{"id":94491,"date":"2016-07-01T04:35:29","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T04:35:29","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/07\/01\/dear-lgbt-community-members-who-dont-think\/"},"modified":"2016-07-01T04:35:29","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T04:35:29","slug":"dear-lgbt-community-members-who-dont-think","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/2016\/07\/01\/dear-lgbt-community-members-who-dont-think\/","title":{"rendered":"Dear LGBT community members who don\u2019t think asexuality should be allowed \u201cin\u201d:"},"content":{"rendered":"

agent-moonshoes<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\n

I\u2019m biologically female, and I\u2019m not attracted to men. Society told me I was supposed to be, but it never happened, and I spent years of my life feeling broken and wrong. The other option presented to me when I was young was being attracted to women. I watched girls closely, trying to figure it out, but that wasn\u2019t working for me, either. Wanting to be sexually close to another person just baffled me. I swore everyone else was making those feelings up. But they weren\u2019t, and I got older, I realized that and it sunk in that I was just one big weirdo. I was in college when I learned the word for it, and had a breakdown of panic and relief. I can\u2019t begin to put into words how it felt to discover I wasn\u2019t broken\u2013that I was a part of a group of people who felt in their hearts and souls the way I did.<\/p>\n

Then came the process of coming out. My friends were a mixed bag, but friends you can pick and choose from if they aren\u2019t supportive.The vast majority of my friends were cool about it, even if they didn\u2019t quite understand. There were assholes, and one suggested \u201cshowing me\u201d I was wrong (creepy creepy creepy), but mostly my friends were neutral to positive.<\/p>\n

After some select friends, I came out to my family. <\/p>\n

My parents told I was wrong. <\/p>\n

It was like being run over by a truck. To this day, I can\u2019t talk about my asexuality around those I love most. It caused one of the only serious arguments I\u2019ve ever had with my parents (I love them and they\u2019re wonderful about 99.9% of the things in my life, but this is one place they weren\u2019t). I was told I just had to find the \u201cright person\u201d, and I would change. That I was too young to understand my feelings (I was in my 20s) towards boys. That I shouldn\u2019t put labels on myself that would make men not want to date me. Because god forbid men not find me attractive! Because clearly, from my conversation with them, what I wanted most of all was to find a man who wanted to get in my pants! Yeah!<\/p>\n

Yeah.<\/p>\n

\nIt\u2019s not really their fault. We live in a world where happiness is defined as falling in love, getting
\n married, etc. Not wanting another person in your life as your \u201cother
\nhalf\u201d is an alien concept. Media is flooded with messages of heterosexual normalcy, and now in very small pockets (hopefully growing, because it should! <3), a homosexual option for partnered normalcy. It\u2019s shoved in our faces CONSTANTLY. Our society and government
\nhave even set things up to benefit couples financially. <\/p>\n

Which is fun now that I\u2019m in my 30s and trying to save up for a future family, all by myself. And thankfully, even though they still avoid the word, over a decade later my parents do seem on board with the fact that I\u2019m not pursuing relationships and are supportive of my life choices to save for a family by myself.<\/p>\n

Listen. I am by no means<\/i> saying that I am oppressed as a person the way people attracted to same-gendered people are. I\u2019m not saying I\u2019m oppressed the way the trans community is. I\u2019m not saying any of that. But I AM dealing with a world where who I am is just not \u201cokay\u201d. Where who I am is wrong, where who I am needs to be fixed. Or, in many cases (most cases), where who I am DOES NOT EXIST. I don\u2019t belong in the heterosexual world. I\u2019m an outsider to it. But I\u2019m also an outsider to any world that involves sex and attraction. And as a youth, I had NO WORD to use to describe who I was! <\/p>\n

So when asexuals advocate for asexual inclusion in the LGBT community, it\u2019s not because we want to weirdly steal thunder from anyone in your community, or because we want false pity for oppression we haven\u2019t faced the way you have. It\u2019s because we don\u2019t want others to have to grow up the way we did. <\/i><\/b><\/p>\n

We don\u2019t want the world to continue not knowing about our existence. We want asexuality recognized publicly\u2013both so asexuals can learn about themselves in an honest way, and so non-aces see us as legitimate humans. The LGBT world seemed like the natural place for us to go to to ask for inclusion. The place where others might understand what it\u2019s like to grow up in a heterosexual world, as someone who is not. It\u2019s who I first turned to when I discovered the word for myself, only to find immediate pain, rejection, and even mockery. I was horrified.<\/p>\n

But I didn\u2019t give up. I couldn\u2019t give up. In 2005, I was in college and gave a talk at my university\u2019s LGBT club. They had never heard of asexuality before, despite being part of a huge liberal university. It was the scariest thing I\u2019d ever done in my life. I had to introduce the concept, and represent the entire community. And then answer a barrage of questions. Personal, personal questions, about my body, my life experiences, everything. And at the end, there was a long period silence. Until one brave person said:<\/p>\n

\u201cWow. You have gone through the same things as us. You said you had some pamphlets about it? Can we put them in our office? People need to know about this. I can\u2019t imagine growing up not knowing about homosexuality. As scary as it was for me, at least I had a word for it.\u201d<\/p>\n

I broke down crying and gave them all the pamphlets I had ordered. Many of them started crying, too. We became a blubbering mess in that meeting room. In that moment, I thought I had found a community who understood after all.<\/p>\n

Did I? I suppose that\u2019s up to you. But please, take some of this into consideration before you say that asexuals shouldn\u2019t have a letter in your acronym, or should make their \u201cown, separate\u201d community. We\u2019re unknown and invisible in so many ways, but nevertheless hurting in ways I think many of you can sympathize with and understand. It\u2019s not that we\u2019re attracted to the \u201cwrong\u201d sex or gender. It\u2019s that we\u2019re not attracted to the \u201cright\u201d one. And holy crap, the world just isn\u2019t super friendly or understanding to people like that. Like us.<\/p>\n

Thank you. <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

agent-moonshoes: I\u2019m biologically female, and I\u2019m not attracted to men. Society told me I was supposed to be, but it never happened, and I spent years of my life feeling broken and wrong. The other option presented to me when I was young was being attracted to women. I watched girls closely, trying to figure … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Dear LGBT community members who don\u2019t think asexuality should be allowed \u201cin\u201d:”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[1928],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94491"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=94491"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94491\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=94491"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=94491"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.merindab.com\/private\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=94491"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}