After The Events of Last Week, How Can People Still Maintain Aspec People Aren’t Marginalised?
“I don’t want to have sex with anyone ever” makes a lot of people angry
London Pride (not the beer!) took place on 2nd July 2023, just a couple of days after the end of Pride Month. Fresh off being the Grand Marshal for New York Pride, Yasmin Benoit was in attendance at the UK’s largest Pride event.
This year’s events took place in an environment of growing anti-LGBT sentiment, particularly towards our trans community with anti-trans laws, especially in the US (with Florida regularly making the news), growing by the day.
Naturally, the vitriol hurled at Benoit in the days after the New York event followed her home and carried on, mostly on the cess pit that is Twitter.
What was her latest “crime”? This tweet…
“Asexual people deserve equal rights. We deserve legal recognition. We deserve protection.”
If you’re not sure what Yasmin was talking about, the UK protects most minority labels under The Equality Act 2010. This includes but is not limited to race, ethnic identity, disability, and LGBT identities… all except asexuality. That’s what Yasmin was getting at. Her identity as an aroace is not protected in the country of her birth.
Further, it is still seen as a medical condition and treated as such. Asexuality is often presumed to be a mental health issue — a symptom of sexual trauma, or as a side effect of certain medicines (SSRIs and other antidepressants were most commonly cited in that thread). In short, it’s something that others presume we need to fix even when we are not and have never been on antidepressants, required therapy, nor on any medicines with hyposexuality as a side effect.
Currently, that tweet has over six thousand responses. I do not recommend clicking through to read them as much for your mental wellbeing as for the sheer number of responses. While there is plenty of love and support for Yasmin, there is also a lot of vitriol — and because bigots see a great advantage to paying for Twitter to get their stuff seen first, many of those negative comments appear first.
The TL;DR version is: gaslighting, mockery, aphobia, “but what rights don’t you have?” (a question that is answered repeatedly), medicalisation, comments about her appearance (especially her clothing). That wasn’t Yasmin’s only post that day, and it wasn’t the only post with negative responses, many of which she responded to directly.
What resulted seemed to be a relentless day-long harassment. I wasn’t even the target and it affected me mentally to see so much aphobia. I came out as demisexual almost a year ago. Seeing all that stuff aimed at Yasmin Benoit was the first time I truly felt threatened as an aspec person. It also dragged my mood down to see so much hatred and vilification for what we are — people who experience little to no sexual attraction.
All this was compounded by a direct personal experience of aphobia from someone who professed to be an ally
I tweeted “Dare I ask why asexuality is trending today?” (The answer is the thread from Yasmin Benoit that I’ve already discussed here) which led to a brief back and forth with someone who didn’t follow me at the time stating that she thought asexuality was a trend, that people were always trying to be different.
I checked her feed before she blocked me; it was full of self-proclaimed allyship of the queer community. It seems for some, such allyship is conditional and limited.
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More articles on aphobia and prejudice against our community:
