The Acephobia to Transphobia Pipeline

Transcript Transcribed by Laura M.

Courtney: Hello everyone and welcome back. My name is Courtney, I am here with my spouse, Royce, and together we are The Ace Couple. And today we are finally tackling the acephobia to transphobia pipeline. This is something we have spoken about for literally years, back when we were on social media it was a conversation we often said. And I am confident that sprinkled throughout our other episodes, we have made mention of it. But given the fact that there is a renewed sense of confusion, that noted transphobe J.K. Rowling is now specifically picking on the Asexual Community, I think now is a great time to actually go through what people like this think, how they operate, where their ideologies are coming from. Because the more we learn about that, the clearer the overlap between acephobia and transphobia becomes. And this is something– I can’t even begrudge too terribly much people who are just very ignorant of ace issues, people who aren’t in community with other asexuals.

Courtney: A lot of this has flown under the radar of mainstream society, because think about all of the actual mainstream conversations about people like J.K. Rowling or in politics, all of the– think trans people in sports becoming such a big culture war, or trans people in bathrooms. These are the conversations that get repeated over and over and over again. These are the ones that you get exposed to most frequently. However, if you just scratch the surface a little bit, you can really get to the bottom of why these talking points exist. And I want everyone throughout this episode to have in mind that culture wars like this are always branding. They are constantly making talking points to see what sticks, what can radicalize more people to their position. They are always workshopping this and refining it over the course of years. So the things we hear over and over again are the ones that, you know, the average Joe off the street who doesn’t necessarily know any queer people, can still get mad about and sink their teeth into. But even people ostensibly on our side, even the inclusionist side of the Queer Community, even sometimes other aces, also have our talking points.

Courtney: And while talking points have their time and their place, and are used to persuade people to one side or another, they also soften and sometimes obscure the underlying ideologies and, in many cases, political concerns. I’ve seen, for instance, over the last couple of weeks, even other ace people who just really aren’t involved in Ace Community but are themselves asexual, I’ve seen even them say, “Well, what J.K. Rowling’s saying is wrong, because we aren’t even saying we’re oppressed, because we’re really not oppressed like the rest of the community. We’re just saying that asexuality is valid.” I have seen that time and time again and that is so profoundly upsetting to me. Because even in your own accepting community and in your own bubble, our talking points of ‘aces are valid’, ‘aces belong’ totally hides the actual legitimate political concerns that we have. But we can shout all day, every day, about our asexual political concerns and nobody sunk their teeth into it. Mainstream news outlets don’t make it a culture war. Therefore the average person does not hear about them and, by extension, sometimes ace people themselves don’t hear about it.

Courtney: And I am so happy, genuinely, for each and every asexual person who has never faced direct oppression, direct assault, direct conversion therapy. I am thrilled that they are leading a good life. But that is not reminiscent of the wider worldwide asexual experience. So folks like us, who have been relatively visible for a certain period of time, we know so well from personal experience that TERFs hate us. The vile, vicious things that famously transphobic people have said directly to us makes it abundantly clear. So from personal observation, many aces do already know this. And I made the case in our last episode and over the last several years, that the people who hate us, the people who are trying to infringe upon our rights in actual, genuine legislation, they do know our talking points, they know what we say and they find a way to flip it on their head and use it against us. I used that with the Girlguiding example last week.

Courtney: But one thing our side is awful at is actually listening to what our opposition is saying, to try to understand why they believe what they believe and getting a really, really clear grasp of their own talking points. And I’m not just talking about, like the public facing tweets, because of course, there have been numerous video essays out there that have gone through the history of J.K. Rowling’s tweets as one famous example. But one thing that we try to do here on The Ace Couple podcast is actually go and see what those conversations look like when they are just speaking to each other. These extreme right wing philosophies, when they are making their own blogs for their own audience, what are they actually saying?

Courtney: Because when we say them out loud, people get shocked. People are like, “I didn’t know it was this bad, I didn’t know that they actually said this out loud.” It’s like, yeah, well, you are not actually listening to what they’re saying. We have our, you know, thought experiments, we have our conversations, we have our podcasts, we have our video essays, and we try to intellectualize things from our perspective. But sometimes we don’t even need to be doing that much. Sometimes we just need to actually listen to what the heck they’re saying. So that’s what we’re doing today. We’re going to put a timeline of anecdotal evidence of people who are both transphobic and acephobic. And I must warn you, we are going into the deep, dark depths of 2017 Tumblr.

Royce: Ah, the place where all modern identities were conceived. 2017 may be more recent. That’s just a talking point that is thrown around a lot. We had a comment come up on a video that basically used the word Tumblr as a personal identity insult, kind of like the way the comment read, I can’t remember it verbatim, but it was used sort of like snowflake or something like that.

Courtney: Yeah, or like blue hair and pronouns, like, “Oh, you’re just on Tumblr, you’ve got blue hair and pronouns.” It’s– it is very that, and I’m glad that you mentioned that, because that’s actually a very important point for some of these blogs that I am going to reference. So I had personally started to notice that transphobic people are incredibly acephobic probably a decade ago, but a very, very interesting thing started happening in around 2017. In 2017, there were a handful of TERF blogs, TERF social media accounts that were specifically discussing acephobia as not only a positive good thing, but as a recruitment tactic. Folks who are elbow deep in ace discourse will have seen a few notable screenshots that get shared in our community a lot, but rarely break out of our own little community bubbles. Some of these come from a blog called not-just-another-fake-lesbi-blog, which was incredibly transphobic and also incredibly acephobic, and started talking about why, from their side, from the exclusion and the hate, they were like, “This is the same fight, acephobes and transphobes, we are in this together. We need to unite.” February 9th, 2017.

Courtney: [reading] “Hey, ace exclusionist genderists, our ideals and reasonings are exactly the same.” And it’s got two hands, like fingers extended, touching each other. It’s kind of a meme format, but this is also very clearly like a stock photo that still has, like, the water marks over it. So I don’t know why they didn’t use an actual meme format. But one says radical feminism and the other says ace exclusion. [reading] “This is how close we are. You don’t want straight people? We don’t want straight people. You think aces are coming up with words to try to make themselves kweer?” Which is in like weird squiggly format and also spelled K-W-E-E-R. [reading] “We think trans people are coming up with words to try and make themselves kweer. You think aces are harmful to the rest of the LGB community? We think trans people are harmful to the rest of the LGB community. You think Ace Tumblr is homophobic? We think Trans Tumblr is homophobic. You think aces telling LGB people to stop PDA in LGB spaces is homophobic?” Which, by the way, show me who said that. Because if you’re also saying LGB spaces, like you’re thinking like a gay bar, right? Like you’re thinking good old fashioned queer bar, spelled with a Q. And you think there are asexual people telling, like, a same sex couple to stop kissing?

Royce: I guarantee you that didn’t happen.

Courtney: But this is the one where they deviate from the format. They’re like, so aces are telling people to stop PDA, [reading] “But we think trans people telling us to stop talking about genital specific attraction in LGB spaces is homophobic. You think asexuals can be harmful by making same sex attracted people identify as ace because of internalized homophobia? We think trans people are harmful by making same-sex attracted people identify as trans because of internalized homophobia.” And there was an update to that and this did get reblogged, it got commented on it. It got edited to say, “I’ve already gotten several people PMing me saying I’ve changed their outlook and that they’ve switched to radical feminism. Please, please, please, think about it. It just makes sense. You aren’t alone.” Of course, a lot of people wanted to call bullshit on that. They’re like, “Yeah, people aren’t saying that to you.”

Courtney: But they did actually post an ask that someone sent them that said, “While it wasn’t your blog specifically, I can attest that I came to radical feminism after getting interested in the ace exclusionary discourse. I don’t remember how exactly I got from here to there, but it most definitely was a slide. So, yeah, I’m sure there are others out there who were kind of sitting around on ace exclusion without the words to express their distress with the movement, who will have their eyes opened by feminism.” So it’s vibes, right? People who just didn’t like ace people because of vibes. The transphobes were like, “Let me try to engineer a logic that will appeal to those icky vibes you’re feeling.” And another thing, their bad faith questions that are not real questions serve the exact same function in the Trans Community versus the Ace Community.

Courtney: Like, think to when everyone was trying to say to J.K. Rowling, “Well, you can be gay and ace. Aces aren’t all straight people.” You know, going into that education mode for someone who absolutely will not hear it. Her question was: “How do they know they’re gay or straight If they don’t experience sexual attraction? I wonder.” That was not a question asked to get an answer. That was a question asked to push an agenda. Because you’re asking a question about something that is, for all intents and purposes, fairly abstract.

Courtney: Attraction to another person is such an internal feeling that it’s very difficult to articulate. It is essentially exactly the same thing when J.K. Rowling asks that and Matt Walsh asks what is a woman. They’re not trying to get a diversity of opinions. They’re not trying to get a real answer. They’re trying to use the fact that these are personal feelings and experiences to not celebrate the diversity of people, or to validate people who feel one way or another. They’re using it to try to double down on the narrow-minded people who just don’t think they exist. They’re using any shadow of a doubt to get people to their conclusion. Which their conclusion being: trans people don’t exist, ace people don’t exist.

Courtney: And this is probably the most famous screenshot – skreenshot spelled with a K – that we see in the Ace Community every time we– Every time a new wave of people learns that TERFs hate aces and everyone goes, “What!? Why?!” This is the screenshot everyone grabs for a conversation between outlawfem and notqueerlesbian. That one actually is spelled with a Q, though, so I don’t know if they identify as queer with a K. Unconfirmed. But outlawfem says, “For the record, as a TERF, I can confirm that being an aphobe is actually the first step toward becoming a TERF.” notqueerlesbian adds, “Now that I think about it, you’re right, lol, it was my first step.” Then outlawfem breaks it down for us perfectly: “Over the course of maybe three months, it went: 1. asexuals aren’t inherently LGBTQ and shouldn’t say queer; 2. actually, nobody should say queer, it’s absolutely meaningless and a slur; 3. actually fuck queer theory, there’s only two genders; 4. actually fuck gender, there’s only two sexes.”

Courtney: So it is always a little bit weird when this happens, in a new discourse, everyone’s like, “But why… do the TERFs hate aces…?” It’s like they have been using acephobic people to grow their community and they have been, like, open about this, saying, “Yeah, we’re recruiting acephobes. We’re looking for the queer exclusionists and we are bringing them in.” And that is exactly the tactic I want everyone to keep in mind as we get a little more modern. So they started noticing. And I was not on Tumblr in 2017. But I’ve got a lot of ace friends who were, and they have like war flashbacks to that time. Every time you bring up Tumblr from like 2016, 2017, they’re like, “I was there…” Even the non smokers, like, take a drag of a cigarette, that just instantly materializes in their hand.

Courtney: Whether people were as blatant as these blogs were at not only saying, “Yeah, I was an acephobe first and then I fell down the TERF pipeline as a result of that,” we have lots of people saying that. Then we have blogs actively trying to recruit more TERFs by targeting the acephobes. Whether or not a lot of TERFs realized it. And now we’re talking about the big, high profile ones. We’re talking about the people who had a direct line of reach to get to the J.K. Rowling’s of the world, to get to the Fox News’s of the world, to get to everybody who writes at, you know, the fucking Spectator. They noticed over time that this sex-based language, and an overly medicalized one, gets people to their ideology or at least a lot closer. And a lot of that tactic that they refined, even without mentioning asexuality sometimes, is inherently acephobic. And here is an example of that. I won’t go over, for example, everything that happened in 2021, because we talked about that last week. If you have not listened to that episode yet, please go do so now.

Courtney: We talk about how there was a big push to show asexual people are just groomers, they’re grooming children, they’re dangerous and shouldn’t be working with children. And that absolutely worked for a time. But the biggest talking points we’re hearing in this day and age come down to like gender affirmation, especially when it comes to children. “We need to protect the children. We can’t give them puberty blockers.” You’ll have these sensationalized points of: “The children will be sterilized,” or this is genital mutilation, when we absolutely know that those are– that’s not the case. But the problem is you can’t reason with these people, you can’t educate them out of this hatred, and you can’t use logic to defend their points. Because they are not trying to say real, accurate, true things. They’re trying to appeal to the icky hidden vibes and the biases that people just some of them inherently feel. They’re trying to give a pseudo-scientific explanation for why those people are justified in feeling that bigotry.

Royce: That’s something that I was going to bring up. Aspects of this movement definitely have the vibes of the scientific racism that happened in the, well, mostly the 1800s, but around that area. Basically, if you look at the time period from Carl Linnaeus to Adolf Hitler, there’s a lot of that going on and it was effective. And yeah, you’re not going to convince someone who is jumping through hoops, trying to connect dots to make them feel reinforced in their own beliefs, their own ideologies that they already have. But you might be able to keep the actual people who are just genuinely ignorant from falling in.

Courtney: Yes, and that’s really why we need to tackle the underlying biases when we have these conversations. Because here’s one that I’m sure I’ve cited before, but, like early 2022, there was a politician who was running for office in Texas and his whole thing was being outraged that he had a trans daughter, nine year old trans daughter, whose mother, whom he was separated from, was very affirming. And every time we have a parent of a trans kid who is absolutely outraged, I always try to hear what is their logic. If they’re trying to convince people that it is a bad thing that their trans child is getting affirmed, why? What is the reason? And this is one that I had seen before, but I took a special note of it because he was running for office. And I’m gonna try to work around this quote a little bit because he was, as you can well imagine, misgendering his daughter left and right in this quote.

Courtney: But his platform, and this was on his political website running for office, this was under his platform: [reading] “If they put my child on chemical castration drugs, my child will be permanently maimed and sterilized. My child will never be able to have a family or a normal sexual relationship with a wife.” Normal sexual relationship. With a heterosexual wife. That is so often what these arguments boil down to. This is so often the end point of these arguments is normal sex life. And for the radical right in this country, in the US, we’ve covered them extensively, they all want it to be cis man cis woman in a marriage having procreative sex. Specifically. That defines their entire worldview for what a stable society ought to look like. What a family unit, the nuclear family ought to look like.

Courtney: And when we have these rebuttals against TERFs. I understand that a lot of our conversations are preaching to the choir, we’re talking to people who already defend trans rights and we’re trying to give them more vocabulary so that they can talk about this, perhaps in their own circles, they can understand better. But we do often come back to gender and the people we’re arguing with, if we were to get in a debate, these people are saying fuck gender. They’re like, “I reject your reality and I substitute my own.” Okay, the conversation’s over at that point. As much as it is true and correct that gender is diverse and gender is expansive, and the only one who is an authority on their own gender is the person in question, the one who has to live with that mind inside of that body, they medicalize their branding, they break it down to sex and anatomy.

Royce: While also trying to stick to an overly narrow definition even of those things. But again, that’s not the point. They are not going for scientific accuracy, they’re going for whatever pseudoscientific beliefs make themselves feel justified in their own convictions.

Courtney: Yes. So what we have here essentially is they don’t believe trans experience is real. They don’t believe asexual experience is real. If you try to talk to them in their verbiage, if you try to make it about sex, it’s not too long before someone says, “Well, what about intersex people?” Intersex people exist. This is a known, scientifically measurable thing. Some people do have differences in sex characteristics, so you can’t even say that sex is 100% binary. The problem is those people who don’t think trans or ace experiences are real, also think that intersex experiences are a medical issue to be fixed. Some of them also think asexuality is a medical issue to be fixed.

Courtney: So this is– I need everyone to understand that, yes, while these bigots just outright do not think that trans is a real identity, when you cut right down to what their actual issues are, with the trans youth medical care in this example that I gave, it always boils back down to sex. It boils down to reproduction and a – quote – “normal sex life”. So the social and political challenge that we have before us is not just heteronormativity, it is not just cisnormativity. This ideology fundamentally comes from a place of compulsory sexuality that they are in no uncertain terms forcing upon literal children who are already in a vulnerable minority group. And that is why we obviously must protect trans kids at all costs. It’s also why asexuality does need to be a part of these conversations.

Courtney: Because I guarantee you, the TERFs are talking about asexuality more than the progressive Trans Community, just percentage wise, from what I have observed. And the Queer Community even sometimes likes to eat its own online and play the, “Oh, you’re not really queer because you’re not as oppressed as I am” game. But trust me when I say that bigotry all comes from the same place of hatred. They all have overlaps. Transphobia has ties with acephobia, acephobia has ties with ableism. And in fact, let’s– let’s take another example from last week. Talking points on both sides are: “Yeah, aces don’t actually have any, like, real issues, but you know, it’s the invisible orientation and we deserve visibility.” A lot of it comes to visibility. That’s what they think our only issue is.

Courtney: I saw– Oh, it was so infuriating. I saw a YouTube video coming right off of this J.K. Rowling thing. It was on like some channel called Queer News Tonight or something. I don’t recommend it. But it built itself as the only queer nonprofit news show and they assembled a panel of five– just five gay men all, I assume, white and cis presenting. None of them knew a damn thing about asexuality. And yet here they are discussing asexuality and J.K. Rowling. And their conversation was so infuriating because they were like, “Yeah, J.K. Rowling’s bad, look at this horrible thing she said.” But also, “Yeah, why do aces need their own day?” And the one guy on this panel who claimed to have done his research before this was like, “Yeah, I was– I was looking into what International Asexuality Day is. And they aren’t saying that aces are oppressed. They aren’t saying aces have any political issues. They’re just saying, you know, we’re here and we exist. They’re trying to talk to other asexual people to let them know that they’re not alone.”

Courtney: Okay, sure, maybe that’s part of it, but we do actually have real political issues. And thank you to this panel of five who did not bother to look into what those might be. But him saying, “Oh, it’s, you know, it’s just aces trying to talk to other aces and say, hey, you exist and you’re valid,” devolved into a conversation of other people on the panel who were like, “Yeah, I don’t think they do need a day. They don’t need a day like us.” One of them said because it’s a sexual choice and sexual choices don’t– This had me laugh. He said, you know, sexual choices don’t need a designation amongst the LGBTQIA community. He said the A! He knows! He said the A! And I was like, you’ve just memorized that acronym and didn’t even think far enough what the acronym means. Fascinating.

Courtney: And then he walked it back and he’s like, “Well, we do have, like, the leather daddies, we have the leather community. That belongs in the queer community. But like aces… Do they need it?” But as soon as someone said, “Oh, it’s about visibility and telling other aces that people exist.” Then a couple were like, “Oh, that makes sense, it’s so aces can find other aces to date. Because I met a guy on Grindr once who said that he wasn’t interested in sex and so I didn’t meet him. I didn’t end up going to see that guy if we weren’t going to have sex. So of course asexual people need to find other asexual people to date, because otherwise they’ll be lonely and they love just like everyone else.” So it was, you know, just a lot of casual arophobia in there as well.

Royce: Yeah, I thought that was going to go the other direction, where they assumed all aces were aroaces or something.

Courtney: No, no. I mean, you can always flip a coin with these ignorant conversations. It will go one way or the other. But one thing that I worry our community over focuses on is the conversation of valid identity. And there are certainly people out here that need to hear that they are valid. There are absolutely people that feel like they are broken and don’t have a place, and so there is very much a time and a place for those conversations, but it is a problem that there aren’t enough of us digging deep to see the underlying ideologies and where these hateful talking points come from. And it’s kind of frustrating because I’ll see people on our side almost do the same thing that TERFs do, and they don’t realize it. It’s just in a different context.

Courtney: Every time we talk about marriage consummation laws or the very concept of sham marriages, there will inevitably be other ace people that are like, “That’s not a thing. Stop trying to look more oppressed than we actually are.” You know, make more space for the, you know, more valid queer people. But I brought up one example last week, and it could be that all of the people who reached out to us saying this, these things haven’t listened to our backlog of episodes where we’ve talked about this a lot in the context of other countries, different personal stories, and aren’t aware that this is an ongoing conversations that we have weighed in to on a number of occasions. But we talked about the Home Office in the UK raiding weddings, showing up at people’s houses to see if they’re in the same bed.

Courtney: All predicated on the fact that if your marriage is not a sexual one, it is not a real marriage. It is not worthy or valid of a wedding marriage certificate, if you will. So many people are so shocked when we say that there are still marriage consummation laws on the books, when there are immigrants in a variety of countries who are not allowed to get married or have additional hurdles to getting married that all hinge on their sex life and their sexual activities and interviews about their sex lives. People are shocked and horrified. And instead of those people really sitting with it and thinking, “I must be in some place of privilege where this is a type of bigotry and oppression that has never come across my radar, it never even occurred to me that that could happen.” It’ll go one of two ways.

Courtney: They’ll either say that’s not happening, which is what the TERFs say, to reference another famous J.K. Rowling tweet: “If you were discriminated against, I would march with you.” Talking to the trans community years ago. Meanwhile, she is now smoking a cigar, rubbing it in everyone’s faces that the Supreme Court ruled that trans women are not women. But she’s like, “You’re not. You’re not being discriminated against. That doesn’t happen.” While actively doing it. So that is a tactic, that is a TERF’s tactic. It’s just: ignore the issue because it’s not your own. Or people will say that’s not an asexual issue because this is an immigration issue. This is a racism issue. Yes, there’s an intersectionality about that.

Courtney: It is an unfair, bigoted law, and an unfair framework of society, that can be disproportionately used as a cudgel against immigrants and anybody who might find themselves in a platonic marriage for whatever reasons are their own. Which I would argue is disproportionately going to be asexual people. And every time I talk about that and people are like, “That’s not actually an asexual issue because they’re not targeting asexual people.” They don’t have to target asexual people. Because the underlying assumption is: a sexless marriage is not a marriage. That is fundamentally acephobic, fundamentally.

Courtney: But yeah, since that is policy in a lot of countries, they’re going to use it against anyone they don’t like in any way they can. But what do the TERFs do when a trans woman or an asexual woman says, “Hey, you say you’re standing up for women’s rights, you don’t want women to be sexually assaulted, but I, as an asexual woman, was assaulted for being ace.” Or, “I, as a trans woman, am at a higher likelihood of becoming sexually assaulted.” They’ll flip it around. I’ve seen this in the ace context where we’ll say you know, aces are at a higher risk of sexual assault. They’ll say, “No, you’re not, it’s just because you’re a woman.” It’s not because you’re asexual, it’s because of something else.

Royce: As if intersections don’t compound that.

Courtney: And don’t get me wrong, no hate to the people who want to enrich the conversation by adding to it and calling attention to the intersectional nature of these bigotries. I’m talking about people who say this is not acephobic because it is only racist. And- ok this is going to meander because I’m still fleshing out my thoughts on this, so bear with me… What if Aces had equal rights? What if sex was not seen as a requirement for a relationship? Then, it couldn’t be used as a cudgel to attack other groups of people. We talked about, for instance, a gay couple immigrating to another country who had been subjected to interviews like this in a previous episode and we were told then “that’s not acephobic, it’s homophobic”. Ok, well we have evidence of it happening to opposite sex couples as well. “Well that’s not acephobic, it’s racist”. They’ll say. And I’m sure by now someone has already commented that aces can be gay too. That’s a silly thing to say to JK Rowling because she doesn’t believe you. And that’s a silly thing to say to us, because we are extremely aware of that fact. But moreover, it kind of inadvertently proves my point. Take two same-sex couples. One is allosexual, the other is asexual. If you put them through the same process, you are absolutely dehumanizing both of them and it shouldn’t happen to either. But which one is actually more likely to be denied their marital rights? It’s gonna be the asexual couple whose stories about their sex lives (or lack thereof) don’t hold up to scrutiny. So people will deflect and deny any and all evidence of acephobia to shut down conversations about it, meanwhile, it is still a base societal and political expectation that in order to get married or otherwise just be a normal, healthy functioning adult you must have sex.

Courtney: And, on the racism note, I’ve got this kind of theory about racism anyway in that there’s sort of two types, two ways it can manifest. There’s a primary, like, visual indicator. Brown or black skin, ethnic features, where you might experience racism just because you look a certain way. As a racially ambiguous person, I’ve gotten this a lot in my life. Sometimes they just vaguely think I’m brown and that’s bad enough, other times they might try to identify what I actually am to hate me more specifically, even if it’s a misidentification. But then there’s the kind of racism that is almost a little more sinister, because it’s sneakier. It’s less overt. It’s easier to dismiss as not being racist. Think social biases, like telling someone that their ethnic food is “smelly”. I hear racists all the time say things like “well it’s not racist, it’s just about the food”. Or when you tell a Black person using AAVE to “talk properly”. That often gets dismissed as “it’s not racist, it’s just about ‘proper grammar”. Or whatever other cultural situation they find distasteful because it is not their own. This is the kind of racism, I don’t personally tend to experience as a racially ambiguous individual because my family is white. I was raised by white, American midwesterners.

Courtney: To bring it back to Aces, Aces don’t tend to have the primary bigotry, because for the most part, we don’t have visual markers that people can easily identify us with. However, we fall outside of a social norm and do face prejudice for it, because it’s a departure from deeply entrenched social norms. But people will always either find a way to justify their hatred or dismiss it and refuse to believe it exists because they personally do not see it.

Courtney: And because of this phenomenon there are primary and secondary bigots too. The primary bigots are the JK Rowlings of the world who hate aces and they hate trans people and they have justified their hatred and they lobby for legislation that oppresses us. The secondary bigots are the ones who listen to her saying that our oppression is fake and think “ya, that sounds about right”.

Courtney: Do you know how many people have looked at me and thought I was a specific race and have been overtly racist to me because they thought I was that race? I’m still experiencing the racism and that is still a problem. I know I wasn’t the originally intended target for the place that that bigotry evolved from, but that is how bigotry operates. They find the most widely palatable target, the low-hanging fruit, a marginalized community that they can get the average person to be on board with, at least passively, if not aggressively, hating, and anyone else who gets caught up in the crosshairs doesn’t matter. Because that is still fueling their agenda. And we see that also incredibly obviously in transphobic rhetoric.

Courtney: How many cis women have we heard stories now of getting kicked out of a bathroom because someone thought they looked a little too masculine? How many cis women in sports have been attacked because they thought she looks a little too masculine? And think about the latest xenophobic stories we have coming, especially out of our country right now. We have people who have been illegally, erroneously deported to an El Salvadorian prison. And the people who have the power to correct that wrong aren’t doing anything because they don’t care about individual people. They care about progressing their ideology. And they do not care about anyone who gets caught up in it. And anytime we have a situation like that, we need to get to the root of the matter. We need to target the underlying ideology that is bad, that led to this expanding bigotry and infringement on our rights.

Courtney: And, honestly, xenophobia and TERFism have a lot more in common than I think a lot of people also give it credit for. Because it is inherently a fascist ideology. Fascism is hyper-nationalism. But that doesn’t always necessarily have to be a literal country. It is who is the in-group, who is the out-group. And that’s kind of what the TERFs are. They are like, “We are the nation of vagina and we are the only people who matter.” And it is also this constant state of self victimization. You’re being victimized by the other. “You’re not oppressed. Actually, we’re the oppressed ones.” It’s not the immigrants, it’s not the undocumented people who are in a press class, it’s America. America has been unfair. And if we have to deport a couple of people who are here legally to get our point across, that doesn’t matter. That’s the cost of getting what we deserve. Same thing with TERFs.

Courtney: Amani Khalifa, “Oh, it doesn’t matter if we attack a cis woman who is an Olympic boxer. It doesn’t matter if we slander her or attempt to ruin her career, because that’s just the price of getting our ideology out there, because that’s all that matters. We, here in the nation of vagina.”

Courtney: But we got off a little bit from the pipeline, so let’s regroup. Starting in 2017, they were like, “Yeah, absolutely, we’re recruiting acephobes. Yeah, acephobia and transphobia, absolutely exactly the same thing.” Now you start having these really frustrating talking points. After the 2021, all aces are groomers debacle. After the 2022, we have to start banning puberty blockers, because my kid will never have a normal sex life.

Courtney: Then, 2023, I started seeing this very frustrating thing. Because, once again, everyone on our side went into education mode. And I get it. I want to go into education mode too. I am naturally an education mode person. I get it! But everyone, “That’s not what asexual means.” I saw so many people talking to us, the two of us personally and us as in the Asexual Community, saying things like, and I quote, “Asexuals don’t exist because you’re either XX or XY.” That is an honest to God comment that we got. And it was a wave of comments that was happening throughout 2023 that were all saying that same thing. So, naturally, all the aces are like, “You don’t understand what asexuality is.”

Royce: Sometimes, for the sake of your own time and energy and sanity, you need to develop your skills at realizing when you’re in what I generally refer to as a flat earth conversation. [Courtney laughs] Like, the sooner that you can realize that the person you are speaking with does not believe in reality, the sooner you can exit the conversation and go do something else. Because if a person exists in a world where we can fly into space and take pictures of the big round-ish rock, we are on and hand it to them and they say, “No, that’s not real.” There is literally nothing you can say to change their mind. And that’s what we’re dealing with here.

Courtney: Well, and the thing is too, we often get flustered when we see that because we’re like, “Those two things have nothing to do with each other.” But they do. If you have watched the evolution of the TERF ideology and talking points going back to 2016, 2017, when they started making this abundantly clear to anyone who was actually listening to them, you saw that it worked. They got more people on their side when they did start saying some acephobic things. They’re like, “Oh, this works!” They saw, when people called asexuals groomers. They saw, oh, all the TERFs came in and were like, “Yeah, we need to safeguard kids.” Yes, it is about safeguarding kids. They know how to talk to the people that are predisposed to their ideologies.

Courtney: This was curated over the course of years and they wanted to synonymize anti-ace rhetoric with anti-trans rhetoric, In our eyes, when we know better, no, those two things don’t have anything to do with each other because, you know, men can be ace, women can be ace, you know you can be ace and intersex there are trans ace people. What does biological sex have to do with asexuality? They know what they’re doing and they’re laughing at us trying to over-explain ourselves. Because they know what they’re doing. There’s a reason they’re saying what they’re saying, which has been tried and tested. Peer-reviewed TERF rhetoric!

Courtney: It is a large-scale push to synonymize a binary, inaccurate, biological sex with gender. Because they already don’t think gender exists. But if they synonymize sex with gender, maybe they can start getting some people who are like, “Yeah, sex is real, they can get that over there.” That’s kind of how it started with J.K. Rowling, isn’t it? Of course sex is real. Why would we fire a woman for saying sex is real? That’s how it starts, because they know they can start pulling them over and then start questioning what’s gender. But then there’s a step further that people don’t always take in these educational conversations about the TERF radicalization pipeline. They’re also trying to synonymize this binary sex with implied compulsory sexuality and often antiquated social roles.

Courtney: A lot of the extreme right wing politicians in our country would take not only that compulsory sexuality but make it specific heterosexuality. Then we have the– the LGB crowd that, you know, try to champion lesbian rights and same sex rights. But the really, really fascinating thing is, and we’ve talked about this before as well, at least in our country, Obergefell vs Hodges, the landmark Supreme Court case that made same sex marriage the law of this land, which of course we have politicians trying to overturn it by saying that it’s dangerous and it’s going to lead to platonic marriage. But that Supreme Court case was won by arguing that a same sex couple can function like an opposite sex couple. They argued this can still be a sexual, romantic, exclusive relationship and they can raise kids together. That was enough to make the precedence to say, yes, it would be unequal, it would be unfair if an opposite sex couple can get married but a same sex can’t.

Courtney: Because at the end of the day they’re gonna function exactly the same way. So that does kind of throw under the bus any marriage that is not sexual, any marriage options that don’t exist yet, of course, like multiple partner marriage. And we have judges in this country, we have politicians in this country who say that asexual marriage or platonic marriage is not legal, it is not real. So as important as that piece of legislation was, it certainly did not do enough for queer liberation in a broader sense. But what was our talking point at the time that that passed? It was love wins, love wins. Good, happy, celebrate. And we did need that. I was also out there saying love wins. I’m guilty of this too.

Courtney: But you’ll have these conversations with the LGB crowd. Because, yes, they aren’t taking it all the way to heterosexuality is required, but they still have this appeal to normalcy. Like, “Well, sure, same sex attraction might be a little out of the norm, but that’s an acceptable out of the norm, but gender fluidity? Trans identity? Asexuality? Aromanticism? Absolutely not. Get those out of here. A lesbian couple can and should be just like a straight couple.” And I don’t know what we need to do to get people to include asexuality in the conversation or to care about our political issues. Because there are gay couples in the US right now who are married, who are terrified that gay marriage is going to get overturned. Yeah, that is a terrifying thing. Some of them who are not in community with ace people will tell us to shut up when we talk about marriage consummation laws, the concept of a sham marriage.

Courtney: When we talk about this, they’ll say, “Why would you be talking about this when they’re trying to get rid of same sex marriage? Isn’t that more important?” Have you seen what they’re saying to try to overturn same-sex marriage? They’re saying platonic marriage is the end of the slippery slope. It’s the natural conclusion of the slippery slope that same-sex marriage put us on. They’re saying we can’t codify the Respect for Marriage Act because what’s next? Platonic marriage? We are an asexual married couple, and over the course of several years we’ve seen with increasing frequency legislators, judges, legal scholars, ranking members of the Heritage Foundation talk about how not only should asexual marriage not be legal, but it isn’t currently legal.

Courtney: So how are we not supposed to take that in any other way but our marriage is just coasting on the fact that nobody’s challenged it in court yet? The IRS hasn’t questioned our taxes yet. And thank goodness they haven’t. But once again, it’s the same fight. It is a collective fight for queer liberation.

Courtney: And then when even other aces say, “Well, the issues you’re talking about aren’t actually ace issues, there’s something else entirely. It’s an immigration issue.” Okay, I have friends who are immigrants to the UK. I know how difficult of a process that is. Does that mean if I immigrated to the UK and attempted to get married and got asked all these invasive questions about my sex life and I said, “Oh, we don’t actually have that,” and we were denied a marriage license, does that become an ace issue then? Or are you going to say, no, it’s because you’re an immigrant?

Royce: So the train of thought that you’re hovering around here. There is a parallel. When anyone is trying to champion rights for any sort of oppressed group, there is a sort of bigoted reaction to that, where people who are at a point of higher privilege, who aren’t the group of people that are benefiting from, you know, some more progressive set of laws, that lifts someone near to the bottom up where they will have a very negative, knee-jerk reaction to someone else getting rights. As if they themselves were somehow losing rights. As if there is a finite amount of rights in the world and if someone else gets more, that means that I’m losing some of mine. That is irrational. It’s rooted in bigotry. But this idea that you flip that around and forms of oppression oppress a wide variety of people, the minds of the people creating that legislator, they might have a specific group in mind, but it doesn’t really matter because there are side effects to a lot of laws. There isn’t an oppression pie where if you put multiple groups in somehow, that is taking away the focus from other people or exacerbating the problem. Like, that’s not a real rational reaction.

Courtney: No, it’s absolutely not. And to bring it back to the more recent– I’m going to call these the asexual conspiracy theories. Which we touched on, maybe, a little bit last week. But in recent years, because, mind you, the Venn diagram of transphobes and acephobes is practically a circle, and that was by design. Yeah, you get those silly comments that’s like, “Asexuals don’t exist. You’re either XX or XY.” They know what they’re doing there. They also know what they’re doing when they say, and they do, “Asexuality is not real. What we actually are are just all kids who were formerly put on puberty blockers.” We genuinely have this same camp of TERFs out there saying they invented asexual identity and they’re championing asexual visibility because they want to normalize the fact that they’re severing these children’s sexual development. They’re making it so that these kids’ genitals are getting mutilated. These kids who get, you know, gender– gender affirming care.

Courtney: They’ll, they’ll always bring it back to orgasm also. They’ll be like, “These kids are never going to be able to have an orgasm.” And that’s why sometimes a queer organization will say, “Hey, happy Ace Week.” Because they want to normalize the fact that they’re ruining these children forever. They’re creating asexuals. And despite a lack of scientific evidence for any of these claims, we see it time and time again. They’ll say, “Oh, these kids will be incapable of orgasm.” They’ll say, “These kids will never have a functioning sex life as adults.” Once again, bringing it back to the sex life. That’s the end game, end all be all issue. They aren’t going to have a normal sex life. And it doesn’t matter that there’s no lack of scientific evidence for that, because compulsory sexuality in our society is so widely accepted. It is the norm that anyone who might be a little on the fence or maybe have a little bit of weird vibes, oh, that’s something they can relate to. “I like having sex, I like having orgasms. Yes, you know the population is declining and that is a crisis. We do need more babies.”

Courtney: All of these are, you know, related, but not related issues that people can grab to, and it kind of all centers on the conversation of sex. And so sometimes when we try to have these conversations about gender affirming care for minors, which is genuinely under attack right now in our home State recently– Our governor vetoed a ban on gender affirming care for minors, but there was a big enough conservative majority that they were able to overturn her veto. And I not only mourned for those trans kids. I attended the emergency Town Hall virtually for trans kids and their families and the allies who want to help them as a response to this, because I want to do everything I can to help them. We need to protect trans kids, but it is very, very disheartening when you try to address that this mythical concept of a normal, functional sex life has so much power in so many areas of legislation. People will say, “Well, stop taking up space. Stop making it about you, this isn’t about you,” which is also just a tactic to shut down conversation, Because at no point have we or would we ever say that asexuals are more important than trans people. That is so absurd.

Royce: I also just don’t understand the motivation, aside from some amount of either internalized or externalized bigotry, of wanting to join hands with another community that’s experiencing the same underlying issue that you are. Like common enemies unite people, like, for a reason. Or they’re supposed to at least. Like the broader Queer Community should want to join together to get more people fighting these issues so they don’t happen.

Courtney: So there is another asexual conspiracy theory that is same but different, which is that asexuals are just a plant for Big Pharma. Because if it’s not gender affirming care that they’re coming from, it’s antidepressants. And people will say that giving antidepressants to teenagers creates post-SSRI sexual dysfunction. Which I’ve been doing some research on. I’m not ready to, you know, have a whole episode of it yet as I’m learning more. But from what I do understand, the study I saw that might actually have some weight to it sort of defines the symptom of post-SSRI sexual dysfunction as a loss of feeling in your genitals when having sex. Which, as a symptom, is called hypoesthesia, which is not the same thing as asexuality to begin with, as a hopefully very obvious base point. It’s really difficult from our standpoint to not see the parallel of: here are two potentially life-saving medical interventions, whether that be gender affirming care or antidepressants, that are so controversial in wider public discourse to allow teenagers to have access to, where, both sides of it, people are saying, “No normal sex life, that’s bad, that’s not worth it.”

Courtney: Asexuals are either just medically wrong and broken and should probably be fixed, or should just never be – quote – “created” in the first place; or asexuality is not real, they’re just trying to push an agenda and say it is real so that they’re normalizing all this harm that they’re doing to kids. It’s all in service to Big Pharma. It’s all in service to, you know, the trans ideology. In a previous year, on International Asexuality Day, when we still weren’t getting as much attention as Ms Rowling brought us, here’s one specific tweet that said, “We’re trying to promote asexuality as a thing while we’re puberty blocking and cutting the genitals off children. These things are completely unrelated.” So while it is so easy to see commentary like that repeated and trotted out on things like International Asexuality Day and Ace Week, it’s really easy to think this is the very first time this person has ever even heard of asexuality.

Courtney: But chances are, no, they know about asexuals. They hate us. They use us and the hatred against us as a recruitment tactic. And they know that acephobic talking points stick. Whether or not they even mention asexuals. The things like ‘normal sex life’ come up way too often. I’ve got another one here that says, “This pushing of asexuality as a sexuality/identity is handy, given the move to give kids puberty blockers stunting their sexual function as they move to adulthood. Might reduce future litigation if lacking sex drive/function has its own flag and social legitimacy. Just a thought.” Oh, speaking of flag, I’m just going to rant about that queer news site again for half a second here.

Courtney: Another thing that infuriated me was one so flippantly said like, “Oh, what are they gonna do for a flag for them? Because aren’t we running out of ideas for flags?” We have had a flag since 2010. Our community voted on our flag in 2010. We have one already.

Courtney: If you go to Stonewall tonight, you will see an asexual flag on the wall. If you went to New York City pride in 2023, you would’ve seen Yasmin Benoit, the grand marshall, holding an asexual flag in the parade. Which they should know, because they actually covered that story and showed footage of that parade. And they showed a photo of Yasmin holding a flag in the intro to the panel where they asked what the flag is going to be. So, a way to ignore us and call into question our political concerns, somehow at the same time, while pretending to talk about us. Meanwhile, in our personal life, we swap notes on further protections we can take for ourselves with our married gay friends. We actually have very similar tangible concerns. On an individual level, we have these beautiful diverse queer social coalitions, but on a large, online discourse mainstream scale, even the people dunking on Rowling and saying they ostensibly believe in representation are not listening to us or attempting to learn. So how are we to fight back when the bigots who are very politically active learn more about us in their attempt to demonize our community than the ones who do “at least theoretically” believe in queer liberation? Listen to us. Learn from us. But most importantly please work with us.

Courtney: If you googled asexual flag, you’d find it real fast. But you didn’t even google the word asexual before you were put on a panel to discuss asexuality? So you know what? It’s not even unrelated, it’s part of the same point. Include asexual perspectives in these conversations. They’re not overshadowing the conversation, they’re enriching it. They’re adding additional context that doesn’t get nearly as much mainstream news coverage.

Courtney: So I think that’s where we ought to end for today, because if we go too long, it will go one of two ways. It will either just be me reading more and more tweets and Tumblr posts that are all saying exactly the same thing over the course of many years, or it will be me taking the– taking my thoughts further in response to the, “These aren’t ace issues. These are XYZ issues,” even further. Where the inevitable conclusion is me ranting for another good couple hours about how the entire concept and legislatively incentivize nuclear family is entirely in service to the Western colonial project and how. Not only is it all queerphobic, it’s also all racist. It’s all everything. It is everything everywhere all at once. All of the bigotries overlap. It’s the same bigotry. It’s not one or the other, it’s not one more so than the other. It’s all the same, damn it. But we don’t have another couple of hours to do that right now, and I’m sure I’ve already gotten some of those points out in previous episodes too.

Courtney: So on that note, I want to leave you all with our featured MarketplACE vendor of the week from an artist who has, in fact, all of the intersectional identities that we love. Trans, non-binary, intersex, neurodivergent, disabled, ace and aro. And I am so glad that they are all of the things. Because they have brought us the most adorable little Pride dragons that I have seen in my entire life. Our featured vendor this week is – I’m going to try to do this, so – Lunariya, lunariyifer, lunaria fr. Is that Lunaria For Real? Is that what that’s trying to be? The first time I saw this, my brain jumbled up some letters and I thought it was Lunar Friar, but no, Lunariafr. Even though I am so sorry and I do not know how to pronounce your name, I am such a big fan of your dragons. And I want all of you to go look at these adorable dragons. They have dragons in the trans colors. They have dragons in the ace colors, the aro colors. They have our wonderful AAA battery trifecta. They have an aroace and agender dragon, all interlocking each other. They have an intersex dragon.

Courtney: They even have– Well, not only do they have, I have a little asexual dragon holding spoons who looks very sleepy. I might be that dragon. I actually have several giant dragon stickers from this shop because I like to use them as bookmarks in my Dungeons & Dragons books. So I’ve got the spoony ace dragon sticker, I’ve got the aromantic dragon sticker. And then there’s another ace dragon who’s sitting in like a little teacup, which is very cute. So I also have that one. We’ve got a set of aromantic colored dice and we have a set of Aromantic Pride colored aromatics, think herbs, garlic, onions all in the green, white, gray and black colors of the Aromantic Pride flag. Which is hilarious to me because I know so many dyslexic aspec who, every time they read aromantic, read aromatic. So the fact that this very relatable shared experience has been immortalized in a beautiful work of art is chef’s kiss. So, as per the usual, you can find links to Lunaria For Real, Lunariafr, in the show notes on our websites, as well as the description in the little box on YouTube.

Royce: Oh, I wondered, the FR is for France.

Courtney: Lunaria, France. How did you discover this? What did you see that I could not?

Royce: I just– It occurred to me that FR is the code used for French anything online, and so I had to double check. And turns out, yes, they are from France.

Courtney: I am so sorry, Lunaria France! I’m also gonna go ahead and pop some links to, you know, some of the posts we talked about today. This not-just-another-fake-lesbi-blog is actually kind of funny, because they haven’t posted since 2017, but they posted a lot in 2017. And it says, “Buy my silence. Permanently. $8000 per month. For $8,000 a month, I will stop.” I am sure someone has not been giving them $8,000 a month since then. But in the bio it also says: “Don’t call me cis, allo, or queer. Happy lesbian. Proud gatekeeping TERF, aphobe, and transphobe. Transphobia and aphobia aren’t real.” Which– Even though we read a small selection from this blog, there is a lot more there if you have the sanity to spare.

Courtney: So, as always, thank you all so much for being here. I hope that anyone who was still confused about the acephobia and transphobia overlap maybe have a little additional clarity, and also a little more knowledge of the sort of progression and evolution of these things. Because it is not new. It has been here for several years. And with that, we will talk to you all next time.