Content warning: this article discusses violence and queerphobia, including sexual violence.
Asexuality is experiencing little to no sexual attraction to others or experiencing it only conditionally. It does not necessarily define a person’s sexual activity or romantic orientation.
Asexuals are often seen as part of the queer community but not part of its struggle. We are not understood to have a stake in discrimination issues. Allonormativity—the concept that all humans need and desire sexual and romantic relationships—is pervasive, even in queer spaces. Among the asexual community, most activism simply asks for visibility; for recognition, even in name only. Meaningful left-wing campaigns are few and far between.
However, we are collectively missing crucial opportunities for solidarity. While asexual personal expressions often look undeniably different from other queer identities, discrimination and violence against asexuals manifests similarly to oppression of other queer people. Asexuality, like other queer identities, requires the complete dissolution and reshaping of our social structures for meaningful acceptance and autonomy.
Are you sure you don’t have a hormone imbalance?
Asexuals are offered or undergo conversion therapy 10% more often than people of any other sexuality. A recent UK study found 31% of respondents believed asexuality can be “cured” through therapy. Low sexual desire, interest, or activity is highly pathologised. Even where asexuality is recognised, such as in the DSM-5—the American manual for diagnosing psychiatric disorders—it is included only to say patients should not be diagnosed with a hyposexuality disorder if they already identify as asexual, putting the onus on the patient to come out and leaving all allonormative diagnostic structures intact.
One of the most frequent reactions from medical providers upon learning their patient is asexual is to pivot to trying to determine and reverse the “cause” of their asexuality, often impeding the care actually needed. Asexuality is also frequently wrongly assumed to result from childhood sexual abuse. Therapists sometimes even recommend patients force themselves to have sex, to work through assumed but nonexistent traumas.
Asexual people are often prescribed unwanted birth control because they are assumed to be sexually active, despite self-assertion otherwise, before being able to access medication that could harm their nonexistent fetuses, such as dermatological treatments. Conversely, many asexuals are denied STI vaccines or gynecology/urology referrals because healthcare providers believe they would never need this healthcare, fundamentally misunderstanding what asexuality is.
Acephobic medical practices also overlap with women and trans people being disbelieved about their own health and denied care and bodily autonomy. A 2023 study of acephobic violence and discrimination includes anecdotes such as one from a pregnant asexual who was denied necessary medication for a fetus that was too small. The doctor did not believe when the patient said they had no further sex past the baby’s conception, insisting the baby was younger than she was. This resulted in the person miscarrying and losing their child.
TERFs weaponise acephobia to restrict gender-affirming care for minors. They wrongly claim puberty blockers make children asexual and argue children should not be “denied” a “normal” sexuality. Transgender asexuals face barriers to healthcare on all sides due to both of their identities being medicalised and discredited.
You just haven’t met the right person yet!
Medicalisation of asexuality occurs due to the belief that the only healthy body is a sexual one, but sexual engagement is required at every level of society. In social settings, being single or a virgin must be either a temporary state or a depressing affair. Seldom can anyone express disinterest in sex or romance without being told to “just keep trying!” These comments are the tip of a cultural iceberg where our social structure, built on heteronormativity and rape culture, views sexual disinterest as a deficit that the “right person” can, and should, fix.
“Corrective” rape—a term initially coined to describe men raping lesbians in an attempt to make them straight—is a form of conversion “therapy” perpetrated against asexuals at high rates. Whether they are out as asexual or not, asexuals are especially vulnerable to sexual violence in both cis-het and queer spaces. We have fundamentally different relationships to sexuality from allosexuals that are often obvious to and punished by those with power.
Asexual rights are thus targeted by TERFs and the religious right because asexuality is the ultimate transgression against their tight control over bodily autonomy. Allonormativity is the most universal and fundamental expression of rape culture. Conservative control over bodily autonomy does not merely manifest in abstinence-only sex education or slut-shaming (whether socially or legally). It sets out guidelines for when and how having sex is acceptable, e.g., heterosexual marriage, and then it says that people must have sex in these situations. If people were allowed to completely refuse sexual relationships and reproduction, which go hand-in-hand for the religious right, they would be unmanageable by control structures such as purity culture. They would be able to opt out of the nuclear family used to isolate workers and ensure perpetual creation of future laborers. Sexual violence is thus wielded on both state and interpersonal levels to punish anyone who deviates from the relationship structures and sexuality expressions acceptable under patriarchy and capitalism.
Do you take them to be your lawfully wedded tax benefit?
One of the most present ways sexual (and romantic) relationships are both required and privileged in society is through the institution of marriage. Asexuals and aromantics are much less likely to get married than the general population, so they are locked out of one of the fundamental ways people find community and financial stability.
The privileges gained exclusively or most easily through marriage are innumerable to ensure marriage is the only feasible option for most people to own a home, raise children, and manage their health and workload. Job schedules are set with the assumption that someone else minds your home and children, while the cost of living makes housing and children unaffordable on a single salary.
Marriage is so entrenched as a universal milestone that single people are viewed as less mature, responsible, and stable. This idea enables landlords to privilege married couples and families over single people for housing. It enables managers to pass over single people for promotions in favor of the trusted “family man.” It makes it harder for single people to adopt children as they must prove they have the same stability and finances as married couples.
Getting married is also incentivised through tax systems. In Australia, the amount that spouses have to pay for certain charges is based on their combined income, usually lowering the fee, and they typically get more money refunded to them. There are exceptions, such as disabled people getting locked into poverty by oppositional tax and welfare systems, but the general expectation is that marriage provides financial benefits.
In countries without universal healthcare or where healthcare is tied to employment, being someone’s spouse or parent (up to a certain age) is usually the only way to ensure they are covered by your health insurance plan. Unmarried couples, siblings, friends, disabled adults living with their parents, or adults taking care of aging parents face complex barriers to health insurance and high costs of care.
Marriage also provides a legal structure to enforce rape culture. For much of history, marital rape was legal as women were considered the sexual property of their husbands. Consummation laws allow spouses or external parties to declare marriages invalid if couples don’t have sex within a specific time period. Even when laws around sex in marriage are not present or enforced, there is a pervasive attitude that a sexless marriage is a failed one, with a lucrative industry of sex therapists, self-help books, and arousal medication marketed toward couples with “dead bedrooms.” Relationships involving little to no sex are assumed to be unfulfilling and broken. Because of the substantial privileges afforded to married couples, legally or socially tying marriage to sex is necessarily coercive.
The solution is not to make marriage friendlier to asexuals. The institution of marriage reinforces all existing class inequalities, and there will always be people excluded. Equality movements are better suited to fight for the decentralisation of marriage, affordable housing for all, fewer work hours with higher pay, free or subsidised childcare, and universal healthcare. We must prioritise community-based structures to support people to live good lives regardless of their marital status.
Love Wins, but only if you can prove it’s LoveTM
In colonial states, immigration is heavily regulated as a way to maintain control over the population. Invasive and discriminatory practices, drenched in allonormativity, are the norm. These acephobic practices manifest most clearly in the partnership visa and asylum seeking processes. Couples must prove their relationships to continue to see each other, and LGBTQIA+ asylum seekers prove both their queerness and their suffering to remain safe and in their communities.
Queer people can get married in many countries and are theoretically eligible for the same marriage privileges and immigration opportunities as straight people. However, marriage equality campaigns like “Love is Love” pushed for the legalisation of gay marriage under the promise to cis-het society that gay marriage would be exactly like straight marriage but with two men or two women. This was an exclusively reformist campaign, and it did not change the fundamental issues with legally classifying intimate relationships. Gay marriage being legalised in this assimilatory way has enforced a narrow view of queerness that continues to exclude asexuals.
This understanding of queerness means couples must assimilate to allosexual conceptions of what a committed partnership looks like. This includes dating and/or living together for a required number of years and having physical or digital proof of their relationship. Migrants must convince border officials they are in (romantic) love with their partner, detail their affection and formalised ties to each other, and give corroborated stories of their sex lives. These are bigoted criteria on their own, and queer people are targeted with more invasive screening than cis-het immigrants.
Asexuality is also not a recognised sexuality anywhere except in New York (USA) and Tasmania. Asexuality not being named, whether as a protected or outlawed identity, means acephobic discrimination in queerphobic countries is not considered real. For example, an asexual Algerian man applied for asylum in the Netherlands in 2018 due to fears of persecution and of forced marriage to his niece, but the Dutch Council State denied his application, stating that asexuality “is not punishable” in Algeria and cannot be included under special provisions for LGBTI refugees.
However, even if asexuality was nominally protected, immigration systems would still deny refuge to asexuals. Yasmin’s article on page 17 explains the Australian process of gender and sexuality testing, used to “verify” queer asylum seekers’ sexuality and persecution claims. It would be impossible for an asexual person to pass this testing.
While domestic policy is notoriously cruel, acephobia intersects with racism worldwide. Immigrant couples in the UK, especially where one or more partners are Asian or Muslim, have reported the Home Office raiding their homes early in the morning to check if they are sleeping in the same bed, or interrupting their weddings to interrogate them about their sex lives. Partnerships that fail to live up to arbitrary standards are deemed “sham marriages,” and the couples are detained and/or forced apart.
Asexuals constantly have to explain that our relationships are legitimate and important. We are not in fake relationships when partnered with other asexuals, and we are not deceiving or abusing our partners with our sexuality when partnered with allosexuals. Immigration systems make chiding remarks into policy that separates families and forces queer people into further invisibility and danger. The state should not have jurisdiction over our relationships, and marriage and immigration policies ignore the material reality of our social structures.
So, where to from here?
Understanding asexuality necessitates a broadening of our concept of sexuality from “who” to “how” and “if at all.” Asexual experiences cannot be confined into Western cis-het-allo understandings of queer sexualities. The asexual struggle is about defying capitalist and patriarchal requirements for our interpersonal relationships and reproductive labor. These are struggles also long fought by other queer activists, but asexuals face them in a unique and thus far under-appreciated way.
While often not completely linear, the assimilation of queer identities into modern Western society follows a path somewhat like this:
| Relatively complete lack of visibility, understanding, or acceptance | > | Visibility but not acceptance or understanding | > | Increasing societal understanding, beginnings of legal protections | > | Widespread acceptance, many or all basic assimilatory legal protections in place |
Homosexuality has essentially completed all of these steps in Australia. While severe inadequacies in policy remain, especially affecting otherwise marginalised gay people, homosexuality has been assimilated into our cis-het-allo world such that many gay people can live openly and accumulate capital. The fight for transgender rights follows the same path but a few steps behind, with transgender people experiencing hyper-visibility but not widespread acceptance or consistent legal protections.
Asexuality is struggling to reach the second step of this process. Outside of queer spaces, few people know of asexuality at all. Within queer spaces, most have heard of asexuality but lack understanding of asexuals’ day-to-day experiences and struggles. We have a long way to go before achieving any semblance of rights, and, as explained above, face serious societal neglect and danger due to our invisibility. However, we are also in a place of exceptional opportunity. The asexual rights movement is poised to be able to avoid some of the mishaps and liberalisation of the gay and transgender rights movements because we can still catch them early.
Prior to the diversion of the queer community’s energy into fighting the AIDs crisis, there were many radical activists who did not want marriage equality as a main queer rights demand at all. They fought instead for the decentralising and deconstructing of the institution of marriage because they worried that gay marriage equality would require them to sanitise and simplify their desires, relationships, and lives. They were right. The marriage equality movement failed to challenge the sexist and racist aspects of marriage, nor did it change the way nuclear families are privileged over all others. It simply gave gay people the opportunity to get a slice of the privilege pie. Gay rights struggles concluding here forces queer people to fit into the same systems that have historically oppressed them in order to obtain social recognition or financial and legal equality.
With the insight gained from the loss of radical goals and the subsequent liberalisation and defanging of the gay rights movement, asexual activists can and should aim higher. We need more than visibility, and we need more than being tacked onto a list of sexualities nominally protected by fundamentally queerphobic laws. Asexuals face specific, targeted exclusion that overlaps with, but is distinct from, discrimination against other sexualities. For any chance at truly dismantling the medicalisation of queerness, rape culture, the dominance of the nuclear family, or border controls, asexual rights must be included at the forefront of radical struggles. Upending allonormativity is not just a bonus—it is a necessity—without which true liberation cannot exist.
