Asexual Awareness Week 2018 has begun. Asexual communities in New Zealand and around the world are celebrating their identity. The Asexuality New Zealand Trust is excited to be part of celebrating asexuality.
Being celebrated around the world from October 22 – October 28, Asexual Awareness Week aims to highlight and educate people about the experiences of asexuals, demisexuals, and grey-asexuals.
Since first beginning in the United States in 2011, the Asexual Awareness Week campaign has spread to a number of major centres around the globe. In 2015 asexual community events were held during Asexual Awareness Week in London, Perth, Sydney, Phoenix, Austin (Texas), Flint (Michigan), New York San Francisco, and even Auckland!
Asexual Awareness Week is part on the ongoing emergence of greater representation of asexuals and their experiences in the LGBTQIA+ community and wider society. Ace individuals are coming together to share and support each others’ experience more and more: Auckland Pride Parade featured an Asexual pride group, and there are increasing numbers active on the facebook social group Asexuals New Zealand. A number of meet-ups have also run successfully around the country.
Asexual community activists here and abroad continue to do great work in highlighting the experiences of asexuals which, despite likely being over 1% of the population, often remain invisible within the Rainbow community and in the public’s view of sexuality.
By becoming an incorporated Trust Board and obtaining charitable status this year, the Trust hopes to prove a stable footing for our ongoing efforts to educate New Zealand’s asexuals and their friends and family in the community about this important part of our society. Founding our knowledge base on this website and creating pamphlets to distribute at the 2018 Auckland Pride Parade were important first steps. During the months since Pride we’ve been slowly working behind the scenes to offer more educational resources, while asexual community leaders work to grow the ace social scene in New Zealand.
The Trust remains committed to pursuing our charitable educational objectives of promoting ever greater understanding of asexual, demisexual, and grey-asexual experiences. This includes both introducing individuals on the asexual spectrum to terminology and ideas that might help them understand their experiences and helping society at large better understand this part of the human experience. The Trust believes educating New Zealanders about asexuality will make our community a more tolerant, better place for everyone – including asexuals – to live.
As part of this mission, we are excited to announce we will soon be releasing an updated version of the Introducing Asexuality pamphlet from the 2018 Auckland Pride Parade on the resources section of this website, and that we have other resources in the works.
Our website now contains 12 pages of content aimed at unpacking parts of the asexual experience, from asexual people and relationships to the difference between sexual attraction and arousal and a heap of stuff in between. Written in an easy to approach and quick to read but still comprehensive format, the Trust intends to continue developing our website so that we can offer support to all of New Zealand’s asexuals in thinking about and explaining to others every part of their experience.
We are also excited to announce the launch of our Facebook and Twitter accounts, which we’ll be using to draw attention to new educational content on our website and ace and Trust news from our blog. We’re also excited to announce we’ll be updating our blog to bring you news about asexuals in society from around the world every fortnight, so be sure to keep an eye out.
To celebrate Asexual Awareness Week, we’ll be sharing highlights from our blog from the last 6 months and highlighting some pages from our website. Check back in at the end of the Week for an update on all the Awareness Week events that took place around the world!
The Asexuality New Zealand Trust has no control over, accepts no responsibility for, and does not necessarily endorse the content of external websites.
Asexuality New Zealand Trust 