[Coda]

I had a larger post typed up here where I recounted my own experience as a teenager as a way to compare changes in social attitudes toward the ace lifestyle over the last 25 years. I thought better of posting it, because I realized that it really didn't help; it just put too much focus on something that doesn't actually matter to what I'm trying to say.

But social attitudes HAVE changed over the last 25 years, and things that would have been shrugged off then have somehow become a big deal now. A lifestyle that was merely innocently misunderstood in my generation is now feeling oppression and discrimination where it didn't exist before. And that's what I've been lamenting.

But I've seen that same thing happen all over the place in that time. When by all rational sense things should have been getting better year-over-year, I instead see things getting worse as everything grows increasingly polarized. And the only people I see actually doing cruel bigoted things are people that have developed a sensitized, knee-jerk reaction against what in truth is only a tiny sliver of radicals.

That's why I hold the belief that ace people have been done a disservice by being lumped in with queer lifestyles: they weren't considered queer (and weren't discriminated against) until comparatively recently. That's not to demean or invalidate anyone's identity; you are who you are and no label or attribute will change that. But I just feel really bad that a group of people that I used to count myself among has to deal with such a negative environment that as far as I can tell really only exists because of the political climate of the last 10-15 years.