American Aces Weirdly Hostile Towards Australian Survey

The internet is very US-centric. Most of the popular social media platforms and search engines are US based so the US and its quirks are at times over represented in digital spaces. A side-effect of this is the bias that the US view is the dominant view or even the “right” view. Like-wise the ace community, which very heavily relies on digital spaces and communications, over represents US views, history and living memory when a more global understanding is called for. This is why I’m disappointed, but not surprised that the AACAU report was met with hostility from US-based aces.

“When I recently read the AACAU report on asexuality, discrimination, and violence, one of the things to stick out to me was a part that asks how come information on this subject is so hard to find. The reason this stuck out to me is because that information is out there, and work has already been undertaken in this area, and the report doesn’t talk about that. Whether or not this was an unintentional omission, this reflects (and contributes to) a gap in community memory.”

Coyote (2023, April 23). “Community Memory and the Search for Unassailable Abuse”. The Ace Theist. https://theacetheist.wordpress.com/2023/04/23/community-memory-unassailable-abuse/#more-30701

My first reaction to Coyote’s post was “OMG! I do remember Queenie! <3”. However, what I take issue with is Coyote is imposing our community memory onto the world and expecting the rest of the world to get our references with ease. It’s been a while since I’ve checked into the long-form communities, but I’m concerned that this is a bias that isn’t being addressed. One of the perks of a micro-blogging format is if you say something overtly bias it takes seconds for somebody to jump in and point it out. Without including non-US sources in Coyote’s blog post and reading list, I’m concerned that once again it is the US-centric bias that is winning in this debate rather than the credibility of the AACAU report itself.

Another example from living memory that I can recall was the drama around “Ace Day” where, if you’ll kindly remember, there was a disagreement among the global ace communities about what day we should coordinate our respective digital ace awareness campaigns. One of the suggested dates was a major European day of remembrance and therefore was not appropriate and the backlash about that simple fact was uncalled for, unnecessarily hostile at times, and perfectly illustrates the USness that is a legitimate problem if the ace community wants to truly be a global community.

Coyote says in reply to a comment:

“The group did not reply to my last email to them sent on April 16th, and I got the impression that they are uninterested in further correspondence with me…but I don’t have a reason to believe that my concerns are important to them.”

Coyote (2023, April 23). “Community Memory and the Search for Unassailable Abuse”. The Ace Theist.

And I have to wonder why??? What business do you have telling an ace organization on another continent, in another time-zone, in another hemisphere how to conduct their survey? I find it very confusing, especially since I also have talked to Kate Wood. The internet is magical like that and she’s lovely and a delight to talk to by the way (as seen here on The Ace Couple podcast) Kate said she would have loved and accepted “reasonable criticism” which strongly implied that the emails were probably not very tactful if not outright hostile. Kate also told me she is in the process make changes to the report based on community feedback. Coyote is welcome to approve her comments on the post whenever is convenient, so yes, the post has been seen by the relevant parties.

Time for a language tangent! It’s my favorite go-to. Let’s talk SAM (Split-attraction-model). By now, everyone’s read up on the history, checked the archived tumblr posts, and we’re all up to speed and all that good stuff. So, the last time I checked, I thought we had all agreed that it was personal choice whether or not somebody wanted to continue to use the term as a reclaimed term while the community explored other options. I believe “divergent attraction” was suggested but I don’t think it caught on because you can’t force language. Language is a very organic beast. Eventually, the younger crowd started just using “orientated”, especially with aroaces who felt strong non-sexual/non-romantic attractions. I recently saw “orientated” make the jump to older aces/late adopters and I was like “yes! it’s a thing now.” It’s kind of like how all my younger coworkers use the phrase, “say less” but it hasn’t made the jump to the 30-somethings yet, but once it does BAM- It has achieved thingness. Language defuses, it doesn’t magically change overnight (although it certainly feels like it does when your’re older). With that in mind, when I casually mentioned “orientated” in a moderately globally diverse space (twitter) I was reminded again that oops, US=/=World. There are still parts of the world where SAM is the preferred language. It’s on the way out because language marches on at top speed in minority spaces, but this happens at different rates in different places.

I love my ace community. This is the community that helped me figure out a very confusing time in my life and has helped me course correct so many times and helped make me who I am now as a person. All the kudos. I’m just really confused why some folks are getting uptight over another ace org’s business, especially if you forgot to leave the US-centric viewpoint at the door beforehand. It’s great that Coyote, who is a PhD student (presumably soon-to-graduate), is willing to advise people on how to conduct community surveys, BUT there’s additional nuance that comes with surveying minority groups that should probably be touched on- but that’s a whole other post for later because I have scholarly sources for that. Until then, check your biases please.

Post script: I’m genuinely concerned that people will get caught up in nitpicking that they overlook that community driven research is awesome. As an information science student being able to see in real time a minority group meeting it’s own information needs without needing academia for validation is a eureka moment. When we argue with acephobes in digital spaces we often rely on scholarly citations (not that the acephobes ever read them) but being able to point to community sources is awesome and I want more community driven research organized by and for the community.

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Carnival of Aces February 2022

It has been a ridiculously long time since I updated my blog because wave upon wave of covid variants tanked my mental health. As a frontline healthcare worker I needed time and help to recover from burnout. Recently I’ve been doing a lot better oddly enough because of my class load. Working on my master’s degree gives me something outside of work to focus on and the coursework is challenging, enlightening, and restorative. I really lucked out with my program and I’m excited to change careers. Anywho! We’re not here today to talk about my identity as a student (or are we??? oooo foreshadowing). We’re here to see if I understood the assignment. I didn’t have the time to look through scholarly articles to see if someone’s already thought about this take or something similar (they probably have), but I at the very least wanted to get a new post up and actually finish a CoA. For the past few months I’d start a post and then give up after a paragraph because, honestly, if I’m staring blankly at an open word doc, it might as well be my class writing assignment. So without further ado-

This month’s Carnival of Aces is being hosted by sildarmillion on the topic of “Can you conceptualize your identity and/or orientation in terms other than attraction?”

The half thought that’s been cooking in my head for a while now is, “No, seriously, what if gender attraction wasn’t a main factor in forming and maintaining interpersonal relationships?” As an aroace this is easy to imagine because that is the reality that I live with 24/7. Since I’m not actually sexually or romantically attracted to any gender, it is now an even more level playing field than if I was pansexual. Now that the possibilities are virtually endless, what are the determining factors I’m paying attention to when I form and maintain interpersonal relationships?

Firstly, I’m romanced repulsed. There are specific behaviors and western cultural norms in specific contexts that trigger my flight/freeze response. Someone giving me a rose and asking if I have any weekend plans is a totally different experience than a coworker giving me a bouquet of sunflowers saying, “thank you for all your hard work and being a team player”. One of those things is more culturally normalized than the other. Secondly, the first step to forming any interpersonal relationship is actually going out and meeting people. Whooo boy, that is a struggle. I could totally blame covid, but this is a major barrier that already existed for me because there have been very few points in my life where I haven’t been working full-time and in school. I am a cat person and liking cats is pretty much nonnegotiable. I have a bucket list vacation that would require putting my life on hold for a month and I would be specifically looking for someone willing to share that with me. The popular narrative is that even if a person is perfect for you in every way -willing to meet you where you’re at, similar life goals, similar tastes in pets, and so on- if the relationship doesn’t have “that spark” it’s not going to work out. However, whenever you ask, they can’t tell you what “that spark” actually is.

Here’s my hot take: The only reason I even describe my identity/orientation in terms of attraction in the first place is because that’s the only way to get other people to conceptualize my experience as an aroace. It’s actually kind of weird if you think about it because I’m basically using someone else’s reality to describe my experiences.

I see all relationships as an emotional energy exchange. You put time and energy into the relationship and get an emotional boost out of it. It’s not tit-for-tat, it’s more like the algebra formulas you had to do for math class because every person is running on a different emotional exchange rate. I like that metaphor more than the “love languages”.

My two favorite examples of relationships that deserve more press are the favorite teacher and reliable coworker. Hopefully everyone has had a favorite teacher who acted as a pivotal point in their life. What effort did you have to put in to maintain that relationship vs the emotional satisfaction that you got out of it? Is there a coworker that you know you can always count on? How did you maintain that relationship? Sometimes it’s as simple as the “Harvest Moon” method.

In the Harvest Moon games in order to build friendship points with the towns people you have to talk to them everyday and for extra points you can give them gifts. Failing to consistently talk to the town’s folk drops their friendship score into the negative and they dislike you. It’s shocking how real that is. If you fail to greet a coworker everyday they will notice and people will call you out on it. I have a “lunch buddy” who works a different department but we somehow manage to regularly see each other in the breakroom and say “hi”. I can just imagine the friendship meter going up one point everyday xD. In contrast on Saturday mornings the pharmacy intern walks in 30 minutes after me as I’m putting orders away with my headphones on blasting my angsty pirate music and so I end up “ignoring” her when she says “good morning”. It takes her a minute to realize I’m not intentionally being rude. Zero friendship points there.

Alright, so in a perfect world where I don’t have to whip out the Asexuality 101 PowerPoint every five minutes, how would I actually describe my orientation? I’d describe it by the relationships where I get the maximum emotional payout. For me specifically my biggest emotional payout has come from teacher/student relationships. The emotional high I get from learning is comparable to the feeling (I assume) people get from a blossoming romance. The second biggest emotional payout has come from family. Our family game nights are just pure energy and chaos, I love it. The third biggest emotional payout comes from myself. When I was in middle school I got really lucky and made serious effort to have a positive internal monologue through daily practice. The meanest thing my internal monologue has said all year was “fun fact, the KJV is still a bestseller and has never been out of print unlike your favorite Steven Chow film” Ouch, xD. Other than that my internal monologue is as fluffy as I need it to be or is the voice of reason that I need it to be. From what little I’ve seen about internal monologues, it’s apparently really rare to have a fully positive one and most are a string of negative thoughts and put downs.

So, to the rest of the ace community: When you map out all the interpersonal relationships in your life, which ones stand out as giving you the biggest emotional payout? What if it was normal not to define ourselves by what genders we’re most attracted to, but instead by the relationships we find the most emotionally fulfilling? What if we found ways to talk about and celebrate those relationships with the same energy that we talk about and celebrate romantic relationships? How pissed off would the “behavior = orientation” crowd be?

Carnival of Aces: Briefly Comparing My Communities Online

[This is my submission for the Carnival of Aces for February 2021 hosted this Month by Ace Film Reviews on the Topic of “Comparing Ace Spaces“]

My first introduction to the Ace Community was through the WordPress community in 2014. I was 25 and had just come back home to Texas after working out of state for two years and had finally ran out of excuses for why I had literally never dated. Well, obviously the answer is my interpersonal skills leave much to be desired BUT I had also come to the conclusion that if dating had been a priority in any way for me, I would have found a way to do it. So, the real question was, why wasn’t dating even on my list of of priorities? With that in mind I finally sat down and literally Googled “25 and never dated”. After skipping over a bunch of pop-psy articles that amounted to “don’t worry, your prince will come” I finally came to a wordpress blog by an asexual man.

I kick myself everyday for not bookmarking the page because I have never been able to find it again nor thank him. Part of the reason I keep this blog going is as a way to pay that moment forward. That man’s blog post means a lot to me because it set me on the right path to finding out that not only am I asexual, but I’m aromantic and agender too. Before that I was living and believing the lie that I was cis and straight “by default”. It’s scary to think it’s like I didn’t even know myself before that. Because of that the WordPress community will always have a special place in my heart as a place of learning and personal growth.

The next community that meant a lot to me was Tumblr. Specifically the chat created by The Asexuality Blog. I’m missing a huge chunk of history and discourse knowledge because I tended to avoid drama. I mostly used tumblr as a resource for writers. Every single job title you can think of was putting out lists of common bad tropes and mistakes writers make. Doctors, EMTs, MEs, nurses, lawyers, firefighters, *literally every professional* you might have as a background character had wishlists of tropes they wanted writers to stop using. Historians and scientists putting out debunk lists. Every minority group you could think of was putting out dos and donts and how to lists as well as answering plot specific asks. It was a magical time to be a would-be writer. I eventually left tumblr because the nsfw ban also nuked my *collection of writer’s resources*, but before that the ace chats gave me a chance to talk to real humans in real time and that was an important step in not only accepting that I was aromantic, but also an important step in figuring out I was agender.

One major difference that was kind of alienating between wordpress and the TAB chats was the age difference. Most of the aces in the chats were in their teens and I very much wasn’t. It just felt weird for most of the chat to be talking about figuring and setting into their ace identity on top of highschool problems (by which I mean absolutely zero judgment because high school problems are serious, serious business) and then I was off in the corner figuring and settling into my ace identity while complaining about paying rent, the ethicacy of tax returns, and debating the pros and cons of coming out to coworkers. Granted the chat mods were older and wiser, but they were there to moderate rather than counsel. I still owe a huge debt to the chats for helping me figure out I was nonbinary.

Another alienating thing about the chats is how amatonormative they were. Even the aro chats! I now know that I’m a romance-repulsed aro trying to figure out life and stuff, but people are constantly wanting to talk about how cute/amazing their partner/gf/bf is. I’m not anti-romance; absolutely gush about your five year anniversary, but sometimes I *just want a break* that doesn’t involve isolating myself from other humans.

Last, but not least, I’m now mostly involved with the Twitter community. It’s kind of a mix of both info dump and real time interaction. I’ve tried discord, but that gets too overwhelming. Twitter offers a lot of control over what content you want to interact with because you can save searches and mute words as well as accounts. Since the pandemic started I haven’t actually been doing the most “healthy” of searches since most of the time I’m snooping for content for @AphobeHottakes like a sleezy mag reporter. There ain’t no drama like Twitter drama. If you missed the tumblr discourse era, don’t worry, it plays out every week like it’s on syndicate in the Twitter stream.

I can’t attest much to the conversation about RL meet ups because the only other ace I’ve met in RL is my high school friend who stopped talking to me for other (and I’m prerry sure are perfectly valid) reasons. Even at 25 I still had a LOT of growing to do as a person and while I mourn the loss of a friendship even after five years, the only thing I can control is trying to maintain what I only hope an upward trend of personal growth. For now RL meetups are on hold because of Covid, but I maintain the hope that they’ll happen some day in the future.

Carnival of Aces August 2020 Round Up: What are you Hoping to get out of the Ace Community?

[If I’m missing anyone’s submission please post a link or a note in the comments or send me an email at lettredemarque(at)outlook(dot)com. I’ve been checking my spam box but life happens. Speaking of life happens if anyone has a late submission they want me to retroactively add I’m okay doing that too]

Greetings! This takes us to the end of this month’s Carnival of Aces and I’m happy to present our five fabulous submissions based on this month’s topic of “What are you hoping to get out of the Ace community?”

First of up we have Coyote, the author behind The Ace Theist here on WordPress, with “Directions for Ace Community Advocacy”; It’s a quick read that brings up several advocacy points the community needs to be thinking more about and individuals should probably be incorporating into their advocacy plans:

…I see mental healthcare as a key issue for the ace community for a number of reasons — because it can be psychologically damaging to be trapped in a sexnormative culture, because it can be difficult to access treatment for other mental health issues when anti-ace narratives stand in the way, and because “low sexual desire” is officially pathologized as a disorder in the DSM. For all these reasons and more, I think ace advocacy should be prioritizing therapy as an important area of concern…

Up next we have redbeardace’s post “Get Out Of It” about wanting to step back as an activist but not willing to leave the community floundering to repeat past mistakes or without a clear direction forward:

…For years, the primary drive has been visibility.  Shouting “WE EXIST!” as loud as we can until someone hears us. Okay.  They’ve heard us. What now? How about fighting singlism, pushing for better mental and physical healthcare, tearing down compulsory sexuality, inclusion in anti-discrimination policies, more and better media representation, sociological research that’s not mind-numbingly out of touch…more and stronger advocacy groups and closer ties/direct involvement with general queer groups, reaching all the people who are long past high school and feel lost and broken and confused because they haven’t heard of asexuality yet, and that’s just the beginning…

Moving right along Henry sent me a submission via email; “A Disconnected Past, and A Curious Present” brings the perspective of feeling unwelcome and disconnected to the ace community. This post actually reminded me of when Vivek Shraya (a Canadian trans activist) visited my college and mentioned that community spaces were some of the loneliest places she had ever been in and it was in the art community that she found love and acceptance. Henry had a similar experience and reminds that while there’s a lot of shared experience among aces, not everyone’s asexual journey is going to look the same:

…I had instead followed my fantastic side to a very different community. This other community is all about self-discovery and self-expression, and both is very open about sexuality and extremely non-heteronormative. Their art was the perfect thing to feed my imagination and my fiction writer’s pen. The friends I made were just who I needed. Not only could I talk to them about my imagination, but I could write very NSFW stories from it they would eagerly lap up…

lokiofjotunheim’s post simply titled “Carnival of Aces – August 2020” talks about being relatively new to the ace community, how they discovered asexuality, learning community history and what they’re hoping for in the future:

…I want other 15, 16-year-olds, 40, 70, 90-year-olds who’ve never quite had a word that fit to find that for themselves. I want people to not have to be resigned to (and I was resigned, heavily) living life as “straight by default.” I’m not active in the sense that I’ve done activism. I have my Tumblr, sure, where I reblog ace posts and sometimes add a comment or two on the occasional post. I’m in several ace discords, and I have my ring, and my flag but…that’s about it…

Lastly we have my own submission for this topic, “I am not an Activist” which is basically just me venting about acephobia for three paragraphs and listing things I appreciate about the ace community; namely it’s nice not to feel alone in my experiences as an asexual even if I don’t have the skills to necessary to carry the community forward.

Edit: Not your professor, I accept late submissions! Drop a link below and I’ll add it to the round up. Here are the posts that were added after Aug 31st:

Elisabeth talks about “Virtual Meetups” (click here to read part one of “Increasingly Accessibility” series). Your asexual movement isn’t inclusive unless it’s accessible. With the world in the middle of a global pandemic the logical thing seems to move meetups online, but that doesn’t automatically mean online meetups are fully accessible to everyone:

My biggest problem with the state of virtual meetups in asexual communities right now, though, is just the sheer amount of effort it takes to even find out about them. Most groups are set to private, so you have to already be a member to know what they’re up to

The Call for Submissions for September is already up with the exciting topic of “Manifestos”

Please help us keep the conversation going by volunteering to become a future host!

I am Not an Activist

[This is my own submission for the Carnival of Aces hosted this month by me, for the prompt “What are you hoping to get out of the ace community?“ I will be posting the Roundup on Monday night, Aug 31st, so if you’ve submitted something and have not received a like on the comment or a “thank you” acknowledgement let me know because that probably means that I missed it. If you sent me something via email and didn’t get a response please resend it and let me know in the comments here or the Call for Submissions post so I can be on the look out for it. Thank you!]

As the title says, I am not an activist. I don’t think of myself as an activist, I don’t call myself an activist, and I try not present myself as an activist because I am not an activist. I merely exist as an asexual (and aromantic and agender) person and I infrequently ramble on my personal blog (and admin a Twitter account that posts screenshots of aphobes being assholes on the internet, which is also definitely not activism).

The thing is just existing as an asexual person comes with caveats. For instance if an acephobic troll shit-post goes viral on Twitter (or tumblr or Facebook or any mainstream online media) you literally have hundreds of armchair pharmacists, evolutionary biologists, and psychologists swarming the comments trying to pick apart your existence based on what they probably remember from their high school biology textbook. LGBTQ exclusionists demand “proof” of your existence and “oppression” in the form of peer reviewed journal articles and hard science while hypocritically using PowerPoint slides that they’ve clobbered together based off of a preliminary study/article they either obviously didn’t actually read or obviously didn’t understand how the data was being interpreted because the orginal source overtly contradicts their claim. Then there are “well meaning” family members and friends who instead of listening to you as you share a deeply personal, core aspect of your very self and personal identity, they brush you off or offer irrelivant/harmful advice because what you are saying contradicts the status quo they’ve been conditioned to believe without question their entire lives. What I’m hoping to get out of the ace community is just a goddamn break.

It is completely and utterly exhausting to go through life feeling isolated, disconnected, and othered by every emotional support system you’ve build up, especially if you can’t fully trust the medical systems in place because of heteronormative bias on top of cost/availability. It’s almost like life decided to push out of a plane with just a spool of thread instead of a parachute and you just have to find a way to deal with it. Okay, the parachute thing might be just a bit over dramatic (again, personal blog, I can vent if I want), but just because I’m “complaining” it doesn’t automatically make my perception untrue or “out of turn” and it’s really nice to know that there’s a group of people who understand that. Day-to-day I’m really just hoping for bare bones, basic dictionary definition of “community”.

I am looking for a human connection that I literally cannot get in my regular life. It’s nice to have a conversation with a stranger who already knows what asexuality is. It’s nice to have someone who’s sympathetic to my crappy coming-out-to-my-parents story. It’s nice to know there’s other people who also didn’t realize until later in life that there’re more options than just “straight or gay”. It’s nice to know that even though I barely had the energy to put a new coat of gorilla tape on my car today, there are other people who are working really, really hard on the daily to make real, meaningful changes to laws, medical practices, and general awareness regarding asexuality. I’m not an activist, I can’t organize people, I don’t consider myself charismatic, I don’t know anybody important, but I do a pretty good impression of a warm body when the situation calls for it. It’s not much, but it’s also not nothing either.

[Carnival of Aces Guest Post] The Ace Community and Me: A Disconnected Past, and A Curious Present

This is a submission for the Carnival of Aces August for the topic of “What are you hoping to get out of the ace community” written by Henry:

I would like to thank Lib for posting this. Though you can find me in a couple places on the internet if you look for me, I didn’t feel any of them were a place to host this essay.

That fact is probably a pretty good introduction: you are about to read about my early struggles with asexuality, why I didn’t feel like the community spoke to me then, and why I am cautiously looking into it more now.

What’s it Like Running an Aphobe Hot-takes account?

Greetings! My internet is absolutely crap right now so I just wanted to do a quick post and the easiest topic I can throw together is about running @Aphobehottakes on Twitter. It’s actually not very exciting.

TW// aphobia because I will be showing some screenshots. yay. Fingers crossed that all of my screenshots still load after I hit “Publish”
(TW is short hand for trigger warning)

What are you hoping to get out of the ace community?

This Carnival is already closed and you can find the Roundup Post Here

Greetings! This is the call for submissions for the Carnival of aces for August 2020. A blogging carnival is where a bunch of blogs will get together and post about the same topic and a host will select the topic and gather all the links in a round up post at the end. Future host spots are open!!! To see past round ups or volunteer to be a host check out the Masterpost on the Asexual Agenda. The topic I’ve selected is “What are you hoping to get out of the ace community?” To see July’s roundup on the topic of “Renaissance-people’s experience with ace culture and how they have seen it change.” hosted by the Ace Initiative Center (AIC) the link will be HERE when it becomes available.

What are you hoping to get out of the ace community? This is intentionally a broad topic, but here some suggested ideas to get you started:

• How did you find the ace community and why did you decide to join? If you’re not an active community member, why not?
• How is your experiences in the ace community different from the larger LGBTQIA+ or other communities (ethnic, religious, ect..) you belong to?
• What are new activists doing that you think is working or not working? Who are your favorite activists and why? What have activists done in the past that you’d like to see make a comeback or you’re glad people are no longer doing?
• What would you like to see more of in the ace community or is there something lacking?

Submissions can be blog posts, videos, Twitter threads, poems, whatever, as long as it relates to the topic. Just drop a link in the comments below or send an email to lettredemarque(at)outlook.com. I will be posting the round up on September the 1st so please have the submissions in to my by then. Happy blogging!

That One Medium Article Acephobes Love to Cite

There’s a Medium “article” that acephobes like to cite as “proof” that Aces aren’t inherently part of the LGBTQ community. Throwing the link into the Twitter search bar is an easy way to get a block list going.

Twitter Screenshot: “This article does a great job at explaining why asexuals are not inherently LGBT”

Twitter Screenshot: “worldpride madrid is wrong”

Twitter Screenshot “cishet aces in our spaces put us at risk.”

Today I’m going to put this article under the microscope. Who wrote it? What sources did they use? Is it accurate or is it just a hodgepodge of tumblr posts spliced together to look official?

Capture the Flag (Why I’m Concerned about Flag Discourse on Twitter)

Before we get started we’re going to need some context. It began (to my knowledge) when the creator of the pan flag came out and said that they supported bi-lesbians and pan-lesbians. Bi/pan-lesbian discourse is THE divisive discourse right now. Basically two kinds of people might call themselves a bi lesbian or pan lesbian; a) someone describing their romantic and sexual orientation (like aces and aros do) or more commonly it’s b) a nonbinary person who doesn’t feel like either label by itself is an accurate enough label so they’ll use the double label in community spaces.

Nobody is ready for the conversation on how terms like “SGA” and “het” get really complicated really fast when you actually account for nonbinary gender diversity. Regardless a lot of people believe that double labeling is invalidating for lesbians and discussions tend to get heated.

In response to the pan flag creator supporting bi/pan lesbians, a lesbian (as the Twitter rumor mill claims) created a “new pan flag”

In what I would consider an impressive counter tactic, pan-lesbians reclaimed the new flag and dubbed it the pan-lesbian flag:

It was at this point that I had a good laugh at the situation and assumed the issue would be self-contained.

It was not self-contained.

Soon newflagitis started spreading to other communities:

screen shot: “new bi flag”

“New bi flag” with stripe meaning

The idea of creating a new flag for bisexuality after BiNet’s “copyright” stunt and the resulting backlash is purely nonsensical and I would have been willing to dismiss the trend as merely teen boredom from Covid restrictions-

But then it spread to the ace community:

Screenshot: “new ace flag”

What was alarming about “new ace flag” posts was the misinformation that proceeded it. Once the word got out established ace accounts mobilized quickly to target the misinformation, namely that David Jay didn’t create the ace flag (see my previous post about how acephobes can’t get over a forum post from 2003). The AVEN threads showing the flag’s creation and unveiling were shared and boosted and the countering short hand narrative became “the ace flag was a community project”. It was noted that changing the purple to a gradient made the flag unfriendly for commercial production and artists. The flag itself was deemed mostly harmless and a fad that would likely die out quickly.

Shortly there after infighting broke out between aroace activist Yasmin Benoit and Rose from FYA. The flag situation was set aside in favor of what was seen as a bigger crisis that needed to be dealt with.

But then it happened again:

Once again someone posted a “new ace flag” proceeded by misinformation. I’m not sure if this is becoming a thing yet since the “antisemitic roots” mentioned in regards to the original flag is that AVEN’s symbol IS A TRIANGLE. That’s one hell of a reach, but he went for it and doubled down. Once again ace twitter mobilized to tackle the misinformation and point out that the “new flag” was too similar to other flags like the demi boy flag and the freysexual/romantic flag. As BiNet showed us, if you’re going to start flag discourse you better be squeaky clean. Similarly, when this flag maker was confronted by community members he started spouting exclusionary rhetoric like “allo is a slur” and “cis het aces aren’t LGBT” and eventually deactivated.

Our concern in the ace twitter community isn’t that people are making new flags. New flags appear all the time. The aroace flag, for example, has grown on me despite my initial rejection when I first saw it and it’s now one of my favorites for merchandise and swag. What made the “new ace flag” posts different from the pan and bi flag posts is that the ace flag posts contained misinformation directly lifted from anti-ace tumblr blogs like “David Jay is a misogynist homophobe” and “the AVEN triangle is a nazi symbol” and when confronted they used tumblr screenshots as “evidence”.

We’re not worried, per say, but we are getting a little nervous because we don’t know if this is just the latest teen fad as a result of being lonely and stuck inside during the Covid pandemic or if this is a symptom of larger issue that could negatively impact the community. We don’t know yet, but we’re keeping an eye on it.