donnapaella:

Why do people act like oppression dynamics never existed within the LGBT+ community before the whole ace discourse ?

A few exemples that we all already knows but apparently everyone is ignoring it: cis people, even non straight cis people, have a privilege over trans people. Or a white LGBT+ person is privileged compared to their non-white counterpart. Or a wealthy one is privileged compared to their poor counterpart. Or an abled one, or an NT one, or, or…

There are numerous examples: there are oppression dynamics within the Pride, and many people are going to be in the same Pride as groups that oppress them in some way, without the oppressor’s legitimacy being questioned.

So when you claim a “”“”“"cishet”“”“”“ ace (heteromantic ace folks I guess, and aroace folks probably) is your oppressor, because they’re not going to be targeted for liking the same gender (but they ARE targeted for another reason, y’all keep in mind I’m trying to respond to exclusionists’ logic), you’re basically saying “no matter if you face an oppression I’m refusing to see, you’re oppressing ME by not being like me so go away”.

And trust me, if we all had to do that, trans folks would dump all of our asses.

They don’t fit in the hetero world, they face oppressions that are their own (I’m not going to list them because there are many other great posts about it and if you don’t know about it you just decided to ignore it) but these oppressions intersect a lot with other kinds of queerphobia (omg Donna wrote queer in their post, I’m calling the police), so, they belong at pride, because they, too, need that place to be proud of their identity and they, too, fight heteronormativity with us.

Do some of them belong to groups that are privileged compared to some of other LGBT+ folks ? Maybe, depending if they are white, cis, rich, abled, etc etc. But, again, so do many of us all.

Like. If we’re going to talk about privileges within the community, we’re going to talk about them all.

My own stance is that we don’t know enough about ace identities to make exclusionism justifiable. There’s been barely any academic work done about ace identities and what has been done has had flaws due to the lack of understanding academia has for non-straight identities (one study also looked at “sapiosexuals”…really???). There’s a concept in environmental science called the Precautionary Principle, which is defined as “in situations where we lack scientific knowledge, pick the stance that causes the least amount of harm” and that’s what I think the community should be following at this time. Meanwhile, I expect that once academia catches up to where the LGBTQ+ community is at that we will know more and people who have excluded ace identities will start to walk it back as they have with bi identities when similar research was conducted about us.