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he/they | 24

[infectiouspiss]

kids deserve so much more respect and it turns out that saying that is a great way to locate the horrible people in any community <3

[infectiouspiss]

you'll say something as simple as "no child deserves to be hit" and people will crawl out of the woodwork to explain why they should be allowed to beat a 6 year old for spilling some water

[infectiouspiss]

you'll say "i think it's weird that adults literally have control over when children are allowed to use the bathroom" and up pops a teacher to say that when they're not shouting at the kids they teach, they're trying to stop them from hiding in the bathrooms

you'll say "i think children shouldn't be forced to eat food they hate" and here comes someone who feeds their kids plain rice and boiled chicken (while eating a nicely seasoned stirfry) claiming that it's okay actually and kids shouldn't be allowed to taste things

you'll say "i think kids should have bodily autonomy" and in comes someone who pierced their babies ears before it was even 24 hours old, frothing at the mouth because their kid wanted a haircut and thats somehow an insult

[infectiouspiss]

children are an oppressed class and everyone should be looking back at their own childhoods and making sure they don't ever make a child feel the same way they felt.

[bifca]

i've tripped people up by pointing out that if you were to say "this stranger didn't do what i told them to do so i hit them" it would be treated like assault. if you say "my partner didn't do what i told them to do so i hit them" it would be treated like domestic abuse. but "my child didn't do what i told them to do so i hit them" has people like "ah yes, teaching them discipline"

[vampurrring]

maybe growing up is just becoming who you were at 14 again but learning how to love her this time

[softpyramid]

Wilson Bentley Gouttes de rosée (Dewdrops), circa 1900

[gendercensus]

The 2025 Gender Census is now open!

[ Link to survey ]

The 12th annual international gender census, collecting information about the language we use to refer to ourselves and each other, is now open until 30th August 2025.

It’s short and easy, for most participants it takes 5 minutes or less.

After the survey is closed I’ll process the results and publish a spreadsheet of the data and a report summarising the main findings. Then anyone can use them for academic or business purposes, self-advocacy, tracking the popularity of language over time, and just feeling like we’re part of a huge and diverse community.

If you think you might have friends and followers who’d be interested, please do reblog this blog post, and share the survey URL by email or at AFK social groups or on other social networks. Every share is extremely helpful!

Survey URL: https://survey.gendercensus.com

The survey is open to anyone anywhere who speaks English and feels that the gender binary doesn’t fully describe their experience of themselves and their gender(s) or lack thereof.

If you can't wait for survey numbers, you can click here for a public spreadsheet of non-secret info with graphs as it comes in, updated manually a few times per day.

Thank you so much!

[ Link to survey ]

[aromanticmanifesto]

an aromantic manifesto (full zine here)

by yingchen & yingtong

[aromanticmanifesto]

pg 2 (full zine at tinyurl.com/aromanticmanifesto)

‘the here and now is a prison house. We must strive, in the face of the here and now’s totalizing rendering of reality, to think and feel a then and there… Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.’

- josé esteban muñoz, cruising utopia

‘I want a world where friendship is appreciated as a form of romance… I want a world where our worth isn’t linked to our desireability, our security to our monogamy, our family to our biology.’

- alok vaid-menon

(image: alok vaid-menon by eloy cruz del prado)

[nonbinaro]

I stumbled across this today, and WOW. What a way to start off Arospec Awareness Week!

This is exactly the kind of thing I was thinking about when I made that post about activism not being ready for aro-influenced politics yesterday.

Holy shit. This is radical. This is aro-influenced politics. And this is exactly the kind of thing alloros would be enraged about; it would make them feel personally attacked; it challenges amatonormativity in the most direct and bold-faced way possible: DESTROY ROMANCE. Not just the hierarchy around it - the social construct it is.

I have so many thoughts about this. This is so radical that it intimidates me! I don’t know if I believe we should abolish romance entirely - but do I feel that way because I’m afraid of the backlash against such a goal? have I been convinced of romance’s superiority in the way this zine sets out to expose? Now I’m asking myself those questions, thinking about them. I don’t know if I’ll have an answer anytime soon, but I’m thinking about it.

One thing that struck me about this was the structure of aromanticism as a utopia and as a political movement, not an orientation. It reminds me of political lesbianism, which while I am not The Most Informed About, I believe has a sticky history….and deep ties to radfem ideology, so uhh. Idk about that.

I’m hesitant to adopt the idea of aromanticism as inherently political. To me it is first and foremost an orientation; it is not a choice. It is political, yes, but it is not an ideology.

Perhaps it should be. Or perhaps I am misreading this. Or perhaps I’m right.

You can’t choose to be aro, just like you can’t choose to be a lesbian. (I’m not talking about “which label should I use”; I’m talking about the experience of attraction.) Then again, I don’t think this is advocating for everyone choosing to be aro…I think it’s advocating the abolition of romance as a social construct, and therefore the elimination of romantic orientation as a whole. (Which is different from political lesbianism. Though again: I am not an expert.)

I am incredibly intrigued by this concept of social aromanticism. Maybe for now it would need a different name… Aromanticism as an orientation is not the same as what this zine - this Manifesto - proposes. Aromanticism as an orientation is “not experiencing romantic attraction.” This manifesto’s idea of social aromanticism is the abolition of romance and the expansion of relationships. They are linked, absolutely, but…not the same.

I don’t know. This is all an initial response to this mind-blowing document I just read. I will probably end up changing my mind on these subjects, and complexifying my responses.

But this doesn’t have many notes right now - despite having been posted over 6 months ago - so I’d like to boost it. I want us to talk about this as an aromantic community. We need to have these discussions.

Outside our bubble of radical aromanticism, people aren’t ready for this. I admire the OPs of this post; from scrolling through their blog I believe they were handing it out at a convention! Which is great. But alloromantics aren’t ready for this kind of activism.

If we adopt this manifesto, how do we make it palatable for them? Can we do that without betraying the ideals of the manifesto? Queer spaces are built around the reclamation of romance; this will be seen as a threat to that, even though it shouldn’t. And straight spaces…god, I don’t want to think about what my religious mother woudl say about this.

I’ve rambled for too long. @aromanticmanifesto Thank you for your work. I hope that the aro community can have a rich discussion around your manifesto.

[also: I use the word radical a lot in this post. I DON”T want that to be associated with radical feminism, which is bad for reasons i’m not going into now. I use the word in the most literal definition of the word “radical”

radical (adj)

1. (especially of change or action) relating to or affecting the fundamental nature of something; far-reaching or thorough.

2. advocating or based on thorough or complete political or social change; representing or supporting an extreme or progressive section of a political party.

(thanks google for the def..)

uhhh yeah. the zine is explicitly trans-inclusive and i am too. i’m also not about separatism or the superiority of one group of people over the other, which is what being a radfem is about afaik. they’ve warped that word; they aren’t radical at all. i have a post in my drafts about hierarchies Fand how they are inherently bad….anyway, that’s a discussion for another time. if i’m falling into the trap of radfem rhetoric while analyzing this please call me out, but i don’t think i am. just wanted to clear that up.]

[ask-an-aro]

Yeah I’d be hesitant to link an orientation to a political movement because not all people who identify as aromantic will agree and that would be exclusionary for them.

That said, on a personal level, I do believe our current system of romance as informed by capitalism is queerphobic and destructive. I honestly love this manifesto.

[aromanticmanifesto]

Hello! Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts!!! You are right that aromanticism shouldn’t be treated as a purely political affiliation in the way one might view, say, anti-capitalism. Even if romance is a social construct, different people respond differently to romantic interpellation. Some people find their desires fit easily within it, some, especially aromantics, don’t. This isn’t a “choice.” However, we find (and fear) that a lot of current aro discourse treats aromanticism too much as a static biological identity, echoing what we feel are some of the bad practices of neoliberal white queer activism, that revolve solely around finding the appropriate inclusive language to describe ever more specialized identities without interrogating global histories of gendered (and mostly colonial, in recent history) violence that produced modern queerphobic oppression as we know it in the first place.

By “political aromanticism,” we are not taking inspiration from white separatist political lesbians, but from queer of color and non-western queer theorists who have critiqued the neoimperialism of modern LGBTQ+ identity politics for positing “lesbian,” “gay,” “bisexual,” “transgender,” etc. as ahistorical identities that have always existed in all communities, when they are, in fact, historically-specific reactions (and only make sense in relation) to Eurocentric forms of gender policing and queerphobic oppression. “Cisgender” and “heterosexual” identities didn’t exist before modern biology/sexology/psychiatry pathologized queerness as a reductively biological, essentialist phenomenon that definitively separated queer people from their “normal” counterparts.

So yes, we think aromanticism can function as both a form of politics and identity without debilitating contradiction, although there will have to be some (hopefully productive) tension between the two. Besides, what it means to “not feel romantic attraction” is so difficult to pin down anyway, because the construct of romance itself is highly unstable; what counts as the experience and expression of romantic attraction has varied tremendously throughout history. To know what it means not to feel romantic attraction, you need to have some idea of what the heck romantic attraction is in the first place! And nobody is born knowing what it is. Romance is necessarily a journey of messy (and usually violent) self-discovery under its interpellative force. Rather than try to pin both aromanticism (and its opposite of alloromanticism) down in rigid, biologistic terms, we think it can be far more powerful to politicize this moment of uncertainty into a radical counter-politics, even while acknowledging that people do, for perhaps biological reasons, experience varying levels of receptiveness to coercive romantic interpellation, and being aromantic is often not a “choice.”

[eclos1on]

I just stumbled across this now when looking for files for my Facebook group. I have to say I dont mind the idea of an aro manifesto(thus being political because if you look at others from the 70s and 90s theyre about the same and the LGBTA+ allyship is a political one).

The one thing I did have an issue with is calling romance inherently queerphobic. Not sure what you meant by that but most other LGBTA+ people feel their romance is a defining aspect and an important one in a world that doesnt want you to love those whom you can’t help loving/being attracted to. This can easily come across as homophobic.

The rest of it I like but I do suggest an ammendment to that phrase if possible.

[blood-on-my-french-fries]

Maybe I’m wrong but… How I’ve understood it, romance is inherently queerphobic, not romantic attraction.

Society’s views on romance are mostly based on and enforce outdated gender roles along with some other “rules” that exclude both LGBT+ and polyamorous people.

It’s not the sentiment that’s damaging, but the social structure built around it.

[angleofmusings]

I would even take it a step further and point out that there is no “romantic” attraction without the institution of romance. The label placed on it is one that is created to describe a certain kind of interpersonal social relationship that complies with the romantic ideal. Yes, there is a difference between (to use the societally acceptable phrasing) physical/sexual attraction and emotional/romantic attraction; need there be any difference between “romantic” and “platonic” attraction? Romantic society says there inherently must, and yet simultaneously says that “you can’t be friends with someone you’re attracted to, or could ever potentially be attracted to,” and “guys can’t really be friends with girls, they just want to get with them,” and in doing so forces an unnatural divide that reinforces the idea of exclusive, monogamous relationships.

In refusing “romantic” relationships, aromanticism rejects that barrier. Without a largely untouchable romantic in-group, more opportunities for emotional and social connections can be explored. One can comfort and support their friend who is struggling with the emotional burden of a toxic breakup, disillusioned with romance as an institution, without needing to artificially create distance because there isn’t a romantic relationship present. One can call or text different people each night, rather than being left without that option if their romantic partner is unavailable. Aromanticism allows for connections through action instead of allowing institutionalized labels to restrict the form a relationship can take.

[aromanticmanifesto]

Yes, this is what we were trying to argue. “Romantic attraction” is not an inherent biological feeling people get. Insofar as some LGBTQ+ people might feel that way, it speaks to the naturalizing power of amatonormativity. The same applies to any other LGBTQ+ identity. These are not timeless categories, but ones that emerge from particular (Western-centric) histories that only acquire some semblance of a universalizing force through the global spread of neo-colonial institutions, the institution of romance being one of them. It may feel necessary to assert the essential truth (aka the “born this way” narrative) of LGBTQ+ identities in societies that still advocate for things like conversion therapy, but that comes at the cost of ignoring the very violent histories through which these categories also emerge.

For further reading on this, take a look at “Taxonomically Queer?: Sexology and New Queer, Trans, and Asexual Identities” by Kadji Amin. If you can’t get past the paywall, feel free to email us at [email protected] for a copy :)

[skidfart-deactivated20250503]

"why r u smiling at ur phone" bc my friebds 🌈🌈🥰🌞 and i love friend 😊😊😊🫂💞 Friends 👍👍🌈 And im Happy 😊😊🫂💞👍🌈

[onlytiktoks]

[nongunktional]

it's genuinely crazy that free the nipple died

[nongunktional]

like we're back to the point where you only rarely find someone brave enough to go braless with a shirt on it's gotten so bad. i dont make a particularly regular habit of staring at the boobs of strangers but when im dabbling i have to say i may be noticing a downward trend of pokies

[minovskyy]

Feminism isn't doing so hot rn even down to the little day-to-day line items like "you don't have to wear a restrictive undergarment cause your nipples are not more inappropriate than male nipples"

[kindyu]

interestingly, here in the czech republic, more and more people are going braless!! it's very common here!

[ayeforscotland]

The UK’s first trans judge, Victoria McCloud, brings action against the UK and has appealed to the ECHR over the Supreme Court ruling.

Source.

[turquoisemagpie]

For the UK peeps!!

Petition: An independent evaluation of the Cass review on child gender services

We believe that trans healthcare should be based on unbiased research that is peer reviewed. We think that the Cass review's findings have l

[unwelcome-ozian]

[tofumarinado]

it's so funny to me when i see pearl-clutching articles about how "teenagers are diagnosing themselves with mental disorders via tiktok" because like. this is not happening in a vacuum. teenagers are severely and i mean severely medically neglected. i cannot stress this enough. teenagers do not have free access to medical care. those same news outlets would be clowning on women with housewife psychosis in the 1950's.

i sometimes go pale when listening to some of what my friends have gone through in their childhoods and teenagehoods. they talk about it so nonchalantly, things that would be considered straight up torture if done to an adult, can't fathom the effect this has on children. they are on multiple anti-psychotics and several antidepressants and anxiety meds now that they are adults. medical neglect has legally and effectively disabled them. a timely diagnosis and intervention could have saved them.

of course teenagers are self-diagnosing using tiktok. if your knee-jerk reaction is to scoff at the idea and dismiss it as dumb teenager shit instead of being radicalized because the best shot young people have at attaining the mental health support they need is a fucking dancing videos app, you're categorically a political enemy of the youth.

[wholeheartedsuggestions]

you’ll never “just get over it”. it’ll always be there a little bit, tucked away somewhere. you’ll continue to live your life and not notice it much. but maybe every so often it’ll hurt again and that’s alright. our traumas don’t magically go away when we heal. but they also stop taking up so much space.

[bougiebutchbinch]

ranking the best things I have heard surgeons say mid-surgery:

1. "Five second rule!" while scrubbed, after dropping a sterile scalpel on the floor (no they did NOT pick it up again but I swear everyone's buttholes puckered)

2. (spoken during the closing of a particularly long and difficult case) "Nurse - my tunes." :heavy metal starts blasting:

3. Gently to a fretful patient, pre-anaesthesia: "It's going to be okay. I promise, I've dealt with worse." As soon as the patient is unconscious: "This is literally the worst thing I've ever seen."

4. [okay this one was a med student] "Wowwww, that's so gross!!" Reg: "Please remember that [patient] is awake for this procedure." Student to patient: "Oh my god. I am so sorry, that was really unprofessional - " Patient, cheerfully, also engrossed with what's happening inside them on the screen: "Nah - it's, like, super gross, right?"

5. [another procedure where the patient couldn't be put under GA] Patient: *starts singing country roads midway through the procedure* Surgeon: *shrugs and joins in with surprisingly good harmony*

[marcusbrutus]

the worst part about ocd and ocd-like tendencies is that you think hyper-analyzing your thoughts and constantly psychoanalyzing yourself will fix you but that's actually part of the disorder. it's the disorder. disordering.

[nebularious]

fml

[prettycottonmouthlamia]

Sometimes it does feel weird talking about NSFW bans because you either see it discussed in the sense of "NSFW bans are bad because the systems just randomly shoot innocent queer people!" or "The NSFW was bad (supposedly) but all the weirdos who jacked off to porn went away so things are nicer now" and its like

man that's great meanwhile I don't think Mastercard should decide if I pay someone to draw Cynthia from Pokemon being brainwashed or not.