i met the first trans person i ever dated when we were 18. they were (are) TME and cissexual; i'm TMA and would have gotten on hormones had i believed it safe for me. they were my first sexual experience. we dated for 2 1/2 years. we were horrible for each other! and i was the problem.

in addition to trying to work out higher education, employment, and what felt like the first serious relationship of my entire life, i now had to grapple with my practical sexuality, something which had previously only existed in abstract. it was weird. i liked it, i guess? i couldn't really believe that someone found me desirable. i liked fingering them and eating them out well enough, making them feel good was gratifying i guess, and it turned out i was good at it to boot. there just didn't seem to be a way to make me feel good. why? isn't sex supposed to be some crazy shit? it certainly seemed to be for them. maybe it's dysphoria? no? kinda? what's wrong with me?

we keep having sex,and i keep asking myself these questions. my dysphoria ebbs and flows, but even when i eventually come to some sort of terms with my penis, sex still doesn't feel good. the closest i got was whenever i had their feet in my face, which i requested a lot since they seemed okay with it. when i eventually declared that i was ace (gray ace, a label i still enjoy to this day), it wasn't so much a realization or discovery as it was the conclusion from a deductive effort.

My dicks huge but I'm asexual so I only use it for peeing

because this leaves room for sex in our relationship, we continue to have it and enjoy it in the ways we do, and they continue to be open about their desires. eventually they express an interest in bondage, pain, toys, fantasies about group sex, and a lot of other ideas that made me really uncomfortable for reasons i couldn't articulate, they just did.

if you're allosexual and reading this, imagine briefly that you're ace. you figure this out at some point and you begin to realize the vast gulf between your relation to sex and others'. it is deeply, viscerally uncomfortable. nobody, especially in young queer spaces, wants to accommodate this. we're young queer and trans people, finally meeting other young queer and trans people. we can't even decide if you're included in our activism, so let us be horny and don't rock the boat and we'll keep paying you lip service for now. so we let them be horny, of course.

but that sucks, right? you have a bunch of people you're supposedly allied with telling you yeah sure you're valid or whatever, but lowkey we don't give a fuck about your (very real!) sex repulsion. so you seek out the only people who will reliably accommodate you: other sex-repulsed asexuals. this instantly places you in an echo chamber with people who think that sex repulsion is an immutable part of yourself, it is who you are, we were Born This Way and there can't be anything wrong with that. once you accept that, you don't question reactionary rhetoric on kink at pride, or public indecency laws, or the idea that two+ adults can consent to doing something and have something about that be inexcusably, metaphysically wrong to the point that we should seek to prevent the possibility and render punishment when we can't.

so i lashed out at them. at first it started with clamming up when harder kinks got mentioned, or ignoring the topic when it got brought up. one day, they text me to ask if i want to hear about a sexy dream they had. i say yes(!) and they tell me about how they had a penis in the dream, and how that was kind of exciting for them! my sex repulsion compounds with my internalized transmisogyny, and i shut them out. after months uninterrupted of texting every day, i gave them the silent treatment for the rest of the weekend, and blew up at them when they texted me to see what the matter was on Monday, insisting that they should have somehow "known better."

we continued dating for over a year after this, but demonstrating so clearly to them that i was not safe to discuss their fantasies with colored the remainder of our relationship. after all, what else might i have decided privately was strictly off-limits?

both the liberal queer orgs and communities i got funneled into as a teen and young adult and the ace communities i found after suffer from the same problem: sexual idealism. it's hard not to fall into it; cisheteropatriarchy sets a sexual norm and then demands you fuck according to that norm. be you gay or ace, the way you want to fuck is distant from that norm, and earns you corrective punishment. if all you know to do is play by the rules of their game - highly likely, in a society like ours - of course your reaction is going to be "let us fuck!" and "please stop talking about sex!" respectively.

Tweet by Halimede @HalimedeMF, August 22 2023: "and I wish people online would stop talking about sex!!!!!

this paradigm was never meaningfully challenged until i met communists. they were the first people i ever watched ask one another hey, what is it that makes sex so unique? can you point to the component of it which sets it apart from, say, having dinner with someone? of course, you can't without resorting to idealism. this example came full circle later as i began to learn about youth liberation. someone tried to argue that the difference between sex and dinner is that dinner isn't traumatic and sex can be, obviously.

is that obvious? no one, no child has ever experienced trauma at the dinner table? forced to eat something they didn't want to, forced to eat less than they wanted to, shamed for eating too much or too little, forced to participate in a religious ritual, humiliated in conversation by an adult they can't stand up to, forced to sit next to family members who have harmed them, forced to be quiet about it?

thanks to the advances of feminism, we have a framework for talking about the abuses that happen in a sexual context and legitimizing them as abuses, as traumatic, but its present form retains a strong measure of that idealism. permitting and reinforcing the idealism becomes, effectively, a survival mechanism for the critique; a relief valve which discourages access to the material root of the matter, allowing subsumption of the critique and thereby permitting it to exist under capitalism. the communists - specifically those informed by transfeminism - who have provided me with the framework to discuss and legitimize these other abuses and traumas are not interested in this idealist defanging, and that makes it a tough pill to swallow. in order to truly accept that sex isn't special, you have to accept that nothing is special, and that all of these things that we've naturalized are not in fact natural, they're abuses we've been excusing for much of our lives. that's nothing short of horrifying.

since improving my understanding of materialism in this way, my sex repulsion has all but disappeared. of course, people are reactionary because (they believe) it benefits them. i would not have allowed my sex repulsion to be challenged had i not tried to understand how transmisogyny operates upon me. once i understood that idealism regarding sex is one of the mechanisms that enables transmisogynistic abuse - the fuel for the engine that chews up and spits out transfems for unsubstantiated allegations of rape, sexual assault, sexual assault of children, grooming, or just "creepy vibes" - i understood that my continued belief in sexual idealism aids my oppressors. the beliefs which made me feel entitled to queer spaces where people don't talk about sex are, fundamentally, the same beliefs which start whisper campaigns about transfems, get callouts written, and get us exiled.

An asexual pride flag with a yellow hammer and sickle overlaid in the middle.

from each top according to their ability, to each bottom according to their needs...

does this mean that all sex repulsion is the result of reactionary beliefs? absolutely not. it is not a stretch for me to imagine someone who comprehends exactly the same things i do and yet cannot help feeling squeamish and put off regardless. but i was not simply squeamish and put off, my disgust informed my politics and my interpersonal relationships; being in community with people who refused to grapple with that disgust and encouraged others to refuse as well fostered regressive positions. i snapped at my partner for telling me about their dream because i was convinced that i was the wronged party.

i think the disgust many asexual people feel over sex is necessarily informed and exacerbated by the outsized stigma and importance it's granted culturally. this, again, does not make the feelings not real, but the purpose of the system is what it does, and what i did was feel like i was bravely standing up for myself while communicating opaquely and making my partner feel unsafe.

this isn't the question i set out to answer, but it is one i'm interested in as an unwilling participant of the Tumblr ace discourse years. are asexual people - and furthermore, aromantic people - queer? are they "LGBT," should that activism include ace people? insofar as that activism is useful, i think the only useful answer is yes. at the root of the matter are the cisheteropatriarchical standards i identified previously. although the corrective punishment doled out to ace/aro people and allosexual queer people takes different shapes, its source and function are the same. sexual liberation - total destigmatization of sex, reproduction, and all shapes and forms of the human body - will benefit asexual people and allosexual queers equally.

that said, i also strongly believe that successful liberatory spaces are not inclusive. those who are sex repulsed are not entitled to their comfort when the matter at hand is sexual liberation, and that space is not regressive for maintaining its values. this was, i believe, the root of the conflict. early ace advocacy typically stood on a foundation of idealism and reactionary thought, both intertwined and reinforcing one another; thus, the complaints made reflected this shaky analysis and indeed ran counter to the goals of sexual liberation. any such demand to make sexual liberatory spaces better accommodate asexual people by i.e. making those spaces less sexual can rightly be discarded as reactionary. the same cannot be said for critiques stemming from a material analysis of the asexual condition (of which we are receiving an increasing number in the literature), which reveals that despite what individual reactionaries may strive for, the ace struggle and the queer struggle are indeed linked inextricably.

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