#some allo queers will never include us for the life of us

[hidden-so-far-away]

Asexuals and aromatics are queer because our experiences match the allo queer people. Why are queer people one large group who stick together and celebrate ourselves and one another? Because we grew up in a world where there was only one acceptable way to live, to identify with and present strongly as the gender you were assigned at birth, to marry one partner of the opposite sex, to have children.

We did not feel we had a place in this world. Some of us felt wrong wearing a dress or a suit, some of us felt uncomfortable with our bodies and our names and our voices. We learned one day that we were not what the world says everyone should be, we had to learn to love and accept ourselves, how to be safe in a world that violently opposes our self expression.

Some of us couldn't relate to other girls or boys when they talked about their crushes. When they talked about heteronormative marrige, when they fantasized about someone you couldn't see the appeal of. Some of us struggled with our feelings for the same gender as us. Some of us felt sick and wrong because we were taught this love is wrong. We learned one day that we were not what the world says everyone should be, we had to learn to love and accept ourselves, how to be safe in a world that violently opposes our self expression.

Some of us couldn't relate to anyone who talked longingly about sex or love. Some of us didn't get crushes or feel attraction to others. Some of us dreaded the "Do you have a girlfriend yet?" Or the "Where are my grandchildren?" Questions we always inevitably heard. Every movie character has a partner. Every adult did. Every child was supposed to want one. Everyone around us wanted one. We wondered if we were sick, if there was something wrong with us, if we were bad people because we didn't feel attraction to others. People treated us like emotionless freaks. We learned one day that we were not what the world says everyone should be, we had to learn to love and accept ourselves, how to be safe in a world that violently opposes our self expression.

Ace and aro people are LGBT because our experiences are the same as yours. We grew up surrounded by the idea that life MUST be lived one specific way, the way everyone does, but that never suited us. We were treated like freaks and outsiders for it. We lied to ourselves and others to feel included and/or to stay safe. We are the same. Sexuality is a spectrum in all directions.

[aronarchy]

https://twitter.com/AbolitionF_ists/status/1467939051613396995

[transcription:

ember ☭ @bimbomarxistt · Dec 5, 2021

imagine hearing a baby cry and your first thought is that they’re t[r]ying to manipulate you into spoiling them

Afrofuturist Abolitionists of the Americas · Dec 6, 2021

The ascription of malice to Children comes from white supremacy. Especially in the US case the logic was built into Puritan theology. The text “Performing Childhoods” goes into the ways this intersected with antiblackness especially during slavery and into the late 1800s

At some point white children were placed into a notion of child innocence especially as the developing bourgeois society needed, in places like the US, to frame them as blank slates to be trained in the school system to become workers. Black children never got that

Black children became the embodiment of childhood malice that needed to be controlled. This always had implications for Black parents bc it became common to paint the children as either dangerous or endangered by Black adults’ irresponsibility

These narratives still follow us: overpolicing blamed on kids having “no home training”; and lack of “home training” blamed on supposed Black Matriarchy (a la Moynihan ideology); or on poor Black cishet men not being proper breadwinners (Bootstraps ideology)

None of these ideas developed in a stable form. It developed over time. We specified the late 1800s bc around then the foundation of more well known “science” inquiries was being harnessed in a unique way, especially as class struggle are under way, in the way of abolitionisms...

... the early “intellectual projects” that would become eugenics in the 20th century, the scramblings for territory in Africa that definitely was a material undercurrent to these things... It is all connected. These things were interacting

Interested in hearing about how Colonial constructions of childhood developed and shifted outside the US context tho. If any folks [have] information on that let us know.

(As far as the Christian theology: original sin doctrines had a history of positioning children as in need of authoritarian parenting in order to punish the devil or temptation out of them. The same logic went into certain values of why abstinence and cisheterosexism was needed to control so-called human sexuality that often got coded as the quintessential expression of original sin.)

The reinforcement of childis[t] and cisheterosexist relations under Patriarchy has a class function. In the Colonial context it takes on a particular life because Black and Indigenous are coded as inherently devilish and heathen because of religious/ethnic supremacism. But also as a civilizational insistence to justify clearing away class/social relations that didn’t fit the mold necessary for the interests being mounted by Man, including relations of gender/sexual lines, as well as relations between children and adults/elders.

Authoritarian parental mastery and cis/allo-heterosexist control had to take on a particular kind of intensity and regulation for the “backward” peoples who are always already the embodiment of a Fallen Nature that the church and Western institutions must police on behalf of the ruling class’ material interests.

The mistreatment of Black children by the school, nuclear family, police + media narratives, church, and the implications this is having for how Black adults (especially QTGNC ones, bc this is connected to why the “Gay Agenda” idea is used to accuse us of forcing queerness/transness onto kids) get impacted by the State, the family misregulation (foster care/child protective) system, esp for mothers & birthing parents... there is alot to parse.

Again, it is all part of a system. We need to study, struggle, build solidarity, and a revolutionary spirit: and fight for our collective liberation. We can also talk about how rape culture is often upheld by the ascribing of adultlike malicion and sexual proclivities to Black children across genders. This is why the cishet boys aren’t seen as victims of CSA; and young girls and marginalized genders across the spectrum are always victim-blamed or painted as the real predators or deserving of it all.)

In all we gotta fight racial capitalism and cisheterosexism, patriarchy and ableist notions of biology, psychology, neurology, etc that are used to organize many of these institutions and relations: and part of that requires examining how the pathologization of children is used

/end transcription]