#actuallyqueer

[allopropaganda]

[intersectionalpositivity]

The thing I love most about having spent time in the aspec, mspec, and queer communities is a freedom from having to conform to sexual orientation in the ways society would prefer me to. Society has created this internal battle between “Not Sexual Enough” and “Too Sexual” and by embracing both my bi-ness and my asexuality, I’ve been able to explore my own sexual orientation outside of the worlds pressured perspectives on what it should be. According to the worlds perspective I’m “supposed to be sexual” because I’m bi, but I’m “not supposed to be sexual” because I’m ace. I’m supposed to perform a certain level of sexuality according to what they see fit.

I love the freedom of labels in the queer, mspec, and aspec community because I’m capable of living my life and embracing my non-straight non-cisness while still engaging with other people like me. This community has taught me that if my orientation or my gender shifts or I gain a new perspective of myself, that’s a good thing and I can embrace it. Having both “microlabels” and umbrella terms at my disposal means I can be descriptive of my current feelings and impression of myself without prescribing a singular permanent identity across my entire life.

I can be as queer as I want, I can defy all of the cisheteronormative and amatonormative barriers and still claim autonomy over my orientation and gender without paying heed to what straight, cis, and allo society considers proper. They don’t choose how queer I get to be, because I’ll be as queer as I freaking want.

So my fellow queer people, thanks for being queer with me.

[actingnt]

There's no such thing as "de-transition" that's just transitioning twice. That's MORE transition.

[iamshadow21]

On the Edge of Gone by Corinne Duyvis

Dear Corinne, I got so excited when I found out that there was a book in the sci-fi/fantasy genre with an autistic character, written by an autistic person. You have no idea. The moment Otherbound hit my radar, it was on my wishlist, an eventually, I managed to snag a copy. It's on my shelf, waiting, and I'll get to it, too, but I haven't quite yet. I wasn't expecting that I would read On the Edge of Gone so soon. I have serious anxiety comorbid with my autism, and end-of-the-world/apocalyse scenarios are a trigger for me sometimes. It's a hangover from being a child of the time before the Berlin Wall fell. There's so many books from the Soviet era that are all about what happens to a kid after the bombs fall. It was so normal that when someone a few years back asked for recs for this subgenere, I came up with about thirty books. We were brought up in the shadow of our imminent extinction. Let me tell you, the current POTUS isn't helping that. But fate stepped in - my library had a copy that I found by accident on the shelf in Young Adult. Both Otherbound and On the Edge of Gone, just sitting there, waiting for me, and On the Edge of Gone was the one I didn't own, so I grabbed it. And once I started reading it, I didn't stop. My attention issues make it hard these days to hyperfocus enough to read a book in one sitting, but I did it. It wasn't just the autistic character. It was the others - the queer secondary characters, that I saw a lot of myself in, too. The sister. The couple, helping out any way they could. I even saw myself in the mother, though her burden isn't one of my own, I saw myself at my most dependant, my most weak, and I ached for her. You shone a light on the side of society that most people forget exists - the queer, the disabled, the addicted, the different, and you didn't just make it a narrative of horrendous loss. You made it heart-breaking, yes, but you made it hopeful. You gave your characters choices that weren't always right or wrong but were always HUMAN, and made me feel my inherent connection to a species I often feel has marginalised me for my neurotype, my gender, my sexuality. It took the common 'they all die, obviously' trope and turned it on its head and created something beautiful. I still have Otherbound waiting for me, but reading it isn't stepping into the unknown. I know now what you can do, and how you can make me feel, so I'm anticipating what it will be with excitement. Thank you.

[defectivegembrain]

I think one part of coming out that we need to talk about more is where you’ve come out to a person, they’ve accepted you, and everything should be fine but it’s not. Because it’s a Thing now. Doesn’t matter how accepting they are, it’s awkward because it’s like this new information about you and it feels, rightly or wrongly, like they have to sort of reprocess who you are. Like there’s been a shift in your relationship.

And you start thinking about it all the time, and everything you do is calculated as to how it might be interpreted differently with this new information. Like oh I can’t have that haircut, I’ll seem like a stereotype. I can’t complain about a man, I’ll seem like a man-hating lesbian. I can’t talk about my sexuality or gender too much, I’ll seem like that’s all I am. Am I talking about girls too much? She’s talking about boys but I can’t talk about girls. Shit I mentioned the Thing, I need to change the subject! And idk it’s very frustrating and the sucky thing is only time will make it not a Thing anymore.

[allopropaganda]

People get hurt by the people who find them attractive - because of that attraction, all the time.

Attraction is not the measuring stick of value of you and quality of your relationship you think it is.

[actingnt]

MOGAI literally just means Marginalized Orientations, Gender Alignments, and Intersex. That's what it stands for.

No, it's not just another word for nonbinary, and it doesn't automatically mean microlabels.

If you've been marginalized because of your orientation, or because your actual gender doesn't line up with your official birth assignment, or you're intersex, then you're MOGAI.

It's a superior alternative to LGBTQIAP2SN*+&etc that just includes everyone from the get-go instead of centering a few popular labels and becoming endlessly more cumbersome while making the margins of the margins have to fight for their inclusion.

It's an alternative to using queer as an umbrella term that doesn't assume anyone is cool enough to be called queer.

Literally the only thing wrong with MOGAI is that not as many people know what it means. But that's one of the easiest problems to fix.

[actingnt]

Just putting this out there now so we can say "called it" when half of these "asexuals go away, this is for aromantics" posts turn out to be made by exclusionists as a strategy to create hostility within the asexual/aromantic community. (As if the aspec community wasn't enough of a fucking mess already...)