Could you expand on your aphobia post? It sounds right instinctively but I can't quite figure out the concrete ways of how, except that I'm guessing the absolute refusal to let people ID how they want/feel is right is part of it (ie. hatred and mocking of the SAM that bled out well past the original target)?
I think i could answer this question more thoroughly another time, but ill try to explain:
-a lot of posts that people will circulate like the one i discussed a couple hours ago are interpreted to mean one thing but had an aphobic context. Those posts grow into active discussion. Sometimes it might be difficult to see the roots of aphobia, but more often than not the aphobia seeps into those ideas. The creators also get praise for making one statement when they were making a very diffierent one
-aphobic dogwhistles are not easily identifed by most people, therefore a lot of people are unable to recognize them when they interact with posts and broader ideas
-ace and aro terminology has largely been retired and buried, aro and ace activism and history has been buried, the aro and ace participation in formulating queer theory has been set back signficantly
-strides that aro and ace people have made to participate in discussion have been seperated from them. The idea of "queer cafes" has made a reappearance apart from the aspec community, after it became an aphobic talking point, but in a largely diminished form
-ace and aro spaces were largely dismantled. It is harder to participate and be heard when aros and aces have a diminished capacity to organize
-aro and ace concerns become no longer part of the discussion. If they are part of the discussion it takes a lot of pushing from ace and aro people. The power to self advocate has been diminished and set back, not to mention assumed acceptence in the first place
-the toolkit of aphobes has been applied to a lot of other groups. Aphobic gatekeeping is not just used against aspec ppl, but against other "suspect and undesirable" groups as well
-terfs have in the past used aphobic gatekeeping as a recruting tool for other terfs, and its acceptability allowed terfs to gain even more power in discussion
-the rampant aphobia has also pushed a lot of aspec people back into tbe closet and made them shy away from visibility
-as youve said before, SAM and the idea of an identity spectrum have been ridiculed to the point where people now dissmiss it. Many other concepts created by the aspec community are no longer as widely used, are easy targets for ridicule, and have also therefore not evolved to keep up with other concepts in queer theory. How much more productive could discussions of queer theory be if we assumed amatonormativity was part of the discussion? Or valued the queer friendship or qpr as much as queer romance? How much more fruitful and complex would our discussions be if aspecs had not been chased away?
All of these reasons and more have guided queer conversations and theory and set us as a community back signficantly. Theres so many subtle ways in which the way we formulate queerness has been directed by the systematic silencing of ace and aro people
