1-3 on this statement are true of any discussion of sexuality, surely.
4 - ditto, if not age appropriate
5 - 6 may be true but the point surely as per 1-3 is that GG leaders are not experts and really could not say. I am struggling to think of a situation where a young person, eg 14, would say they are asexual without sexuality or boyfriends or such like being discussed anyway. The best I can come up with is if they are discussing books, say Loveless by Alice Oseman, and in any case, the conversation would move on. It would be completely inappropriate for a leader to jump in and say, no, you are not. In the unlikely hypothetical scenario where a young person confided in a leader that they thought they were asexual, surely the appropriate response is to ask if they have spoken to anyone else about this and point them in the right direction of an appropriate person, if they want to speak to anyone else, not to start telling them the reasons why they might not be. What would a leader do if a young person (again 14, not 10) said they thought they might be gay? Or that they had a boyfriend? Apart from anything else, no person, regardless of sexuality, has to have sex anyway and that is the basics of consent. I am not seeing the unique danger asexuality poses in 14 year old discussions. There either need to be protocols for all discussion of sexuality or it is discriminatory.
- This is not an issue solely to asexuality.
- This is a question of context. The FB post was presumably aimed at adults, not children. Why is a post aimed at adults related to diversity a safe-guarding issue?
- The definition of asexuality is wrong here, and builds a straw man to knock down. There is quite a scholarly literature in the last fifteen years or so, which is around the definition of asexuality and indeed, the experiences of asexual people. The consensus is that it is a lack of sexual attraction. Asexual people do, according to the literature, generally have either no sexual desire or lower sexual desire but the two things are not mutually exclusive. Regardless, the key point is around consent, which is important regardless of orientation. And asexuality is increasingly regarded in scholarly literature as an orientation.
Given the hypersexualised culture mentioned above, it is far, far more likely and indeed documented that young people, and I mean teens not children, will be pressured into things they don’t want to do with boys they are attracted to and in a relationship with - ie conventionally heterosexual young people.
The idea that sex is some sort of obligation has its longest history in marriage, and heterosexual relationships. Positing that asexuality presents some kind of unique danger is bizarre. The safeguarding is teaching and consistently reiterating messages about consent, surely, in an age appropriate manner. Whether GG is the appropriate place to do it is another matter.
So in short, if there are arguments to be made about safe guarding, these are general and it is discriminatory to raise them solely by focusing on asexuality. I can see that the post about Ace Week is the springboard and there are concerns about Stonewall’s diversity scheme being behind this (are these evidenced in this case?), but the letter as it stands seems to single out discussion of asexuality as particularly dangerous for young people.
As I said on the other thread, my DD said she would have been quite happy age 14 to know that asexuality was a thing. It would have saved her a lot of angst about something being wrong with her. It is not particularly dangerous for teenagers to know about asexuality any more than it is dangerous for them to know about sex. The question is what is appropriate to discuss in GG, which surely applies to all sexualities. (And yes, I know that GG did not mention Lesbian Visibility week, but that is not in the letter above).
Plus, the parallel to a sexual person of whatever orientation saying, in brief mention, that they had a husband, partner, girlfriend (deemed okay) is an asexual person saying they are not in a relationship (surely also okay?). Just because they post on a FB page (aimed at adults) that they are ace, does this mean that they are suddenly going to be announcing it to ten year olds anymore than the sexual person would say what they had been up to the night before. Or is the underlying message that really, ace people are not welcome in GG as leaders?