Rose

appreciate that you took the time to write out / explain this.

I entered the community well after this happened, I'm grateful that you wrote this since I now have a better understanding of our history and how the community has changed because of it.

The degree that social media (and the internet in general) has changed the way young queer communities grow/act is very interesting to me, I would love for someone to further study this, especially in comparison to before the internet took hold of most communication. It's both for better, in the sense outreach and access to information is easy, and for worse because of lack of context, interference in communication, and anonymity.

God I'd fully forgotten some of this had happened- I was very much a young ace person on Tumblr up until early 2016, when I took a break for a while, came back to find just. SO much seemingly unprompted vitriol from people who had, months before, been purely fandom blogs.

I actually went back and found on a side blog a response post I'd made to a former mutual who jumped on the "allosexual is fucked up because it implies children want to have sex" train in my DMs, and uhhhh for posterity and as supporting evidence I'll link it here? I think it's a good example of a lot of the ways people were highly antagonistic towards the community, and how we were, indeed, made to answer for every single thing any ace person online ever said.

Edit: I found the original DMs and they're even wilder, holy shit

the amount of people who share those "joke" ace moodboards without knowing they were specifically made to mock ace people is so upsetting, it always reminds me of this time. i wish there was a better thing to call it than "ace discourse", because that doesn't really get across how bad it was

Yeah, this tracks for about how it went and how it still goes. Been told "no you're not" and "you'll meet someone who changes that for you someday" since the 90s. No real need to elaborate further since it would just be a truckload of trauma anyway, but yeah.
This all tracks, and people in queer groups today still try to pull that shit to this day. Except now I'm not afraid to get aggressive about it when challenged.

i grew up right at the tail end of all of this, old enough knowing some people thought acearo people weren’t queer, but young enough that most people my age did not care and usually accepted ace people in queer spaces very openly. i no longer identify with asexual labels now, since a lot of my sexuality as a trans lesbian was repressed due to comphet and internalized homophobia and dysphoria turns out, but this was still an insightful read of older queer history.

generally the 2000s to 2010s era of queer politicking feels like this insane black box, as i go back in time for my own research and there feels like there’s a lot of parallels between trans communities and ace communities in regards to their acceptance and needs being pitted against other “real” queer people, and that it feels like this was to diffuse any radical organizing or actioning. i still feel like the trans community doesn’t have a proper understanding of the materiality of transness, and we are really only starting to develop one. before recently, i remember it being half-botched readings of gender performativity in a way that passively implies trans people aren’t the genders we say we are.

Fuck, that's awful. I wasn't exposed to queer communities at all until late 2019 but I'm genuinely surprised I hadn't heard about this level of aphobia until now. So, thanks for informing.

For reference, I'm lesbian and trans, and find the term allo actively helpful as a term for non-aro/ace people. Similar to how cis is useful as a term for non-trans. Do you know of any good ways I can help support the ace community beyond just... using my voice and actions to make sure you all feel welcome in queer spaces?

tumblr did some really fucking awful things for general discourse which mostly consisted of making excuses for why someone/something is harmful and then forming a lynch mob over it, and after the porn ban they all came over to twitter and did the same shit

and so much anti-ace shit over the years just seems rooted in the same "people getting incandescently mad and shaming you for not being sexually available" shit

hell, back in the 70s and early 80s "bambisexual" was used as a slur in the gay community for describing someone who was insufficiently kinky and promiscuous or just wanted a romantic relationship moreso than just fucking, and there was some pushback against the term then but it's hard to tell whether it went away because that pushback got momentum or because the AIDS crisis forced everyone to join hands and drop the idea behind the insult

and now twitter's imploding thanks to elon I'm seeing more of the spaces I'm in come around to the idea that who someone fucks (or doesn't, as the case may be) is in fact nobody's business but their own, which on the one hand is good, on the other hand I'm worried 'cause this might just be another Dipshit Herd Migration like the one that lead the tumblr discourse warriors to twitter

thank you for this, i id'ed as ace literally right before this era and my memory is too foggy of that time to extend the earlier history but very obviously things were already on the rails for that explosion. i was too busy getting a degree and exposed to other needlessly aggressive queer discourse to have my eyes on this specifically so the breakdown is much appreciated.
i dont id as ace anymore, but my identity is fully informed by a variety of sources and has overlap with the way people talk about their ace/aro identities and i do feel a true loss in the queer community of not being able to have these wider community conversations without drawing the ire formed by these things.

i was on tumblr from 2010 to 2013 and whew the ace "discourse" was already at a boiling point that entire time. it was exhausting and hard to stay away from and people going mask off with it gave me the motivation i needed to leave. thanks for writing about this

Thanks for writing this out. Man, this makes me so sad. I’m an older allo queer, and the ace community also had problems with aphobia and shitty treatment from the gay community on LiveJournal, too.

The arguments I hear about why ace people can’t be accepted into the queer community are the same what I hear from certain straight/cis people for why queers can’t be accepted into heteronormative society. We’re literally parroting the words of our oppressors to oppress others. Fuck that, we should know better.

I’m sorry you had to be exposed to that.

Aspec folks are rad, and are part of the queer community.

Thanks for sharing all of this. I was never on tumblr at any point, but close enough to communities that would have been part of it\adjacent to it that I was never far from knock-on effects and the like. Hearing a firsthand experience like this is very helpful to maybe help be able to visualize a piece of a puzzle that I hadn't previously been able to see, even though I could feel the reverberations of culture at a distance. Really important stuff.

TERFs were (are!) very organized on tumblr and they love exploiting aphobia as a wedge issue. They didn't invent it, they're far from the only ones, but they very much exploit it as much as they can. It feeds easily into their "cis lesbian women are the most oppressed and any attempt at solidarity is oppression" agenda.

It's really funny to me that I figured out that there was a word for what I was during this, but never actually knowing this discourse was going on.

What's really interesting to me about this oral history is that if you remove all the years I'd read it and say "Ah, yes, I too was on tumblr during these events and I remember all of it" except... all of the years you cite are ~4 years later than when I'd peg the events as having occurred. And I appear to be ~4 years older than you.

There's an interesting dynamic on social media that is following-specific-people-based rather than everyone-on-one-forum based where you get the sense that "the whole community" is having one big shared conversation, but it's actually entirely within a bubble of people who follow certain circles in common, and a lot of demographic similarities will create these sorts of "discourse cohorts."

I was on tumblr from 2009 to 2016. There was already discussions of asexuality, microlabels, aphobia, and "ace discourse" occurring back then. Around 2010 to 2013 I think we had a sort of peak-normal of things like split attraction theory, and then in 2014-2015 was when I witnessed that same backlash against things like the split-attraction model and the intensity of "ace discourse" followed by a similar detente type period in 2016.

What's notable to me is that, I think like most people, I mostly followed people who were my age or +4 years older than me. I did not generally follow people who were younger than me by more than a couple years. The intervals of meaningful eras being multiples of 4 feels significant to me because that is the length of a segment of schooling in American education. High schoolers, college students, and recent college grads. 4. 4. 4. It seems like we witnessed similar events happen among different people in different cohorts.

I experienced my teenage and start-of-college years as peak cake and dragons cheery everyone is valid acceptance times, mid-college as peak vitriolic only lesbians are valid toxic discourse, and post-college as the jaded exhausted detente where everyone was just kinda done talking about it. You are ~four years younger than me. The period of time I experienced as peak vitriolic discourse, when I was in college, seems to be when you had experienced things as relatively accepting. When I was done with college and everyone seemed to be chilling out, you witnessed peak vitriolic discourse while in mid-college. When you finished college, everyone seemed to be jaded and burnt out and done talking about it without really ever resolving the matter.

My own personal path from "how could a cishet ace be queer" to "eh i dont see why it matters to argue about these hypothetical cishet aces who never show up to anything anyway" to "I mean... they do seem to be queer... the ones that I have met" to "I am making out with The Dreaded Cishet Asexual Man right now and it's fantastic that we aren't going to have to have sex after oh shit I think I might be ace" roughly just corresponds to getting older. I think as people get further and further away from college the less they care about Identity Discourse in general. They become tired and jaded and start seeing people four years younger than them (or more) having the exact same arguments over and over again in a cycle. TikTok 20 year olds seem to frequently be re-hashing arguments I was having ten years ago on tumblr. My thought is always "didn't we all already come to a shared conclusion on the correct answer to this in 2014?" and then I remember that these people were 10 years old when that happened and so just weren't there. None of the internet discourse gets translated to some sort of shared communal history that they get caught up on. Even now when you look at a lot of twitter/bluesky discourse it seems to be a refrain of the Lesbian Sex Wars of the 1970s, which also consisted of young 20-somethings arguing viciously and then many of them, in their older years, reconciling and concluding they didn't need to be so vitriolic to each other.

Maybe it's ironic to say all this after I wrote a 500,000 word coming out essay in the form of philosophical discourse about the definitions of identity labels but it does seem like this oral history is less of a chronologically-specific history of a universal shared reality and more of... a description of an eternally repeating hell chamber that everyone is caught getting put through over and over again in the social media terror cyclone as new young people discover their own identities, discover the thrill of harassing each other over their differences, and then get burnt out and stop caring. I'm not sure how one makes the cycle stop traumatizing every young queer person, but it does give me hope that, among the spaces I spend time in now in my 30s, nobody seems to be invested in how other people identity and if it is "correct" or "valid" or "appropriating from lesbians" (really don't know why everyone is so often concerned about people stealing words from lesbians). Maybe we just need a way to speedrun getting 18 year olds to that point of acceptance before they can be exposed to the Liberal Arts.

Thank you for writing this, I joined tumblr a year before you, and this discourse strongly shaped my understanding of queerness broadly. Same as you, I didn't realize that a lot of folks don't know this history anymore.

My personal take on why ace discourse "died down" from 2017-2019 is because tumblr's TERF discourse became much more visible and influential during that same era. Not that there weren't TERFs before, but the battle lines were redrawn during this period. While anti-TERF communities weren't always safe for ace folks (in the same ways they weren't safe for trans folks), they provided a new bastion which created the ace-détente you describe.

For me, that era isn't defined by less discourse or solidarity, simply different discourse which captured an even larger reactionary crowd. It was a relief that ace folks weren't as centered in the debate, but I got the impression that was because TERFs felt like they "had won" that debate. I was a queer leader in college during this era, and seeing TERFs and anti-ace folks get emboldened in-person over Trump's presidency was incredibly eerie, and frankly frightening.

While I have a slightly different perspective, I'm so incredibly glad that you've documented this history for others. This is going to be my go-to post if anyone ever needs ace-discourse explained to them. Thanks again <3 <3 <3

I wasn't around Tumblr at the time when I found out about (and subsequently adopted) the Asexual label, but It's very unfortunate to hear that this happened.
It is very important to write about this history though, especially given how recent it is. It gives room for future Queer folk (as well as those like myself who were fortunate enough to not have seen/heard about it) to learn from history, and will lead to alot more understanding and growth in Queer communities moving forward.

Luckily with the spaces I've seen there's alot more Ace Positivity nowadays, so hopefully we can keep that momentum going for the future. Y'all are valid <3

Partly due to PTSD & other NDs and partly due to being a multiple system, our memory is absolute, utter dogshit, so it's really nice to see a timeline of some kind about these events. Thank you so, so much for writing this post.

We've been on Tumblr since 2010 and in contrast to what someone else in this thread said (but not to contradict or deny her experience, obviously), we didn't see much aphobia on Tumblr until probably 2013 or 2014, if I had to guess. We saw generally more what we think of as like mean-spirited and ill-informed or (literally) ignorant comments. We were also way more involved with the kinky community on Tumblr at the time, which was accepting of any kind of person and identity (ioo). Fast forward to 2015 and someone in our system was bullied horrendously and repeatedly for firmly identifying as an ace lesbian (until she deleted her blog and quit using Tumblr) because that wasn't "possible" as well as a whole slew of other weird and hurtful shit we've been through....

These days we simply tell people we're queer -- partly because the nature of being plural makes it damn-near impossible to have an actual, static orientation (including/especially where it self-relates to gender, which is also incredibly varied in our system, lol) but also DEFINITELY because we don't want people bothering us about being ace or being "just curious" how we can be ace "and also" [x] [y] or [z]. To sadly echo what many have said in this comment thread or on the linked Tumblr post, we were definitely put back into the closet. It's really fucked up because being ace is actually THE ONE THING that's static and consistent as an identity for most of our system. I mean, it's really fucked up for other reasons as well, obviously, but this specific thing makes me want to grind concrete with my teeth.

On a happier note, we've had an okay time informing IRL friends we're ace when it comes up and have an asexual dragon flag pin that we adore. :) I hope every aro/ace person who reads this post and/or this comment thread can eventually find the strength and safety to explore and express their identity again.

i've done a lot of introspection over the years following leaving tumblr and on the point of the lesbians vs aces thing (as someone who admittedly got very suspicious of blogs that identified as lesbians at this time) there were a small handful of very popular blogs run by lesbians who were absolutely horrendous to aces/aros. they would share from each other and make relatable lesbian posts (tm) which meant that i would constantly see them, even having them blocked, and even having told people that they're aphobic.

it's been a while but i think one of them was pissvortex- idk if you remember them.

which is to say i think it's a very vocal minority of lesbians who blogged about being a lesbian and also about how much they hated aces.