LauraG

While many of you commenting on the thread do know about this issue already, there may be other people on arocalypse who don't. I think part of the purpose of Coy's initial post, and this thread in turn, is to try to get ahead of the misinformation to prevent it from spreading more. Yes, it's happening on Tumblr, but at least half of us here are also on Tumblr and I'd imagine that the rest of arocalypse's userbase also contains some Tumblr users who might unwittingly spread misinformation here. I'd handle it the way you'd handle any other misinformation. If you see it, correct it if you're able. If you've unwittingly spread it? Make a correction. Again, this may be what a lot of people commenting on the thread are already doing. Being tired of this makes a lot of sense. My suggestion? Don't mention who coined the word. If someone's tired of people telling them that ace people coined the word, spreading misinformation is not going to help that. It's just going to prompt people to come on their posts and tell them the one thing they don't want to hear - that aces were actually the one to coin it. If people just don't mention who coined it, no one is going to mention the ace community. And if for some reason they did make some comment about terms coming from the ace community without prompting, that would be inappropriate (and you'd also be justified in telling them so).

Hm. In my experience people tend to be quite reluctant to let go of the idea that it was aros who coined the term, often getting stuck on not believing that the coiners don't identify as aro. Maybe bringing that up earlier in the conversation would work better. I also found @Coyote's post helpful because it highlighted that often the reluctance comes from being afraid of losing the term somehow? So I'm planning on reassuring that that's not the case in the future too. Hopefully one of those things would help. Yeah, I agree that this is somewhat of a widespread problem that does warrant some community effort to correct. I get that we're all tired of this topic, but as long as the misinformation is spread more than the corrections to the misinformation, the more the problems going to keep coming up. If we address it, we'll be able to put it behind us much more than if we ignore it. And to further illustrate the point of this causing harm, I've gotten anon hate calling me an "alloro ace stealing aro terms" for mentioning that aces (of unspecified romantic orientations) might be in queerplatonic relationships. Seeing as I also get hate calling me allo for being greyro, it wasn't the most pleasant message to receive. I want to make sure that doesn't happen to other people.

How do people typically react when you correct them? My experiences trying to politely correct people have... not been positive, to say the least. I'd be curious to hear how you go about it if it typically goes smoothly for you.