It occurs to me that my current Thing with the “ace discourse” community is at odds with my oft-stated opinions about antagonistic activism/activists needing to educate, not berate. On one hand, I do recognize the cognitive dissonance, but on the other…

These are all LGBT people themselves. They’re not outsiders. This is the exact same rhetoric HRC apologists used to justify excluding transgender people like myself. Not in the 80s, literally five years ago!

“Oh, I’m not saying they don’t have problems, but gender identity and sexual orientation are two different things. They should just build their own community and let us focus on ours.”

Except now, thankfully, most of the LGBT community realizes that’s incredibly wrong–in both definitions of the word. Unless you run a search/replace for “transgender” and stick “asexual/aromantic” in the same exact sentence, apparently.

This is the same rhetoric used against my people. This same rhetoric is what TERFs use to refer to us. This same rhetoric is what, in five years when we’ve all moved past this episode of infighting nonsense, will inevitably be used to exclude poly people, or whatever random part of our community they decide should go “get their own.”

The Venn diagram of “people engaging in ace discourse” and “people who should know better” is a fucking circle.