender in general and my gender like the concept of gender were always kind of blurry to me, so I used to force try and be hyperfeminine and like do everything to be like a girl/woman because well that’s what I was supposed to do, and a big part of that definitely was about inventing crushes on guys so that people wouldn’t thing there was anything wrong with me, my sexuality or how much of a girl I was - I’m using past tense but like that’s still the way I behave with people I’m not out to, so most people, it’s just that I stress it less now than when I was 16.

The way romance and the need of it in your life when you’re born female is crazy, and the worst is that so many people won’t even try to see it.

Today I don’t know what I identify as gender wise, I still don’t get gender, but I still have to present myself as female, because well, people and all that shit. I’m glad that people think my “lack of” interest in romance is because I’m too focused on uni (lmao), but I’m really scared of how things will be in a few years, because as I was born in a female body I must have plans to get in a romantic relationship and start a family of my own and become more feminine than I am now with my sweatshirts and unladylike manners at some point. And I really don’t know how I’ll be able to handle that, as an aro, ace, queer person.

Anyway, I can give examples of every single stage of my life, from being a little kid to now, illustrating all of this but my phone is dying so. yeah

[arotaro]

Honestly, even as a cis woman this shit has definitely fucked up my relationship with my gender.

I’m someone who as we all know is very invested in fiction and stories, but I’ve just… Never enjoyed the “girly” kinds. I was never into Sailor Moon, or Twilight, or Ouran, or- Hell I can’t even think of what else girls my age were into when I was younger, that’s how disinterested I was. I was into things like Star Wars or Pokemon or Fullmetal Alchemist or X-Men, you know, things where there’s like a 5:1 male-to-female gender ratio and a lot of the plot consists of people beating the shit out of each other. And even for the series I was into, I just genuinely didn’t often like the female characters as much. My favorites were always guys. For years I felt guilty for it, and assumed I must have been a misogynist and a bad person. I’m a girl, so why didn’t I like the girl characters? I tried to be a feminist, but clearly I was a misogynist, and a traitor to my gender. What a fucking monster I was for not being able to love Winry as much as Ling, or not watching shoujo anime, or whatever. 

I like, genuinely felt so guilty about it, and it wasn’t until recently that I figured out that the reason I didn’t like those things wasn’t because I hated women, but because of the romance (yes, even long before I found out I was aro). I’ve talked about this a bit before, but series aimed at women tend to be a lot more romance-heavy, and in series aimed at men, female characters- even the best ones- are generally either really minor characters, or heavily involved in romance. Men have love interests, women are love interests.

Not only did amatonormativity and misogyny come together to cause problems for me when I was a kid, but they then placed the blame for those problems on my shoulders when I was too young to even understand what was going on. And hell, it’s still something I struggle with today! Even now that I’m fully aware of the issue, I still feel guilty for not liking Winry very much (despite her being a cool character), or for never finishing shoujo anime, and I still find myself wondering if I just hate them because they’re women even though I know I don’t. It’s that bad!!

And yeah, I definitely agree that the pressure for women to be romantic is more than just pressure to be straight. I wished I was a lesbian when I was younger. I spent a while in a relationship with another girl (and was miserable throughout most of it, even though she was and still is a close friend of mine), because that was what you were supposed to do, right? As long as I was in a relationship with someone, then I was Normal, and it didn’t matter what gender they were because only freaks and monsters went through life without falling in love. Right?

[growinguparo]

my gender (afab nb) and my aromanticism have always been complementary. i’ve never thought they interacted, but in the process of writing this post i realized i guess they have.

when i was a kid i had a lot of dysphoria, which manifested itself in misogyny. i was different than the other girls. i thought i was better because i wasn’t feminine. if something was marketed towards girls, i hated it on principle. i didn’t feel the [pressure to be into romance because i was a girl] because well girls were all stupid and i was better than them so i was better than that too.

the other thing is i only figured out kid-crushes were real when i was 14, so up til then i always assumed when people were talking about crushes they were making it up to sound cool by imitating adults. this fed even more into my belief that i was better than other girls, because i was the only one not faking for attention.

i know most aros felt pressure to make up crushes when they were the age where that was a thing. i never did. i’d never really thought about it before, but i guess the reason for that was because of my dysphoria.

(and jsyk, i am no longer a misogynist lol. i deconstructed my feelings toward femininity after being exposed to feminist thought in my early teens, so by the time i was actually questioning my gender and sexuality at 14-15, i wasn’t like that anymore.)

[aromagni]

Oh mood about thinking people made up crushes….and yeah like romance and gender are both such intertwined social constructs that upon removing romance it’s hard to identify what gender is supposed to be? So my agender self is just like…sounds fake but okay. Also this post has mainly been from afab perspective but I know I’ve heard amab people express similar feelings.

Several months ago, I remember @arokaladin coined the term arogender to convey how gender can be so influenced by being aro. (Origin)(flag).

I think I would’ve started actually identifying as nonbinary sooner if the term arogender was around then, because one of the main ways I dismissed my feelings about not feeling like a woman was saying that like these things I feel are because I’m aro, I don’t want to look “feminine” as in desirable and stuff. So it’s important to actively acknowledge how aromanticism can affect gender and therefore validate a gender identity rather than invalidate it.

[slightlystalebread-blog]

Even when I identified as asexual & heteroromantic a few years ago, I realized that how I saw gender was different than how other people saw it. Since I’ve added aromantic to my identity and especially since I’ve dropped asexual as a descriptor, I’ve noticed how much I no longer feel the need to identify with a gender. For the past few years – back when I identified as asexual – I always saw myself as female, but mildly so: I didn’t feel much connection to it, but I didn’t suffer from dysphoria, which my transgender friend told me meant that I was not trans myself. I dropped my asexual label this past month in favor of aromantic, and with that I’ve definitely felt that I no longer identify myself with anything. I don’t identify as agender either though. Privately, I use gender-queer to describe myself, but I am yet to tell anyone in my life about that. The vastness of the term allows for it to fit me well, as I feel I don’t experience gender in any capacity. 

Back when I was ace, I would say that if someone used male pronouns for me, I wouldn’t feel any different. I think it’s still the case now that I identify as aro instead. I think that it stems from my desire to not be seen sexually or romantically, because I do not interact with others or think in such ways. I have no evidence or personal experience to back the claim up, but maybe a lot of aromantic people feel less connected to gender because the majority of people out there are attracted to either males, females, or both. There are very few people – in the grand scheme of how many people live on Earth – that would be attracted to someone who doesn’t identify themselves with a gender. This is not being said to invalidate this phenomenon, because it is very real, but perhaps it begins as a subconscious defense mechanism from things with which we do not wish to be involved

[aro-nb-spn-blog]

To me being nonbinary, afab and aro doesn’t affect each other. I think, that’s because of 2 things. I didn’t realise gender and romance were real until I was 14/15. And the languages I grow up with.

When I was 6, I thought gender was whatevery adults said you were. It was first when I was 14 and heard about being transgender, that I realised gender was something.

Not long after I turned 15 I heard about aromanticism, that explained why I didn’t think romance and crushes were real.

So my lack of interest in romance didn’t affect my feeling of gender, becuase to me gender was just what adults said.

In danish and icelandic the word for romantic partner is genderneutral. Now I’m almost 16, I do know other people feel crushes, but when they talk about crushes and romantic relationship, it doesn’t feel gendered to me.

[galactic-aro]

The binary of aroace and aro allo

Does anyone else feel like there’s quite a bit of pressure for aros to either identify as aroace or aro allo? Of course it can be an important distinction, since the two groups have different experiences based on their sexual orientation, but it’s a pretty unforgiving binary for anyone who doesn’t neatly fit either category

For example, I’ve seen surveys that are aroace specific, as well as ones that are aro allo specific, that are very insistent that you must fit that label. After all, asexual and allosexual aros deserve their own spaces

But I’ve never seen a grey area between aroace and allo ace be acknowledged, though I’m sure it must exist

My personal experience is that I relate to neither the label asexual or allosexual. If I was forced to put a label on my sexuality, I guess I would go with grey-asexual, but even that doesn’t ring true. I can relate to aspects of allosexuality to the extent that I don’t really relate to the ace community, but not enough to feel entirely allosexual

Being aro without the compound asexual or allosexual label has given me a unique experience that I don’t see reflected in aroace or aro allo spaces. The closest label I’ve found to describe what I feel is oriented aroace (to my knowledge, a term coined by @biaroace ? correct me if I’m wrong) but that identity is meant to describe people who identify as strictly aromantic and asexual, not acespec, like grey-ace or acespec identities

Feel free to add on, I’d be really curious to see if anyone relates

[aro-nb-spn-blog]

I have often told myself “maybe I’m somewhere on the ace-spectrum I just haven’t found the right label yet, maybe I feel so betrayed by the ace community that I don’t feel comfortable being part af the ace community.”

I have also told myself “maybe it’s just because I’m young and haven’t felt that much sexual attraction, maybe it’s because I don’t want sex yet, maybe it’s because I can’t recognise faces, maybe it’s because my aromantisimen affects my sexual attraction in ways I haven’t seen talked about.”

The thing is, I relate to some parts of asexuality and some parts of allosexuality, but I’m not comfortable with any of the labels. Not ace, ace-spec, aceflux (or any other ace-spec label I found), abrosexual (at a point I questioned if I were asexual sometimes and something else other times) or allosexual.

[aro-who-reads]

Someone tried to tell me today that pairing off and reproducing is the point of life, saying it was all biological. And I get where they’re coming from, but it really hurt when I’d just come out as aromantic.

I worry enough about what I’m going to do in my life if I don’t partner off, I don’t need someone else to do it for me.

[saltyaro]

I could get what they’re saying without the “pairing off” bit. Even if you think the point of life is ton continue the specie, just reproducing is enough, “pairing off” isn’t. Romance isn’t exactly needed for reproduction. 

But…that’s all assuming there’s a point in life. Which there isn’t. Also, we as a specie have gone way further than just…continuing to birth people. Why have technology if the only goal in life is reproducing? Why did we create culture, why did we even create any language at all? Aren’t those things useless to reproduction?

The current human experience is so much more than that. That person is full of bullshit and probably just hates anyone who’s not Straight, trying to justify their bigotry by biology. Our bodies can function without a lot of things. Those things are still important. Just let them reproduce and never have meaningful relationships or distract themself in any way. You’re better off being aromantic and actually living for yourself, and not for a weird concept of specie.

[adhd-bi-aro]

*snort*

I’m aro. I still wanted kids so I had them on my own. Pairing off totally not required to satiate the reproduction cravings! True, they go together for the majority but they are not inherently linked. The pairing thing? That’s psychology and social conditioning, propped up by the need to have male+female gametes. The craving for kids? Sure, it’s rooted in a basic biological instinct but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a hefty non-biological component. We are not mindless creatures driven by primal instincts; we are complex sentient beings with an amazing range of natural responses, desires and experiences.

Don’t confine yourself to the beaten path. If you want X but not Y, don’t blindly accept that you have to take both or neither. To hell with binary choices, if both default options make you unhappy, toss the binary out the window and go your way.

[aro-nb-spn-blog]

Evolution isn’t as simple as you get your own biological children, and then you have done your part.

It can be better to have some people take care of others children, without ever getting their own biologically children. Even to get their own genes to survive, because you share many genes with your biological siblings.

And that is still a simplification. Saving a lot of people by finding out new stuff is a way to get genes to survive, too. This is still simplified.

So the “but what about your genes/evolution” argument is bullshit. That just shows that the person is using something they don’t understand to hate on people.

Edit: I realised it sounded like I meant the person saying it to OP was hateful. I didn’t mean it like that, I don’t know why the person said that. I meant that people who say that as in “therefore you shouldn’t exist”.

[saltyaro]

Sooo after almost one year of being on a waiting list, I finally got my first appointment with a therapist. Obviously this was a first appointment, so I can’ really know whether or not this will be helpful but…

She didn’t ask The Question™. You know the one. “Do you have a boyfriend?” followed with “did you have one before (/moving out)?” and, more rarely, if you’re lucky “or a girlfriend”. 

No seriously, the psychiatrists I got ALL asked me about that on the first appointment. But not this therapist. And honestly this is nothing short of a miracle. I asked a lesbian friend of mine, if she ever got a psychiatrist or therapist who didn’t ask her that on the first encounter, and her answer was no. And she’s seen more psychiatrists and therapists than I have (I’m only on my third psychiatrist). 

Sooo yeah, feeling pretty lucky for now. It doesn’t mean she won’t ask me about it next time, but, because I didn’t mention it, she probably got that it wasn’t something relevant. And it feels so awesome. Not wasting time because of hetero- and amatonormativity. Because, yeah, they tend to insist and ask further questions on the topic when you say “no” which is extremely annoying. 

I do have a question for my followers though. Any of you read as a man/boy and seeing any kind of mental health professional? Do you get asked that question too? I’m genuinely curious. Also, if you’re not being asked that, and people read as women overwhelmingly get asked, then it’ll indicate it’s probably just misogyny and I can shut down the question more easily. 

[aro-nb-spn-blog]

I’m nonbinary, but they know me as a girl. I was 14, when I saw the first psychiatrist. I’m now 15 and I have had three psychiatrists. Only one has asked if I have a romantic partner(the word in danish is gender neutral, but it was most likely boyfriend they would have asked about if it were in english). They asked to find out if anything were stressing me. I was getting my diagnosis, and they were asking about everything. I said no, and they asked if I wanted a romantic relationship. I said no. They just asked about the next thing.