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Who Should And Shouldn't Be Included In Pride? | A Quick Guide 🌈

Sunday 3 June 2018


Hello helo hello and welcome to a fun social awareness blog post!! I wanna just put a quick disclaimer out right now that this post is chock full of my own opinions - don't take anything I say as gospel or fact because it's most likely not, and I'm only gonna encourage healthy discussion on this topic rather than hate and backlash!! Aight, back to rainbows and happiness.

makeup deets are over on my instagram!!!

There's been many a tweet floating around on the internet about 'who Pride is for' this year. As far as I know we've never really had this narrative going on around Pride Month before, or if we did I've not really seen it, but this year it seems to be even more prevalent. And the one thing that seems to be incredibly prevalent is asexuals, aromantic and agender people being excluded from Pride on the grounds that they can still be cishet (cisgender/heteronormative) and therefore are excluded from Pride and celebrating Pride Month.

Here's a bit of education for ya. Asexual (ace) = people who are not sexually attracted to other people, aromantic (aro) = people who are not romantically attracted to other people and agender = people who don't identify with either male or female. The updated LGBT acronym is now LGBTQ+A, meaning Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Ace/Aro/Agender. As far as I know, the term 'queer' (having studied this in depth in my first year of uni) includes anything outside social norms, therefore becoming an umbrella term for all types of sexualities that aren't exclusively cishet. There are a lot of terms to get your head around, trust me!! Now, the tricky thing is, these terms, especially queer, have many different meanings and people attach different things to them, but that's what I understand those terms to mean and that's how I explain them to other people.

In my opinion, the purpose of Gay Pride has changed a lot in the last ten or so years. It's a movement designed to end discrimination and violence against LGBTQ+A, as well as to promote our self affirmation, equal rights and increase our visibility as a community. While Pride is still for all those things, it's also now to celebrate our differences and the differences in the ways in which we love, and to break the stigma down surrounding our sexual diversity.

Because of this, I really disagree with the narrative that 'aces aren't included in Pride'. I'm gonna throw back to the days when bisexual people weren't just discriminated against outside the LG community but also inside it. I remember gay people online saying to me 'you're just a lesbian and can't admit it' and 'you're not really gay, you're just pretending to be bi because it's different' and this narrative is even still going on someplaces, with people saying 'you're only bi because it's fashionable'. I remember the exclusion I faced and I remember feeling unwanted in a community that was to celebrate sexual diversity. Bisexuality, like any sexuality, is a tough thing to understand if you don't identify with it, but that doesn't mean it isn't valid. Bisexual people have faced abuse at previous Pride marches due to being in a m/f (male/female, aka hetero) relationship. In my eyes, this just isn't fair. Bisexuality is real, it's valid and no one should be made to feel like it's not.



This is exactly the same with asexual/aromantic. 

Ace/aro is still a 'queer' sexuality. They are included in the acronym. They are confused about their identity and who on earth are we to say that Pride is not for them because they appear to be cishet? I know what exclusion from this community can feel like and while I can't completely understand ace/aro, I know people who are ace and therefore have secondhand experience of what it's like to be excluded from something that should be for everyone. Ace/aro people have their identities erased all over the place - the fact I had to put a note in the beginning of this post explaining what these terms and identities mean shows this - and we don't need this same sort of erasure in LGBT spaces either. The acronym used to be LGT before bisexuality got included, so why are we still not accepting Q+A at the end?

In my opinion, the only people Pride is not for, are people who are going to hurl abuse at the celebrators for whatever reasons - homophobia, biphobia, transphobia or for just being cishet. It's my opinion that straight allies (straight people who support Pride) shouldn't be excluded from Pride either. While Pride is not exclusively for them, why should we stop anyone celebrating love? Pride is not for gatekeeping.

Surely, Pride is to celebrate love for just being love, and it doesn't matter HOW you love.

I know that there are some seriously differing opinions on this topic and it's very sensitive indeed, but this narrative that Pride is only for a certain approved list of identities and sexualities has really only cropped up very recently, and I think it's plain wrong and it actually draws just more boundaries than we need - it's entirely counter-productive and defeats the point of Pride. Our queer community is one of the most inclusive out there, so why are we excluding people that are in the same boat as bisexual people once were? It can feel confusing enough to not know how to identify yourself, or not know where you fit in, but being told that you don't belong at a festival of love - it's just awful that we're still supporting this idea in 2018. 

There are no rules over who gets to celebrate all the diverse, beautiful, messy ways in which we love.

What do you think about ace/aro people and their 'place' at Pride?

Em xx

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