Everyone will think I'm crazy, but I cannot stress that an atrocity was done to ace and aro people, and we never got so much as a fucking apology.

I do want to say if you got caught up in this I don't hate you, especially if you learned and changed, because like most reactionary hate movements ace/aro discourse was always presented as righteous and fun, and also it was EVERYWHERE and the people stirring shit were very well articulated. A lot of us were teenagers joining queer spaces for the first time ever and we wanted to belong and sometimes that means hating who the people who already belong tell you to hate. I get why people fell for it, I came close a few times myself when I was at my lowest and most desperate to feel like I belonged again. I get it.

I can't offer forgiveness or absolution to everyone, but you don't need me to forgive you to forgive yourself and move on, and I do think most of the people who got caught up in it have more than earned moving on.

However, what I want is for everyone to stop downplaying it. Don't call it stupid infighting, don't go "ace stuff was one thing but this with trans men is too far" don't claim it didn't leave tumblr or the internet, own how bad it was. If you were there you know, and your history is valuable, so even when it sucks please be honest about what happened. This part of queer history should not be forgotten, and especially not for the people who never really changed and have an interest in making sure everyone thinks this was just some silly infighting.

That's what I ask, do right by us, don't let us be erased again.

Especially because when you forget, when you downplay it, you downplay what's happened with truscum shit, with biphobia, and now with trans masc exclusion. You downplay it and you disguise that it's the same people saying the same things about a new group. I found out about the rise in trans man/masc exclusion because I saw someone saying that trans men are collateral damage secondary to the real targets of transphobia, trans women, and I immediately knew the person saying it was a shithead I should NEVER trust because that is exactly what they said about bi and ace and aro people. Word for word.

You do those who were hurt a disservice when you downplay what happened, but you also make our spaces less safe because if we pretend what happened didn't we can't stop it when it starts again.

And it always starts again.

Reblogging again after seeing YET ANOTHER person say ace/aro discourse wasn't mainstream and didn't leave the internet. People got kicked out of irl queer spaces behind this, stop fucking lying about what happened. At this point more someone pushes the "ace/aro discourse was bad but not mainstream/offline/as bad as what's happening now with [xyz group]" the more I think you have a vested interest in making it out to be not a big deal and that doesn't say anything good about you.

Like y'all claim to be against oppression olympics, but you're still engaging with it every single time you say anything even remotely like "ace/aro discourse was really bad but nothing as serious as what's happening now" and I'm sick of pretending it's not oppression olympics and also not a manifestation of the continued violence against ace and aro people. If the only way you're going to talk about what happened is through downplaying our suffering and/or spreading misinformation about it, do me and every other aro and ace person a favor and stop fucking talking about us.

I keep seeing this get mentioned and I genuinely have no idea what era/etc this is referring to if anyone can explain?

I tried googling and didn’t really get anything specific.

For most of the 2010s the western queer community, under the influence of TERFs and transmedicalists, was taken over by an exclusionary hate movement targeting asexual and aromantic people as not queer and not welcome in queer spaces. This directly contradicted decades of queer as well as ace and aro history on top of just, reality, but that didn't matter. Many, MANY people were convinced aro and ace people were not queer and deserved scorn and mockery for thinking we were.

I don't have the time to pull together a comprehensive history rn but if anyone has any links they wanna add that would be great! If you have questions I can also try to answer them as someone who was there.

one of the reasons people feel so comfortable being dismissive of the harm it caused is that one of the core results of ace discourse was a mass re-closeting of ace + aro people. they literally can't see the harm it caused because as far as they're concerned the evidence doesn't exist. SO many people i knew, teens and adults, stopped calling themselves ace in public spaces because they were scared of being harassed and doxxed, socially shunned, or at worst sexually and physically abused by resentful bigots who now suddenly included their own queer peers. people argued with their full chests that being aro was an excuse to sexually abuse alloromantic people and that ace people were pedophiles because saying teens could be ace meant you were thinking about teens sexually (try and make THAT one square with any type of earth logic)

literally an evil event and i have NEVER seen a big name ace discourser take accountability for what they did, just a lot of handwaving about how cringe and embarrassing that whole period was and "wellll i was a stupid kid lol what can you do!" like if you genuinely cared beyond a vague sense that the culture no longer fully cosigns the stuff you did, you would be advocating for and protecting ace people. instead the craven shitsucking losers just moved on looking for another horse to beat.