Ever since taking a deeper look at the Medium Article ace-exclusionists like to cite I’ve been toying with the idea of writing a rebuttal as just sort of a demonstration that literally anyone can write and post something to Medium, but instead of just doing a sloppy copy-paste like the original I would treat it like more of a final project worth 25% of the class grade. Research actually isn’t one of my favorite things, I much prefer direct teaching methods like you find in traditional math classes, so I let the idea simmer for about a week to see if it would go away. It didn’t.
Another reason I was hesitant to adopt the rebuttal project is all the community college campuses are closed because of Covid so I don’t have easy access to archives and databases which limits my pool of sources to secondary and tertiary sources. I wouldn’t be satisfied with that. If I’m going to put time and effort into a project like this, because it’s about my sexual orientation it needs as pristine as I can possibly accomplish even if that pushes the timeline back. There’s no real rush. The original Medium article, despite the blatant copy-paste format isn’t going anywhere.
Just to test the inquisitive waters I started looking at the section of the article I could address, the part about David. The original article referenced rumors (although it didn’t refer to them as such) about David Jay being homophobic and a misogynist, but didn’t actually cite any sources. Since I had already gone down that rabbit hole before it was just a matter of going over the tumblr posts again specifically looking for things I had missed.
Tumblr is both a curse and a blessing because even if the original blog is deactivated any posts that were reblogged are still preserved. One blog in particular kept popping up in my search as not necessarily the original source of the rumors, but was definitely an agent in passing them on. When I went to their bio I found a link to her book. She had a book. This was no longer a nameless, faceless person on the internet. This was a writer and activist living in Montreal. What am I supposed I do with that information?
Do I blast this woman on Twitter (obviously not)? Should I pass the information on to ace activists (maybe)? Do I include that information in my rebuttal? Is her identity even relevant or is citing the original tumblr posts enough and it doesn’t actually matter who actually wrote it? I guess the shock of actually putting a face to the baseless tumblr claims rattled me. This is why I don’t like research, the pursuit of truth isn’t about comfort and the truth is rarely comfortable.
A³ 
I can’t weigh in on the value of publically rebutting this article, but I’d definitely be cautious about spreading this person’s details to a wide audience, especially RL details.
Also, if she isn’t still actively propagating misinformation, there’s probably not much more you can achieve by focusing on her.
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I think you can criticize the claims without necessarily talking about who they’re coming from. If you’re citing their tumblr posts I guess you’re mentioning them implicitly, but you’re requiring a reader to follow the links and do their own due diligence to make a connection to this particular writer.
It might be interesting to reach out to the author, to see if they still hold the same views after however many years. Although, maybe that would just be a waste of time and energy.
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Do you need to see any particular papers or search results? I’ve got access to some academic databases and might be able to find copies of things for you.
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I really appreciate the offer, thank you! I haven’t decided what route I’m going to go yet so I’ll have to take you up in that later. Something that was missing from the medium article was they mentioned asexuality having close ties to the bi community in the early years and I heard bisexual folks mention that before but they never reference any sources so I’m probably going to explore that first and start asking around.
I confess I’ve been distracted recently because proud exclusionists have started organizing on Twitter, making flags and infographics, networking, ect… under the acronym ‘eclipse’. It’s just one trash fire after another
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