the way some of you on this site treat questioning people who are literal strangers is....hmm.....

like i hate to break it to you but some people will question their gender/sexuality for years at a time, and that’s no ones business but their own + maybe their partner’s if they have one and their new identity changes something about the relationship. people are allowed to bounce back and forth on two distinct but mutually exclusive identities that they feel equally drawn to, at any time, for whatever reasons they may have. and for a website with this many lgbt people—most of whom have previously thought they were something different than their current identity—there’s a pretty stark lack of empathy for anyone else in that regard.

i question if i’m actually nonbinary or if womanhood is just Like That basically every week. i’ve gone back and forth on whether i’m a femme or just a feminine lesbian more times than i can count. on a more basic identity level, it took me YEARS of happily-yet-slightly-uncomfortably identifying as bisexual to come to terms with the fact that i’m actually a lesbian. and while many people on here were incredibly supportive in my journey and whatever identity struggles i was going through, there was always a disproportionate number of clowns on here who thought it was not only their business but their g-d given RIGHT to intervene with their unprovoked clown commentary. i’ve seen it happen to myself, my friends, my mutuals, even random people on my dash i don’t know. i STILL see it happen as of recently, and it’s usually brought on when someone dares to experiment with a different label than the one they previously used just to see if it’s a more comfortable fit. as if that’s the worst crime someone could possibly commit, or as if questioning is any easier resolved WITHOUT trying on different labels to see how they feel.

if the fact that someone might need more time than you deem “acceptable” to figure things out about themself makes you THIS angry...that’s a you problem, not a them problem. they’ll figure it out eventually, but will you figure out that being invasive and entitled solves literally nothing?

Yes and also

Some people never settle on a label. Some people's feelings about how they interact with the world change constantly. And that's fine!

People evolve, and some frameworks only work for them for some of the time. Or they just can't find one that fits! I was so confused for much of my life, because I didn't find out I was allowed to be non-binary until I was 26! And agender for years after that!

Or they just like it! It doesn't matter! People are allowed to change their mind about who they are, how they see themselves, how they interact with the world.

[Image description - Images of the nonbinary, genderqueer, genderfluid, genderflux, transneutral and agender pride flags with the text: I don’t have to be more specific. End description.]

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[Image description - Image of the queer chevrons with the text: I don’t have to be more specific. End description.]

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[Image description - Images of the rainbow, trans, lesbian, nonbinary, queer, pan, bi, aromantic and asexual pride flag with the text: It’s fine if you haven’t always known. End description.]

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. 

(Image description: a dark background with a rainbow stripe along the right side; white text says “You don’t need permission to identify as queer. If you believe that queer fits your identity, then you are valid as a queer person.” End image description.)

macrolabels are, in fact, a thing.

I’ve started calling myself sapphic as my only label, not specifying whether I only feel attraction to girls, or one gender. 

my experiences with labels have been uncomfortable, like people are trying to squeeze a circle to fit inside a square box, and that’s an understatement. 

macrolabels can be just as comforting and mentally beneficial as microlabels. many people find comfort in not having to explain their labels in depth, and knowing they still have a place in the community, even if they don’t want to specify. 

know what one of the most crucial macrolabels in this community is?

queer.

i feel like this meme will be helpful

[Image description - Image of a boyflux pride flag with the text: Not too specific. End description.]

(Image description: a piece of paper taped to a beige wall with words in black font; the words say “It’s okay to use microlabels to better understand and describe your gender and sexuality. There is nothing wrong with wanting language to talk about your identity.”)

Blue, Sky, Navy, Indigo, cobalt, cyan, azure, sapphire, lapis.

I can think of nine different shades of blue off the top of my head we have different names for and there are many, many more. We give micro labels to everything, from colors to wood to cars because micro labels are useful and conducive to understanding. And yet applying them to gender and sexuality is supposedly a step too far. I call BS.

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.

“Your identity doesn’t make any sense”

It doesn’t have to make sense to you, because it’s my life and not yours. What I choose to call myself doesn’t affect you any way at all.

Fact: Bisexuality is the potential for attraction to multiple genders, not necessarily in the same way, at the same time, or to the same degree.

Pansexuality describes someone who experiences attraction to all genders, or attraction regardless of gender.

These labels overlap, but that’s okay, because they are identity labels, not a rigid taxonomy. Your identity label is something that you choose because it feels like a good fit for what you experience. Some people even identify as both, and that’s okay too! 

Daily Affirmation 636.

Being aro can be the most important part of your identity. You don’t have to value other parts of your identity more for the sake of pleasing others. Being aro is important, and you’re allowed to feel that.

Dear ace kids,

You are not being sexualized. If someone says you are, point out that adults–adults who should know better–say things like “Oh this infant/toddler is going to be a real ladies’ man/heartbreaker when they grow up! Just look at how well they get on with infants/toddlers of the opposite gender!”

That is sexualization. That is forcing a sexual identity on a child. Not letting you know that there is a word for what you are.

You are not sexualized. You have been given a choice. And if you accept it, just know that you’re appreciated and accepted back. We got you, budlings. We got you.

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.

Reminder to aros and arospecs that you are allowed to use whatever aro terms you want to describe your romantic orientation. It doesn’t mean you’re attention seeking, or trying to be a special snowflake. You’re using the best words you’ve managed to find to explain your own complicated feelings and that’s a good thing.