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Advice for getting asexuality included in sexuality inclusion trainings?


sirenian

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My work place is currently looking into adding a gender and sexuality inclusion training for its staff.  This isn't in response to any particular problem at the organization.  It's just in response to the leadership wanting to take active steps toward greater inclusion for the whole community. This new training will be in addition to other kinds of inclusion training that we already offer.  We also have what I think is a pretty strong diversity statement for the company.  I definitely think that this is a wonderful thing for everyone.

 

Here's my question.  The organization that we are thinking of hiring to provide the training is a regional LGBTQ activist organization. I think they do good work in the community, and what I have learned about their training materials and activities gives me confidence that they lead well-informed, compassionate, and engaging workshops.  However, you will notice that they call themselves an LGBTQ organization.  They do not have a + after those letters.  They certainly do not have an A after those letters.  As best I can tell, none of their materials mention asexuality. (I have not actually asked yet, but I have done a very thorough search of their publicly available materials.)

 

I am curious whether any of you have advice for approaching this organization about adding asexuality visibility into their trainings.  I want to do my homework ahead of time so that when I approach them I have all of the information that I might want in order to best make my case and, if necessary, make suggestions to them for how they might improve their materials.

 

 

More specific notes about what I think might be helpful:

  • Have any of you approached organizations with this type of recommendation in the past?  If so, what kinds of questions have they asked you? What kind of pushback have you received? What should I be prepared to encounter?
  • Beyond the anecdotal material that I'm sure most of us could give, does anyone know of any quantitative data about harms caused to the ace community by ace erasure?
    Flip side of that, does anyone know of data that demonstrates benefits of ace visibility?
  • Are there examples that you know of other organizations that do this kind of training that you believe do a particularly good job of including ace visibility?
    [In my experience, I have seen organizations mention asexuality, maybe include it on a list of vocabulary terms, define it. But I've never seen an organization talk about what inclusion looks like for Ace people.]
  • If you have participated in a group training like this that did include asexuality in its curriculum, are there particular aspects of the presentation that you thought were particularly well received or particularly poorly received by the group?  (That is, what kinds of reactions did you observe among your presumably largely non-ace colleagues?)

 

 

Two notes about what I'm not looking for:

  • I am a seasoned professional, so I don't need advice about how to network or anything like that!  I'm more looking for advice on particular kinds of information that you think it would be helpful to have on hand in order to make my case for why adding this piece of inclusion is important.
  • I'm not looking for a list of talking points for what they should include in the training.  That type of information is widely available elsewhere.
  • I am not interested in the debate about whether asexuality is or isn't included under their umbrella of LGBTQ identities.  I don't have a horse in that race, and even if I did, I don't think it's productive to try to fight that fight in this particular context.  Rather, I only want to seek to rectify what I perceive as Ace erasure.  If they are doing a training about sexuality inclusion, then it stands to reason that they should lay out a full spectrum of the sexual identities that are out there, and as we all well know, asexuality is most definitely a sexual identity that's out there! I don't need inclusion in their acronym. I just want inclusion in their training.

 

 

Thank you, everyone.

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Hello @sirenian

 

It's great that your work place is doing this :)

 

Regarding this part:

 

16 minutes ago, sirenian said:

Beyond the anecdotal material that I'm sure most of us could give, does anyone know of any quantitative data about harms caused to the ace community by ace erasure?
Flip side of that, does anyone know of data that demonstrates benefits of ace visibility?

 

I am reading right now this book --> https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20344514-the-invisible-orientation

 

I haven't seen yet any graphs or data, although I will look into it later... but there is a chapter about the harms and negative aspects, with a lot of details/examples.

 

Maybe that can be helpful? If you think so, I can send you the information.

 

I will also look into the bibliography, to see if there is data here that could be interesting.

 

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I'm on mobile now so links are a pain to get, but you might be able to find some data from the Ace Community Survey (formerly called the Asexual Census). They have a blog with results from different years that might have some information on discrimination or barriers faced due to erasure or an overall lack of awareness. 

 

I've tried to get asexuality acknowledged more in training for my employer through individual people doing projects for their specific teams, but to disappointing results. The training I've received from external organizations has barely mentioned it, just like your experiences so far. 

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Thank you both for these suggestions.

 

On 5/13/2021 at 10:40 AM, Snao Cone said:

I've tried to get asexuality acknowledged more in training for my employer through individual people doing projects for their specific teams, but to disappointing results. The training I've received from external organizations has barely mentioned it, just like your experiences so far. 

I am not looking to change the world with a single set of conversations, but visibility starts somewhere.  I'll try to circle back to this discussion and let you know how I got on later this summer.

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  • 4 weeks later...
Sennkestra

I know it's been a bit since this was posted, but in case you are still looking for recommendations:

 

For data, I would second the recommendation above of the Ace Community Survey data - see the "past surveys and reports" for overview reports, or scroll through the recent blog posts for some more specific reports. In addition to that, you may also be interested in the Asexual Research Zotero Bibliography, which is a broader bibliography of ace research as a whole, and the An Academic Look At The Systemic Oppression of Asexuality carrd, which focuses on reports related to asexual discrimination and disadvantages (I still recommend pulling up the original versions of the reports referenced in either of these lists for full context)

 

In particular, you may want to consider mentioning results from orgs like the Trevor Project and GLAAD about the prevalence of ace identity among young LGBTQ people, since those two groups have good name recognition in LGBTQ organizing. Depending on the nature of the conversation, I sometimes combine this with data from the ace community survey on coming out and experiences with offline LGBTQ spaces (a few exs here) to make the point that many orgs likely have ace members already, and if they didn't know that yet it's because they haven't made the space enough for those members to speak out. 

 

With regards to other organizations that do a good job on ace inclusivity, the Trevor project is pretty well known for having explicit policies of ace inclusion after trainings with folks from AVEN and Ace Week several years ago; I think one of the training handouts they created is still available here, although the numbers are probably out of date by now. Unfortunately it looks like the other training manual excerpts for call takers that used to be viewable have been taken offline.

 

Asexual Outreach also has an ace inclusion guide for highschools that could potentially be adapted in part for more general audiences. 

 

As far as actually presenting, I've worked with a couple local groups to be more ace inclusive, although we usually weren't cold contacting - most often we had contact with at least a  sympathetic mid-level staffer who put us in touch with upper level staff and could help us advocate from the inside. In my experience, when advocating for having trainings in the first place, the biggest hurdle is that many organizations/individuals just don't feel remotely informed about asexuality or comfortable discussing it themselves, so we often end up focusing on how to find partners with local or national ace organizations who can help create/organize/present actual trainings as well as ongoing support and questions. 


In terms of content, I've also noted that discussions of terms and definitions tend to overwhelm people, so I try to move that information to supplementary written handouts and spend more of the discussion on actual experiences and calls to action. I also usually try to allow a lot of time for Q&A and discussion in order to better gauge the group's level of information and what they're actually looking for help with. 

 

Anyway, if you're interested in any further info, I'm happy to chat more. I should also still have archived versions of past training presentations I've been involved with in my files somewhere if you'd be curious to see any of those. 

 

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