Queerdo

I think one point of tension I feel between queer and aroace communities is that queer people have our own critiques of amatonormativity (a concept grounded in queer theory to start with). So every now and then I see a post that 1. reinvents the wheel and 2. assumes that non-straight relationships mirror straight ones. Queer people literally wrote most of the better books on ethical non-monogamy and families of choice. It's a conflict that mirrors a long-standing one between "gay rights" groups and "radical queer" groups. Do you see romance (including marriage) as a civil right? Or do you see it as a form of cisheteropatriarchal power? That debate has been going on for at least 50 years now. Along with disagreement about the degree to which we are "born this way" when heterosexuality is also a political system.

There's at least some analysis that while anti-trans politics plays well in Republican primaries, it doesn't play as well in many general elections.

I do not find the concept of "romance" accessible to me as a queer person.

The discussion of pelvic exams in the book was a lot more explicit than any discussion of Kobabe's sexuality.

Great book!

I'm arguably arospec, definitely not acespec.

I largely nope out with WTFromantic. But we don't all have to use the same words or the same definitions.

Catching up on Star Trek, but I think they've really been knocking it out of the park between Strange New Worlds (Captain Angel) and Prodigy (Zero).

No direct statement yet, but Jannick on Dance 100 is dropping major hints.

The task of defining who I will be five years from now is way too intimidating for me to tackle, so I've been working on who I want to be next year. I can commit to making changes that will (hopefully) improve my life next year without taking on the expectations of committing to binary transition or passing.

If I had to describe my long-term relationship in one word, it's "cozy." It helps that they're easy on the eyes (and ears, and nose, and brain for that matter) but attraction isn't really what our relationship is based on. Love and attraction are both ambiguous words. I'm firmly in the "love is a verb" camp as I experience it. I choose to make commitments of care to people I consider family. Attraction isn't a verb, and the "I want..." interpretation freaks me out. I'm starting to wonder if my skepticism there has something to do with the way my brain is bent. I have intrusive thoughts and feelings all the time, not all of them are worth chasing.

Vent: Saw another "how do allos have sex all the time?" thing. Most of my peers are not having a lot of sex. It's very difficult to have partnered sex without a sexual relationship (even if that's only for a few hours) and one of the ambiguous joys of being over 40 is becoming less and less willing to compromise your own wants and needs just for sex. (Especially since sex as a trans person means figuring out what sex means for me, and communicating that to another person.) When I was first coming of age, a popular feminist slogan was "Women need men like a fish needs a bicycle." Lately that's been coming to the top of my brain more and more often. I need sex like a fish needs a bicycle. I'm happy doing it for myself until I find someone I feel comfortable sharing with. If that never happens, it's not a loss.

I see gender roles as a bit like a rubber band. You can get away with stretching it in a few directions, but if you try to stretch too far or in too many directions, you'll exceed the elastic limit and things start breaking.

Love the family of choice in Pose for modern drama. SFF: The Vorkosigan stories have the fluid family relationships of Beta Colony. The protagonist of Yoon Ha Lee's Dragon Pearl seems to be raised within a sororial household of aunts. Ancillary Sword reveals that the Imperial Raadch has fluid family relationships (but rigid class systems). In Provenance in the same setting, we see entrepreneurial extended families.

A majority of trans people either choose not to get "bottom" surgery or don't have access to it. That's especially true for transmasc people. Having a phallus does not define boyhood, and I know some great dudes (some of whom rock biker beards) who have not had gender-affirming surgery.

Breq/Seivarden from the Ancillary Justice series.

I feel that's exactly it. There's a fair number of people putting sex and romance on a pedestal, and treating anything else as either unhealthy or a disability accommodation.

No, you're not the only one. Rant: I think "theoretical" is often too kind since usually what I see is erasure, or patronizing stereotypes about how we need to "get over" our own boundaries.

Wouldn't mind more discussion on the construction of romance and cisheteronormative values.

Big fan of Sherlock/Joan on Elementary. Doing a Mass Effect playthrough and trying an all queer-platonic run this time.

I have a bad habit of reading AVEN, and see way too much of people (mostly very outspoken allosexual people) expressing very spicy personal takes as universal truths about what sex is and isn't for everyone else. In spite of a "no invalidation" rule, there's a lot of it going around. And I'd rather have these conversations with my offline community where people are a lot more polite, diverse, and accepting of the fact that sexuality and relationships are different for everyone. If I wanted to be told on a daily basis that my mixed-orientation relationships are doomed, I'd read the supermarket tabloids. I don't know if it's "ace" spaces so much as a few particular spaces, albeit ones that are treated as the central space for ace people. I've found some wordpress and pillowfort circles that are generally much more skeptical of cisheterocentric ideas that seem to be pushed on AVEN.