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:
- aces largely stopped calling people allos or even discussing aphobia and amatonormativity
- 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.
- aces largely stopped asking for or expecting allos to reflect on allo norms/behaviors/etc.
- 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:

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