Effzeh that is why as I posted upthread, my DD’s asexuality is not something she has discussed with her younger siblings. She is not aromantic. They are two different things. You cannot have a discussion about asexuality without discussing or understanding sex. I don’t think it would be appropriate to discuss sex outside the home or sex education at school for a ten year old. I agree that ‘some people do not want to get married and have babies’ is quite fine for a 10 year old, but moving up the school, that is not what my DD got. She got ‘we are going to talk about sex because sooner or later, you are all going to want to have sex with someone’.
But anyway, ten year olds are not the audience of tweets. Therefore, the furore about this is not just about what is appropriate to teach to 10-14 year olds, it is about the societal place of asexuality. Which from this thread (and the comments under the Times article on the same topic today) is entirely dismissive and hostile.
And I don’t think it Is just because asexuality is impossible to discuss without mentioning sex or what you do with your bits. Arguably, homosexuality, heterosexuality and bisexuality are about what you do with your bits. The whole entire history of marriage is about ensuring that sex is for procreation within a family unit (where and how bits are used). Until relatively recently in time, there were few opportunities for women outside marriage. Until relatively recently, women were condemned for sex outside marriage, particularly if they got pregnant. A whole social system based around what you do with your bits, which young people were (and still are to a large extent) socialised into.
Homosexuality among men was criminalised for a long time (and there was also an attempt to criminalise lesbianism in the 1920s), so society was very exercised about what men (and less so women) did sexually. Gay liberation was all about acceptance of what people did with their bits and with who.
And yet, asexual people are supposed to shut up and hide away because their existence can apparently be used to further the medicalisation of gender non-conformity, it may be a foil for paedophilia, they may be objectified and fetishised as an object of desire, it is part of a woke agenda - what else from this thread?
So it is not only because asexuality is about sex and an organisation which provides extracurricular activities for 10-14 years olds has tweeted about it (to their adult members), it is because broader society a) does not know how to place asexuality given the whole entire history and culture is built around marriage and family as the foundation of society and that is only slowly changing, b) part of that change has been the ever increasing saturation of sexual culture in our society, and c) that same society is fractured or even divided by identity politics and asexuality is seen as part of that, rather than something like homosexuality, ie just how people are (and also forgetting that the freedom if you like, to openly live and define as homosexual was hard fought for).
So rather than being just how someone is and accepted as that, an asexual person - going by this thread - has all this cultural and identity politics baggage to contend with, and I am minded to agree with whoever posted that if you replaced ‘asexual’ with any other characteristic in some of the posts on this thread, such as homosexual, it would quite easily be seen as offensive.