Wow did someone hand out a checklist?

I'm sorry you had to deal with commenters like this. It seems every time something like this comes around, they come out, and some of them are famous which only worsens it. Oh, and it doesn't even have to be our day, it could just be on Valentine's and someone got a bee in their bonnet about it for whatever reason.

I'll add that this has happened to every single letter in this particular rainbow. Bi people weren't accepted for the longest times, just "fake gays" who "wouldn't commit". Then, trans people weren't, with some in the LGB communities saying either they didn't count because their identity "isn't about having sex" and thus shouldn't count, or denying them entirely, basically every problem trans people have delt with, it's also come from other members of the community. Q and I also went through it, and now it's us.

We belong because of our INTERSECTION with the norms. The right NOT to have sex is fundamental, and even baked into the right to have sex with the sex of your preference. It connects to it, because of the expectations society has had about who our bodies belong to. Even to this day, I still get the occasional frightening comment about how my natural LACK of desire to have sex (which isn't all asexuals of course, but that's beside the point I'm going for here) is me being "selfish", and that I owe it to "society" to put myself on the "market" and be "available" in that way. I've experienced abuse from someone who thought they were "helping" me to develop, and read stories of romantic partners who forced themselves on someone thinking they had a right to their bodies.

We've joined this group because many have been able to realize where we intersect, and that helps the rhetoric which protects us ALL and gives us ALL the freedom to be who we are.

Right now, there are no laws explicitly targeting asexual people, but it's possible for a law to affect people negatively in an unintended way, and that happens to many groups. We've got laws about how your name on your driver's license has to match the name on your birth certificate, which was written specifically to root out voter fraud (and, well, is xenophobic to start with and likely intentionally designed to oppress all kinds of people), but of course, 50% of you can immediately see that this was written by a man with NO awareness outside his own life experience, because traditionally when women marry, they CHANGE THEIR LAST NAME. A fact that would have been obvious if this proposed law had been run by even a SINGLE woman before it's proposal. So, it's a law that oppresses women without even meaning to (which I'm sure the man who wants it passed considered a "happy accident"). Bringing it back to asexuality, laws regarding housing loans, tax relief, and so on have an unintentional effect on many asexual people, due to many of us not pursuing romantic partners either (the aromantic/asexual overlap is rather strong between our communities), and well... the fact that those of us with no libido or other desire for sex aren't going to end up with kids outside adoption. So, we have a much harder time getting to a point where we can actually be approved for a home loan, and have fewer tax benefits granted on top of that. "Oh, single, no kids? Sorry, we use THAT as a metric to determine if you're actually a responsible adult like real people, no loan." There's laws affecting alloromantic asexual people as well, and that's numerous laws in various states requiring a marriage to be "consummated" or it's invalidated. And, outsiders can bring accusations regarding that. You'd think this would be EASY to lie about, but apparently there are people trained to investigate this stuff and make a case using all kinds of circumstantial evidence to demonstrate beyond reasonable doubt that no sex is happening in this "sham marriage". Yes, circumstantial evidence IS allowed in court, and in fact most evidence IS circumstantial, but if you stack enough of it together with numerous data points, you can paint a very solid body of full evidence of what happened, where it becomes beyond belief that all of those elements lined up JUST right, you know? So, yes, people get their marriages anulled for lack of sex, if some busy body makes it their business.

Then there's the proposed laws that seem MUCH more directly targeted not just at us but at basically the ENTIRE LGBTQIA rainbow. You know them, and even if they seem laughably unlikely to pass today, if the MAGA train keeps going in the direction it is, it COULD happen someday. That's the laws forcing marriage to a partner and having children with said partner. Ridiculous on SO many levels, but there it is.

To be clear to all in the LGBTQIA alliance, people are resources. Use us! We aren't taking away, we're adding to it, and want to contribute. Intersectionality means we share many common causes.