/u/seaminglydreaming on Experiences of discrimination against asexuals
Mine's a bit niche I suppose but I'm aego ace (recently discovered, woo!) and I participate in fandom spaces specifically for anime/video game pairings. Ever since I was in high school and I discovered yaoi/BL (boy's love), it's been a way for me to explore my sexuality in a way that's safe and makes me happy. I didn't tell a lot of people in my life about it because not many people would have understood it. I'm also a cis woman and totally secure with my female identity. But people who are like me have been catching flack especially lately as gatekeeping becomes more rampant in LGBTQ+ and fandom spaces and I've been told I'm "not allowed" to enjoy these sort of things simply because I'm a cis woman and not a gay man. Aegosexuality is one of the umbrella identities that isn't really spoken of that much, because most people think an ace person is someone who doesn't want anything to do with sex whatsoever and has no gender/sex preferences. But obviously it's a spectrum. There's a lot of "How can you like erotic fiction if you're repulsed by sex, you must be faking it to feel special" and stuff like that.
It's gotten so bad that people even get death threats over liking things while not sharing the exact identity of the content they consume. I think a lot of people who are into shipping are LGBTQ+ even if they don't know it yet, because I was one of them and I know a lot of other people who found out they were queer because of the kinds of things they were into. Ace people in general are also harassed a lot in fandom spaces because they're deemed "not queer" so we're not allowed to consume queer content.
September 10, 2020 at 11:38PM
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