I don’t think people who weren’t in ace community spaces pre-2016 really have any idea how much asexual communities and cultures have been destroyed by “ace discourse.”
Like, if you know, you know, but if you don’t know, I don’t know if I can fully explain to you just how much we lost because hating asexuals was so normalized it’s basically a fucking meme.
There really is no good way to explain all the fronts the ace community was bludgeoned to death on. From troll ace blogs to suicide bait, misinformation and harassment and suppression of statistics and ableism and driving the wedge between the ace and aro communities, it all feels surreal to try and talk about to those who didn’t witness it first hand. So many people were chased off of online spaces.
But we’re all just a bunch of whiny children afraid of PDA at Pride, right?
I was heavy in the aspec discourse when it was in full swing, under my old url(s). I argued directly with sobercommunist and rebelbaze and discourseprincesa. I spent over a year constantly shoveling bad shit, spreading positivity when I could, and in general tanking because I could. I wrote novella-length posts and point-by-point rebuttals. I had smear posts going around about me and had my disabilities specifically targeted for ableist harassment.
I remember the origin of “trans or SGA” as a community litmus and the way it was used to invalidate mspec and nonbinary people, and how the fact that “SGA” originated in Mormon conversion therapy was ignored and ridiculed. I remember how it tied into the further push to regard attraction to nonbinary people as “fetishizing.” I remember the pushback against queer that began at close to the same time as the aspec discourse itself. I remember the dovecourse and the mooncourse and the accusations of pedophilia leveled at aspecs and our supporters. I remember the aspec positivity tags being flooded with gore and porn and suicide baiting. I remember the creator of the orange-and-pink lesbian flag being nastily anti-aspec and walking herself back to “neutral” when the design got popular, and the smear campaigns against queer creators who refused to use the flag in their designs.
I was eventually driven away when anti-aspec discoursers repeated the same words and sentiments my abuser had used against me, and insisted that I must have been the abusive one because I had “withheld” sex from my abuser. I had to quit for my mental health, and almost quit the site entirely, because even without actively engaging, it was impossible to escape. It worsened my anxiety disorder and AvPD symptoms immeasurably.
The damage was overwhelming, to the point that almost no one who was prominent on the pro-aspec side of the discourse is on tumblr anymore, and those who are have (like me) hopped urls or gone silent. It was horrible. It made so many aspecs hate themselves and shove themselves back into the closet because it was “inappropriate/nsfw” to come out.
I don’t even have a cap for this. It just. It’s really impossible to describe the scope of what the discourse did to us.
Yooo and the amount of shit ace poc got for being ourselves was crazy, people legit were trying to say it was problematic for Asian men to identify as ace because of stereotypes that asian men have to face. As well, if you talked about discrimination you faced for being ace you were trying so hard to get, "oppression points." Like....bruh, I couldn't. I remember some people just advocating for the death of all asexuals it was a wild time. I rarely come onto this site anymore but the amount of times someone tried to "prove" i wasnt black was astounding.
