I’m a single person who happens to be ace thank you
“being ace is fine” doesn’t mean shit if you're aware of the pains that people go through for being asexual and intentionally, knowingly, and actively try to block them from receiving access to resources, spaces, and solidarity that they so desperately need. it doesn’t matter how positive you try to be while you do it, that is still violence
straight people don’t try to turn straight people straight, it’s that simple.
tw rape mention start
A study (X, X) was done on 39 universities in Australia with a sample size of 31,000 students that measured sexual assault and harassment statistics as well as weighed them based on sexuality.
in it it was found that asexuality consistently shared the top with bisexuality, with a sexual assault rate higher than not only their straight counterparts but their gay and lesbian ones as well
I also have a second study (X) on hand that corroborates these numbers.
This time it was an survey launched in 2017 by the government equalities office questioning people in the UK 16 years or older, it was open for 12 weeks and received 108,100 valid responses. while it doesn’t have straight respondents as a control it Does filter out the results of trangender identified people so a sexuality that happens to have a higher percentage of trans people isn’t artificially inflated. they have results for trans participants in their own table, not listed here for space, if you’re curious on that
asexuals aren’t, statistically here in this chart, The Most Oppressed All The Time, but you can see how the numbers are comparable
that’s a combined sample size of 139,100 that agrees that asexual people on average face a higher percentages of sexual assault and harassment that are at least on par with their gay counterparts. those kind of numbers just can’t be ignored
and again, you have countless personal stories of asexual people being harassed and even assaulted specifically because they’re ace, either because it marks them as being other to be out as ace or to explicitly try to turn them straight. frankly, none of them are my story to retell. so, I’m going to link this huffpost article on the subject (X) as well as tell a personal story with harassment.
thankfully it was comparatively mild, likely due to the location being abundantly public. this was literally the first time I’d ever told anyone I was ace, and I was about 13 or 14 at the time. I’d just moved over to a new school so while I was wandering about trying to find a new seat I got invited to sit with a group of seniors. I sat down, we chatted, and I gradually got more and more uncomfortable with how sexual they were being, which mind you they were 18 years old. I decided to tell them that I was ace because it seemed like the safer option at the time. they didn’t know what it was so I told them in detail, they argued that I was wrong and that it was the old scientific definition, they pulled out google, looked at Several pages about asexuality, and then said that we were “both right.”
I thought that was the end of it but this man turned, looked me right in the eye, and said “I can fix you (...) like I did with that lesbian”
as you can probably imagine, my child mind wasn’t yet equipped to properly respond to that, but in my panicked state I managed to remind him about our age difference and he finally dropped it, but Boy was that a lot to unpack.
but like, that spells it out doesn’t it? I explained In Detail what asexuality was, I gave him no romantic orientation and I wouldn’t understand that I was trans for several years after that, so the only thing he could latch onto was that I was asexual. and Yet as soon as he understood he A: decided that I was broken and needed to be Fixed, preferably with his penis and B: automatically lumped asexuality in with other non-straight sexualities without me telling him
it’s not Just that asexuals face higher levels of rape and sexual harassment, it’s that it happens because we’re specifically othered for our sexualities and hurt with the intention of being “fixed.” and it’s very explicitly tied together with the same hatred that leads to the same thing happening to other lgbt+ members.
that does Not happen to straight people, not unless they’re also trans.
even if you somehow for some reason believe that straight people rape other straight people with the explicit goal of changing their sexuality to then be straight, you have to recognize that including asexuality in the queer community is essential to fixing this problem
if asexuals face an increased rate of rape because of prejudice against asexuals then the most effective way of decreasing the rate of rape that they face is to Address that prejudice.
asexuals just having exposure by being included with other lgbt+ members on it’s Own is useful for that, but specifically helping to normalize them by inclusion during events like pride is an enormous help. moreover, having the numbers help. if nobody knows what asexuality is or if people actively fight to censor asexuality then studies done on say, sexual assault and harassment statistics in 39 australian universities wouldn’t report on the statistics of asexual people. and then people don’t Know that it’s a problem that needs to be addressed.
Moreover, suicide hotlines specifically trained to speak to asexual people? kind of useful in cases like these.
even if, for whatever reason, you still don’t want to count this as oppression, which it is, it cannot be denied that blocking asexual people from these resources actively causes harm to asexual people, and that knowingly doing that Is A Bad Thing.
tw conversion therapy mention start
you probably have an idea of what I’m about to get into now, but well if you didn’t want proof of systemic oppression then we wouldn’t need to get into the nitty-gritty
We’re going back to the uk study (X) for this one, which remember had a sample size of 108,100.
asexuals were the most likely to be offered conversion therapy and tied for the most likely to actually be put through it. of course this isn’t the end all be all, it wasn’t a study on every person who has ever existed in the world, but it tells us that something is wrong
again, I can’t get into the specifics without sharing personal anecdotes, however this time I don’t have any to share of my own, which is obviously a good thing but it means that I will need to speak in more general terms. However, here’s an article on psychology today that goes into the experiences of asexuals with conversation therapy (X) as well as someone speaking of their own experiences on their blog (X) and for flavor here’s a fox news article arguing that asexuality is just a disorder that needs to be cured (X) and a post that goes a little more in detail on the general patholization of asexual people (X)
and a post talking about the treatment of low or no sex-drive in women in asylums tw rape mention (X)
there’s definitely more out there but honestly I’m not in the emotional state to go down That particular rabbit hole, at least not when there’s no guarantee that you’ll even look at what I have written already
it’s hard to say exactly how prevalent, how painful, how intentionally malicious this all is, there just hasn’t been enough research looking into the issue, at least not that I've personally found. but what I Do know is that it’s not uncommon for medical professionals to prescribe asexual people with medication they don’t need or want, in one case that I saw a woman was prescribed with viagra which doesn’t even work on women and I’ve seen Multiple cases of cis women being prescribed testosterone and experiences body dysmorphia from what it did to them, in an attempt to Force them to feel attraction they don’t want. in other cases I’ve seen asexual people have medication taken away from them that they needed for their mental health when they came out to their therapists. and of course literally being told by your doctor or therapist to force yourself to have sex until you’re “fixed,” or to tell your spouse to for themselves on you without you agreeing to it.
often times this all comes on top of emotional abuse by family members or even therapists and medical staff
and that’s all just from what I personally have seen by looking into the issue in my spare time when I can stomach it.
again, this would not happen if cis straight society viewed asexuality as normal, if it viewed asexuality as straight. you cannot argue that a straight person would be sent through conversion therapy, assigned drugs and told to force themselves into sexual situations they aren’t comfortable with and sometimes can’t consent to at all, and traumatized because other straight people want them to be straight. straight people see asexuality as a sickness that needs to be cured. they’re telling us that, they’re hurting us to try to bend us into what they think we should be. none of that is okay
which again, even if you don’t think that’s oppression, which it /is/, you have to admit that it’s a problem worth fixing and one that asexuality has in common with other lgbt+ identities, and one that the lgbt+ community can help Deal With
tw conversion therapy mention end
before I move on, here’s some other Fun statistics from the uk study, which again had a sample size of over 100,000
there’s of course more here if you’re interested (X)
I’d go into the personal suffering of asexual people more but I’m frankly tired and if that isn’t enough for you then the issue here is a fundamental difference in morals. so I’m going to get to my next point, that being that asexuals have existed throughout history and have existed in lgbt+ spaces for decades, possibly even hundreds of years.
a recent great find was “The Asexual Manifesto,” written by Lisa Orlando in 1972 (X, X, X)
“We chose the term “asexual” to describe ourselves because both “celibate” and “anti-sexual” have connotations we wished to avoid: the first implies that one has sacrificed sexuality for some higher good, the second that sexuality is degrading or somehow inherently bad. “Asexual”, as we use it, does not mean “without sex” but “relating sexually to no one”. This does not, of course, exclude masturbation but implies that if one has sexual feelings they do not require another person for their expression. Asexuality is, simply, self-contained sexuality.”
this is a source just shy of 50 years old explicitly using the term asexual in it’s modern definition
and just a year later you see it crop up again in publish photography (X)
and another print that includes asexuality along with other lgbt+ identities, this time from 1970 ! (X)
and here’s a masterpost with sources with proof that the bisexual and asexual communities heavily mixed up until relatively recently (X)
and a post going into how asexuals were targeted as being queer during the 19′s, particularly in relation to the spinster movement (X)
and yet another post of asexuals/asexual behavior being lumped in with other queer people throughout the 1900s (X)
I could go on but I’d really only subject myself to More reading if I knew for a fact you were going to read it.
So ! the takeaway here is that excluding asexuals now isn’t a decision on whether or not asexuals should Start being a part of the queer community, it’s choosing to deliberately undermine decades and possibly hundreds of years worth of shared history between asexuals and other queer people, which will specifically deny them resources to deal with oppression against them while Also trying to convince other people that they don’t need help, thus contributing to the rape and abuse of another minority group
which isn’t exactly, you know, fantastic
so that leaves us with the question of whether or not you simply didn’t understand the situation or if you’re willfully ignorant, ignoring the truth in order to justify prejudice, and unfortunately I can’t answer that question
so to close us off, why don’t we ask cishet people what they think of asexuality for a moment
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