Triple Queer

just your local queer here telling you to drink water and get 8 hours of sleep 😊

[triple-queer-blog]

Actual Convo

me: *tumbles gloriously down a rocky hill; lands cut up, bruised, limping horribly, and shaking*

them: omg are you okay??!

me: *fighting back tears* yeah, yeah i’m fine. sorry, idk why i’m crying.

them: *deadpan* you’re in pain.

[triple-queer-blog]

me: I’m not about to run off and be irresponsible; I have morals.

parents: nnOo...... u R the GAY™ so U...... no longer have...... the morlz......

me: *sigh* I’m not gonna run off, do drugs, drink alcohol, have a bunch of sex, and join a gang, because you raised me to be smart. Are you saying you were bad at parenting me?

parents: nO it IZ beecuz of the E-vil wurld u liVe in....... my bABy woold neVer.........

me:

[triple-queer-blog]

to feel prettier:

i can’t say i really wear makeup. sometimes i’ll put it on, make myself look all fancy, and i’ll look in the mirror and my usually crappy self-esteem about my face will lift up and be like, “hey. i... i look nice.”

this isn’t a bad thing. it isn’t the best thing, but if you need to put on makeup to feel that little genuine flutter of, “hey.... maybe i don’t always look bad,” then take it. if it makes you happy, it makes you happy, and don’t let anyone take that from you.

and idk about you, but for me, after wearing makeup and feeling like i actually look good for a while, it changes the way i see myself. so then when i take the makeup off, i’ll sit and stare in the mirror and wonder why i look so much better than i did before i put on the makeup.

nothing changed. just my perception.

[triple-queer-blog]

Yes, I was once transphobic.

I remember thinking, “why doesn’t he just say he likes girls? It’s basically the same thing.” (I’m using correct pronouns now, btw).

Then my brain snarked back, “If you became a boy you could be straight. It’s basically the same thing, right?”

I then recognized my idiocy, and chose to cease being transphobic.

[triple-queer-blog]

THE ASEXUAL AGENDA:

making sex jokes while meaning none of them.

[eatabricc]

HELLO I HEARD MY CALLING???

[triple-queer-blog]

Gay Code

so i’m taking a nap, right, but i’m supposed to be doing my calc homework. now, i have this crazy spidey sense so i’ll be asleep and hear the sounds of people coming down the stairs. but i don’t wake up if it’s my brother or sister. but if i hear my mom or my dad come down the stairs then guess who’s outta bed real quick

(this is relevant just hang on)

but even though i physically get up in such situations, my brain is still back in that bed, so i act like. a two year old. so spidey-sense hears my mom coming down the stairs during my nap, and i yeet myself outta bed and run and hide in my closet. why? heck if i know man. i was two in the body of tired-seventeen-year-old-procrastinator. so i hear my mom come into my room and look around, as the bed is empty and i am not at my desk. now i’m starting to wonder wtf i’m doing but too late to back down now. we’re in this for the long haul, ladies. she leaves to look for me elsewhere, and i sneak outta my closet and wonder what imma do now

so now aged up from two to something like 10 (with the bitterness of a 13 year old), i have the brilliant idea to, instead of giving a logical excuse or alias, appear in the middle of my room when i was previously gone, and i just mcfreaking wing it.

(u see how smart 1 minute post nap Em is)

so i stand smack in the middle of my floor, facing the door as my mom approaches yet again. she opens it and does the classic Shocked White Mom™ gasp and “u scared me!” 

i have a moment of pride, until she throws the most unexpected curveball into my plans. she asks me,,,,,, “where were you?”

now i’ve got the panic of a 15 year old who got home late and is now cornered by their parents. because no way was i napping,,,,, or hiding in the closet,,,,, and if i answer closet Homophobic Parent Mode™ will be activated.

but we’ve established i have the logic of a 10 year old with the snark and bitterness of a 13 year old. i am ultimate sass. i am power. i am a god.

so i answer with the most respectful grin in the world, and say, “i was beamed down from the sacred home of the Gays.” and i walk off to do my calculus.

bc i’m always awkwardly skirting around the subject, and if even a casual mention of something they know to be gay code is brought up, such as closet (even if i’m literally grabbing clothes for my naked self) they will be an Angered and my life will be miserable for at least a week.

but i’d never blatantly acknowledged it until this blessed day.

bless my reincarnated emo teen self with no filter to teach me the best diversion...... when they’re so proud of themselves for picking up on Evil Gay Code like Closet..... just mcducking smash their faces into the rainbow.

there’s my overly long story of me being an idiot post-nap, thanks for sticking around. drink lots of water and eat good food, girls and gays, because there’s no rest for the wicked. 

[stayatsam]

yall love trans boys until they start T and get manly and hairy and grow a trans guy penis and get deep voices and some belly chub and get a fucked high sex drive and  not some “uwu space smol bean boy” that you wanna romanticize so deeply and “protect” 

whatever yeehaw 

[the-rice-cat-deactivated2021070]

Not only is this the tea, the yeehaw is the cherry on top

[vanillavillain48-deactivated201]

support trans boys 

as they become

TRANS MEN.

[hhnggmushrooms-deactivated20191]

yeehaw

[gothicashworld]

Men are men no matter the fat in their pecs or the size of their dicks. Us ladies and gentlemen (and others) may have our preferences but there’s a right fit for someone! Just fucking support good men!

[cryptidmonger-blog]

Yeehaw

[triple-queer-blog]

me: I’m asexual

aphobe: well I think asexuality is stupid and overusing labels it just means you don’t have a sex drive trust me it’s science I read once-

me, having spent the last 8 years researching what I was feeling and is now a pretty darn good source on this shit: uh huh sure honey

[triple-queer-blog]

THE ASEXUAL AGENDA:

making sex jokes while meaning none of them.

[justanothertiredgay]

Growing up Aro/Ace

When you see someone you’re aesthetically attracted to, and you don’t want to date them or kiss them or anything, and you’re just like. 

“You face is nice. I have no idea what to do with this information.”

what’s your growing up Aro, Ace, or Aro/Ace story? 

[etudiea]

This has put words to something ive thought for years.

[grungegoths]

Asexual culture is all those posts which go like “My sexual fantasy/kink is *non sexual activity* “ .

For instance, my biggest sexual fantasy is being happy and satisfied with how im living my life.Tell me whats yours 

[grungegoths]

*Sobs* You are so fucking right my dude 

[fuckyeahasexual]

i think the real reason why exclus specifically love to pit aro/ace-specs and lesbians against each other (acting like the inclusion of the ace flag excludes the lesbian flag, etc.) is because they know deep down that aro/ace/aroace women and lesbians have so much in common in terms of experiences and figuring out our identities and if we were allowed to band together we would be unstoppable

IT IS AN HONOR TO POST THIS

You had such a positive take on what I was saying and I just needed that today.

Discourse officially over!

Aro / Ace / Lesbain Solidarity 2k19

🤝 Taking over the world together 🤝

[starchythoughts]

Hermeneutical Injustice in Consent and Asexuality

I was introduced to the concept of hermeneutical injustice a couple days ago and it’s been blowing my mind. I’ve been struggling for a while to reconcile consent and asexuality, specifically in the context where asexuality isn’t known. If asexuality isn’t an option, how can someone’s consent be truly free? Anagnori’s post on Asexuality and Consent Issues sums it up well:

Consent can only be freely given when all people involved are mentally, physically, socially and financially able to say “No.” An imbalance of power or of information limits the options that one of the partners can take, and it casts doubt on the voluntariness of the relationship. […] How many asexual people consent to sex that they would not have consented to if they grew up knowing that asexuality was a good, normal, and healthy way to be? How many people are pressured or manipulated into sex because they believe that they need to be fixed?

Queenie’s post on Mapping the grey area of sexual experience: consent, compulsory sexuality, and sex normativity shows how prevalent these experiences are:

I’ve had countless conversations with other aces who felt pressured into sex before they discovered asexuality, not necessarily because their partner was standing over them saying, “You must have sex with me or the heavens will smite you with thunderbolts” (although that has happened to some people), but because they couldn’t think of a “good” reason why they shouldn’t want to have sex. They loved their partner. They had birth control. They hadn’t experienced trauma. What was stopping them? Why didn’t they want it?

I think part of the problem is that there’s this idea that people’s natural state is wanting sex and wanting to consent to sex. […] You don’t need a reason to consent; ”you need a *reason* to opt out of sex rather than a reason to opt-in in the first place.“

This is a personal topic for me. I wouldn’t have consented to a lot of things in a previous relationship had I known that asexuality existed – had I known that asexuality is “a good, normal, and healthy way to be” – and there’s a lot of hurt in that for me. I was blamed and blamed myself for not being sexually attracted to my partner; after realizing that I’m asexual, I was able to stop blaming myself for not feeling sexual attraction. But then I became angry. I was angry at my ex for pushing sex. I was angry at the abysmal state of sex ed. I was angry at compulsory sexuality. And I was angry at myself. Why hadn’t I had the courage and confidence to say no?

I blamed my ex for a while – why did he push it when I said no so many times before? why did he enjoy it when I was clearly disinterested? – but that didn’t feel quite right. I said yes multiple times, and people can’t read minds. So then I was back to blaming myself. Perhaps if I truly felt so strongly that I didn’t want to have sex, I would have said no every time. But that doesn’t encapsulate the pressure and feeling of brokenness that I felt – the unspoken social norm that because I didn’t have a “good” reason to “deny” him, saying yes was a given. The problem is that I was left with no way to explain my hurt. On the surface, it shouldn’t have been a big deal: he said yes, I said yes, therefore everything was consensual. The problem is, had I known about asexuality, I would have said no. It felt like a wrong had occurred, even though there was no one to blame. And that is hermeneutical injustice.

Coined by Miranda Fricker in her book, Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing, hermeneutical injustice is “the injustice of having some significant area of one’s social experience obscured from collective understanding owing to a structural identity prejudice in the collective hermeneutical resource.” twin_me’s introduction to epistemic justice explains it well:

Hermeneutical injustice is scary because of the word “hermeneutical.” What we need to know is that “hermeneutical” just means “having to do with interpreting things” – and in our case, “having to do with interpreting our experiences.” The foundational idea is fairly straightforward: having certain concepts helps us interpret our experiences. (Imagine trying to interpret the experience of anger or jealously or being “in the zone” without having a name or concept for it). But, how is this injustice? The answer to this question lies in the fact that a lot of experiences never become concepts that everyone learns. In fact, the concepts that everyone learns are often the concepts of people who are doing pretty well in society – not marginalized people. So, roughly, hermeneutical injustice happens when the reason that a relevant concept doesn’t become part of the collective consciousness is because the concept interprets an experience that is felt primarily by a marginalized group. Because [there] is no concept for the injustice the person is feeling, the person can’t express, understand, or know it.

Fricker discusses a few case studies, the central case being the story of a woman, Wendy Sanford, who had severe depression after the birth of her first child. She blamed herself for her depression, and her husband blamed her as well. A friend convinced her to go to a workshop on women’s medical and sexual health, where one of the small groups she was in started talking about postpartum depression. Suddenly, she was able to make sense of her experience. Just knowing that she was experiencing a real phenomenon that other people experience changed her life. Even though many people experienced postpartum depression, it wasn’t talked about, and it wasn’t in the collective consciousness.

The parallel between Wendy’s revelation about postpartum depression and an asexual person’s revelation about asexuality is clear, particularly when the asexual person is in a relationship with a non-ace person. Fricker writes, “the primary harm of hermeneutical injustice consists in a situated hermeneutical inequality: the concrete situation is such that the subject is rendered unable to make communicatively intelligible something which it is particularly in his or her interests to be able to render intelligible.” In sexual situations, an asexual is left without hermeneutical resources to interpret their feelings. The collective hermeneutical lacuna around asexuality – or to go one step further, the lacuna around asexual feelings in general, i.e. lack of sexual attraction without a socially prescribed reason – harms the asexual person’s ability to consent. Learning about asexuality is therefore not only a hermeneutical breakthrough, but an overcoming of epistemic injustice.

Asexual invisibility is harmful in more ways than specific situations of sexual consent, too. Fricker asks, “Is hermeneutical injustice sometimes so damaging that it cramps the very development of self?” She gives an example using Edmund White’s autobiographical novel, A Boy’s Own Story. As he describes his love for a friend, the collective hermeneutical resources classifying homosexuality as a “sickness” or an “adolescent stage to pass through” conflicts with his own feelings. His sense of self is being formed by collective understandings of homosexuality, which are more powerful than his singular personal experiences. “The primary harm of hermeneutical injustice, then, is to be understood not only in terms of the subject’s being unfairly disadvantaged by some collective hermeneutical lacuna, but also in terms of the very construction (constitutive and/or causal) of selfhood. In certain social contexts, hermeneutical injustice can mean that someone is socially constituted as, and perhaps even caused to be, something they are not, and which it is against their interests to be seen to be.”

Similarly, an asexual’s sense of self is formed by collective understandings of sexuality, leading to feelings of brokenness, abnormality, and isolation. When the collective hermeneutical resources construct sexuality as default, there is no way develop a healthy asexual selfhood. Moreover, asexuals are socially constituted as sexual where, particularly in intimate and physical relationships, it is against their interests to be seen as such. We see the harm in this played out again in issues of consent. The collective understandings of sexuality are more powerful than the singular personal experiences of asexuals, and an asexual person doesn’t have the courage and confidence backed by hermeneutical resources to say that their feelings and experiences are valid and must be respected by their partner.

When you find yourself in a situation in which you seem to be the only one to feel the dissonance between received understanding and your own intimated sense of a given experience, it tends to knock your faith in your own ability to make sense of the world, or at least the relevant region of the world. […] hermeneutical injustice not only brings secondary practical disadvantages, it also brings secondary epistemic disadvantages [… that] stem most basically from the subject’s loss of epistemic confidence. The various ways in which loss of epistemic confidence might hinder one’s epistemic career are, to reiterate, that it can cause literal loss of knowledge, that it may prevent one from gaining new knowledge, and more generally, that it is likely to stop one gaining certain important epistemic virtues, such as intellectual courage.

When I learned about asexuality, it was like the floodgates opened. Suddenly there was a term for my experiences and an entire community built around discussing them. Backed by this collective knowledge, I’m much more confident in my self, my boundaries, and my relationships. However, I was still left with pain and bitterness about my previous relationship; I didn’t have a model or framework in which to analyze a situation where lack of knowledge – for which no one was accountable – would’ve affected consent.

Now, we can talk about these consent situations as hermeneutical injustice. It encapsulates the visceral feeling that something wrong has occurred, yet no one involved in the situation is directly responsible. Fricker concludes, “hermeneutical injustice is not inflicted by any agent, but rather is caused by a feature of the collective hermeneutical resource – a one-off blind spot (in incidental cases), or (in systematic cases) a lacuna generated by a structural identity prejudice in the hermeneutical repertoire. Consequently, questions of culpability do not arise in the same way. None the less, they do arise, for the phenomenon should inspire us to ask what sorts of hearers we should try to be in a society in which there are likely to be speakers whose attempts to make communicative sense of their experiences are unjustly hindered.”

When people say that sexuality is a personal matter and no one should care what people do (or don’t do) in bed, it means that the collective hermeneutical lacuna around non-heterosexualities will never be filled. When people are confused on why some asexuals feel the need to “come out”, I can now explain hermeneutical injustice. As Anagnori concludes:

This is why asexual awareness is so important. We need everyone in the world to know that we exist, not only so that we can be respected, but so that millions of other asexual people can have the power to make informed, confident choices about their own sexuality. We need asexual people everywhere to know that they are not broken, abnormal or wrong for what they are feeling, and that they have the right to reject sex at any time, for any reason. When asexual people can confidently say “No,” then they will also be able to say “Yes” with more certainty and weight, and they will have the option of forming sexual relationships that respect their asexuality and bring them happiness.

In her article, Queenie goes on to state that the simple knowledge of the existence of asexuality might not be enough to counter compulsory sexuality, i.e. aces aren’t “suddenly free from pressure and expectations” after realizing they’re asexual. I completely agree. To analyze other consent situations, there’s Emily Nagoski’s model of consent (with addendums made by other people, as mentioned in the first paragraph of Queenie’s post). I’m also particularly fond of Lisa’s non-binary power model of consent. However, for the very specific case of an asexual person consenting to sex when either partner had no knowledge or understanding of asexuality, I believe that hermeneutical injustice is the best interpretation of the situation.

[pwapboi-deactivated20200412]

if you’re gay, you’re doing GREAT and i will die for you

[pwapboi-deactivated20200412]

if you’re a lesbian, you’re doing AMAZING and i will kill for you

[pwapboi-deactivated20200412]

if you’re bisexual, you’re doing SPECTACULARLY and i will fight for you

[pwapboi-deactivated20200412]

if you’re pansexual, you’re doing WONDERFULLY and i will guide you on your journey

[pwapboi-deactivated20200412]

if you’re transgender, you’re doing GLORIOUSLY and i will climb a mountain for you

[pwapboi-deactivated20200412]

if you’re asexual or aromantic, you’re doing INCREDIBLY and i will walk through fire for you

[pwapboi-deactivated20200412]

if you’re nonbinary, you’re doing BEAUTIFULLY and i will defend your honour

[pwapboi-deactivated20200412]

if you’re queer or questioning, you’re doing EXCEPTIONALLY and i will protect you

[ashleyetc]

seriously though bisexuality being defined as attraction to men and women is a heterosexual’s definition of bisexuality actual bisexual groups and organizations have been defining it as attraction to two or more genders or same and other genders since the nineties and plenty of nb people actually id as bi and refusing to accept how we define ourselves is so absurdly biphobic and heterosexist and jfc it’s 2014 can other queer people fucking realize and acknowledge this

[jackawful]

The purple stripe on the bi flag is meant to represent attraction to nb genders and the bisexual manifesto published in Anything That Moves includes the lines “Do not assume that bisexuality is binary or duogamous in nature … In fact, don’t assume that there are only two genders.” That was published in 1990. It’s older than a lot of people here, including me, and older than terms like “pansexual” and “polysexual” by at least a decade. Bi history is important.

[scribblemoose]

‘Bisexual’ meant ‘all genders and none’ back in the 1970s when I came out. It’s important to remember that. Maybe the word isn’t quite right now, but the meaning behind it, in my experience, always has been.

[thinster13]

It’s 2018 and there are still people who think bisexual is transphobic. This post was written four years ago and is still relevant.

[luxgalador]

In 20biteen we learn our history, y'all

[pinkwhiteandblue]

dedicated to that one jerk who still thinks it’s funny 5 years later.

[letters-to-lgbt-kids]

My dear lgbt+ kids, 

Just stumbled across this study and want to share it with you: 

“Same-Sex Marriage Legalization Linked to Reduction in Suicide Attempts Among High School Students". Johns Hopkins University. February 20, 2017.

“A study of nationwide data from across the United States from January 1999 to December 2015 revealed that the rate of attempted suicide among all schoolchildren in grades 9–12 declined by 7% and the rate of attempted suicide among schoolchildren of a minority sexual orientation in grades 9–12 declined by 14% in states which established same-sex marriage, resulting in approximately 134,000 fewer children attempting suicide each year in the United States. (…) The lead researcher of the study observed that “laws that have the greatest impact on gay adults may make gay kids feel more hopeful for the future"”. 

With all my love, 

Your Tumblr Mom 

PS: Here are some additional sources/information on the study: 

"Study: Teen suicide attempts fell as same-sex marriage was legalized”. USA Today. February 20, 2017.

“Same-sex marriage laws linked to fewer youth suicide attempts, new study says”. PBS. February 20, 2017.

“Same-sex marriage laws tied to fewer teen suicide attempts”. Reuters. February 23, 2017.