I enjoy your verbage. What I don't understand is why do people question the ace/aro spectrum in the LGBT+ community. I'm new to the movement as a whole but I thought it was about accepting all walks of life. How can we leave out our ace/aro brethren?
This is an extremely complex question that people having this conversation have been asking for a long time. In fact, that question predates this particular conversation. It’s been a recurring topic since the earliest days of queer organization: who do we let in, who do we keep out, and why.
It is my belief- and no matter what you see on tumblr, this is in fact a very common belief- that people whose identities are rejected and abused under the prevailing forces of cisheterosexism are entitled to these spaces, this community, these conversations.
Without some degree of access to safety and each other, it would be impossible to start dismantling cisheterosexism at all. UNified action is the only effective action.
However, dismantling long standing social forces? It’s hard. it’s really hard. There is an overwhelming tendency to focus on symptoms, because they are more obviously solved, and ignore the causes.
In some cases, you have to do that. You can’t go up to an uninformed straight person and say “straightness as a social construct damages us all, but it especially damages people like me.” Straightness-as-a-social-concept is not at all a clear, easily traced thing.
But specific symptoms of cisheteronsexism? Those are identifiable, they are easily explained to others, and they can be attacked directly and acutely, without needing to unravel generations of cultural baggage.
And often times, those symptoms are very, very pressing indeed. After all, one symptom of cisheterosexism? The spread of AIDS. And there’s no denying that was- and still is, in many communities and regions- a horrific situation that needed to be addressed directly, quickly, aggressively.
But ignoring the cause doesn’t solve the problems for long. it just shifts them.
Still, attacking symptoms is easier, much, much easier. And, it’s much, much more rewarding. The eradication of the symptoms of cisheterosexism can help improve the livelihood of certain groups.
And from that improved livelihood of some, but not all, of us comes this problem. As some groups begin achieving slightly more acceptance from the cissexist, heterosexist in groups (colloquially, the straights), they receive increase social capital: better access to jobs, housing, human rights, less attacks of violence, better ability to respond to that violence through traditional channels, etc.
These groups, generally referred to as “LG” and meaning “cisgender lesbian and gay people who perform their romance/sexuality in manners that abide by heteronormative relationship models with the glaring exception of being same gender relationships,” are put into a very tenuous position. Straight people say, “you’re almost like us.”
And then, they say, “prove it.”
And how do you prove you’re like straight people?
This is a transitory process that any outgroup being absorbed into an ingroup goes through. People we now perceive as white, german and irish immigrants in the US for example, achieved integration into whiteness by being overtly racist against “acceptable targets:” black people, primarily, but any racial minority less accepted than them worked well enough.
Cisgender gay and lesbian people are in that position today: they are being taunted by straight people with the promise of complete integration, if only they’ll prove- as a group- that they are worthy of “not being queer.”
The easiest way to do this is to be abusive towards other queer people.
And because the aro/ace-spec identities are relatively new, having only come into cohesive organized usage in the early nineties at best, aro/ace-spec people make the most appealing targets to abuse. Because the communities only recently began organizing under any title more specific than “queer” or just “not straight,” it is easy to pretend that aro and ace people are a new invention, and as a new invention, they must not have suffered under the forces of cisheterosexism the same way the rest of us “acceptable queer people” have done.
It’s a very tempting thing. Dismantling cisheterosexism requires a lot of grueling, thankless work. And it requires a lot of painful self analysis, too. Self analysis that people who have suffered immensely may not want to subject themselves to. It is reasonable to fear inflicting pain on yourself when you have already suffered immense pains.
And it’s easier to get those same gains of dismantling cisheterosexism by instead integrating into it.
Why destroy the system at great personal cost, when you can just join it, and get all the benefits without having to hurt anymore?
The answer, of course, is that other people, people who have trusted and allied with you, who have fought alongside and for you, are still going to hurt. And leaving them behind to suffer, when their contributions helped you achieve that integration in the first place, is an act of undeniable violence.
But many people who are so, so close to achieving a state of comfort that has been denied to them are unwilling to acknowledge that. many people even outside the lesbian and gay communities are also joining in on this, because it has worked well for the lesbian and gay communities so far. Abusing “unacceptable queer people” has proven beneficial to these groups, so members of other groups start joining in, under the faulty assumption that it will work similarly well for them too.
Ultimately all of this comes from a place of wanting to avoid abuse.
It’s a natural human response, I think, but that doesn’t make it any better. That doesn’t make it okay, at all.
But that does make it understandable, in a horrible, horrible way.
So, to most directly answer your questions, if there were any:
The exclusion of aro/ace people is a result of misdirected anger after generations of oppression and abuse
And yes, the queer community should be about accepting anyone whose fundamental self is threatened, abused, devalued, or destroyed under cisheterosexism, but unfortunately, reality rarely lives up to the ideal.
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