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My Roommate found a really great cartoon that was about Asexuality the other day. She posted it on my timeline and I read through it and really liked what it said. So I thought I'd share it here.
Uh, a pale gremlin usurped The Robot?!
Huh?
Uh, a pale gremlin usurped The Robot?!
I still think of those in terms of Hellboy 2 portrayal...
Uh... That has some unpleasant implications to those who invoke The Robot's Moderation Wrath on the forums...
If you love what you do...smile
I'm sure I fall somewhere on the asexual spectrum, but then I'm also Aspergic (from years before it was popular), so I'm not entirely sure how much is one and how much is the other. Either way, I have almost no interest in having sex and very little interest in having a relationship.
As I hit my mid-30s, I do think that perhaps I should have started a family or at least sprogged in some fashion, but as I seriously dislike many aspects of very young children (screaming, horrible sticky messes of all kinds and so on), I think I'm definitely better off without all that stuff!
I'm sure I fall somewhere on the asexual spectrum, but then I'm also Aspergic (from years before it was popular), so I'm not entirely sure how much is one and how much is the other. Either way, I have almost no interest in having sex and very little interest in having a relationship.
As I hit my mid-30s, I do think that perhaps I should have started a family or at least sprogged in some fashion, but as I seriously dislike many aspects of very young children (screaming, horrible sticky messes of all kinds and so on), I think I'm definitely better off without all that stuff!
Same about the Aspergers only I wasn't diagnosed until my 30's. And I also feel the same about young children. They're so cute when they are someone else's and I can give them back when I'm done. I am, however, not uninterested in emotional relationships. I just don't want anything physical. My Roommate calls me Heteroromatic, which I think is apt. (Some people consider sex romance, I do not. Romance is all the stuff that happens before the sex gets involved).
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...I do think that perhaps I should have started a family or at least sprogged in some fashion, but as I seriously dislike many aspects of very young children (screaming, horrible sticky messes of all kinds and so on), I think I'm definitely better off without all that stuff!Same about the Aspergers only I wasn't diagnosed until my 30's. And I also feel the same about young children. They're so cute when they are someone else's and I can give them back when I'm done. I am, however, not uninterested in emotional relationships. I just don't want anything physical. My Roommate calls me Heteroromatic, which I think is apt. (Some people consider sex romance, I do not. Romance is all the stuff that happens before the sex gets involved).
Before, after, during, in-between; but you're right. Sex isn't romance. Sex can be romantic, or more appropriately you can be romantic during sex, but they are definitely not the same thing.
And no, children are a bad idea unless you actually want children. I wanted children so it worked. If you don't like having to deal with the day to day aspect of having children and really don't seriously want children; don't go there. They will devour you alive.
I love my kids. Youngest just started college. The house will finally be mine once more.
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Yeah, I love my kids, and my wife's kids, but it's a hellacious amount of work. If you don't want kids and don't think you'd deal well with kids, don't have any. If you're concerned about your genetic potential going to waste, well, there's always sperm banks if you are able to produce sperm, or egg donation if you are able to produce eggs.
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Yeah, I love my kids, and my wife's kids, but it's a hellacious amount of work. If you don't want kids and don't think you'd deal well with kids, don't have any. If you're concerned about your genetic potential going to waste, well, there's always sperm banks if you are able to produce sperm, or egg donation if you are able to produce eggs.
I'd rather not pass on my malfunctioning genes. :) Besides, I have 3 sisters all of whom have kids, so I don't have to produce any grand children. I'll remain the Auntie that gets to spoil them rotten and return them when I'm done :D
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Oh, I'm not concerned about my (missed) genetic potential and I'm only slightly more concerned about my surname going to waste (my father was an only child and my sister's already married). I'd like to have a child to pass on my (non-biological) legacy, but I certainly don't want to have to deal with the maintenance.
Then again, my parents would probably be more surprised if I got married than if I won the lottery (which of course I don't play). :)
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Yeah, I love my kids, and my wife's kids, but it's a hellacious amount of work. If you don't want kids and don't think you'd deal well with kids, don't have any. If you're concerned about your genetic potential going to waste, well, there's always sperm banks if you are able to produce sperm, or egg donation if you are able to produce eggs.
Since this is the LGBT community thread, it's worth pointing out that most banks won't take sperm or eggs from LGBT donors.
Since this is the LGBT community thread, it's worth pointing out that most banks won't take sperm or eggs from LGBT donors.
WUT.
On the subject of kids, I do want them someday. Just not right now.
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Yeah, I love my kids, and my wife's kids, but it's a hellacious amount of work. If you don't want kids and don't think you'd deal well with kids, don't have any. If you're concerned about your genetic potential going to waste, well, there's always sperm banks if you are able to produce sperm, or egg donation if you are able to produce eggs.Since this is the LGBT community thread, it's worth pointing out that most banks won't take sperm or eggs from LGBT donors.
WHAAAAAAA? That's utterly ridiculous. Right up there with refusing blood donations! These are people we are talking about!
Yeah, I love my kids, and my wife's kids, but it's a hellacious amount of work. If you don't want kids and don't think you'd deal well with kids, don't have any. If you're concerned about your genetic potential going to waste, well, there's always sperm banks if you are able to produce sperm, or egg donation if you are able to produce eggs.Since this is the LGBT community thread, it's worth pointing out that most banks won't take sperm or eggs from LGBT donors.
Huh. I think it's pretty common these days, when you start hormone therapy as a trans woman (male to female) for the doctor to tell you if you want to have kids some day (and don't have any yet), you might want to consider putting some sperm in a sperm bank (since HRT makes you sterile). I know my doctor did.
There is a fun question to ask, what are folks favorite LGBTQ characters from fiction? ...aside from beloved pathfinder iconics? =pCaptain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who/Torchwood.
WHAAAAAAA? That's utterly ridiculous. Right up there with refusing blood donations! These are people we are talking about!
Refusing blood donations is frequently stupid, but I can see why they do it (including, perhaps, sperm). I don't see any reason why they'd refuse a woman's eggs.
Your value as a human being doesn't lie in whether you can donate blood. Seriously. Not taking LGBT donor eggs and sperm is, on the other hand, a concrete problem.
I would say it is a very direct correlation to many people, though, perhaps even a majority. Involuntary childlessness is one of the worst conditions to handle psychologically.
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Your value as a human being doesn't lie in whether you can donate blood. Seriously. Not taking LGBT donor eggs and sperm is, on the other hand, a concrete problem.
I would not be here if several people beyond my father had not been generous with their vital fluids. So yeah, to me, value as a human being is very heavily wrapped up in blood donation.
Your value as a human being doesn't lie in whether you can donate blood. Seriously. Not taking LGBT donor eggs and sperm is, on the other hand, a concrete problem.I would not be here if several people beyond my father had not been generous with their vital fluids. So yeah, to me, value as a human being is very heavily wrapped up in blood donation.
While that's quite understandable, I think it's quite enough to know that you would if you could. Heck, I take medications which make me ineligible, so I can't do it either. See, having those in the body increases the risk of fainting while donating blood, so they don't want it. Otherwise, I would. Fainting is also a risk I am quite willing to take, so I find it pretty pointless. I have a hard time seeing myself as less of a human being than if I did donate blood, though.
While that's quite understandable, I think it's quite enough to know that you would if you could. Heck, I take medications which make me ineligible, so I can't do it either. See, having those in the body increases the risk of fainting while donating blood, so they don't want it. Otherwise, I would. Fainting is also a risk I am quite willing to take, so I find it pretty pointless. I have a hard time seeing myself as less of a human being than if I did donate blood, though.
This is why I can't donate blood. I faint every time. I have naturally low blood pressure and I just pass out every time they take more than a few vials for blood tests.
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I should clarify:
Banks don't take sperm or eggs from LGBT people to be considered donors for paying customers. They will take them if you are saving them for your own future use (such as is done with some trans people, people going into certain medical procedures, etc), or if it is a private arrangement where the donor and recipient are acquainted.
But if the hope is you want to donate under the belief that somebody, somewhere will conceive your child and carry on your genes, that is not going to happen.
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Huh. I think it's pretty common these days, when you start hormone therapy as a trans woman (male to female) for the doctor to tell you if you want to have kids some day (and don't have any yet), you might want to consider putting some sperm in a sperm bank (since HRT makes you sterile). I know my doctor did.Yeah, I love my kids, and my wife's kids, but it's a hellacious amount of work. If you don't want kids and don't think you'd deal well with kids, don't have any. If you're concerned about your genetic potential going to waste, well, there's always sperm banks if you are able to produce sperm, or egg donation if you are able to produce eggs.Since this is the LGBT community thread, it's worth pointing out that most banks won't take sperm or eggs from LGBT donors.
I think that there is a difference between donating and storing for your own future use. But I'm not sure since I've never had cause to look into it.
Edit: Got to read all the way through in the future.
Romance is all the stuff that happens before the sex gets involved).
I absolutely agree! People these days spend too little time on the Romance, and too much on the sexual aspect. I blame modern day movies.
Romance is all the stuff that happens before the sex gets involved).I absolutely agree! People these days spend too little time on the Romance, and too much on the sexual aspect. I blame modern day movies.Though as the Usual Suspect said, the Romance doesn't have to stop when the sex starts.
They're not the same thing, but they're not exclusive either.
True, but I'm only interested in the non-sexual aspects of romance.
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True, but I'm only interested in the non-sexual aspects of romance.Romance is all the stuff that happens before the sex gets involved).I absolutely agree! People these days spend too little time on the Romance, and too much on the sexual aspect. I blame modern day movies.Though as the Usual Suspect said, the Romance doesn't have to stop when the sex starts.
They're not the same thing, but they're not exclusive either.
That's cool with us. Long distance sex gets awkward on these boards anyway. Besides, my wife doesn't let me date other women.
<Wait? I haven't actually asked anybody's gender here. I'm just making a presumption from people's chosen avatars and that's probably a bad thing. If I may ask, Liranys; do you prefer to identify as male, female, or an alternate gender term? I honestly don't know. I'm also not sure it really matters; but I hate not knowing something.>
Ugh, the blood donation thing. This is a sore spot for me. I just got back from the hospital, actually, and, well, it was kinda harrowing.
For reference, the average human has around 11 pints of blood in them. Being a big guy, I expect I have more than that, but any way you look at it, it took basically another homo sapien worth of blood to keep me alive and get me back to the point where my own regenerative capabilities can take over.
I'm fortunate enough to have decent health insurance and to live in a city with a first-rate hospital. I'm doing fine now although the scar from the surgery is huge and will be pretty ugly, I'm guessing.
TL;DR: I went to the hospital and needed 13 pints of blood.
I feel like I'm in debt karmically for this. I gave blood several times during college, but I doubt I did it 13 times. Besides, enough people out there don't (or can't) give blood at all that I still feel like I took more than my share from the total supply of blood available to society.
However, as a bisexual man who has had sex with a man since 1977, they don't want my blood. It doesn't matter that I've been tested many times since my last gay relationship; it doesn't matter that I'm in a faithful relationship with my wife; it doesn't matter that neither of us have had sex with anyone who could even conceivably have HIV or other such diseases for years. They don't want my blood and they don't even want my wife's blood unless she and I didn't have sex with each other for a year.
I should also note that I am very privileged to be married, as if I were in a same-sex relationship, there's the possibility that the hospital might not have let my wife sleep in the same room with me every night. I don't think they would be like that, but I can't be certain. (Yeah, I know AZ recently got handed a ruling that forces them to offer marriage licenses, but the question of whether a hospital can exclude a same-sex legally married spouse is still untested in court.)
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I think of it this way: There are enough orthorectic health nuts to donate blood for most occasions. Thing is, it is important that the checks work and are simple and cheap enough. I think it really IS the desire to donate blood that matters.
True, but I'm only interested in the non-sexual aspects of romance.Romance is all the stuff that happens before the sex gets involved).I absolutely agree! People these days spend too little time on the Romance, and too much on the sexual aspect. I blame modern day movies.Though as the Usual Suspect said, the Romance doesn't have to stop when the sex starts.
They're not the same thing, but they're not exclusive either.
That would be me as well.
A Lot of it is that when there is suddenly this nude scene on screen or they are doing things like that, watching actually makes me feel rather uncomfortable.
I don't enjoy watching people do that.
On the otherhand, the romance alone is far more interesting and does not make me feel uncomfortable.
In real life, I think too little time is spent on the romance itself. Sure, the sexual aspect may be part of romance, in the proper settings, but too often people don't use it as romance and instead use it as...well...sex.
People focus too much on it. They forget how wonderful it could be just to hold hands, or cuddle, or converse, or any number of other things that romance includes.
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Sorry, folks, I'm dragging the conversation backwards a bit again.
in a few days I’ll be marking my first couple of months living full-time in the correct gender as an openly (but not always vocally) trans woman.Congrats! Feels good, don't it? (And I completely sympathize with the "not always vocally" part.)...
Yes, it’s ... well, I’m not quite sure how I would describe it. In negative terms, I’m not feeling forced into pretending to be something I’m not, and, more positively, I think more people are beginning to read me correctly.
I’m still in the early stages of second adolescence, I guess, so there’s quite a bit I still want to explore in my gender expression that I would never have dared – or even been equipped – to when I was younger, but I don’t feel like I’m really missing anything. I’m a comfortably shod, earth-tone clad, hedge-witchy sort of girl, and I don’t expect that I’ll end up moving much closer to high femme according to whatever metric one might be tempted to construct for these sorts of things.The place I work and study at instituted a preferred name system last year, at the behest of a trans faculty member. Basically, your preferred name gets stored in the university's system along with your usual info, and unless the legal name is needed, it's the one that gets displayed, in the campus directory and alongside your email address, for instance. Which was a big help for me once I was out to my students - no confusion from seeing my old name (which at this point some of them have never even heard). And, as of a few months ago, it now appears on student and faculty/staff IDs as well. The legal name gets printed on the back of the ID. Gives you at least one photo ID with your proper name on it, at no cost.
Maybe a similar preferred name system could be a goal for LGBT groups on your campus to work for? (Sorry, I know that's not immediately helpful.)
Thank you for the link, I’ll have to see who I can talk to about getting something similar started at my school. Fortunately, the equity and diversity office is in the next building to mine, and I think the TA and postdoc union would be supportive; they certainly were when I came in to talk about why I had filled out my union card a bit more elaborately than usual. As for official business, I’ll see – none of the people in my circle back home were at the stage when any of us were ready to file for name changes, and justifying one’s existence, so to speak, is an intimidating prospect in the absence of other people who can reassure one that it’s not so terrifying. In my home province, the process is rather technocratic: as I understand it, one sends off one's paperwork, and the faceless machinery of the state spits out a pronouncement a few weeks later.
With common sue-happy mentality in USA I wouldn't be surprised that they are more afraid of people suing them: "You gave me gay blood?! noo! Wargh! Give me ten zillion dollars because you made me a sinner! My right to be bigot was violated by proving that gays have the same blood as righteous folk! No! It can't be! Waaarrghhh!"
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With common sue-happy mentality in USA I wouldn't be surprised that they are more afraid of people suing them: "You gave me gay blood?! noo! Wargh! Give me ten zillion dollars because you made me a sinner! My right to be bigot was violated by proving that gays have the same blood as righteous folk! No! It can't be! Waaarrghhh!"
I don't believe your sexual preference is recorded with your donations; and even if it was the doctor/patient confidentiality laws in the US would prevent you from learning the sexual orientation/identity of a donor.
No, it really is just bigotry on the inside of the government bureaucracy.