I don't even come on here as often as I used to, but here's a long post that may or may not be entirely relevant, I guess.
Alright, unpopular opinions from the norm that the Tumblr LGBT crowd holds here, and I'm tired of the ace discourse, "truscum/tucute" discourse and labeling discourse, really, and there's like... so much to say on how pointless and dumb it is and how the policing really gets nobody anywhere and is anything less from progressive... But I'm mainly gonna talk about the ace discourse because it's a bad and dumb Tumblr thing that gets repeated mostly by minors and it's doing more harm than good. Like I've even seen people regressing back to the "haha virgin" crap and shaming people(including minors+csa survivors) for being repulsed by sex because of this discourse... like this is really sad, lol.
With ace identities the common theme I've noticed is people getting hung up on the fact that it is a spectrum or how that spectrum is defined as such along with the expression of attraction(action upon attraction and the lack of it) making it difficult for folks to find observable queerness in asexuality because of how expression of attraction applies in both hetero and queer relationships. Like yeah, I get that, because most of us have an apprehension in allowing space for cisheteronormativity to be co-opted into queer spaces and it shouldn't be. But it's real damn important for us to also understand that abuse of that space isn't an issue of asexuality, especially considering queer aces exist, but an issue on the individual. At the most fundamental and toxic core, heteronormativity burdens relationships with the expectation of absolute physical attraction and dutifully having children. Now taking that into consideration, asexuality's expression of attraction is inherently not normative and the LGBTQ+ community seeks to give a space to and recognize identities that don't align with the "norm". Asexuality is a community that's inherently adjacent to the struggles of the queer community in combating patriarchal gender roles whether people like to admit this or not. Furthermore, it's untrue to claim ace folk don't experience oppression when asexuality alone is considered broken and abnormal under the gaze of heteronormativity. Oppression within this discourse is treated so much like a competition it's just... ridiculous, but I'll get onto that later. Privilege within the community isn't limited to ace folk and spans across all identities in one way or another, making most arguments on the topic moot. Now, self awareness and intersectional reflection of one's place within socioeconomic groups is a reasonable expectation of anyone and failure to do so isn't representative of ace folks but rather the individual.
Also... on the oxymoronic and stupid "cishet ace" thing... If someone is aromantic or asexual, they do not benefit from full straight cisgender privilege, seeing as though they are not cis, heterosexual, and heteromantic to begin with. If someone is aspec they can, and do, face different kinds of oppression such as but not limited to: corrective rape, being seen as less than human, feeling "broken", being seen as mentally ill or something being medically wrong with them for feeling this way, having partners acting as though the aspec individual is somehow denying the other their "right" to sex, being abused in multiple ways and manipulated to feel as though you’re being childish or selfish, others ignoring physical boundaries to try "fixing" you, and more. And in a society that seems to show sexual/romantic depictions as well as trying to play on people’s attraction towards those deemed "sexually appealing", it can feel really awkward having to hear and see these things all the time. And yes, these things go for, you guessed it, the "cishet" aspec individuals as well seeing as though these are aspec experiences. While it's true that if someone is cis they do benefit from being cis, and while being in some form of relationship with a different gender than oneself might appear to benefit the person from the view of outsiders since they're then assumed to be straight, this does not negate the fact that many aspec individuals face different pressures and issues that cisgender heterosexual heteromantic individuals don't face based on their sexuality or romantic orientation. Now if someone feels as though they’re cishet while also being on the ace spectrum, then they can choose that for themselves if it feels right for them personally, but to force this upon everyone is just wrong since someone else cannot determine someone’s identity for them when it comes to incredibly personal labels such as these.
Folks are bent on this idea that in order for oppression in the LGBT+ community to be considered "vaild oppression" there has to be some sort of law being made about your identity or whatever which is... a very limited view on how oppression works. Systematic oppression includes microaggressions. It's why despite there being laws in the U.S. supposedly limiting discrimination of PoC in housing, jobs, and etc. we still face oppression in millions of ways. This is because bigots go outside of the legal system and use other systems, like how the justice system is riddled with corruption and police brutality. Oppression doesn't rely on laws that specifically say "this group should be disenfranchised". It's where the lines of discrimination and oppression are blurred, because lemme tell you that if a group is discriminated against on the basis of their sexuality in similar ways the rest of us in the community are, what are you gonna call that? All in all, people willing to discriminate is literally a large part of how oppression works.
Lastly, the whole excuse that this is a call to "keep out oppressors" or whatever is extremely dumb, because horizontal oppression is already a thing meaning that oppressors already exist considering cis and trans people and folks of different races but whatever. Not only that but this discourse prevents any creation of an asexual community like folks like to complain about wanting to have. The acecourse actively stops them from talking about issues affecting them. Literally the whole "aphobia isn’t real", shpheel affects all of this, and even those who go as far as hunting down kids posting selfies and making stimboards etc for their sexuality contribute to it as well. Many ace people, completely stopped talking about being ace, stopped sharing problems and experiences, and stopped reaching out to help questioning youth etc. Like... imagine being proud of ingraining fear and shame into an entire group of people. So how are they to develop and grow as a community (in the LGBTQ+ or separately), as people, and in their terminology and identities, when people continuously keep on invalidating their experiences, changing the meaning of their terminology, and attacking them (especially kids) for expressing themselves through art, jokes, labels, and just sharing experiences?
That's my tangent on this stuff for the day.
