yrgirlkv

"it's yr girl; you already know!"

—dj who is not yr girl and who you do not know at all

sister @cass | mom @pegasus-poetry | writer/designer @ songs for the dusk, sunblack | asexual @ large

icon by @hedgemice.


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.)


Inumo
@Inumo

This is a really good summary of the "externally-sourced" Ace Discourse I remember growing up with and (thankfully) being peripherally present for but not directly engaged in. I also want to add another layer to Ace Discourse from my experience of it, though, and that's specifically the in-fighting within the ace community itself during this time period.

Much in the same way that transmedicalism rose to prominence in no small part out of the pursuit of legitimacy & externally-validated definitions of transness, there was a branch of Ace Discourse that saw the rejection of asexuality by the broader queer community as a failure of sufficiently strict definitions – if we just clearly proved that this rigorous definition identified an oppressed community, then they'd accept us, right? This led to all the purity-testing arguments about "can an ace person have sex, enjoy sex, masturbate, etc" and drove the production of the many sub-identities and -features of the asexuality spectrum (e.g. demisexuality, the split attraction model, autochoris-/aegosexuality). From there arose further, nested arguments about whether those things were real – are gray asexuals/graysexuals really different from straights/gays/bis/pans? Is autochorissexuality just a voyeurism fetish? Is there a meaningful difference between "ace/aro" and "just ace?" There were heated debates that repeated the pattern of "we have a word for it, therefore it must be real" vs "you're inventing words for experiences that don't exist (or at least are socially illegible) and delegitimizing The Movement."

The result was this feeling that, if you were ace (or at least, thought you were ace – the Discourse made it hard to trust yourself), nowhere felt safe. You couldn't trust other queers, because what if they didn't think you were one of them? You couldn't trust fellow asexuals, because what if they thought you weren't actually ace? Your choices were to either fight tooth and claw for space, thereby participating in & reinforcing Ace Discourse, or you had to recede into the woodwork. For my part... I chose the latter, same as the folks mentioned in the OP's part 3.


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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.

in reply to @Inumo's post:

really good addition -- i think it's the best explanation for how and why ace community language got particularly complicated over the course of the 2010s specifically, as people developed redefinition after redefinition of ace identity in the hopes of winning a respect we were never going to actually receive