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Aro Folks under the Trans and/or Nb Umbrella


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Are there any other folks who fall under the trans and/or nb umbrella who can really appreciate realizing you were aro? 

Because I feel like one of the most common transphobic rhetorics thrown around is that “nobody will love you if you’re (insert identity)”. And while this extends to all different flavors of love, most people put an emphasis on the romantic aspect of it. That if you’re not cis, nobody is going to want to be in a romantic relationship with you, or be attracted to you romantically. 

The benefit of realizing you’re aro or aro-spec though is that you’re much more likely to recognize amatonormativity and it’s negative effects. You’re able to build your own self-worth outside of those standards. And it’s very liberating to divert those expectations entirely, to realize they don’t even apply to you to begin with. Anyone else?

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Guest Queerdo

I sometimes self-describe as quoiromantic because I feel that the concept of "romance" is intensely dysphoric and inaccessible to me as a genderqueer person in American culture. At best, my relationships are an uphill struggle to emulate heteronormative roles and reclaim them for our own needs. At worst, my relationships are tragic or degenerate and unfit to celebrate as equal to heterosexual monogamy. 

I experience love, and have relationships, but since those relationships don't conform to the highly gendered ideals expected of "romance" I prefer not to call them that. 

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I identified as nonbinary after I conceived of myself as aro, and I've never been interested in having a romantic relationship ever since I was a kid, so I don't relate much to that, though I can totally get how relieving it can be to understand that being (romantically) loved isn't a requirement for a fulfilling life.

I feel like it was the opposite, in fact. That since I realized I wasn't interested in partnering with anyone, there wasn't much as much of a need to apply the concept of gender to myself. Some orientations are based on your own gender in addition to others (straight, gay, lesbian...) and some aren't (ace, aro, bi, pan, which are gender neutral in a way). Granted, it's not the sole reason as to why I'm nonbinary, but I feel like it was a small factor.

13 hours ago, Guest Queerdo said:

I sometimes self-describe as quoiromantic because I feel that the concept of "romance" is intensely dysphoric and inaccessible to me as a genderqueer person in American culture.

I've seen someone talk about that before:

Quote

I really can’t identify into anything “romantic.” Straight and cis people get romcoms; I get porn tags. The word gives me intense gender dysphoria due to prior abuse. And none of the explanations of “romantic orientation” hit on what I consider essential qualities of care I share with partners.

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  • 1 month later...

Before I figured out my romantic identity, I found out my gender identity. I didn't really think about the consequences of this with romance despite hearing a lot of trans people talking about them struggling to find people who would be willing to love them but I just didn't think about it. This is probably due to my disinterest in romantic relationships but it could also be because we're living in a better world nowadays. At the time of figuring out my gender identity I think I thought I was homoromantic or something so I though, being queer will increase my chances of finding someone who understands being trans more than if I was straight because of the LBGTQ+ community, trans people are grouped together with queer people. Now I realise from lots of personal experience and lots of other people's experiences that people in the LBGTQ+ community can still be shockingly ignorant to others in the same community. I kinda strayed from the point I was trying to make there but to summarise, didn't even think about the romantic problem of being trans in the first place. I definitely haven't experienced the same problems as other trans people, not out to anybody at all about that because being genderfluid is confusing for some people and I don't want to scare them off with my ever-changing bloody pronouns.

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I'm genderfluid, and I guess you could say that my intersex identity is kind of related to that as well, I use the genderfluid identity to explain my comfort with my body I guess. Before I fully embraced being aro, I did have the whole "no one is going to want to invest in me and treat me well because i'm not cis" and then I was like, well, just because someone doesn't want to date me doesn't mean they can't treat me with respect? What kind of messed up thinking is this?

And it's true that many people (in my experience) don't want to, well have a family, whether via biological means or through adoption, with an intersex person, I have found people in kind of non-traditional ways who I could do stuff like that, at least outside of the "I'm romantically attracted to someone, lets have a family" model. I get along well with gay folks and just elderly ladies in the village I grew up in, and I realized that I did have quite a bit of "love" and "affection" in my life, it's just different. I just only have a few people close to me at the moment and it sucks that i'm not amatonormative, sadly. I really despise having to live with the two tiered system of treating people you are romantically into better than those that you aren't, or just treating people you are aesthetically attracted to better as well. 

 

Edited by MulticulturalFarmer
Added some words
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i’m quoiromantic and transmasc, and i always felt really bad because i thought not loving or experiencing love only proved that being trans meant you were unloveable. now i know my identity more, i can see that i was just copying the ideas of people around me. 

being openly trans is hard enough, and then this! argh!

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