I didn’t talk about it much, but until recently I was technically still involved in academia. I participated in Project Recognize, a research grant to improve survey measures of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity (SSOGI) for public health research.

The project was particularly interested in measures of asexual and intersex groups, because there is a gap in the academic literature. For example, this NASEM report has hundreds of pages on SSOGI measures, but barely anything to say about asexuality at all.  We were filling that gap by looking beyond academic literature, such as exploring grassroots community literature.

We were funded by an NIH grant, but as you can imagine, this is exactly the sort of research that’s getting targeted for being too “woke”.

I offered my expertise as an ace activist, and as one of the PIs of the Ace Community Survey. I should say, I was a fairly marginal participant in Project Recognize, and I hadn’t actually been active for the past year. I helped gather ace community literature, and stepped back when they started doing focus groups.

I haven’t really had time to process this. Though this directly impacts me, it’s hardly the worst of it. I want to live in a democracy where they don’t round up people with tattoos to send them to El Salvadorian jails.