#my relationship with sex is fluid. im sex-positive always‚ but i often find myself sex repulsed. im otherwise neutral about it but im sick

[gayvampyr]

“queer spaces should be inclusive of people who don’t enjoy sex and who have “strange”, negative or repulsed relationships with sex” and “sex is an important aspect of lgbt community, history, and activism and queer people should be allowed and able to talk freely about sex without stigma or shame” are ideas that can and should coexist.

[ayy-spec]

Anything to Add?

The final question in this survey was a write-in section for people to leave any additional comments. 113 people responded.

Important/Particularly Interesting Comments

• I hope this goes well for you because you seem nice and if you have any advice for new to the community 15 year olds like me, don't be afraid to share because I'm trying to embrace my sexuality as much as possible but it can be hard when I don't know where to go or turn to to find what I'm supposed to do and where to ask questions and just fully embrass this part of me and it can be hard when I don't even know many if any aspecs so representation is great and it is helpful to hear your experiences and how you handle certain parts, so just keep doing what your doing because it is making a difference [note: 🥺🥺😭]

• i often consider myself more as just aroace rather than aro and ace seperately so i prefer seeing the blue and orange aroace flag over the individual aro and ace flags

• I don't really shorten my identity often with aroace, only when im feeling very romance repulsed and its been a while since I felt romantic attraction. I am a pan-demiromantic asexual. My pan label makes me feel more connected to the lgbt+ community bc it feels like my nonbinary and intersex status doesn't count either. I know I belong in the queer community, but the lgbt+ community is so sexual orientation focused.

• Thank you for having a wide variety of labels to choose from in the options!! I don't see the term aegoromantic very often on things, it feels nice to be known I guess haha

• Thank you for this, i recently started thinking about being in arospec and it was so relieving, all this time i thought something was wrong or maybe i was broken. I'm still trying to learn more about it, and I'm grateful for people willing to teach and help

• didn't realize I hadn't experienced sexual attraction until I finally did and was like "OH, no wonder all my other relationships felt like I was playing pretend"

• I dont often tell people I'm gray aroace. Not because of shame or it not being "as important" (I'm a gay trans dude) but I think because I just feel its a very intimate part of myself, as well as my romanticism and sexuality (in terms of like asexuality) feeling as though it doesn't always need a label. I'm fine just being myself most of the time, a lot of labels can be tricky for myself I think. I'm happy the label exists nonetheless though because Its nice to know I'm not the only one who feels like this.

• I'm queer! But if I'm getting down to the bones of it, I'm pan/ace. Still relearning how to be proud of that, after The Grand Clusterfuck years back.

• even though I would be considered to have an alloromantic orientation, alloace isn't really a term I feel any strong connection or attachment to

• i'd like to add that i do consider myself alloaro and use that label openly but i'd also not consider myself 100% allosexual. i'm questioning my sexuality but even if i do end up feeling more solidly ace-spec i'd still use the alloaro label

• Idk who else does this or if this is interesting enough to write down, but I thought I would! I use Aroace as a label. Other, smaller labels inside that would probably fit me better! Aroace feels too big, like it doesn't *really* define exactly who I am. But at the same time, I prefer using it because more people know what Aroace means (at least compared to myrromantic and myrsexual). I use Aroace so the public can define me. I don't typically use it around my close friends 'cause they already know my idiosyncrasies and where I really am. They already made their own definitions for me, so I don't have to make one for them!

• I'm still figuring myself out, so I leave myself at the blanket terms and hopefully everything'll work out in the end

The rest of the responses are below:

Comments Alerting Me About Typos (that I was then able to resolve)

• There's a typo in your "sexual orientation labels" question, because you have Aroflux listed and not Aceflux, but I didn't want to confuse things so I put Aceflux (which I do use) under Other. I also am polysexual (I flux between polysexual and asexual but I am always aegosexual) but didn't know if I should but it under Other anywhere since it's not an acespec label. I consider my polysexuality tied to me being aego/aceflux though, which is why I mention it here.

• the sexual orientations options are the same of the romantic ones ( for example, there's arovague and arospike in the sexual cathegory)

People Clarifying/Expounding Upon Their Own Identity/Experiences

·  to clarify: i'm unsure whether or not i am demi or aceflux; so i use graysexual since both labels technically fall under that as an umbrella term.

• I’m still a confused gorl and I really only know that I don’t like sex it sexual acts but I do like romantic and sensual acts

• Sex/romance repulsed and I have aesthetic attraction

• I'm also animesexual and fictosexual (and romantic I guess but I don't like using the SAM for myself).

• I have never seen most of these labels, haha, I expect one of them is the one I always forget that's for being aro due to past trauma but people always assume it's romantic/sexual trauma so I don't use it and thus have forgotten it...but that's the essay I'm not usually up for writing: was biromantic but then had several awful life events on top of each other and had a complete breakdown and have been aro since. Unclear if it's permanent but it's been 14 years now. [note: I believe this person is thinking of caedromantic]

• I tend to use the word ace more than asexual because it's shorter, but I don't feel more favorably about one than the other.

• i can't tell the difference between platonic vs romantic attraction, and am unsure if people i have "liked" in the past was romantic, platonic, or a fake stemming from peer pressure.

• Also Gender-Neutral/Agender

• I’m gray-aro but identify more with being biromantic even though I know I’m aro-spec. As for sexual orientation, I’m just completely ace xD

• The fact I'm still trying to figure out my gender makes it harder to pinpoint exactly what my orientations are :( but I usually say I'm queer, and if it's safe: Bi Ace, and if I can get more specific: biromantic grey-asexual

• I also use a platonic label (biplatonic). I use it not in a friendship way, but more like in a QPR way.

• Thank you for doing this! My identity on the aro/ace spectrums has shifted a lot over the years and while I’ve just settled on aroace and queer for the most part, this community is so diverse and under appreciated. People who find joy in/identify with micro-identities are valid and deserve representation!

• I'm still figuring out my romantic orientation but it's looking less allo by the day lmao

• My romantic label is very fluid, but in terms of sexual labels, very sex repulsed Asexual

• Content with just Aspec cause it's difficult to pinpoint anything but cool with both asexual/ace and aromantic/aro

• I think of my romantic orientation as halfway between aromantic and homoromantic

• I'm a polyamorous ace, if there'd be a way to include that sometimes that'd be neat :)

• I am still questioning my identity

• I used to identify as 100% ace but now I have no idea other than that I seem to be pan-ace in some way shape or form so my identity is ???people???

• Sex/romance repulsed and I have aesthetic attraction

• to clarify: i'm unsure whether or not i am demi or aceflux; so i use graysexual since both labels technically fall under that as an umbrella term.

Queer Rights

• Trans rights, baybee 🤠🦂

• I just hope a-spec and aro-spec people will experience less negativity and hate this year <3

• Aspec rights!!

• aspec rights, baby

People Being Nice to Me  (I appreciated this thank you everyone!!)

·  :)

• Have a good day

• Uhhh, cool survey, nice to see a lot of labels.... good job! Nothing I have to add, it was great

• Have fun chief, thank you for your work

• Thank you for creating!

• thanks for the survey! I don't know too many aspec in person so I love participating in things like this about the ace/aro community!

• Thank you for what you’re doing

• just hi :)

• thanks!!

• I really love your blog! Reading your posts always makes me happy :) [note: thank you!]

• Good luck, have a nice day !

• I hope you're having a good day :)

• you're lived and valid af!! have a great day!!!

• Thank you for all your hard work i really appreciate it ☺️

• Drink some water Right Now OP

• Nope, :> hope the best for you.

• Cool survey, 10/10 would survey again.

• 💛

• Have a nice day uwu

• Nope! Have a nice day!

• Thank you for making pride flag edits! They're really nice! [note: thank you!!]

• nope, but this is really cool!!

• ❤️

• Have a good day.

• I think this survey idea is super cool! Definitely a great way to see what sort of aspec people are on tumblr :)

• You are doing the lords work

• Thank you for asking us.

• good luck!

• This is really cute idea :)

• I hope you're having a nice day!

• Good luck in your endevours!

• Thank you for making our community visible!

• Have a good day :3

• Have a good day!!

• Keep doing great stuff!

• Thank you for all the positivity I get from your blog! It's super helpful, keep it up :) [note: thank you!!]

• thanks for doing this. recognition is always nice

• Have fun <3

• Lots of love 💛

• This is a cool project, thanks for doing it and good luck! :)

People Saying They Love Me (and I love you, random a-specs)

·  i love you OP!!!!!

• love you, hope you have a great day

An A-Spec Person Being Rude to Other A-Specs

• If you enjoy sex with your romantic partner then you are not asexual

A Person Who Is Not A-Spec Being Rude To A-Specs

• sweetie im sorry that you're so insecure that you feel like you have to make up new identities to feel better about yourself. if you are a lesbian or bisexual please know that you are welcome in the community, but other than that making thousands of microlabels like this makes a huge joke out of what was once an important and respected group. nobody takes us seriously anymore because of this shit. does labelling your identity like this really help you with anything? demisexual and fraysexual and all this are just fancy words for normal human feelings that everyone has. there is no need to microlabel it.

Other

· [variations of “no” (12)]

• not sure that helps lmao but still hope it does. all the best

• Axolotls (or as I like to call them, asexulotls) are amazing and I love them [Note: the man in question]

• Sorry, I can't remember the names of any blogs that do edits

• Ok random but the colors of the aro/ace flag? The blue and orange one? They’re gorgeous.

• I'm not so sure if I should use the aroace flag, I feel comfortable using both aro and ace flags, but I don't like the colors for the aroace flag :c [note: these are in chronological order, it’s a total coincidence that these comments are together]

• Curious to see where the survey goes

• It would be cool if you could also do some aplatonic-spectrum edits!

• there were fully half of the terms on that list that i had never even seen before. like, everything below litho down to no label was entirely new to me. at some point i will look into those! (but not right now, my brain is full enough at the moment)

• actually had to look up the majority of these orientations. Thank you for the opportunity to learn!

• Gonna reblog and follow and hopefully learn a bit more, about others and myself

Note: The only comment that is not listed in order is the first comment, which I put at the top because I found it the most important. It’s so important that kids and teens have space to explore their identity and learn about themselves. The reason I made this blog in the first place was because I was 19 and working on figuring out my gender and sexuality. Now that I’m a bit older and understand things better, I’m so glad that I’m able to help people in this way. 

I make it a point to be very openly queer in my life and at work because I need LGBTQ+ people, especially youths, to know that we’re here. I’m lucky that I live somewhere that I can be visibly queer and speak about it openly. We are everywhere, and there’s more of us than you think!

Something that I really like about the comments at the top is that they show how diverse we are, and how people use words differently. Some people feel like they’re more aroace than aromantic and asexual separately, and others consider their romantic and sexual orientations to be completely different things.

I definitely relate to the person who identifies are myrromantic and myrsexual with their friends but just says aroace when speaking with people they don’t know as well. I believe a lot of people use different words depending on who they’re speaking with.

[radiqueer]

I’ve been trying to figure out how to contribute to the “born this way” conversation, but I’m not fully sure how to articulate my ideas. For me I feel like my identity... like I feel I was “born this way” like I’ve had intermittent dysphoria for as long as I can remember. But also as far as mspec labels go I could ID as pan, or poly, or Omni, but I’ve always felt bi fits and that’s the identity I choose. My partner tho, feels that they, more than anything, chose to be bi (1/2)

My partner feels that they had no inclination towards being anything other than a straight man until well into their thirties, when, due to a lot of factors, they decided any company was good company and decided to see if they liked being with men. They had a good experience, and they feel they could have left it at that but CHOSE to continue to pursue their attraction to men, and then much more recently, in doing their own research about gender identity and being around me (2/3 oops)

They chose to question their gender identity (which as of right now is inconclusive), and my partner feels happy as a bi questioning person, but also felt happy as a straight man and could have remained so but chose to be happy a different way. Idk it’s complicated/messy and I don’t really get it but it’s how my partner feels and I believe them. And then Political lesbianism is a thing. Idk it��s hard for me to wrap my head around I wish I could contribute more. It’s def not one size fits all tho

this makes a ton of sense, thanks for sharing!

I feel like - in a lot of ways, being queer and identifying as queer changed me as a person. it changed everything, from the way I think about and approach new topics, the way I see myself and the world, my politics, my tastes in books and art. queerness is fundamental to me, but I can conceive not being queer. if I didn’t know it was an option to identify this way, if I didn’t grow in a home that encouraged me to question and pursue new avenues, I would be a different person. and I cannot with any certainty say that I would definitely identify as queer at some point, if not at 14 then at 17, 19, 25, 40. I think I am happier for being queer, because it is relieving to share an experience and a community (things which have been difficult for me in the past) with people who love and support me. I like having a voice and an opinion on issues. I like my politics. I don’t like being discriminated against, but who does?

there are so many ways to have a fluid identity. you can be the same person all your life with the same experiences and label yourself differently over time. like your partner. one could be happy in one’s assigned roles but happier in a different set that they sought out and choose (kudos to your partner for keeping an open mind and allowing themselves to be happy in a non-normative way, btw), you can have a fluid identity that changes with time, you can be one thing and identify as another, you can refuse a labels on principle, you can be a political lesbian (or it’s equivalents, I suppose? I don’t know if we have something analogous to political lesbianism in other queer subgroups. I think certain parts of the ace community are the closest we’ve come) 

the problem is the idea that there’s only one way to be and feel about queerness and identity and labels. which, IME, is what the BTW crowd seeks to do - normalise us because we are an expression of naturally occurring human diversity. we deserve equality because we are people, just slightly different, and we didn’t choose to be this way any more than you did. it’s not our fault! give us some money! [/s]

people who are written over by this narrative, in no particular order:

questioning people who don’t even know whether they’re straight - they may or may not be

nb people who are often told we are special snowflakes, a symptoms of the excesses of liberal/left wing politics. that we wouldn’t exist if not for the internet [true of me if not for you / ymmv]

bisexual and mspec people

people with fluid identities

people who choose to present a certain way

political [orientation]

people who are choosing to not labels themselves out of fear

people whose identity is informed by trauma

etc

the problem is the dichotomy that seems to be essential to this debate - that you can only have one or the other, that people on one side keep trying to erase the opposing narrative. I frankly don’t know. I’ve only been a part of this debate for a few months and all my thoughts about BTW are informed by personal experience and what I have stumbled across on tumblr. not a comprehensive start by any means. but ime it’s always the BTWs who are trying to shove differing narratives away, and not the choicers. maybe @korrasera and i have different experiences! in fact, I think we have very different experiences 

The problem I’m trying to highlight, the whole reason I made this post, is that I’ve never seen someone suggest that only BTW is valid. In fact, the only times I’ve ever seen people discussing BTW was to specifically suggest that we have to do whatever we can to erase it as an idea because they perceive it as being inherently exclusionary, as though the existence of people who were BTW meant that people could not be queer, gay, lesbian, or trans without having been born in that state. I think it’s a reasonable assumption to consider such intentions as being somewhat noble, since they’re meant to criticize and deconstruct social constructs of legitimacy, but I literally never see the topic raised without it being ‘let’s get rid of the idea that BTW people exist, it’s not true and it hurts the cause’. 

[emphasis added all mine; taken from this post]

I have a different experience. I’ve seen BTW discussed as the only right way to be, and not only by exclusionists (I wouldn’t be able to find receipts on this - I remade my blog recently, and lost all my likes and the people I was following). even when I talk to people irl, I’m forced to resort to a narrative I don’t have any stake in to get my point across, a narrative that doesn’t help me. it’s frustrating and alienating. and I still don’t think we should do away with BTW. I think we make room for people like me to exist and talk, and define clearly what it means so more people can figure out whether or not they fit.

I read around some while I was writing this post, so here’s some stuff tangential but essential to my thoughts:

this post about the relationship of radfems to what constitutes essential womanhood

this post by the same user about why some people may choose a certain labels

another post by the same user

this post, which possibly everyone has read, but I was thinking about this part (emphasis mine)

My girlfriend Marna has been a queer activist since the late 80s. She’s told me about the incredible deliberation and debates LGBTQ+ activists had, in the late 90s and early 00s as the community began to see past the AIDS crisis and immediate goals of “surviving a plague” and “burying our dead.” There were a lot of things we wanted to achieve, but we had to decide how to allocate our scarce reserves of money, labour, publicity, and public goodwiil. Those were the discussions that decided the next big goals we’d pursue were same-sex marriage equality and legal recognition of medical gender transition.

From hearing her tell it, it seems like it was actually a wrenching decision, because it absolutely left a lot of people in the dust. A lot of people, her included, had broad agendas based on sexual freedom and the rights of people to do whatever they wanted with their bodies and consenting partners—and they agreed to put their broader concerns aside and drill down, very specifically, onto the rights of cis gays and lesbians to marry, and the ability to legally change your sex and gender.

As a political tactic it was terrifically effective. […]

Activists of 20 years ago chose to sideline and diminish efforts to blur and abolish the gender binary. Efforts to promote alternative family structures, including polyamorous families and non-sexual bonds between non-related adults. Efforts to fight the Christian cultural message that sex is dirty, sinful, bad, and in need of containment. Efforts to promote sexual pleasure as a positive good.

I couldn’t tell you why these posts stuck out to me while I was writing this, but they do a better job, by and large, of contextualising what I’ve said here