#half formed rambles

[queersithhappens]

I’ve been introduced to the terms omniaromantic and omniasexual sometime a few months back (maybe even half a year, most of this one so far has been a Depression Blur), and they do cover a nuance of my aroace identity that I’ve often had trouble expressing within a-spec spaces, which is neat.

But I do have... certain qualms about them which make the words, for me at least, more of a temporary patch solution to the problem I had than a long-term fix.

One of them is, to be fair, the potential for confusion with omni-romantic/sexual. Which is... annoying, but also a rather natural consequence of the way our orientation words are constructed? And when neither set of words is that common, I don’t really know how serious an issue that is.

The fact that omniaromantic and omniasexual are still distinguished from each other is what really doesn’t work that well for me. Another of my problems existing in a-spec spaces is that I just cannot separate my aromanticism and my asexuality functionally. I’ve had to learn to phrase things in a way that separates my aro and my ace, just to like. get to say anything and not get yelled at for Conflating Experiences (and I do get where the aro community at least is coming from on that score, but. still difficult to exist there when that’s a bearing tone of conversation), but that’s a false distinction that isn’t true to the way I experience either thing and is often detrimental to me trying to voice my experiences at all.

On the flipside, I can also understand why people don’t want to pick either asexuality or aromanticism and make that be the Omni-A(identity) at the expense of the other.

(There’s an additional note about the sidelining of other forms of attraction that may be equally important to other a-spec people, but I’m rambling enough as it is here.)

Ideally, I’d be able to just roll my identity into one word and leave it there and just. sidestep the issue of dancing around split attraction that isn’t that split at all. But that, quite frankly, requires a step away from the established vocabulary of orientation, and one that I don’t really know how to make.

(It’s not like I really want to have to do More Explaining of what a word I use to describe myself means, after all. It’s just that if I don’t do that explaining, I get stuck using words that just don’t capture certain nuances of my experience that I would much prefer to be able to express.)

Internally, I’m at an impasse here. I don’t... really have any strong feelings about words I could reasonably use as an identifier, but the vocabulary gap is very much still there. So for the time being, I’m sort of using omni-aroace as a patch measure, but I’m not... entirely satisfied with that. Except I don’t know what to do in order to make it satisfactory. Blah.

[queersithhappens]

Half-verbalised thought incoming, but there’s a level of theory I see tossed around a lot when it comes to NB and a-spec issues every so often that seems to fail to take into account the difference between ‘understanding a queer identity’ and ‘having information about the concept’.

The phrasing needs work, but essentially the principle goes thusly: the majority of cisstraight people in Western society do not know what ‘nonbinary’ or ‘asexual’ or ‘aromantic’ mean as identities. If someone comes out as one of those things, there are likely to be many questions along the lines of ‘what does that mean?’, ‘but is that even a thing?’, and other ground-level questions that get very tiring to answer after a while.

This then gets extrapolated to mean that there is no information about the concepts conveyed by those identities - an existence outside ‘man’ and ‘woman’, not experiencing various types of attraction. And so we get statements like ‘the vast majority of people don’t actually hate a-specs, they just don’t know we exist or what to do about us’, ‘all NB people are treated as being the same as either men or women because the cisstraight folk all think that NB people don’t exist’, and other variations on a general theme of ‘we don’t exist to the privileged group which somehow turns all aggression directed at us into miscommunication and misdirected something’.

And this is where my take on the matter veers into speculation, but I don’t think that’s really accurate to the society we live in.

Western society comes with a set of norms that demands all people experiences sexual (and romantic, although the two are folded together and subsumed under the ‘sexual’ aspect often as not) attraction. The above framework focuses on this fact and uses that to say that there is no concept of asexuality or aromanticism in that society.

But it could be argued that by inference, the norms that demand all people experience that attraction also imply that ‘not-people’ do not experience attraction. So even if a lot of cisstraight people, by virtue of not being acquainted with any a-spec people, aren’t in the habit of having to apply their understanding of ‘does not experience attraction’ to other human people that exist, they have a concept of ‘does not experience attraction’.

That concept has damn little to do with the actual lives and experiences of a-spec people, often as not. There’s the whole dehumanisation thing, there’s the conflation of sexual orientation with sexual activity and the wrong assertions that get made from there, there’s our old ‘aro frat boy’ and ‘prudish woman’ stereotypes that serve to control how these traits are allowed to express themselves under heteronormativity, all of which are examples of how society at large conceptualises a lack of attraction in a way that clashes with the actual experiences of a-spec people.

And the fact that these examples are things that many different a-spec people can speak to with a degree of consistency would indicate that they are a systematic, and hence a societal, issue.

One thing that should be noted here is that a-spec people will often have others attempt to force an orientation on them, and it’s unlikely that most of the people who say things like ‘you’re just [x] and weird about sex’ or ‘you’re just gay and in denial’ aren’t thinking ‘oh dear, this person is expressing a sexual orientation that doesn’t fit into the acceptable list of orientations, better bludgeon them into expressing a different one’. Individual people may well not think that a-spec orientations exist. And they’re going to get even more attached to that ‘this doesn’t exist!’ line when an a-spec person says ‘not experiencing attraction isn’t the experience you think it is’, because that’s then a violation of the concept of not experiencing attraction that the cisstraight person has built up.

Maybe that’s a decent summary of what I’ve been floundering after here, actually. It’s not that society doesn’t think we exist, but it doesn’t think we exist like this.

[queersithhappens]

It’s occurred to me that a lot of the issues I, a nonbinary person, had with calling myself trans damn near evaporated once I was walking around being openly NB in meatspace talking to other trans folks on an equal footing.

There’s still a binary assumption carried with the term on some level (one guy I bumped into definitely misheard my vague half-neutral name as the definitely gendered analogue), but even talking to a binary trans person, so many of the little details we bonded over - name shenanigans, the awkwardness of physical transition decisions and the interesting experience that is figuring out an orientation - were clearly shared nonetheless.

And as for the cis people in the room... nonbinary, trans, same difference. If I say trans, it provides all the context I need them to have for the vast majority of purposes. That is, admittedly, a situation that could easily be more complicated for NB folk who don’t use binary-associated pronouns, but it works for me when all I need them to know is that they kindly should not assume my gender based on the sound of my voice.

Thus far, most of the spaces I’ve been openly NB in are ones where there is a certain built-in openness to queer experiences though the space itself is not necessarily designed to be safe for queer people. This does limit the extent of the more serious conversations that are happening there. But it does mean a lot of casual interaction with other queer folk. That’s a valuable experience in its own right, I’ve found.

The issue may lie not so much in ‘NB people not counting as trans’ so much as ‘people not accounting for NB people when they talk about trans people’.