lesbians have been figuring aromanticism as inherently political for like half a century
let’s just scroll the dial all the way back to that time where if you didn’t date and eventually marry a man you would be viewed as an old spinster and have zero social safety net
the trend of using romance as an exclusionary policy to gatekeep who does and does not receive community belonging or social support was both precedented, predicted, and opposed
so anyway i’m glad the kids are rediscovering that, but let’s not pretend like the TERFs using their unwillingness to date trans lesbians as a way to exclude them from lesbian networks of support is in any way a unanimous or necessary consequence of queer activism of old
it’s a new development spurned by the increased acceptance and normalization of gay dating in the ’10s, mirroring the similar (but much older) deployment of romance by heterosexuals with the aim of controlling acceptable forms of gender expression, especially among women
p.s. this is where “political lesbianism” comes in, you may have heard some people making fun of that, like haha you’re a lesbian for political reasons not because you like girls, haha
yes, that’s aromanticism as praxis, yes
this is also why lesbian is not mutually exclusive with asexual, bisexual, pansexual, or possibly even heterosexual
the more you know 🌠
the slippage that queer “romance” is somehow equivalent to straight “romance” or that it even makes sense to refer to the former as “romance” at all is part of the reason why queers opposed gay marriage