Fish with a Knife @fish-with-a-knife - Tumblr Blog

boychic-deactivated20230922

when i attempted to march before i realized my limited mobility puts me and my comrades in danger... i just remember this girl in a neon pink anime wig who immediately started having a panic attack when the cops started to advance. if that's something you'd do, if your nerves are too bad for you to stay cool in a scary situation, you need to be helping somewhere else entirely. no cosplay, you need sturdy clothes that protect your body and want to blend in.

they definitely plant provocateurs and cops in crowds and try to get people to follow their directions. ive seen people react to images of poorly disguised cops with "umm what if they're neurodivergent like me?" again if thats you, you need to be helping somewhere else. nobody has the means to make being hunted by militarized cops accessible, they kill disabled people all the time and are going to take even less care to not murder you should you be caught in a crowd or out past curfew

turnways

(Hope this is OK to comment if not lmk and I'll delete)

I feel like people think that the only way to help is to be on the front lines of a march/protest/riot which sure we do need people to do that!

But ykw what else is needed?

Trusted people who can be on standby in the area to drive folks to the hospital or home. Being an emergency contact who can call lawyers or bail groups. People who are cpr and street medic trained. This won't make the potential for police interaction 0 of course I'm just throwing out alternative ideas on alternative ways to participate.

Even before a protest or anything occurs its good to be part of an affinity/mutual aid group helping provide people with a consistent amount of care and resources.

Being on the front lines is needed but if you default to doing that without considering other ways to help, and you can't handle it, you're potentially putting yourself and your comrades in danger.

2spirit-1spoon

I'd like to add all these other things I've seen at protests and some things I've seen done to help prep for them:

We also need safehouses, places to go when some of our comrades need to get out of the area ASAP. We need someone spreading info about Events by word of mouth so others hear about it (remember not to share protest info online or from an acct with your name and face on it). One of the things I always LOVE at protests is seeing people with wagons full of snacks and water roll by in the moments of calm. We need people making signs. We need people to go collect protection gear from thrift shops. We need people to facilitate "take what you need" centers that front-liners can go to BEFORE protests AND we need people donating (black clothes, protection gear, first aid, food, water, sanitary products, Anything). We need people to share useful knowledge and experience (like how to fight, how to protect yourself, how best to hold a shield, squad formations, etc). We need people spreading posts like these. We need people recording events and keeping that shit UNDER WRAPS until the footage would help prove a cop is lying/help a comrade. We need people at home to give us moral support, letting us know that even if politicians and cops and liberals hate us, that we STILL have a reason to keep showing up (cuz it gets tiring taking tear gas to the face AND hate on every single media outlet we use for our "violence" when we Aren't protesting). We need you to hit up whatever c#shapp and p#ypal you see posted for protest and bail funds.

I was at protest once and they were saying things VERY similar to what OP did. And it may have been 2 years ago but I remember this Very clearly.

"If you can't protest then find another front line to fight."

Know your limits, stay safe, and protect your comrades however you can. However you can is good enough.

But it needs to be Something.

ponderingcorvid

Jail support is also incredibly important after a protest! This includes roles like driving people home or to their cars (since usually the protest venue is not walkable from the jail and a lot of jails like to release people at 3am when buses aren't running), helping people get in contact with lawyers and long-term support systems, buying/making/delivering/handing out food/drinks/cigarettes, and generally being a friendly face to greet someone after they're released from jail. Being arrested is incredibly stressful for anyone, and for many people it's deeply traumatizing. Social and material support immediately afterwards make a huge difference.

I find that jail support is also a good way to make social connections with people OTG and find out about other people's projects, which is a great way to find other roles you might fit into well! Since one of the primary goals of jail support is to provide a supportive environment for the people getting released, it's usually pretty social and friendly IME. Even if you're active in other areas, I encourage you to try out jail support and talk to some people you might not have otherwise!! :)

hobocrip

PUNK PSA:

Please don’t put anything too political on your back patches— especially about your own marginalized experiences.

This has been a long standing rule in punk communities, passed down for generations. People do get jumped and experience violence as a result of this. You can’t see who is behind you, you can’t tell if they’re far right, and you can’t prepare yourself for sudden violence from behind.

So many people are new to the scene, introduced via social media, and don’t know the weight of walking with something on your back (literally and metaphorically) that immediately outs you as marginalized. If you’re able to defend yourself, or out with friends who can watch your back, by all means go for it and wear whatever you want on your back patches but if you walk alone at all ever, please be safe.

Also this is why punks wear spikes and studs on our shoulders especially. Makes it harder for someone to grab you and works as self defense (but also never wear spikes at a small show or if you plan to mosh— people can get hurt!).

sunanthrope

This is also why my main collar has spikes on it, the one i wear out every day. why i have a few pairs of boots with spikes on the heel as well as the toe. Why the spikes on my bracelets and arm cuffs are so sharp. spikes look cool but they are also protective.

1-jar-of-stars

On Friendship.

secondlina

It's dangerous to go alone...

cryptonature

The idea that rest and recreation are "useless" ways to spend your day did not come from folks who value your health or happiness.

deadliestpieceontheboard

I don't think younger/newer users fully grasp the shit show that ace discourse was around 2014-17

It was so hostile that, to this day, discussions that begin to derail just enough can make me physically nauseous, some specific mockery trigger crying sessions years later. We lost most accounts with any sort of ace positivity. There was no information, no support, and all this damage was done predominantly by other queer people.

All this to say that you, however you identify yourself, should be engaging with aphobic comments the same way you do any hate. We don't sugarcoat or try to be comprehensive with people who are blatantly racist, homophobic or terfs, so why give it a pass just because it's coming from a queer person? I see how this tolerance goes and it's done enough damage as it is.

bumblebeerror

I’ve met new aces who know nothing about ace culture. We had rings, black for ace, white for aro. We had dragons and space and cake and all of it. All of it got mocked and erased and bullied so completely that it’s not on the site anymore. I still follow the aro/ace positivity tags and sometimes someone brings them up again and I flinch. I honest to god flinch.

Hell, I came out as aroace at the same time as that discourse - and AVEN got so thoroughly smeared that I’ve never gone looking for it. There’s culture I don’t know. It kills me.

starlightnecromancer

I used to run a blog for ace rep in books, I deleted it out of fear that I was going to get harassed.

When ace folk talk about being forced back into the closet we are not joking. Anyone on the ace spectrum were so violently harrassed that it was legitmately safer for them to not ID as ace publicly. Literally anything would get you death threats.

Anti-ace folks were in bed with terfs and I'm sorry if that upsets people but yall really gotta understand that literally every anti-ace talking point was the exact same that is given to bisexuals, pansexuals, and trans women.

They talked about how we were "stealing resources", about how we were "predators" because we "sexualized children" with our identities as being asexual, about how we are "invading LGBT spaces".

There were multiple anti-ace "memes" that were just straight up death threats. "Take the shot Jessica" followed up with "Target Sighted" is one that still haunts me to this day.

Some of the biggest "exclusionist" discourse blogs all ended up being white women, several of whom race faked. One even claimed to be a Half-black half-jewish intersex trans woman who would become half of whatever race she was arguing with. It took a massive amount of people all pouring evidence into what she was doing for her to finally get dropped because oh yea, maybe its a bad look to have the white christian perisex girl be the "face" after all of this.

Ace people were routinely told that their sexual assaults didn't happen. People routinely told us that we can't have words to describe our oppression because it "groups gay people with straights". Ace people were routinely told that because we aren't sent to conversion therapy that we weren't "actually LGBT", and the people who did let it clear that they were sent to conversion therapy because they're asexual? "Oh that didn't happen." "Actually that was homophobia, not aphobia"

The "exclusionists" likewise, would REFUSE to not tie anything into conversion therapy. They'd literally use conversion therapy doctrine to dictate if you're gay enough.

The Acecourse was also around the time "queer is a slur" really started to gain traction, and guess what the exclusionists were doing? They were calling aces and our allies "Radikweers" without a fucking hint of irony while screaming about how queer is a slur and you need to tag everything with Q Slur

There was a DEDICATED sect of "exclusionists" who were lesbians obsessed with the idea of making the existence of asexual women a lesbophoic problem. I'm not even fucking joking. Same group of people would then claim that if you didn't have sex with them then you're abusive because you're "Witholding sex, which is an emotional need".

Exclusionists were by and large, white gays that were pissed off that they couldn't do assimilation and respectability politics because the rest of us were too weird rocked the boats too much to be able to slot neatly into the whole 2 kids white picket fence.

bumblebeerror

^nailed it. “Piss your pants” replaced “kys” and “up the road not cross the street” but we all knew what it meant. Most of the people targeted were like me - 18 and under who dared to like being aroace, ace, or aro. Almost all of us weren’t even “straight” (as in heterosexual or heteromantic). All trying to defend ourselves and our orientations while being attacked by people who proudly called us “kweer”s and “mogai trash” and told us to die. Told us we should be put in concentration camps, once. That we weren’t hurt or struggling or erased, we were just white kids trying to be different and quirky.

Edit: by the by, the reason they changed to piss your pants was because we were mass reporting their blogs for harassment for telling aces and aros to kill themselves. They changed it to piss your pants specifically because you can’t really report that to tumblr and expect a takedown. But again. We knew what it meant.

rjalker

And these same people to this day are pretending like it's absurd to make that conncection.

This is why I block everyone with any variation of "discourse" in their URL on sight. Aphobes made "discourse" blogs specifically for the purpose of harassing aspec people, so that their main blog was kept nice and clean and none of their followers had to see them telling people to kill themselves because they didn't want to date anyone.

I very vividly remember a post from what I thought was a nice person, that read something along the lines of, "It's important to tell kids it's okay to be gay, but it's pedophilic to tell kids it's okay to be ace".

These people literally fucking thought that being ace meant you were a pedophile, because it meant you were sexualizing all other orientations, and therefore telling kids they could be aspec meant you were sexualizing kids.

Every single fucking argument these people leveled against aspec people was not only blatantly recycled homophobia, absurd ammounts of it relied entirely upon ableism and racism, because these people were pretending that only white people were aspec, and the identity was, and I fucking quote, "A white supremacist's wet dream". They literally went around saying that everyone who was aspec was white, completely speaking over the black and brown people who were proudly aspec whose existance proved that what they were claiming was absolute bullshit.

These aphobes would claim to support all other LGBT people, especially trans people...unless the aspec person they were targeting was trans. Then not being a transphobe flew out the fucking window. Aphobes would claim that if you were trans and ace, that meant you weren't really trans, you were just pretending to be so you could invade the LGBT community.

Aphobes equated ace and aro identities as all "asexy cringiness" but they attacked both communities with equal viciousness, just under the same words.

This is why I block blogs with any variaiton of the word "discourse" in their url on sight. This is why whenever I see a new blog I want to follow, or get a new follower, I search the word "ace" and "aro" along with "trans" and "nonbinary" and "pan" and whatever other specific fucking keywords apply at the moment.

And the worst part is?

The aphobes who spent years harassing and attacking and traumatizing aspec people on this site are still here, with friends and tons of followers, like nothing ever happened. They'll claim they're no longer "terminally online" about aspec identities, mocking themselves for "caring too much" instead of actually doing anything to make amends for the literal hate crimes they committed. They'll fucking downplay and make light of the Literal Hate Crimes they spent years committing because now it's no longer socially acceptable to stalk and sexually harass people over being aspec.

Anyways, block foulserpent, then known as snakegay. Do not let these fucking people get away with this shit and pretend it never happened.

Edit: Oh and how the fuck could I forget all their ableism towards autistic people???? These fuckers were claiming that "aspec" was a shortened version of "autistic spectrum" and that you were ableist if you used it to refer to the "disgustingly pedophilic fake identity" of being aspec.

Even though literally too many gods damned people to count, including me and my twin and literally too mnay people to count, who were aspec, who used the term aspec, were also literally autistic and told these people over and over again that that's literally not true, stop fucking speaking for autistic people (because, to be crystal fucking clear, no one making this aphobic claim was autistic. It was literally just allistic people infantilizing us and not only speaking for us, but beating us down when we contradicted them!).

Literally the most ableist fucking post I've ever seen on this site that claimed to support autistic people was written by an ableist as shit fucking aphobe who was. Gods even just remembering this fucking post is so fucking infuriating. Everything about it was so fucking infantilizing and ableist. They claimed that aspec people using the term aspec was, and I paraphrase from memory, "trapping autistic people in your posts like nets, unable to understand why everyone is hating on them".

Like. Literally. So much of this fucking hate spree was ableist it's fucking absurd. Allistic people really just fucking hate autistic people and try to use us as a bludgeon //against ourselves// whenever they think they can get away with it. And let's not forget that if you were openly autistic and proud to be aspec, they'd then come in and claim you were faking being autistic (the same way they'd claim you were faking being black or brown or trans or gay) to invade the community and "steal resources from real LGBT people".

And again. Cannot stress enough how these people screamed and cried about how the word queer is a slur and always has been and always will be, then immediately turned around to hurl the word kweer AS A SLUR. With no fucking irony. Literally using a slur they claim to hate as a slur and thinking they're the good guys. I guess they thought changing the spelling would make it okay for them to /literally use it as a slur/??? they literally just made it into a slur again and used it as such and then acted like they were the heroes for...calling queer people slurs that are apparenly unforgivable >.>

rjalker

And lets not forget that these people regularly flooded aspec tags with gore and porn despite their own claims that only "misguided children" were identifying as asexual or aromantic...

rjalker

Go through the notes of this post if you want to learn about the hellscape this was. There are so many people sharing their experiences.

warriorsdebt

There has been a lot that has struck me about this thread, especially as someone who has been active in this conversation since 2011. But I reblogged this post last week

And two days later, I got a note directly from my personal blog that from my activity preview seems to have been from someone unfamiliar with this entire sphere of discourse.

I saw the note the day after they left it, and there were so many "this really happened?"-style comments that I couldn't easily find their note in my activity.

This has gone from normal, to unheard-of, and back to normal again, at least insofar as young aces coming into our community don't know what we all fought through to make a space for you to feel safe in.

If you'd like to learn more, please feel free to reach out--I've been here since 2007, and I'm glad to fill you in on what I've seen. If not, that's okay too--but please know that a lot of us have bled and hurt and died so that "ace" is something you can put in your bio without fear. I don't begrudge you that; you're the reason I did it. But there was a fight, and this post points to some of the pieces of what that fight looked like.

lastoneout

I started to realize I was ace during this time and fuck was it rough. I had to spend years unpacking internalized aphobia just to come to terms with my identity.

And like I remeber this one post that went around that in retrospect I pray wasn't true, where someone was talking about how they were the president of their college's lgbt+ support club and one day someone who was a cis heteroromantic asexual showed up and they had to pull them outside and tell them they weren't queer and weren't welcome at the club. And like god that post fucking haunts me. Can you imagine being that cruel? The OP was fully painting themselves as a wise community leader who was correcting this misguided straight person and people were fucking patting them on the back for it and talking about how they were so proud of OP for protecting the real queer people from straights like that who want to invade our spaces and steal our resources.

I really, really hope that post was fake because I have spent so much time thinking about that ace person and worrying about them, wishing I could find them and tell them that OP was wrong and cruel and they belonged in that group.

And god forbid you HC a character as ace, that shit was a one way ticket to getting harassed and labeled a homophobe. And that shit hasn't even completely gone away, it wasn't that long ago that people in the MP100 fandom were just being openly and unapologetically aphobic because they didn't like ace Reigen HCs.

I also remember at least one prominent queer youtuber legit saying in a video that they didn't think there was anything queer about being asexual. That shit hurt because I really looked up to that creator, and tbf they have changed, but like that was just par for the course back then. You never knew if another queer person was safe or if they were going to turn out to think ace and aro people were special snowflakes who just wanted to pretend they were queer for funsies and thus should be unpersoned.

And Thomas Sanders basically had his entire internet presence nuked just for saying he thought ace and aro people were queer. Siding with aspecs was legit social suicide back then.

This shit also absolutely went hand in hand with transmedicalism, biphobia, and basically any movement that sought to separate queer people. TERFs have openly admitted that ace discourse was a recruitment tactic, because once they got you to believe one group of queer people was the enemy it was much easier to convince you to hate others. Aspec exclusionism and biphobia were the gateway ideologies, and tbh in some places they still are, that's why it's so important to recognize that TERF rhetoric is more than just hating trans people, they are smart enough when recruiting other queer people to not start with the transphobia.

And god the ace/aro exclusionist stuff really did go right into biphobic monosexual discourse(you can't use monosexual it lumps queer people in with straight people and besides biphobia isn't real it's just misdirected homophobia) those arguments were just copy + pasted from aspec discourse, and then transmedicalism and on and on to the next group. It's always the same arguments, the only thing that changes is the target. This is why anyone who EVER uses the argument that a certain type of bigotry is just a different type that's been misdirected is instantly sus to me. It's always an exclusionist dogwhistle used to try to deny whatever queer person is the enemy of the week a seat at the table.

But yeah, I try not to fault people who got swept up but changed and have put in the work, but it is still heartbreaking to think about how much aspec culture has just been completely lost because of that shit. We had solidarity and symbols and communities, and we've had to start over because half of us are too traumatized to bring back cake and dragons and the black/white rings and the rest just don't know because there's no one left to teach them. And it also sucks to see hateful stuff that was born out of that era still get passed around because the context is gone. It's just...beyond tragic. It really is.

chisecco

if you let me add, whenever someone in ANY SOCMED SITE posts the nicki minaj asexual moodboard, it makes me flinch and go through their account because it triggers my fight or flight response. there was also a benito mussolini asexual moodboard and a post claiming donald trump was asexual and aromantic

iirc thomas sanders was accused of being a pedophile during ace discourse, notably bc he posted a spicy drawing a minor had made of him (and then deleted the post and apologized). people kept accusing him for months and he was suddenly Too Cringe

2016 in particular was an insane year. my hero academia and yuri on ice fandoms were extremely large, and if you did as much as suggest that a character in those series could be asexual, acephobes dogpiling you was the least that could happen to you

i lost dozens of mutuals to ace discourse and saw whole blogs sink into acephobia, it was horrible to watch. to this day i Still have internalized acephobia despite being asexual myself, to the point i barely ever talk about my experiences as an asexual person. i am Afraid of what kind of jackasses could come out of nowhere and start being dicks again like they were in 2016-17

ps: a lot of acephobic talk points were also used in the (thankfull) short lived pansexual discourse of the early 2020s. and i mean exact carbon copies. i even saw terfs come forward and say they used to be acephobes before falling deeper into the rabbit hole and becoming terfs

ps2: many, many of the former Important ace discourse bloggers are still on this website. i will not say who they are to avoid a direct confrontation but you can find many "tumblr funnymen" who are still around and who used to be huge acephobic assholes by looking thru their blogs

arodabi

100% everything on this post, people were so vile that i get all shaky and cold sweats whenever i gotta talk about my identity to someone irl STILL bc deep down im scared they’ll turn on me.

Personal discourse anecdote:

I followed an aspec positivity blog in 2015 that would routinely get attacked and harassed so eventually they gave the blog to somebody else and retreated back to their main. I followed them there and realized they were somebody i actually went to high school with. They were a year under me and i never talked to them in person about it bc who wants a stranger coming up to you asking about your tumblr blog.

Anyways over the course of a year i watched them fall into being an ace exclusionist, just as vile as all the rest of them. I unfollowed obvi but i would see them all the time going after mutuals and saying nasty things in aspec tags. I remember them harassing ppl with hivliving if that tells you anything. It was horrible to see somebody who spent time defending us fall like that.

After i graduated i saw that they were made my ex high schools gsa president. They would make snide posts abt it from time to time but eventually they made a post that was basically “some acey came up to me and asked what we were doing for ace week or whatever. I just laughed in their face, why would we do anything for virgin week?” A friend of mine who used to know them screenshotted all of their ani ace posts and reported them to the high school. They then got kicked out of the gsa. They were sooooo mad too, blamed all the butthurt cringe aceys bc they didn’t actually kno who had reported them lol

Anyways, i think about this a lot. I kno that person is still out there, my friend gives me updates on them from time to time. I think it shows that as much as people liked to say this was just an online thing, it wasn’t that big of deal, the people who were doing this online were also the ones participating in irl queer spaces too, sometimes with authority. I’m glad it’s a lot better now but the blogs who screenshotted my post to call me mentally ill for being aro in front of their thousands of followers are still posting and popular. They just know to be quiet about aspec ppl for now. We cannot let them ever feel comfortable expressing that shit again bc i kno they didn’t actually change their mind.

notebeans-galaxy

I'd like to add something that I heard about secondhand. I'm part of an queer club at my university that isn't officially registered with the student clubs listing, in part because it's been around for so long that it used to be blatantly unsafe for there to be an official list of club leadership members that the university community had access to. In the early 2010s and 2000s, that brought an exceptionally high risk of hate crimes. To this day that is still part of the motivation for not officially getting signed up as a student club. My university is extremely queer, with 49% of survey respondents from my incoming class identifying as LGBTQ+ and about half of my class filled out said survey; even so, we're wary of what it means to have queer people on a list like that.

The faculty advisor for this club has been at this university for 15, 20 years or so? So I get to hear stories from them about what it was like at my university in the 2000s and 2010s. Aspec folks regularly would ask in hushed voices whether or not they were welcome at this club for over a decade, because they were not allowed in a lot of queer spaces and people didn't consider aspec identities 'queer enough'.

There was a secret ace club in this time period. As in, you would not be told it existed unless you went to the queer resource center and specifically asked about ace clubs, because there was so much hatred even within the queer community towards aspec folks & their identities. It got better for a period, and then got worse again around 2014 - 2017. Ace discourse very much affected real life queer communities.

#long post