Hey y'all, I finished my research and would like to formerly introduce...
The Fabric of Identity: Using Clothing and Style to Communicate Gender Expression.
Project Summary: A free and accessible website about nonbinary and gender nonconforming people, their history, and how they use their style to interact with the world around them.
Includes:
What Does "Nonbinary" Mean?
Interviews with Nonbinary Folks
Identity Centric Events
The Effect of Digital Spaces
Further Reading and Resources
Community Building
Please give it some love!
Using Clothing and Style to Communicate Gender Expression
In the absolute language between
the poem on your lips and
the blue of the wave
you are the music of silence
only echo of infinity
the unlikely root of words
A lot of you have asked for more stories about my father and while I won't go into too many details on specific stories now, I'd like to mention how entertaining and absurd it is to talk to him.
In our family we enjoy telling stories. I favour fiction (as some of you might have guessed). My father, however, favours real life events. This is probably because his life is batshit crazy and I doubt he has the need or imagination to make up fictional stories to boot. One of the relatively frequent occurrences in his storytelling is him remembering a time he almost died that he'd forgotten. Forgotten, not suppressed. I'm actually fairly certain the only thing my father has ever suppressed has been the urge to punch a dickhead. We're talking real, moments before death instances here, not just mild scares. Some common traits include there having been witnesses who can corroborate his stories, and that he's never told his parents "and you shouldn't either because you know how your grandmother gets." He tends to say he's been luckier with his children than his parents were, and honestly? I concur.
It's not that he's reckless. He is, but it's more than that. My father is a very dangerous mix of recklessness, stubbornness, intelligence, curiosity, and an unwillingness to put other people in danger. A high pain tolerance and being highly competitive doesn't help.
Anyway, that's why while ranting about quasi scientific explanations surrounding anchoring in a magazine, my father went on a bit of a tangent about how he just remembered the time he almost died trapped under a ~400kg block of concrete after they decided to get it into the ocean by tipping the boat because it was too heavy to lift.
What Do You Mean, It’s Been Over A Decade Of This Shit: my history as an aroace
So this piece is something a little different for this blog: rather than a sourced, detailed, fairly-academic-except-for-the-swearing article, this is my own, personal history as an aroace person (but don’t worry, I’ve kept the swearing). My hope is that this will both give you all some context for the stuff I write and the personal opinions I include, and potentially also serve as an example of what it looks like, for me, to be an aroace adult.
This is my entry for the July 2018 Carnival of Aces. Here’s a link that will take you to the explanation post by the host of this month’s carnival. When the carnival wraps up, I’ll post a link to the roundup of responses. I’ll also be adding that link to this post under the Read More, so watch that space.
Running The Numbers
Seems like a good place to start, right? I like numbers.
I first encountered the concept of asexuality at the tail end of 2010 when one of my favorite webcomic artists at the time first posted about demisexuality. I stuck my toes into the waters of coming out by first publicly identifying as grey-asexual in 2012, though I think I first stuck that information on my blog without posting about it in late 2011.
I knew a long time before that, however, that there was something about me that was different. I think that the first time I admitted to myself that I was probably Not Straight was in middle school - so, circa 2002. I was in high school, probably around 2005 when I started identifying as bisexual, operating under the theory that I found the girls around me to be about as aesthetically pleasing as the boys, so that had to mean I was attracted to both genders. (Yes, I know this is a Bad definition of bisexuality. Yes, I have learned better since then. But also yes, I was an incredibly unaware teenager.) I was a freshman in college in 2007 when I learned about pansexuality, and decided that that must be what I was, because I didn’t really care about the genders of the people I hypothetically dated.
This is all without going into my complicated history of “what the fuck is a gender”. That’s fuel for a different post.
So in short, I have been identifying as some variety of queer for more than half my life (and don’t even start: by any metric you care to put forth, I’ve earned my place here and my right to identify however I damned well please). In that time, I have Seen Some Shit, kids.
The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
I've talked about this before, on other posts, most notably the “could you all maybe stop with your vilifying of innocent language” allosexual post. But I see, functionally, no change between the climate I came out into six years ago and the current climate on Tumblr.
Which is to say this:
Far and away, the vast, vast majority of people I have met, interacted with, or seen in passing on Tumblr are lovely, supportive, willing to listen and take my experiences at face value, and generally decent human beings.
A vocal minority of people are the personification of the feeling of stepping on a Lego. They are acutely invested in the idea that my experiences are not queer enough to count - in fact, they’re so invested that they frequently don’t even care what those experiences are, and they’ll go to great lengths to invalidate absolutely everything regardless.
The problem is that this vocal minority, because of how loud they are and how invested they are in their arguments and their vitriol, are enough to actively impede progress. Because there can be no progress without the ability to massively fuck things up occasionally. Like, lets just cite one example: the concept of (allo)sexual privilege. It’s a concept that was being discussed and debated when I started learning about asexuality. By the time I came across the conversation, it was a pretty widely held opinion among people whose opinions I came to respect that it was a pretty shitty concept, that a privilege/disprivilege model really didn’t fit the allosexual/asexual dynamic, and that we could and should be talking about negative things that asexual people experience because of our asexuality without implying that being allosexual was a privileged identity, since the real position of privilege was (heteroromantic) heterosexuality.
Just to be blatantly clear: this means that we put that issue pretty much to bed somewhere around seven years ago.
And yet, you will still see people arguing today, in the year 2018, that aces are trying to say that we’re more oppressed than other sexualities and therefore that other orientations have more privilege than we do.
It’s frustrating. I spend a lot of time wondering where we might be as a community if we didn’t have to spend so much time reacting to nonsense in order to feel safe, if we could collectively give ourselves permission to grow and change and make mistakes and learn from them.
I think that the current climate on Tumblr is preventing the kind of growth that I saw back when I came out. We keep feeling that we have to react to these people, and it’s keeping us stuck in one place.
But We Can Keep Growing
(Or, alternately, this section could have been titled “I’m ending this post on a positive note because fuck it I want to have nice things”.)
Here’s the thing.
Yeah, I’ve seen some shit. And it hurts, particularly because I know, intellectually, that there are spaces that are free of this shit, but this is the space I have access to, and I just have to keep putting in the work to try to clean it up.
But I’ve seen some really good things in the past six years too, and I can’t end this post on a sour note. I refuse. I am cleaning out the cobwebs and the dust bunnies and the fucking Legos and building a better house for us all here, goddammit. I refuse to give up on what could be a beautiful thing, because the bones of this house are strong, and the foundation is deep, and we have been living in it all along.
So let’s talk about how mainstream LGBT+ orgs are getting better all the time at talking about asexual issues and providing the kind of support that aces need, and how much of that is because we’re putting in the work to say “this is what we need from you.”
Let’s talk about representation, and the visceral feeling of relief even when you don’t consume that particular piece of media when you discover that someone is talking about people like you.
Let’s talk about how an entire generation of ace people is learning how to stand up and say ‘no, you’re wrong and you can’t do this any more’ to bullies.
Let’s talk about solidarity, about aces seeing the arguments that have been used against us are just reflections and reworkings of those that hurt our siblings in other identities, and learning to stand together because that is how we’re strongest.
Let’s talk about finding family, finding community, and holding on to those things with all your might, and not letting go just because someone else said to.
Let’s all resolve, here and now, to stop having the same fight over and over again with people who don’t want to listen. It feels like we’ve been on pause for years, in this space, and it’s time to start moving again. There is growth happening out there. I think it’s time to bring it here again.
If you enjoyed reading this, you might enjoy reading some of the other pieces of writing from the July 2018 Carnival of Aces. Here’s a handy link to the round-up post!
anyway i was just reminded of the game we stopped playing at camp by my last year, which was called Ship to Shore, and which we stopped playing because most of the "fun" was the counselors laughing at all the campers making fools of themselves.
basically it was nautical themed Simon Says, so, say, "starboard/port" meant run up/down the field; "hit the deck" meant fall down on your stomach, "up periscope" was lie on your back with one leg up, "mess time" was hold left hand out like a plate, pretend to be eating with your right, and I forget what the command for this was, but there was one that was dancing, and if you didn't get a partner, you were Out; and my absolute favorite, "Captain's coming, don't be late," which meant "not enough people are getting Out," because the last person to get there was Out.
Basically, I thought this was hilarious, even as a camper, but very few people agreed with me.
When I was living in VIC with my partner at the time, it wasn't possible to be legally recognized as being in a domestic partnership. Marriage equality hasn't reached my country yet, but a lot of places keep records of domestic partnerships to assist with taxation, registration, visiting sick partners in hospital etc but in order to qualify there's an application in which you discuss your sexual and romantic life in some detail. Since we didn't... really have one of those, it wasn't ---
even possible for us to be recognized as in a relationship. We lived together for two years, but we had no legal or procedural protections. Maybe we could have gotten married with no questions asked if we'd looked like, or even been an m/f couple, but we didn't, and we couldn't. Maybe we could have lied, but we shouldn't have to, and didn't want to ---
When people say there are no legal discriminations against a-spec people, I keep thinking about this. About the invasive and explicit requirement of sex and sexual attraction to be registered as a domestic partnership.
Can you list some examples of how you've been oppressed (personally) as an asexual person? I'm trying to prove a point to a friend that doesn't believe it happens.
I’d like to direct you to this post, where I’ve already talked about a lot of my own personal experiences with discrimination.
