Asexuality is part of the queer community. Unfortunately, one of the many things it shares with the rest of the queer community is our tendency to make whiteness default and ignore the ways that intersectionality complicates and stacks additional challenges on BIPOC queer people.

There is a strain of gatekeeping who will say that asexual people don’t experience enough discrimination to be considered actually queer. Let’s all recognize that this sort of reasoning leads to some disturbing places quite quickly but also is never applied by those same people in reverse. Or at least, their marker for where “enough” discrimination begins always manages to include them, too.

Queer BIPOC people experience more discrimination than queer white people; queer trans people, particularly queer trans women, experience more discrimination than queer cis people; queer disabled people… and so on. Yet it tends to be queer cis white ableds making the argument that ace people aren’t discriminated against enough to call themselves queer.

Whether an ace person’s romantic attractions are het, gay, both, more, or none, the queer community remains for them what it has always been: an alternative to and refuge from the oppression of a society that wishes to hurt and coerce us all.

As this thread talks about, non-white people deal with additional, specific issues related to their sexualization and assumptions about their sexual behavior, and white spaces often can’t understand this; worse, we add our own exhausting issues without recognizing that being a sexual minority doesn’t wipe away all the privileges that come with white supremacy:

It's been around a year since I last said that the asexual community has a racism issue that it isn't ready to address and it feels like nothing has changed. The mentality of, "We're a minority so we can't discriminate against others" is so ironically strong, considering – pic.twitter.com/sc3htytDV6

— Yasmin Benoit, MSc (@theyasminbenoit) May 8, 2021

Yasmin Benoit, MSc @theyasminbenoit
that the ace community is and always has been predominantly represented by white people. Our online spaces are overwhelmingly white, or at least strikingly non-Black. The loudest voices and the most amplified voices are, more often than not, white.

They are the most palatable, the most relatable, the least threatening, the most protected and the least critiqued. Don’t let my tokenisation fool you. I’ve been on the receiving end of harmful, biased, and alienating behaviours from other aces, including from other activists.

I’ve felt targeted, dehumanised, silenced, and stereotyped, which hasn’t stopped me from working for this community every day but it has made me feel less comfortable within it too often. And as a queer, working class black woman whose volunteer work has been publicly –

recognised, I’m meant to be the privileged one. I say this for the black aces you aren’t hearing who have said the same thing. Don’t underestimate how exhausting it is navigating predominantly white spaces as a black person in your daily life and online.

Don’t underestimate how exhausting it is being a minority within a minority and never quite feeling like you fit anywhere, only to be reminded by white people in your own community, that you don’t. Don’t underestimate the pressures of the ‘job’ and how you only glimpse –

the surface of it, particularly for black people with a public target on their back. Don’t underestimate the role you as an individual can play in being able to make things at least a little easier. Not thinking you’re the problem IS the problem.

Being continously conscious, considerate and empathetic can make all the difference. We can do better. We need to do better or we won’t get anywhere. The asexual community is racist too, just like almost everywhere else. Let’s talk about it. Let’s change it.

And for the record, the only ‘Ace Day’ I acknowledge or support is #InternationalAsexualityDay (April 6) for the reasons I’ve just mentioned so don’t ask me about that. IAD came into existence for a reason.

We, specifically, don’t do a good enough job talking about our ace comrades publicly, so we need to rectify that. But we probably have never talked about/shared others talking about what it’s like to be a BIPOC and specifically Black ace person in society, and we have to do better.

Ace people can still have sex, including very good sex, including very kinky sex, and still be asexual
they may want to make a partner feel good, or enjoy other aspects of intimacy associated with sex, or enjoy sex as physically pleasurable but not necessary.

Other ace people are completely disinterested or repulsed by sex.

The spectrum of behavior can look more or less “normal” to other people, but none of it is better or worse, including within the queer community.

Some people will have identities, presentations, and life experiences that have involved them having more or less trauma than others, but that’s always so and somewhat obvious. It doesn’t do us any good to play oppression Olympics or insist on a queer quantum; it does help the people putting all these crabs in a bucket in the first place.

Anyway, Ace people are an important part of the queer community, have been here all along, and offer a lot about an understanding of sexuality in general which is more complicated than a binary of “hornt” versus “celibate”.