• she/her 30 ±5 yrs

About me
recent (as of march 2024) tumblr refugee.
Expect a lot of different things, many of them very weird and horny! Read my about me if you're curious about what exactly and what you see over there --------------------------------------> doesn't make it obvious.


yrgirlkv
@yrgirlkv

part 0: premises

the conversation that inspired this post got me to realize that many people are actually very unaware of what happened to asexuals in queer spaces as a result of the thing called "ace discourse." this stuff did real, serious damage to the ace community, especially where it overlaps with queerness writ large. it's odd to imagine that i have a perspective on this that is unknown to many others, but it does seem like i do, and i think it is worth sharing if only to establish a context for discussions of asexuality in the future.

so: this post is my attempt to document my own experience of ace discourse and what it did to us. it will be, in all probability, flawed; i am one woman with a limited perspective, and i am largely going to be speaking from memory because i don't want to go spend hours hunting down and screencapping a bunch of vicious bigotry about me and those like me. but my hope is that, while i may get things wrong here and there, the broad strokes will be accurate enough to give people a sense of what things were like.

(a brief note: this post has been lightly edited here and there to make it clearer that what i describe here is deeply influenced by my own particular perspective. this post is about The Discourse as i saw it, not necessarily as it happened.)


however, before i start, i want to do two things. the first is to content warn for aphobia, abstract discussion of sexual assault (by which i mean "i will mention that it occurs but not discuss details"), and harassment, as well as for vitriol and discussions of intracommunity infighting.

the second thing i want to do is establish some premises. by this i mean that i am going to write this post under the following assumptions:

  • asexual and aromantic people are queer, for any practical definitions of any of those terms
  • aphobia is a real phenomenon that exists both in heteronormative society and within the queer community, and aspec people are meaningfully marginalized by it
  • "allo" is not an inherently derogatory term
  • asexuals are generally not more queerphobic than any other queer subcommunity (i.e. asexuals are not more transphobic, lesbophobic, etc. than allosexuals on average)
  • the ace discourse that took place on tumblr had real effects on queer people in physical spaces, and it made a genuine impact on aces' ability to both discuss our identities and organize together

i want to be very clear: i am not brooking challenges to these ideas in this post. if you disagree with any of them, fine; talk about it elsewhere. if you try and fight me on them here i will straight-up block you. this is not up for negotiation.

if you are confused as to why i need to make these ideas clear and pre-empt any argument with them: read on, and i am sorry to tell you that you will find out.

part 1: context

let's get my bona fides out of the way: i'm a 26-year old trans woman of color who has identified as asexual in one form or another for a majority of the past ten years. i spent most of the back half of my teenage years on tumblr, where "asexual" was the first queer identity i adopted; eventually i would describe myself as nonbinary and then afterwards as a (binary) woman, and though i stopped identifying as ace for a period of two or three years after i came out as a girl, i eventually re-adopted the label.

i first joined tumblr in 2014 when i was 15 years old; as is the case for many others, tumblr became the place where i learned a great deal about the nuances of queer identity. i'd known about LGB people in an abstract way, but i learned what a trans person was on tumblr, and i learned about asexuality there too. by the time i stumbled onto the definition of asexual, i had already begun to realize that whatever experience of sexuality i had, it was very different than that of my peers. i didn't seem to develop crushes on strangers at all; i had no idea whether someone i'd never met was "hot." this sort of experience was omnipresent in high school. as an ostensible boy, i was constantly expected to join in on judging whether girls were attractive, but it was clear to me from conversations with girls that they too had strong sexual feelings and strong opinions about what kinds of men were and were not hot. people articulating their feelings of asexuality was the first time i was able to recognize an experience like my own.1

in this first year or so of my time on tumblr, i didn't encounter much aphobic vitriol. when i first wrote this post, i initially suggested that the site was more relaxed in 2014 than it would be in the next couple of years, but after receiving some input from commenters, i now suspect that this impression is biased by the fact that i happened to be new to both tumblr and queerness. regardless of the actual timeline, though, my first impressions of the ace community and its role in queerness writ large was as follows: small and not influential, but at least somewhat well-respected. tumblr was a straighter website in those years, but i had the good fortune that my first exposure to queer discourse was through bloggers who were generally of the opinion that aces were queer and ought to be accepted into the community. i don't know if cake and dragon memes2 were a thing on the AVEN forums but they seemed fairly popular to me in ace and ace-adjacent tumblr circles, and when the A was included in "LGBTQA" i mostly saw people insist it stood for Ace (or, on rarer occasions, Ace/Aro), rather than for Ally.

that said, it was also quite clear that while much of it wasn't necessarily happening in my view, aphobia and ace exclusion by queer people were very much taking place. i remember a video going around of an interview conducted at a pride parade asking various queers in attendance whether they would accept aces into the movement, and the responses tended to be "no." of course, the blogger was sharing it critically, insisting that the queer community ought to be better than this, but the facts of the clip were clear: while some people wanted us there, not everyone did. it was not safe to assume you were queer if being ace was your only vector of divergence from sexual norms. if queer people made space for me, and told me i counted as one of them, i would be grateful, but i was not willing to claim queerness on my own on the basis that i was ace. that was for other people to determine, and i would honor their acceptance by behaving with all the politeness expected of a guest.

"ace discourse" would come into being over the course of the next two to three years, from 2015 to 2016 and, as i remember it, partly into 2017. it is important to know that it erupted in the context of a broader series of arguments over the general direction of politics on tumblr, which is to say that it was happening during and in the immediate wake of the entire debate over social justice and SJWs. a lot of queer people online were frustrated by arguing with both conservatives and centrists, and in my view especially frustrated by being dismissed as immature. this was a time of debates on whether it was fair to insist people use your neopronouns or whether you should also allow for they/them as courtesy; identity clashed with social norm over and over and over again, and overwhelmingly the advocates of identity were written off as teenagers whose experiences of the world were too ill-formed to be taken seriously. as this stuff began to die down and "anti-sjws" diminished in presence, radical politics of many different kinds began to make their way into tumblr spaces. frustrations with obama's failures and a sense of insufficient change made the site fertile ground for college students summarizing marx and posting "no more mister nice gay," and evidently lots of people were still feeling punchy.

i don't know if there was a single incident that really sparked off the ace discourse as people know it now, but my opinion is that two things happened simultaneously. the first is that aspec communities (primarily aces, but a burgeoning aro community as well) were starting to express a frustration with amatonormativity, the general idea that desire for any romantic and sexual relationship is a normal and natural part of the human experience. amatonormativity was obviously something to be criticized--it had the same linguistic structure as heteronormativity, and carried similar implications--and logically, most allo queers were as complicit in it as straight people were. the second is tumblr users now had a much greater exposure to radical queer & feminist politics, both of which were accompanied by a significant increase in the aggression of political language. placed in a position of having to accept a social privilege/advantage they were unfamiliar with and freshly-armed with a newfound set of rhetorical strategies, a number of these allos fell back on a natural defensiveness, and decided that it was not they who were at fault, but the aces.

people have also argued that TERF psyops played a major part in the anti-ace backlash, and that many TERFS used anti-ace rhetoric as a kind of gateway politic to recruit more people to their transphobic ideologies. that sort of recruitment definitely happened, but whether it had enough impact to actually influence transmisogyny on tumblr is a matter of some controversy, and one trans women ourselves are not united on. some of us stand by it wholeheartedly and take the position that this is why we can't afford to abandon aspecs in queer activism; others see it as a distraction from transmisogyny, because it decenters trans women as targets of TERF violence. i tend to lean towards the former position myself, but i don't know if there's an objective answer. either way, though, i'd be remiss not to mention it.

as with most social phenomena, the truest answer is probably some combination of multiple factors. still, whatever causal forces there are that i might be able to form a narrative from now, at the time i mostly remember it feeling supremely sudden.

part 2: discourse

the first major incident i saw in ace discourse was an enormous (to me) controversy over a post made by some guy to the effect of "oh, man, i had a cool idea. what if there was a disease that only spread through sex and like, killed people? ace people would be totally immune to it, it'd be awesome." this went about as well as you'd expect.

before i continue, i want to make something very clear about this incident specifically: the person who made this post was not ace. they were an ally of some kind--i don't remember if they were straight and fully external to the community or just a thoughtless queer person--dashing something off in a sincere attempt to support aces without realizing they were being insensitive to anyone else. but the damage had been done; no follow-up apology post could stem the tide of furious claims that ace people had no business disrespecting the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic, and that was the takeway from the controversy around this dumb fucking post: "how dare these idiots speak about our community like this! they're not even really a part of us!" this sort of thing--aces being held responsible for anything even slightly foolish that happened even in proximity to us--would become typical of the arguments that followed.

ace discourse exploded over the course of the next year. every conversation about asexuality risked inviting an eruption of discourse around it, even the innocuous ones. people started putting "aces are/aren't queer" in their blog descriptions and about pages to ward off potential followers who felt the other way. arguments were constant; ace blogs received regular harassment, even if they tried not to take stances on controversial topics like whether aces and aros were queer. everything aspec people said would inevitably be taken in the worst possible faith. "fun" genres of post from this era include:

  • "ace people aren't really queer, and if we let them into the community they'll take resources meant for REAL queer people. we have to protect those for ourselves!"
  • "isn't the word 'allo' kind of homophobic? i mean you're implying that gay people are somehow privileged for their sexuality, which is a bigoted idea because we're actually oppressed for it. it's offensive to even call people allo, actually"
  • "how are you even oppressed? no one's afraid to come out as ace. you don't get discriminated against; your parents aren't going to kick you out if you tell them.3 oh, some of you have gone through corrective rape? no, that's a lesbian phrase. you were just raped in a non-corrective way because of general misogyny. honestly, isn't it kind of inappropriate to dump that on a stranger? i didn't ask for your secondhand trauma. anyway, aphobia isn't a real thing"
  • "aros are queer? okay, does that mean we have to accept cishet aro men in our community? who are going to hook up with and hurt women but now they count as queer? you're asking us to share space with our own oppressors here!" this one inadvertently became one of my favorites; i was so frustrated by the fixation on this character that i conjured up a whole supervillain out of him. look out, everyone, it's Cishet Aroman! he's here to steal the power crystals for david jay's coven of AVEN warlocks!
  • "lol queerplatonic? do you mean friends? aros are stupid, i can't believe we have to take them seriously"
  • "cake and dragons? i'm supposed to treat these people like adults? sorry, but i fuck and do drugs."
  • "look at this dumb/rude/homophobic thing a teenager said defensively in an environment of constant harassment on the basis of their identity!"

i'm certain i'm forgetting more. the argument was constant; you could not discuss asexuality without becoming embroiled in it unless you had the conversation offsite or in private. i also want to note: i do not doubt plenty of ace people said insensitive and homophobic things during this time. we were a community collectively on the back foot; lots of us were dumb. what was frustrating is that if any ace person (or hell, even an allo ally!) was ever dumb, every ace person bore collective responsibility for it.

another thing i want to make clear: this debate cut across every other line of queer identity you can imagine. there were gay guys and lesbians on all sides of the debate; trans men argued with trans men about it, and trans women with trans women.

of particular note was the especially insidious ways in which lesbians and aces were pitted against each other. aces were often specifically described as lesbophobic, many pro-ace discoursers held a deeply unjustified paranoia about lesbians, and there was a real sense that something was basically incompatible between lesbian4 and asexual identities. some attempts were made to establish solidarity between bi, pan, trans, and nonbinary people and aces on the basis of collective invisibility/erasure, but plenty of those people rejected these attempts at connection. i almost don't blame them; asexuality had become such an immense social liability that plenty of us were reluctant to identify with it.

things somehow managed to get worse from there; at one point, there were genuinely people insisting it was somehow abusive to date as an ace person (i remember a tag on one such post like "if my partner said they weren't sexually attracted to me i'd have a mental health crisis"), and some of the younger anti-ace discoursers went fully mask off, posting things like "maybe nobody else will say it but I'M willing to just be honest: i thinks something's wrong with you freaks!" it had stopped being safe to talk about asexuality joyfully or kindly or patiently or even imperfectly. in many places it had stopped being safe to talk about it at all.

part 3: détente

i don't know what happened that caused this stuff to die down. i always got the sense that a lot of discourses eased up over the course of 2017 to 2018. i feel like the constant lesbian-bi-gay wars also relaxed pretty substantially around this time, and there was an increasing sense of at least surface-level acceptance by cis queers among trans people. maybe trump's election fostered a sense of solidarity in the face of a rising tide of indiscriminate queerphobia; maybe high-profile discoursers were driven off the site by controversy or just got tired and abandoned it. the adult content ban took place around this time iirc? which, as i recall, seriously dropped the population of the site, and that might've contributed as well. as before, it's probably a mix of factors.

whatever the case, it's important to understand that none of this was ever really resolved, and certainly never in a way that was genuinely accepting of ace identity. what instead happened was this:

  1. aces largely stopped calling people allos or even discussing aphobia and amatonormativity
  2. many of us actively recloseted ourselves in otherwise-safe spaces. a number of people were less comfortable being openly ace around other queers than they were being trans, an experience i can personally empathize with. this didn't just happen online; the discourse had poisoned IRL queer scenes, and people concealed their asexuality in those scenes to as a response.
  3. aces largely stopped asking for or expecting allos to reflect on allo norms/behaviors/etc.
  4. allos stopped picking fights with aces merely for having ace in their blog, and stopped putting opinions about whether aces were inherently queer in their bios

this was the exchange we were informally presented with: ace people would stop taking asexuality seriously, stop expecting any other kind of queer to adjust their behavior to make room for our identities and our opinions about sex and sexuality, and in exchange we were allowed to say we were ace as long as we didn't use too many microlabels and didn't get too weird about it. i recall a tweet i found by an ace guy a few years ago where he described what it took to have one's asexuality respected among other queers: "i have to be serious, i have to be articulate, i have to be, maybe, a little bit mean." he was completely right; to do anything less invites immediate ridicule and dismissal.

and as for how long that's lasted? well:
tumblr post screencap: 'finding out theres still huge communities of old tumblr ass acecourse microidentity "everyone is valid and queer" type people is always so scary you guys were supposed to have been roanoke'd back in like 2016.' post url and icon are censored; the date of the post is dec 22, 2023, with the year underlined in red, followed by "3 weeks ago" in reference to the date the screencap was taken.
("3 weeks ago" refers to the date the screencap was taken)

see for yourself.

part 4: environment

a thing you must understand, if you were not there to witness it directly: this is the environment that informs every ace discussion that's taken place since ace discourse first began. the level of intracommunity hostility i've laid out here still has a presence today. i wish i had a better conclusion to this story, but the grim truth is that for the most part we are still in it. when i discuss asexuality i find myself resorting contorted phrases like "anti-ace hostility" because i know "aphobia" is considered a joke word among a remarkably high number of other queer people. every time i discuss the topic, i have to ask myself: will this word or phrase communicate what i want, or is it so tumblr acecourse-y that people will write me off the instant they see it? i think this post might be the most i've used the word "allo" in more than five years; i haven't wanted to risk compromising my message on the occasions that i do decide to discuss asexuality in public. i am far from the only person to have made this calculation.

at the end of the day, i don't know what it would take to get queer people to actually accept ace people, rather than simply to tolerate us. i truly, sincerely, do not. what i do know is this: you cannot understand the ace community--our thoughts, our opinions, our language--without understanding that, at least for now, genuine acceptance remains very much out of our reach.


  1. i'm also bi, but i didn't really recognize my crushes on "other" boys as genuine at this age.

  2. the memes are "as far as ace people are concerned, cake is better than sex" and "ace people really like dragons." i have no opinion on them as memes but they are accurate descriptions of me.

  3. i actually did come out as ace to my father as a teenager. he did not kick me out, but he did tell me to my face "no, you're not; don't say that." in about two years he would go on to respond the same way to my telling him i was trans. i was braced for the second thanks to my experience with the first.

  4. gay male identity was also considered similarly incompatible with asexuality, though with fewer men on tumblr it was a less common line of argument. while i suspect every sexual identity has had people argue that it's the most radical one, there was definitely an idea in anti-ace circles that gays and lesbians were the truly radical/anti-normative sexualities, and i always got the impression that many bi people felt they needed to reject asexuality and ace politics to be accepted as genuinely committed to the queer/LGBT cause. i don't think any of this rhetoric ever translated into real support for young lesbians or gay guys, ace or not.


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in reply to @yrgirlkv's post:

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

lmao god i forgot about "allo implies kids are sexual" but that one was real popular in the most bad-faith circles. there was so much shit like this it's probably an impossible task to document it all

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

THISSSSS oh my god. and the megamind "no bitches" ace flag edits. it always made me so jumpy to see them but then i'd find out the people sharing them are also aces and then feel Deeply conflicted.

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.

positive developments in ace discourse are rare but i do feel that at least now if people get in your face you can get them to back off and not get dogpiled for it. it demands the seriousness and articulation and dash of meanness i referenced, but y'know, small mercies

Yeah that is one thing I'm glad to see. We do have more positive visibility. The internet in general will have its vitriolic corners but face to face if someone pushes on you in a group you've generally got backup. Not like how it was twenty years ago at least.
A loud "I said NO" even in a club these days will snap a few heads around.
Progress is slow and painful, but yeah, small mercies.

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.

yeah, the diffuse-radical-organizing thing is kind of on my mind as a big question mark here. i, for example, really do think a major contributor to the vitriol of ace discourse was simply that a lot of allo queers were unwilling to consider themselves "privileged," which the label "allo" seemed to imply; that was a discomfiting idea to people who considered themselves oppressed radicals, and the backlash emerged as a way of forcing that discomfort back onto the aces who'd imposed it. on the other hand, terfs have straight up admitted using anti-ace spaces as a combination of recruiting ground and rhetorical weapons-testing site, and there's no real way to measure the proportion of these things, so who knows

yea totally, though i can’t help but think of “everybody wants to be a fascist” by guattari and butler’s “bodies that matter.” like that the ways in which society encourages people to desire compulsively means that there is a legitimization of some desires and not others. and i feel like the negative reaction to realizing you have privilege is often a reflection of trying to legitimate that desire as a subject because to acknowledge that desire as a privilege invites the possibility that a desire could not be legitimate and you’d lose power, and therefore would rather use that power to continue to benefit from it. this is what happens with gender too, where its reiteration is constantly happening to bodies within a social context, which invites the possibility of disrupting cisheterosexual regimes and therefore needs to be actively reinforced and policed by those who it benefits.

i also get this a lot when talking about settler-colonialism and immigration too where settlers will moralize about settlers within a context of decolonization. like the function through the societal process of desires’ legitimization is still weaponizing compulsive allosexuality to diffuse the possibility of rupturing the process of its reiteration and end the material privileges allosexuals hold, so i dont think that it has to be intentional in order for the it to be for the diffusing of radical organizing, y’know?

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

that's interesting, actually; i suspect my impression of relative peace in 2014 probably has more to do with the fact that i was new to tumblr and to queerness than with actual peace on the site. happy to hear further input on the timeline of this stuff but either way i'm glad documenting it has been helpful

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.

oh i really appreciate this link, actually; i got another comment just up above mentioning that aphobia/anti-ace vitriol had plenty of play before i joined tumblr and it's good to see documentation of it in an adjacent internet scene.

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.

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.

i do think this is a very neat explanation, but on reread i'm not actually sure the 4-year gap is actually there? you're citing peak vitriol as 2014-15 and detente as 2016, which is only a year off from my own (fairly approximate) figure of '15-'16 with detente in '17. the screencap i posted dates aces being "roanoke'd" to '16 too, and i'm currently reading a thesis paper that's dated to '17, suggesting that most of its research took place in the years leading up to then. this tracks to my memory of when these discourse phases happened relative to my life too, because as i remember it peace was very early high school and didn't last long, peak vitriol was mid-late high school into early college, and jaded exhaustion hit when i was about halfway through college. i definitely agree that my impressions of the timing on the initial peace had much more to do with my own newness to both queerness and tumblr; i'd already begun to suspect as much after getting a couple other comments citing memories of discourse starting way earlier. i'd waited a bit to edit the post because i'd been hoping to get a bit more input on timelines first. i definitely have that now, though it's certainly given me more to consider.

there is an elegance 4-year education cycle/life phase theory that i quite like, and i think you're right to point out that tiktok teens and bluesky 20-year-olds are also having conversations we'd both respond to with "didn't we do this one already?" it also pretty neatly tracks to the phenomenon i'd noted about a bunch of college students who were now freshly armed with a new rhetoric of radical politics and eager to test it out on each other.

that said, with a concrete date for a precipitous user drop on tumblr specifically in 2018 and having seen a few other people speak to similar dates for the start of the detente, i think that part mostly lines up with what i originally posted--this might be more closely tied to the ages and life phases of the site's userbase rather than yours or mine in particular. others have suggested that a number of the most vitriolic discoursers wound up moving to twitter in the wake of the tumblr adult content ban, and while my own twitter experience was fairly relaxed i generally got the impression that this was a result of me much more aggressively pruning my follows there. i think the 1- to 2-year gaps in people's memories of when things took place might map to their own life phases and levels of exhaustion, but i do still get the impression that there are semi-solid dates for when certain arguments took place on specific sites, at the very least.

as far as lesbian appropriation: terf psyop theory is probably the most popular explanation, and while i am wary of overrelying on that class of reasoning, this is a case where it might actually be founded. the idea of intraqueer appropriation kind of only makes sense for lezsep enthusiasts, which terfs have often been. not a theory i'd make a firm commitment to, but it's the best i've got

re the lesbian side of things: as someone who was trying to move in both ace and lesbian circles at the same time i very much did not experience "only lesbians are valid" but rather a feeling that lesbianism had become a sort of "gotcha" for people who were not actually supporting lesbian communities (much less the ace lesbian ones). not to say there were not aphobic lesbians, but it feels like "the aphobic lesbian" has become a kind of rhetorical punching bag.

edited to add: i do remember (as an attempt to counteract this gotcha) some specific invocations of solidarity between ace women and lesbians on the basis of "not sexually attracted to men, in defiance of social expectation" though i can't say how widespread this was beyond my own social circle. in general though it was very much a feeling of being attacked on all sides and pretty extremely miserable.

yeah this is kind of what i mean wrt to wariness of overrelying on terf psyop theory. i have gripes with ideas about intracommunity appropriation specifically which i feelt was very much a product of lesbian separatist rhetoric, but to be quite clear i think "aphobic lesbian" was a very like...deliberately-created character that bad-faith discoursers knew would inspire a lot of vitriol. this worked to the advantage of any participant in the discourse who wanted more vitriol and more factionalization, regardless of side. but like you say these people were not genuinely interested in supporting lesbians; they were wielding a very specific image of lesbian community to win points

yeah "intracommunity appropriation" is definitely not like. a legible idea and i think you're right that it originated in lezsep circles. but i do keep seeing this idea pop up that lesbians were/are considered the most valid/radical (positive) identity and this has definitely never been my experience. the result of ace discourse for me was that i basically stopped identifying as anything because both ace and lesbian felt so fraught but i had stopped iding as bi bc it just did not apply to me at all—jury's still out on whether or not ace applies to me currently but obviously i did find my way back to lesbianism.

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.