grownfromseed:

“I don’t care if your experience is totally in line with how I’m defining ‘asexual’ if you don’t IDENTIFY as asexual you’re not asexual and you don’t understand asexuality and can’t comment on it” so uh I’m just wondering when people who say this will realize that this is a tacit admission that modern definitions of asexual are inconsistent at best and that asexual as an identifier may be personally, individually significant but is materially meaningless?

Identifiers like gay, bisexual, trans, etc are about naming an experience that’s part of a material reality. That experience is the primary thing! The experience comes first, then the label. You can have an experience of effectively being bisexual, for example, and never call yourself that for whatever reason. It is the experience that necessitates a label of some kind in order to communicate this thing that affects how we move in the world, or at least one facet of how we move in the world.

When you say that an asexual experience can ONLY be had by someone who calls themselves asexual you are saying that the label is what necessitates the experience. And when the application of that label is subject to endlessly moving goalposts, well… what else are you really saying?