quixotic chaotic

Fact #529: Changing labels isn’t a bad thing. It’s okay to have been wrong. And it’s okay to have changed. You don’t have to stick to old labels if they don’t suit you anymore.

Just a friendly reminder that it is okay to change how you label yourself even if you’ve already come out. You only get one life, so make it as comfy for you as possible. The only people who refuse to even try to understand because it’s too hard and “confuses” them are irrelevant anyway. 

Your life your label.

You deserve spaces to explore your identity without having to navigate around people who hate you.

when i was 13, i thought i was ace. when my friend was, 14 they thought that they were ace. my cousin is twelve years old and already ids as pan ace. do you see the fucking problem?

why would a twelve year old think they have to id as ace? who told her she should already be thinking she’s ace because she doesn’t experience sexual attraction WHEN SHE’S TWELVE FUCKING YEARS OLD?????

literal children should not be thinking about this shit. and no, fuckers, this is not the same as figuring out you’re lesbian/gay/bi/trans young because none of those imply anything about sex!

being ace is literally directly about sex and how people experience sexual attraction! i don’t know how to explain to you people that pushing these labels towards children is harmful!!!!!

I’m going to cut in and say young children id-omg as ace isn’t the problem. The sexualization Of teens and children is what causes kids who haven’t felt those emotions yet (or never will) to gravitate to a label that they feel describes them

We constantly expect teens and preteens go have crushes and little boyfriends/girlfriends/etc. We push the narrative that everyone is losing their virginity by the time they graduate high school without thinking about those who haven’t or don’t want to.

Personally? when I was 15 I Id’ed as ace bc I wasn’t interested in any boys or girls romantically or sexually. And all over the tv eas teenagers and tweens at minimum having those feelings or being swept up in romance or sex. When I discovered the ace community, it was a comfort to know there were people who didn’t feel that. And having never experienced sexual feelings, I couldn’t IMAGINE ever wanting it

By the time I had given up on love and sex, I was 20.

THATs when naturally I fell for someone and did have those feelings. Was I late in that? Absolutely not.

I was so shocked to find his sexual experience was just as limited as mine— because the narrative we are told is that if you’re 18 surely you’ve fucked or at least agreed to wait till marriage with your HS sweetheart or whatever.

But that’s not the universal— or even common experience.

TLDR; aces aren’t responsible for young children feeling pressured to adopt that label, its our societal narrative that sexualizes children and relies on the assumption that All Teens Have Fucked

It is much better for a teen to misidentify themselves, take comfort in their label and remain safe than for them to push themselves into experiences they are not ready for. Society’s saturation of sex and sexualisation pushes that narrative so badly. So what if later they decide “actually that’s not who I am.” Like @bravebattalion, many teens who don’t have crushes and attraction are made to feel abnormal and wrong by media, dominant social narratives, and by extension their peers. If the ace label makes them feel whole for a while, then that is a good thing. If the community has something to offer them, be it kinship, feeling whole, or simple resources, and they identify with us, then they belong here as long as they choose to stay.

This confuses me because when I was a kid, I had no idea what asexuality was, but I knew that the dominant heterosexual culture I was in wanted me to have sexual feelings. I was assumed to be boy-crazy, to have crushes, to sigh over celebrities. I was supposed to want to sneak out of the house at night and hang out with guys. I was supposed to want to be found sexually attractive. My classmates sang about being sexy and wanted to know if I found them sexy. The lived experiences of tweens and teens for generations have abounded with stories of kids who feel pressured to develop sexually when they aren’t ready for it.

I would have loved to have a way to say, “Nope, this all feels uncomfortable and overwhelming, please count me out,” without implying I was babyish or immature. Because at 13 I wanted to be grown-up more than anything, but there was nobody around to say, “Some adults never develop sexual or romantic attraction and that’s fine.”

I’m not ace and wasn’t even particularly ace then; I just want to handle my attractions and relationships without a ton of social pressure on my back. But goddamn, how can you blame aro/aces for something THE PATRIARCHY has been doing, that they provide resistance against?

So I started identifying as ace when I was fourteen. That was… *whistles* Coming on thirteen years ago, now. Different perspective, I think–I’ve grown and changed a lot since then, and I have shifted in how I conceptualize my sexuality and my orientation, but I still identify as asexual. And I think having access to that identity so young was critical to me and the adult I grew up to be. 

For god’s sake, ace communities have been explicitly welcoming to folks doing this since I started identifying that way. It’s been a huge cultural point for my entire experience with those communities–including those I’ve personally shaped–to cheer on and encourage people to drop labels that stop working and pick up new ones and to particularly celebrate folks figuring themselves out. Whatever that means to them. This is not theoretical–I personally watched several people, including good friends of mine, decide that “asexual” was a label that didn’t fit them and choose to pick up a new one. They remained welcome within asexual communities as allies, people told them it was awesome they found something that fit, and just–that was generally a good thing, within those communities. That was and is an actual ethos. Similarly, a community concept that was and remains important to me is the concept that a label can change without having been wrong–the concept that labels are tools for communication, not prescriptive categories, and that labels might change 

Those were incredibly helpful tools for me as a teenager, in and of themselves. Like. Holy shit, you guys, I can’t emphasize enough how comfortable and good those concepts make coming to terms with your baby queerness and the general uncertainty and pressure of adolescence. You don’t have to be anything except what you are right now. You don’t have to want anything except what you want right now. You can be grown up and never want anything differently than you do now, or maybe things will change and other things will shift, and that is okay, too. You aren’t betraying anyone or anything by being something different. You don’t have to understand what you want right off the bat; you can pause and think about what you want before you go for it. You can disentangle love and sex and family and romance, if you want some of those things but not all of them. There are other people like you. 

When I was fourteen, having the concept that asexuality was a possible option was huge for me: it told me that I could be myself at my own pace, and I didn’t have to do anything I didn’t fucking want to, and if I refigured my shit later on that was all fine, too. The adults around me didn’t necessarily understand that, but that didn’t matter–I had reassurance from other people, including other adults, that I was fine just the fucking way I was. Do you have any idea how crucial that was for me? Literally no one else in my life thought I was fine as I was, I was getting coercive, horrible sit-down talks about my lack of interest in boys and my weird butchness from my parents and marginally less horrible talks about “you can tell us anything, we’ll support you” from random fucking strangers in my high school. I didn’t want to date as a teenager–I barely wanted to have friends!–and I definitely didn’t want to talk about anything, but I didn’t want to femme my life up or pretend to fit into heteronormativity, either. (Probably for the best; I am aggressively uninterested in most men, which is literally why I gravitated towards male friends in high school–it was easier to keep them at arms’ length.) 

Asexual communities were the only source of messaging I had that said that I didn’t have to be anything other than myself, that I didn’t have to want anything at all to be okay and healthy and good. That was so fucking crucial for me, and I can’t think that it could hurt for any teenager to have access to that idea, so long as they also have the idea that they can put down a label and pick up a new one the very moment that the old one starts being constricting instead of useful.

Which is why that secondary concept is so incredibly important in community, goddammit. 

To any people that think they might be aro/ace or on the aro/ace spectrum let me tell you something.

The moment I first realized I was asexual I was 14 years old. I was alone in my grandparent’s computer room and I read the definition online and immediately knew I was asexual. I did not have a moment of clarity or happiness. I cried. I literally fell off of the grey computer chair and had to suppress my sobs as I leaned over on the floor and pulled at my hair. It felt like I had just been given a death sentence. A guarantee that I was a freak and not something anybody could love.

Over the next year I tried to fix myself. I did things that I will not go into, but know that I inflicted trauma on myself. I hurt myself both physically and emotionally. More than once I wished I was any sexual orientation other than asexual. As problematic as that might have been, it was something I wished for. I felt like freak. I felt like there was something fundamentally wrong with me. I seriously considered entering myself into a sexual relationship to see if that would “help”. The very idea of it made me want to throw up.

Don’t do what I did. Do not. Do not hurt yourself. Do not put yourself in any situation that you’re uncomfortable with. If you’re not proud of being ace/aro yet that is fine. It is fine. You can get there. You can. I am 20 now and I love being asexual because it is fundamentally a part of me that is not something to be “fixed”. If you turn out to be ace or aro, Then you turn out to be ace or aro. If you don’t, then you don’t. And that’s nothing to be ashamed of. Whatever you are you are not something to be fixed.

I tell you this because I feel like I almost never see that side of an “asexual/aromantic awakening” as it were. Everyone else seems to have had their aha moment and been so happy. Finally felt a sense of community. It took me way too long to get there. If you weren’t relieved when you found out you were asexual/aromantic you are okay. You are going to be okay. You have a place in this community and you are going to be okay. You are lovable and worthy of belonging. If it takes you time to accept yourself that is okay. Just be careful. You are not something to be fixed. You are complete and whole just as you are.

Allosexual/alloromantic people can reblog. Exclusionists and aphobes do not interact.

If you are just starting to explore the possibility that you may be nonbinary, then it’s very likely that you will try to use labels that don’t really work for you. You’ll probably go through at least a few of them before settling on anything, too.

And that is perfectly fine! Entire species sometimes get reordered into different categories even after decades of that order being treated as fact.

Learning and harmlessly exploring different options is nothing to be ashamed of.

instead of assuring everyone that it “isn’t a phase”, why don’t we just assure everyone that if it is a phase it’s fine? it’s healthy to figure yourself out? because if we tell everyone it’s not a phase and it ends up being a phase, those people are going to feel guilty, like they stole resources or wasted time. It’s not bad to ‘go through a phase’. It’s a healthy way of finding out who you are. And if it isn’t a phase, that’s fine too. But if it is, there’s no reason to feel bad.

THIS THIS THIS THIS^^^^^^

Phases are how I learn things, cuz phases = intensive consideration of a thing. Then it gets less intensive but what I’ve learned stays with me.

Also, a “phase” doesn’t have to just be about experimentation or still figuring yourself out. Sometimes you feel totally set & comfortable in your identity, but it can still change over the course of your life, sometimes multiple times. And that’s okay!

you can take as long as you need to figure out your gender

i wanna give a shout out to all lgbt people who thought they were another identity before realizing they were something else. lesbians realizing they’re trans men, bi/pan people realizing they’re a lesbian/gay, binary trans people realizing they’re genderfluid, etc. even if you don’t know if your current identity is the final stop, even if you think it’s a “phase”, or you don’t know what label fits you best, you’re on a journey to self discovery, every step matters, it shapes you into the person you are or aspire to be, and you’re not fake or a bad person for figuring things out.

I don’t give a flying fuck what you look like. If you tell me you’re a woman, then you’re a woman. If you tell me you’re a man, then you’re a man. If you tell me you’re more than one gender or non-binary or agender or anything else, then that’s what you are. That’s your call to make, not mine.

If you’re not telling the truth for some reason, I’ll still respect that, because I understand that it’s sometimes easier to misgender yourself than to endanger yourself, or maybe you’re just not comfortable coming out to me or the other people around you. Again, your call.

And if the next time we meet you tell me you’re a different gender, then guess what! I’m going to respect that, too.

Possibly unpopular opinion, but honestly I think there really isn’t an age where you’re too young to consider yourself aromantic (and probaby ace too, to some extent). It’s a word I could have easily found use for back when I was like 10, maybe even younger. Aphobes can say all they want that kids are too young to feel nonplatonic attraction, but be sure to tell that to almost all of my old class, who were constantly wrapped up in who was dating who and who was kissing who back in fricken’ 3rd grade while I just sat there being so confused at why they considered these things appealing. And yeah, maybe when you’re around that age, those “crushes” aren’t the most legit of feelings, but whatever. As an aroace, my lack of desire to take part in things commonly associated with sexual/romantic attraction is as important to my identity as the lack of attraction itself, so… (not saying anyone who just doesn’t want to date or something is aro, but hey, if the label helps anyone feel less lost, I say go for it)

i mean a huge part of lgbt culture is the whole “it’s not a phase” and “i’m not confused" thing but that’s just not really true y'know?

like here’s to the people that have gone through countless labels, and still can’t find one that fits here’s to the people that have declared a label, but then realized that label might not be accurate here’s to the people that have to come out 1,000 times because their identity is constantly changing here’s to the people who are confused, and have gone through phases. you’re real and you’re valid.

i love all of you. you don’t have to have everything figured out to be lgbt

Honestly I wonder how many aces with sex drives actually thought they were bi/pan before discovering the term asexual?

I wonder how many aces thought, “huh, sex sounds alright, and I get turned on while thinking about sex no matter the gender of the person, so that must mean I’m bi/pan.”

Because for me, that’s exactly how it was - before I learned what sexual attraction actually was, that having sexual desire for somebody who WASN’T engaged in a sexual act was actually a thing, I thought I was bi simply because sex with any gender was appealing. It was the stimulation, not the person.

Same thing for aromantics interested in life partnerships/QP relationships, who thought that wanting that intimacy with somebody and not caring what gender they were.

That kind of journey of self discovery is just as important as feeling broken before discovering the terms asexuality and aromanticism; don’t let anybody invalidate you because of your past identities, or for having a sex drive/want for a intimate relationship. You’re beautiful and valid and so important!

Yes!!!!! RELATABLE CONTENT!!!

i hate the idea that a certain identity or community is “bad” because it allegedly makes people misidentify 

cuz ya got discoursers here saying stuff like “the ace community is going to cause lgb youngsters to misidentify as asexual!” yeah it sucks to like go by an ill suited label but thats no reason to condemn the ace community lol

and this argument is oddly reminiscent of when terf bloggers say stuff like “lgb kids are going to to think they’re trans!” (i dont care about what tumblr says about comparing discoursers and terfs; as an amab nb person who is one of the targets of terfs im just pointing out my experiences) 

anyway good post op