bihets:
exclusionists jumping on thomas sanders or any other Big Name Inclusionist also need to remember that ‘are ace/aro people part of the lgbt+ community’ isn’t a debate for most people. it isn’t a discourse topic. the majority of mainstream lgbt+ organizations (glaad, the trevor project, hrc, etc) now accept and include asexuality, and the movement to exclude ace people is relatively small compared to the number of people who accept ace people as innately part of the community (on tumblr, anyway.) i’d wager a huge portion of the lgbt+ community on here doesn’t even know there’s a push to exclude ace people, let alone support it.
so everyone jumping on him, or on any other vocal member of the community like jeffrey marsh, for taking a Contentious Stance On The Discourse should realize that for the vast majority of the community, there IS no discourse. ace people are just seen as inherently accepted and that’s the default position. they’re not trying to Let Cishets Invade The Community, they’re taking a look around and saying ‘yeah, obviously ace people are included??’ because yes, for the majority of people not actively involved in this stupid discourse, it’s pretty fucking obvious.
something worth noting here, however, is that before asexuality was universally recognized as an LGBTQ orientation, you know who was against it being recognized in that way? Assimilationalists. People like Dan Savage who only really care about trans and bi people in a performative way, and want the LGBTQ community to be as much like straight people as possible. I mean, look at this shit. (Seriously, that last link was this awful corporation called fckh8 using a lot of rhetoric that exclusionists are now unironically using, like framing asexuality as a meaningless identity that people identify with for attention and/or simply the absence of sex / a detail about one’s sex life akin to masturbation info, and using arguments like “how are asexuals oppressed under the law”. And the first link includes a clip of Dan Savage saying asexuality is a meaningless/”unproductive” identity.)
(Oh yeah, and terfs. Terfs were actually some of the first people to talk about ace discourse in the exaact same way exclusionists do now.)
Most of the big assimilationalists I mentioned (like Fckh8 and Dan Savage) recognize asexuality now (which I’m not saying should be celebrated – as I said, they’re assimilationists, now they’re just adding “asexual” into the group of people they think should try to fit in with straight society), but it’s worthwhile to note that while a-spec folks haven’t always been recognized as LGBTQ, before the current discourse it’s been mostly assimilationists and TERFs who’ve been arguing against their inclusion.
(That doesn’t even cover the fact that I believe the exclusionist position to be inherently assimilationist even though most exclusionists claim to be against that sort of thing, but…we don’t even have to go there right now.)
