Something I've often seen is people asking "What's the point of asexual advocacy? What could ace people even want?"

Lots of things! And they usually overlap with the larger goals of queer/LGBTQ+ advocacy.

Time for an ace week thread!

Note: I'll often see those against including asexuals in the community frame this as a matter of legal rights (For the US, usually they're referring to same-gender marriage).

While the "legal rights" framework does incorporate some things that impact asexuals (e.g. employment discrimination), it doesn't address social stigma or how socially engrained heteronormitivity is.

For instance, "legal rights" doesn't cover anti-suicide work.

One of the main goals of asexual advocacy as well as the LGBTQ+/Queer community is to combat heteronormativity.

Regardless of romantic orientation, asexuals are not heterosexuals, and heteronormativity seeks to enforce heterosexuality as the norm.

I am both asexual and lesbian, and I've experienced stigma around both identities.

Heteronormativity has expectations for how we'll exist and live our lives (and this ties a lot into gender and expectations for everyone to be a binary cis person).

Asexuality threatens those expectations both for not meeting the "norms" and in it's alignment with the larger LGBTQ+/Queer community.

Heterosexuality is the societal "norm," asexuality is not.

The asexual advocate Yasmin Benoit receives a lot of harassment when she posts in those LGBTQ+ Sunday hashtags, and I'll go through and block people.

The same homophobes who harass lesbian, gay, bi, and trans people also harass Yasmin Benoit.

I clearly remember one of them decrying asexuality as a sin and someone asking "exactly what about it do you think is a sin?"

The response? "Promoting the rainbow agenda."

To accept asexuality is to accept sexual orientations beyond heterosexual, which is why I think homophobes so often hate asexuality as well.

Note: Another reason that asexuality is sometimes referred to as a "sin" is the "be fruitful and multiply" bit of the Bible. I mean, I don't think that's the root reason they're calling it a sin, I think that's the bit of scripture they're using to support their bigotry.

Another note: The harassment Yasmin Benoit receives has a lot to do with her race and gender as well as her orientation.

The combination of heteronormitivity and patriarchy assumes cis men are sexually entitled to women (from what I've seen, both cis and trans women)

A lot of the harassment Yasmin Benoit receives is blatantly racist (slurs), but I think the "cis men are sexually entitled to women" is also intersecting with the white supremacist assumption that black women should be sexually available to white men.

I'm a white asexual woman and obviously not the best person to speak about the experiences of black asexual women, but I thought the way patriarchy, heteronormitivity and white supremacy were intersecting was important to point out!

If you want to know more about this topic, here are some essays by black asexual women: https://coolcurrybooks.tumblr.com/post/622588360336277506/librarycards-coolcurrybooks-three-essays-by

If you're wanting to talk about how the combination of patriarchy + heteronormativity impacts queer women, please remember that "not sexually available to cis men" often impacts ace women as well as lesbians.

I'll see this (and corrective rape) treated as lesbian-exclusive when it's very much not! These effect asexual women as well.

(signed someone who is both asexual and lesbian)

I'm talking a lot here about the experiences of asexual women, since that's my experience, but obviously ace men and nonbinary aces are impacted in various ways as well.

Similarly, experiences vary by location/culture, and my experience is someone who lives in the US.

Back to the main topic, combating heteronormativity ties into pretty much every "goal" of asexual advocacy. Decreasing stigma, increasing awareness, ending medicalization -- all of these derive from the assumption that everyone "should" be heterosexual.

I'm not going to go too much into medicalization here, since I covered it in a previous thread. Essentially, asexuality is medicalized in a similar way as homosexuality and bisexuality once were (not that they aren't sometimes still) https://twitter.com/coolcurrybooks/status/1271969276145123329

In my thread on medicalization, I mostly stuck to difficulties with mental health treatment, but it impacts reproductive treatment as well.

Are you comfortable telling a doctor that you're asexual? I'm usually not.

Oh and fun fact: I've had my hormones checked for non-asexuality reasons, and there's nothing concerning.

(Asexual people are often told our sexual orientation is a hormonal problem)

Increased awareness and acceptance is important for pretty much all Queer/LGBTQ+ related advocacy, but "increased awareness" is especially important for asexuality.

Not many people know that asexuality exists.

A common experience is for ace people to struggle with self acceptance and feelings of being "broken" or like there's something wrong with them.

It's important to get the message out that:
1. Asexuality exists
2. There's nothing wrong or "broken" about being asexual

Additionally, it's hard to say "I'm asexual" when people don't know what asexuality is! Ace people are constantly put in the position of having to explain what our own sexual orientation means.

This is one of the reasons that asexuality's inclusion in the Queer/LGBTQ+ community is important. We share goals such as combating heternormitive assumptions, and it makes sense to support each other and share resources.

See the Trevor Project including asexuality -- feelings of "I think I'm not heterosexual and that must mean there's something wrong with me" isn't the sole experience of lesbian/bi/gay/pan teens but impacts ace teens as well.

Any one of the individual "letters" under the community umbrella might not have the strength, visibility, or resources to do something like run a suicide-prevention charity. So we pool resources and support each other. Shared community is strength!

Switching gears, something that impacts asexuality more than most other sexual orientations is the way sex is seen as a critical part of romantic relationships and how both are vital to a happy life... and sometimes lack of interest in them is seen as "inhuman."

The social expectations around sex, romance, relationships say that a sexual romantic relationship is more significant than "just friendship."

There's also the expectation of monogamy (some of what I'm talking about here also impacts polyam people).

The "one important sexual romantic relationship" becomes socially and legally codified into marriage. See the entire concept of "consummation".

In the Western culture I live in, we have centuries of society telling us that --

1. The only important life partnership is marriage
2. Marriage inherently includes sex.

Obviously, "marriage" was also defined in strict heterosexual terms for centuries.

For the most part, this impacts ace people in ways I've already discussed regarding self worth and stigma.

But there are legal ramifications as well.

The US government doesn't usually go around enquiring if married couples are having sex...

unless immigration is involved. Then they are concerned about proving it's a "real" marriage.

See the problem with "real" marriage being defined as sexually active?

And what about asexual people who aren't married to their significant partner(s)? Can they visit them in the hospital? Can they adopt children together?

Not everyone is comfortable engaging with marriage, but marriage is a legal institute as much as a social one.

I do believe that this is an issue for the larger queer community in addition to the asexual one.

In particular, I think of the history of queer people living together as a family and sometimes raising children together, not in a traditional heteronormative marriage.

I think this type of living situation is not as common in the modern-day, but existing counter to heteronormative, monogamous marriage has looong been a part of queer history and community.

The reason that legal same-gender marriage is so important is because of how it grants increased access to the legal rights and protections associated with marriage.

I'm absolutely NOT saying that legal same-gender marriage isn't important. It is.

What I'm saying is that marriage is also a way of legally codifying and granting priority to certain types of relationship structures, and we should consider people who fall outside those.

These aren't all of the issues impacting asexual people (or the ways that these issues tie to the larger Queer/LGBTQ+ community), but they're the main ones that occur to me.

If you're asexual, you can absolutely use this thread as a jumping off point to talk about your own experiences or what changes you want to see to society.

If you're not asexual, I hope this thread has proved educational in some way!

Ah! I brought up employment discrimination in the third tweet and didn't mention it again.

Anyway, "no discrimination based on sexual orientation" is another thing on the "asexual agenda" that isn't asexual-only.