Your weapon against queerphobia? Authenticity.

Bring yourself to the table of your life. It's a pushback to the forces fighting us.

The other day in therapy, I was discussing Ace Dad Advice and a framing I’ve used for the last few years when talking about it. “For me, Ace Dad and Cody are two separate people,” I explained. “Whoever ‘Ace Dad’ is is the one doing the videos and giving the advice and writing the books and all that. Cody is someone else.”

“How is ‘Cody’ different from ‘Ace Dad?’” my therapist asked.

“Well, Ace Dad has got his shit together, basically,” I said. “Cody is still trying to figure it out, I guess. I don’t know. I see myself as kind of a mess, whereas Ace Dad is not.”

“So, do think this serves you?”

“Well, it has been a way to keep my personal self a bit separate from my online self. Making that separation seems healthy in that regard, right? There’s stuff I share with people through this online persona, and there’s stuff I keep to myself, for myself.”

“Okay. But why do you let the online you have all the influence, success, and positive qualities, while the real you just gets to be a mess?”

Clocked. HARD.

One thing I really value about my therapist is his ability to cut to the quick. This was one of those moments. In the last few years of doing this work, I’d intentionally found ways to create some distance between me and the pressures/responsibilities/demands of being “Ace Dad,” which is, in itself, a healthy thing. I can’t give everything to my online audience and work. There’d be nothing left for me. But in choosing where to draw that line, I’d cut myself off from the best things about Ace Dad Advice and cut you off from the best parts of me.

One of my 2026 priorities is to change that. You may be noticing that showing up in my content across the platforms. I’ve been sharing more content about my love of hockey (my NHL mascots series has been fun), I’ve shifted some video content approaches to be more story-based about my own life, and I’ve brought back from the dead my Patreon Discord for members, which has been a hopping place for conversation and cool aspec folks this week.

In the short time since shifting approaches, I’ve noticed some incredible changes. New people are showing up. Existing members of the Ace Dad family are connecting in new ways. We’re having deep and meaningful conversations about being aspec. And I feel fuller, brighter, happier. Plus, I find myself taking an ownership over the successes and positives of Ace Dad Advice in a way I haven’t in a long time. I used to look at this project as something someone else did. Now, I see myself in it — which is great. This process has been a reminder about the power of authenticity.

In this current version of the world, it’s hard to make the choice to be both a queer person and live that authentically. A recent report from the Human Rights Campaign found that almost half of LGBTQ+ Americans report being “less out somewhere in their lives” since the Trump Administration took office. The report also finds that 30% of LGBTQ+ Americans have observed a decline in social acceptance over the last year. As many activists, organizers, and queer leaders have noted over the last year, that chilling of authenticity is the point. The actions of this administration against the queer community are designed to be cruel, designed to be stifling, designed to push queer people back into closets of all kinds, because scared, stifled, closeted queer people will cloak their authenticity. When we do that, we are cloaking one of our great powers.

While not everyone is comfortable choosing the path of very public authenticity — Pride parades, protests, making queer content, and the like — we can activate the power of our authenticity to push back against queerphobia simply by being ourselves in the circles we inhabit. By sharing who we are both within and without our aspec identities in our interpersonal relationships, our neighborhoods, our community, and every other place we are part of a human network, we are telling the story of what it means to be aspec. Even if you’re not out to the people around you, you being you is telling an aspec story. Because what sits at the heart of this fascist pushback on queer lives is the effort to remove our humanity from us. Once our humanity is taken from us, anything can be justified against us. Living as ourselves everywhere we can, emphasizing our humanness in every facet of our work on the planet, pushes back against that.

What’s more, this effort of authenticity helps make us whole, too. Our aspec life and the rest of our life don’t have to belong to different versions of us. We can be all of ourselves at once, and I can tell you from personal, current experience, that integration is liberating and joyful. Even if you’re the only person who lives it, when you allow your aspec self to own all the rest of what makes you amazing, you get to be more of yourself more of the time.

So I’m gonna keep sharing more about Cody with you as part of the Ace Dad Advice project, because I want you to know me and I want the community we share to be personal, connected and authentic. You deserve it. I deserve it. And that nurtured space, I believe, is where we will find the answers to move forward and reconstruct what’s being destroyed right now.

It’s an essential and beautiful part of our queer magic.