I cannot emphasize enough how much exclusionism harms LGBT ace and aro people. There is no such thing as “well those aces are allowed, I’m just worried about straight infiltration” because they’re not actually doing shit to include even the aces that they give their free pass to!
I am asexual, aromantic, and agender. While a lot of people would say that being nonbinary/agender doesn’t count as trans, but for the sake of theory let’s say it does. By supposed exclusionist theory, one of these identities allows me to be included in queer spaces–my gender identity. By their logic this should mean I have nothing to worry about, right?
Except I can’t check my asexual and aromantic identities at the door. I may have three separate words to define myself, but in reality they’re so intertwined I can barely tell where one ends and where another begins. I was best able to explore being agender when around other aromantic and asexual people, who had similar experiences as me. I can’t put into words how beneficial this was in a very dark time in my life.
LGBT aces are not accepted by exclusionists in any real sense of the word. We constantly see your mockery and your ace cringe compilation posts, we constantly see the “I hope ace people have a bad day–gays and lesbians only!” shitposts. We’re told that half of our identity is embarrassing and childish and humiliating, don’t talk about it, pretend it away, only hype the attraction we do have (if any). If you’re a trans aroace person like myself, you’re completely out of luck–it’s difficult enough for the community to remember that trans people exist and don’t also need to justify their place in the community with LGB attraction. Hell, I remember seeing some using the term “queer trans people” to separate them out from straight and aroace trans people, to make sure the rest of us know we’re not welcome.
It erases the extremely important space to talk about the intersection of being ace and LGBT. People shouldn’t have to talk about their sexuality while bottling up how being ace or aro affects it. People shouldn’t be made to think that being ace or aro makes them a diluted form of queerness. I shouldn’t have to untangle the jumble that is my identity, peel away and discard the threads of asexuality and aromanticism and how those have affected my life, and somehow try to talk about and relate to my gender as a stand-alone thing.
This is NOT “acceptance.” This is NOT “oh we’re just trying to keep straight people out.”
When I first started considering I may not be straight, the first resources I found were LGBT blogs that said that asexuality was just people with so much internalized homophobia that they couldn’t accept their own attraction. I tried forcing myself to have attraction, training myself to warm up to the idea of having sex, and just traumatized myself further. I still don’t think I’ve recovered from this almost ten years later, and I think the extent of my sex repulsion came from these self-corrective behaviors. While I’ve seen people who formerly identified as asexual later decide a different identity fits them better, stating this is fact for everyone who doesn’t experience attraction is unspeakably harmful.
I’ve been in this game for a long time, well before the backlash that caused aspec resources to vanish, back before “discourse” was even a commonly used word. I used to try to play along with what everyone told me to do to be a Good Little Ace. Avoided calling myself “queer” because only people with attraction can call themselves that, right? So if I made a post about the struggles I had with self-worth and suicide ideation as an asexual person, in hopes to reaching other asexual people with similar struggles as me, I was still staying within the lines! No mention of being part of any community or calling myself “queer” or “LGBT” or anything! It didn’t prevent me from getting so much harassment I had to deactivate my blog, half of involved accusations of “you’re just pretending to be oppressed so you can infiltrate the LGBT community!” even though I hadn’t said a word about it in my posts!
I am so discouraged by young people who are already so deep in exclusionist rhetoric, and who would rather swallow up and parrot unquestioned hatred rather than think about the harm they’re doing. If your attitude is “I’m not an aphobe, I’m just an exclusionist,” please stop and think of the actual effects of your beliefs. Listen to the people this affects, listen to how this has affected our entire lives. This isn’t an announcement that we’re more oppressed than you, this is a call to recognize we’re with you and that giving us space and companionship and support can be literally life-saving. I am begging for people to listen to each other’s experiences, see and hear us as people, rather than just a jumble of letters to unfeelingly sort.
