[Suzerain of Sheol]

Galla has requested I respond here, so here it goes.

I'm not sure that my perspective can offer anything valuable, to be completely honest. I've been calling myself asexual since before the movement even existed as far as I know, and from the little I know of its current state, I don't feel entirely comfortable grouping myself there any longer.

I've honestly always come down on not wishing to be grouped in lbgtq personally, specifically because I've seen the kinds of abuse and oppression people of those identities have to suffer and feel like it's a disservice to hold my own negative experiences with being asexual to that same level of injustice.

Because, for me, it's never been other people bullying me or inflicting their harmful ignorance on me; it's entirely on my end, confined to my own experience: that feeling of complete alienation and dehumanization, to look around at a species that has evolved via and for this one, specific function - and a culture that has layered it with maddening rules and meanings and contexts far divorced from the gross physical fact of mating - and to realize how absolutely alone one is, to be so fundamentally, effortlessly othered by your very nature, a dead-end of evolution, a grotesque mutation that will be autoselected out of its problematic existence.

And it's something everyone else takes for granted, this implicit assumption that we're all playing the same game by the same rules, while I'm here, isolated, wondering how this is possibly all there is to life, why we're even here at all if it's just to grind our bodies into each other and suffer anxiety and self-loathing and agony and fear because we're born being told that this is the metric of a meaningful life, and then, to close the circle, in so many cases it leads to the forcing of another wretched lifeform into this abbatoir of confusion and inescapable torment we call a planet.

...I probably should have mentioned that for me, being asexual is quintessentially entangled with being an antinatalist, which is another reason why I don't feel comfortable identifying with the greater social movement. My aversion to sex goes far beyond merely being physically disgusted by it and having a touch phobia, the entire concept and the realization of its import to the lives of those around me is absolutely crucifying. It is not pleasant to realize how utterly dysfunctional one was born to be. (And that would be reason number three that I don't feel comfortable with the label, because I recognize fully the validity of the identity to other people who see it as something positive, but for myself, it is as baneful as the incurable disease that wracks my body every day).

That aside, though, in regards to the broader conversation, I honestly remain completely oblivious to any currently active "identity politics" fronted by the asexual community, I'd be curious as to what exactly you're referring to with that, Coda.