literally, nothing exclusionists do, and nothing you say to an exclusionist, will ever matter. nothing will ever get a response beyond “nuh uh!”
they’ll phrase it different ways every time: “aces are cishet. cishets are cishet. they just wanna be oppressed so bad. they’re literally not oppressed in any way. they don’t experience homophobia or transphobia. they benefit from homophobia and transphobia. they are lying. that never happened.
“you can’t use their tumblr posts as proof. you can’t use studies about them as proof. you can’t use every real-life org including them as proof. you can’t use our community’s own oral history as proof. you can’t use our community’s own written historical documents as proof.
“lmao i’m not a terf, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao i’m not quoting terf rhetoric, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao i’m not consistently attacking trans women inclusionists, i’m literally an nb lesbian. lmao our movement isn’t full of terfs, we literally called out a terf once. lmao how dare you show me a blocklist of hundreds of terf exclusionists to call out, I’m literally an nb lesbian.
“anyway the community literally started to combat homophobia and transphobia. anyway it’s always been lgbtpn. anyway it’s always been lgbt. anyway cishets aren’t lgbt.”
some of the things that canonically Don’t Even Matter and are clearly Fake News:
(Same study: A higher percentage of trans aces are harassed at work than of trans LGBQ people. A much higher percentage of trans aces have had to quit school because of harassment, than of trans LGBQ people. A higher percentage of trans aces have experienced family rejection, than of trans LGBQ people. A higher percentage of trans aces lack health insurance, than of trans LGBQ people.)
I had no idea about any of these facts. Have so far tried not to get involved but according to these stats it’s a lot more important than I thought
honestly, getting involved in Discourse is probably pointless. It seems like the only exclusionists left are people who are so invested in their beliefs that they can’t or won’t even look at other information; they just insist everything’s all lies, and make fun of it without reading.
But getting involved in supporting aces in whatever ways they need/want, or raising awareness among the rest of us? That’s always worth doing. 💖
i was talking to my bi ace genderqueer cousin about this and pulled up the post again and like….
i just want to highlight this part. This list is all from the National Transgender Discrimination Survey, which had a sample size of something like 15,000 people. Which is fucking huge for that type of study.
A higher percentage of trans aces are harassed at work than of trans LGBQ people.
A much higher percentage of trans aces have had to quit school because of harassment, than of trans LGBQ people.
A higher percentage of trans aces have experienced family rejection, than of trans LGBQ people.
A higher percentage of trans aces lack health insurance, than of trans LGBQ people.
None of this is because we are trans. If it were because we were trans, then the numbers would be similar to the numbers in the other groups. The difference between the groups is that we’re ace.
I need to point that out, because I’m pretty sure the knee-jerk exclusionist reaction to this would be “but they’re trans, so it is just because they’re trans.”
And it’s not a surprising difference. It parallels what happens when studies of things like suicide, poverty, et cetera, in gay+bi vs straight people, actually separate out the gay and bi people. It always turns out that the bi people have the highest rates of whatever is being studied.
This is just the same thing happening again. The groups that get the least attention have the worst outcomes, gosh gee I wonder how that could be… and then that makes it harder for us to advocate for ourselves, which continues the vicious cycle.
basically, a lot of exclusionists have seized upon Pride Month as a great time to double down on claiming that “aces aren’t oppressed in any way”
this list is my gift to everyone who sees those posts and has to be like, “I mean, we might not die or be kicked out or assaulted for being ace, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy” or “so we should take a backseat, but we deserve to be in the car”
print it out, crumple it into a ball, and throw it at an exclusionist today!
It’s interesting hearing ppl be anti-ace in pride month bc I think a lot of people think about ace spectrum as just, not being interested, and that it therefore affects your life to the same degree as not being interested in like, horror movies or a new AAA game might. That it’s a simple “opt-out” of any sort of sexual experience or identity altogether, rather than another set of complex interactions with a highly regimented, scripted societal concept of “normal,” e.g. hetero nuclear family with clear gender roles
You’d think for a community that focuses so much on the topic of representation in media, it would be a little more obvious that like…in almost every story, romantic/sexual love comes up as a theme or sideplot, and in many of them, it’s presented as a critically important key to happiness or success. As a culture, we recognize that anytime a character is in the same room as another character with the chance for there to be sexual tension, then that sexual tension p much automatically exists by default (assumed straight, but if the character’s label is revealed as gay,etc., follows accordingly). When the lead guy meets a woman with more than a few speaking lines and a meaningful interaction, they are a Romantic Sideplot, to the point where a lot of romantic writing is frankly lazy or forced-feeling simply bc it relies on ppl expecting it as default.
And the thing is, that sort of interaction follows you in real life in a lot of ways. It often feels like meeting people starts with the benchline of “am I or can I become sexually/romantically interested in you?” before moving down the lines of other ways to relate. And while I personally never really fell in the “I’m broken, I need fixed” mentality regarding my sexuality (demi-, to be clear), I have felt alienated or kept at a distance in the process of trying to disengage with this unspoken norm, to the point of it kind of becoming my default. As I’ve gotten older, it’s gotten more pressing, and it feels like many spaces for adults come with the caveat of being related to potential sexual/romantic availability
And it’s hard coming to terms with the fact that the world has designated the “most important relationship” as something that’s counter to you in some essential way. Like it’s a bit of a cruel realization to recognize that you’re probably always going to be playing second fiddle or be a step down in status to the people you view as most important to you because your relationship with them is not sexual or romantic. Being ace-spectrum is not opting-out of wanting meaningful relationships, but it sometimes comes with the resignation that you may have to accept that.
But that’s why representation and community matter. There’s a lot more discussion about things like queerplatonic relationships, about very meaningful but non-sexual ways of relating to others, and it’s awesome to see it come up in media, even if it’s just fanfiction. The notion that something like love, or more specifically, devotion, loyalty, commitment, accountability, compassion, or the act of cherishing/being cherished, can still exist for you outside of the realm of romantic or sexual situations, is something I think everyone deserves to see and understand. And I think that’s worth including in the discussion alongside other LGBTQ+ topics
“Like it’s a bit of a cruel realization to recognize that you’re probably always going to be playing second fiddle or be a step down in status to the people you view as most important to you because your relationship with them is not sexual or romantic.”
“As goes popular imagination, so goes belief, and so goes behavior. Which fictions we choose to elevate matters. I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.” I realized that that scenario is just something I have never been afraid of. And at the same moment, I noticed that the people who are terrified of machine super-intelligence are almost exclusively white men. I don’t think anxiety about AI is really about AI at all. I think it’s certain white men’s displaced anxiety upon realizing that women and people of color have, and have always had, sentience, and are beginning to act on it on scales that they’re unprepared for. There’s a reason that AI is almost exclusively gendered as female, in fiction and in life. There’s a reason they’re almost exclusively in service positions, in fiction and in life. I’m not worried about how we’re going to treat AI some distant day, I’m worried about how we treat other humans, now, today, all over the world, far worse than anything that’s depicted in AI movies. It matters that still, the vast majority of science fiction narratives that appear in popular culture are imagined by, written by, directed by, and funded by white men who interpret the crumbling of their world as the crumbling of the world.”
As goes popular imagination, so goes belief, and so goes behavior. Which fictions we choose to elevate matters.
I want to draw especial attention to the treatment of AI—artificial intelligence—in these narratives. Think of Ex Machina or Blade Runner. I spoke at TED two years in a row, and one year, there were back-to-back talks about whether or not AI was going to evolve out of control and “kill us all.” I realized that that scenario is just something I have never been afraid of. And at the same moment, I noticed that the people who are terrified of machine super-intelligence are almost exclusively white men. I don’t think anxiety about AI is really about AI at all. I think it’s certain white men’s displaced anxiety upon realizing that women and people of color have, and have always had, sentience, and are beginning to act on it on scales that they’re unprepared for. There’s a reason that AI is almost exclusively gendered as female, in fiction and in life. There’s a reason they’re almost exclusively in service positions, in fiction and in life. I’m not worried about how we’re going to treat AI some distant day, I’m worried about how we treat other humans, now, today, all over the world, far worse than anything that’s depicted in AI movies. It matters that still, the vast majority of science fiction narratives that appear in popular culture are imagined by, written by, directed by, and funded by white men who interpret the crumbling of their world as the crumbling of the world.
Sometimes, a work relies on having the privileged group as certain members of the cast. Diversifying those works/roles? A terrible idea.
Lord of the Flies is a critique on the assumption rich white boys are the panicle of civilized behaviour. Rebooting it with an all-female cast misses the point.
Heathers is a story of how a clique of rich white girls run a school. Rebooting it with an all-marginalized group of Heathers misses the point.
While my list of works that are super bad ideas is short, since 1- Hollywood has only recently decided to expand their cast away from white bread (let me know if you have more!) and 2- I tend to try and forget bad examples, these ideas point to a very, very troubling trend:
Taking works whose whole point is lampooning privilege and assuming they’d work the same way if you removed the core concept.
If we actually reached parity between marginalized representation and privileged representation, those types of reboots might be safe ground to tread on. But right now marginalized people are still very much marginalized, and as a result their cultural systems are different from the privileged group.
Rich white people have a wildly different frame of reference from rich black people. A rich black person will usually have a living relative who wasn’t allowed to own a house in a certain area because of skin colour, or whose parents weren’t allowed to. Meanwhile, even a new-money white person doesn’t have the recent historical racist barriers that actively tried to prevent their upward mobility.
The two groups are going to think about money differently. While both can flaunt it for the same reasons— it’s new, and they want to show it off— the sheer amount of ex-legal baggage a black person is carrying around is something I can’t speak about, but know is there.
If you’re starting to think about tossing in a little diversity into your cast, look very hard at the social structures you’ve put in place. Are the villains relying on wealth? Social power? How about the ability to act with impunity? All of those are highly tied to privilege— the type of privilege somebody marginalized simply would not have.
It’s different if you’re doing a single-marginalized-group cast. Black Panther doesn’t suffer from having rich and power-hungry black people as villains because there’s a bunch of rich heroic black people as protagonists, to name one example. In those situations, you’re dealing with equals. The same thing would apply in a secondary world fantasy where everyone in the cast is of the same or similar ethnic groups, or if you had a group of characters who all shared the same axis of oppression in general.
It’s also different if the power structures don’t rely on privilege. All female Ghostbusters? Awesome, because Ghostbusters was primarily about stopping ghosts. The amount of black girls and women in A Wrinkle in Time? Lovely, because we need more stories where the important figures are not white.
But if you’re recreating any sort of power imbalance where one group relies on privilege, and you have multiple ethnic groups in the cast ? Take a good hard look at making too many villains marginalized, especially if they’re kingpins within the organization. Also consider what they can get away with, and if they have to use different tactics from the privileged villains; chances are, they’ll have to.
This applies for both works set in the real world and in secondary world fantasy. Because secondary world fantasy is still read in the real world, and you can reinforce some extremely toxic ideals if you recreate real world marginalization.
Sometimes, diversity is a very bad thing. Keep that in mind when deciding what group plays what role.
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when you take a story about attacking privilige and remove the privilige, it just looks like an attack.
