quousque:

so I found this thing, and now I am 100% sure of my orientation, for the first time since I was aware that sexual orientation was a thing (early high school), and it’s a bigger relief than I thought it would be. I didn’t realize just how subtly stressful it is to not be sure of something so fundamental to our society’s concept of identity until I was. I’m asexual, y’all.

I see a lot of people (not so much on tumblr, but on reddit and real life) complain about the Really Specific sexual identity labels, saying shit like “wow now they’re just making it up” and “ahhaha stupid tumblerina sjw’s” etc. What I’d like to say to those people, if I could, is that people aren’t making up new sexual orientations (or genders, or what have you), people are just coming up with more specific terms to describe more specific portions of the human experience. 

We’re experiencing somewhat of a renaissance in terms of sexual and gender identity liberation, and therefor we’re thinking a lot more about our experiences, and we are more able than ever before to seek out people with experiences similar to our own. It’s only natural that people would come up with more specific terms as we talk about this kind of stuff more.

People always create new terms when they start having conversations about stuff that people haven’t talked about before. Aristotle, Plato and Cicero dedicated chunks of their work to defining terms that we today consider to be the basic vocabulary of philosophical discussion. Terms are basically a shortcut to meaning. Just as a philosopher finds it useful to have a generally understood definition of ‘virtue’, people who talk about sexual and gender identity find it useful to have specific terms for concepts in their areas, as well. 

A hundred years ago, everyone in the LGBT+ community would probably just say they were ‘queer’. Then the community specifically developed terms for trans, lesbian, and gay, because they found it useful to distinguish those meanings, even though they all fell under ‘queer’ (as it was understood at the time- I’m not saying you have to ID as queer if you’re in LGT, just pointing out historical use). People in the community saying “well, my experience is similar to yours, but different in these ways” and others going “me too, i’m different in those same ways” leads to more specific terms, like bisexual and asexual, and a whole bunch of more specific terms under asexuality. 

Labels are useful because they tell you that you aren’t the only one, and there’s nothing “wrong” with you. When I read about autochorissexuality, it was a relief, because it meant that other people experienced the same things that I do. I can use that label to find other people like me. My first thought upon seeing the image above was a mix of “oh it’s me” and “THANK GOD it’s not just me”. 

Now, I probably won’t go around telling people that I’m autochorrissexual. Because most people will have no fucking clue what that means. Hell, probably not even most people in the ace community know what it means. If people ask, I’ll say I’m asexual. Or, if I don’t want to explain asexuality and don’t think they’ll already know what it means, I’ll say bisexual, since I am interested in people of multiple genders (just not sexually). Or, I might just say “queer” because that covers it, too. So even if I don’t go around using this label in everyday life, I’m glad that it exists, because it means that other people share my experiences, and that I can finally be sure that I have a place, in terms of sexual identity.