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Here is a complete list of the people who can decide if someone is LGBTQ+:

1. The person themselves

You don’t owe anyone your story.

I hate how everytime I explain how my disabilities affect me people are just like "🤨?? But?? It would be easier if you weren't like that??? You can't accomplish what you need to do to function in this society if you're like that???" YES!! YES!!!!! THAT'S WHY THEY'RE DISABILITIES!!!!!! YOU LITERALLY ALREADY UNDERSTAND THIS CONCEPT!!!!!!!! WHY ARE YOU STILL TRYING TO ARGUE MY DISABILITIES AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!

As someone who has been living with severe suicidal ideation my entire life I wanna tell you all something, you don’t have to stay alive for yourself. People will say it’s a bad idea to live for external things because they’re temporary, and it’s true living for yourself is ideal but if you’re not to that point yet that’s ok too. 

I’ve lived for my dog for the past 4 years, before that I lived for my snakes, before that I lived for my cat. You can live for whatever needs you and whatever matters to you. Live for your best friend, live for your plants, live for your pets, live for your animal crossing town. Live for whatever keeps you alive and the day will come when you can live for yourself.

This is something everyone should see. Thank you for sharing this.

Transformers kept me alive. When the 2007 movie was announced I was going through an incredibly hard time emotionally. I saw the preview and every time I thought about killing myself I thought, “but then I won’t get to see this thing I’ve always wanted to see, good or not.” And it got me through.

I’m in a place where I live for myself now, but don’t toss away a life preserver just because other people think you should be able to swim on your own.

don’t toss away a life preserver just because other people think you should be able to swim on your own

I see y'all claiming to support mentally ill people while making fun of the homeless drunk who talks to himself.

I see y'all claiming to support mentally ill people while avoiding and making fun of the weird kid in your class who has too blank a stare, who speaks oddly or not at all, who comes to school with greasy hair in yesterday’s clothes.

I see y'all claiming to support mentally ill people while looking down on and making fun of unemployed and less educated people and adults who still live with their parents as if these people are personally at fault for not being able to fit into a system that wasn’t built with them in mind.

I see y'all claiming to support mentally ill people while going “he must be insane” when hearing about killings in the media, not thinking about how the faulty association between mental illness and violence aggravates police brutality and other violence towards especially visibly mentally ill people of color.

I see y'all. And I don’t like what I see.

It’s honestly really creepy the way biphobic radfems fixate on the sex lives of bi women. 

They can’t just say “bi women are attracted to men” or “bi women date men.” It’s always about sex, it’s always about how gross it is that we fuck dudes, how nobody wants to kiss a girl that had a dick in her mouth last week, how gross our pussies are for having been in contact with a cock. How we’re dick-worshippers and cocksuckers and bisluts. It always, always comes down to having sex with men, and it’s always just assumed that any given bi woman frequently has sex with men. 

There’s a lot going on with this gross trend but I’m too tired to get into it, I just wanna say that it’s really, really skeevy to me how obsessed people are with bi women’s sex lives. 

And to clarify, if any given woman, bi or otherwise, wants to be sucking five dicks a day or whatever people think it is we do, you know what? There’s nothing actually wrong with that. What consenting adults choose to do behind closed doors is completely their own business and is not a statement on their morality. 

But it’s just this absolute obsession with the idea that all bi women are, in fact, sucking five dicks a day, and that it’s a bad thing, and the assumption that all bi women–by virtue of being bi–have consented to public discussion about that dicksucking. 

It’s like people think by identifying as bi, we’ve given up our right to privacy and dignity and choice, that our sex lives are now acceptable fodder for public debate, a political statement open for criticism, by whoever feels like chiming in, whenever they feel like it. 

It’s disgusting, it’s violating, it’s dehumanizing. It’s a stone’s throw away from the “sexually available to men” rape apologist bullshit, and I’m tired of it. 

And just so we’re clear, cause I didn’t mention it bc this was mostly a vent post, but like: it’s obviously grossly transmisogynistic as well, given the fact that “has a penis” does not inherently equate to “is a man” but like, these are radfems, what do you expect. 

Genderfluid does not specify:

The only requirement to be genderfluid is having a gender that changes.

I think as a culture we have all forgotten that fandom is supposed to be fun.

It’s not that serious.

It was never supposed to be that serious.

Especially since most of the drama and hurt revolves around shipping.

All of the ships are fictional. Being canon doesn’t actually negate the fact that the ship isn’t real. 

No ship, or any aspect of a fictional universe, is important enough to treat another real life human being badly. 

It’s not that serious.

“No ship, or any aspect of a fictional universe, is important enough to treat another real life human being badly.” I’ve had the misfortune of encountering some people who really, really, really need this drilling into their skulls.

“No ship, or any aspect of a fictional universe, is important enough to treat another real life human being badly.”

Suggestion: Realize that you’re never too old for anything that fills you with joy. Just go ahead and do it, regardless of what anyone else may have to say.

Fact #461: You deserve to have your gender respected. No matter how “”weird”” it is or how recently coined the label for it is. You always deserve to have your gender respected.

Reminder that asexual ≠ desexualized

Desexualization is an act of stripping a person of their sexual agency.

For aces who also hold identities that are commonly objectified (desexualized or fetishized)… your asexuality is not harming anybody else. Affirming your asexuality can even be a way of taking control of your own sexual narrative.

It’s ok to be a black ace, a latinx ace, an asian ace, a disabled ace, an ace survivor, a fat ace, an ace woman, etc.

I’m a Chinese ace and I will never shut up about it

Friendly reminder that it is perfectly okay to use the split attraction model if you want to. Your identity belongs to you, and you’re the only one who gets to define it.

Your relationships don’t have to fit neatly into either friendship, qpr or romantic relationship labels. Some relationships have elements of multiple types of relationships, some fall outside those labels entirely, some shift over time or fluxuate between different labels.

when we talk about how people are allowed to learn from their mistakes, admit they were wrong, and grow to be a better person that 100% has to apply to older adults as well as young kids/teens.

there’s no age where it’s too late for someone to change.

there’s no age where once a person has grown past it they are no longer allowed to ever make mistakes or make up for them.

there’s no age where once a person has grown past it they are no longer to ever have any change in their beliefs.

change and growth are not things that only young people can do and they are not things that we should only support in young people. holding something some said 5, 10, 20 years ago against them when they’ve already apologized for it and moved on from it is just as fucked up if you’re doing it to someone in their 20s or someone in their 40s or older.

I think one of the most important things we can do, as we move beyond the initial surge of “ace dis/course”, is begin documenting our community history and circulating that information.

We are a community that’s been damaged, and we will need time and work to heal. A lot of folks came into the community during years of intense strife, fear, and growing shame.

Now, the community is beginning to pick itself back up again. We’re poking our heads out of the closet, and looking around to see if the dust has settled.

In the wake of all that’s happened, it’s more important than ever to talk about where we’ve come from as we decide where to go.

We come from a deep sense of community, from supporting and uplifting one another, and from a place of establishing traditions and finding meaning and connection in our experiences. Let’s talk about that, revive what we can, and move forward from a place of hope for our future and love for our past.

We already are! Just off the top of my head, here’s some places to start, if you are interested in educating yourself on asexual history (but there’s also so, so much more than just this): If you’re interested in asexual history, I would recommend checking out the Carnival of Aces on Asexual History as one place to start.

If you want to read a great academic review of early ace community history, you can check out chapter four of this masters thesis. 

Nat Titman (who was very influential in early ace community building and helped write a lot of early AVEN materials) has a transcript of their 2012 London worldpride talk that is also very informative.

See also several videos from other ace conferences: on ace and aro zines as history and community building from the 2019 NYC conference, and History of ace communities part 1, part 2, and part 3 from the 2014 Toronto Conference.

Hexaquark also made a visual timeline of early ace community history.

For more on asexuality in news media, the AVEN wiki has some cool places to start with pre-2000 and 2000s media collections.

The asexual bibliography, which collects research on asexuality, also includes some older works. For a history of ace history, this article is kinda neat,m and you may be interested in some of the bloggers highlighted. Also, if you are interested in starting up something more organized, or just want more people to geek out with, try checking out the asexual history interest group mailing list - while it’s mostly inactive at the moment, there are still new people joining every month, and I bet you’d find a lot of people interested in further projects if you shoot out a few messages.