Compulsory Sexuality and Asexual Liberation

For many queer people, sexual liberation consists of embracing sexual desire and pursuing sexual gratification without the shame imposed on them through cisheteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality. But many others who claim an asexual identity experience sexual liberation as a liberation from sex.

As a trans fem, my understanding of the varieties of asexual experience comes mainly from conversations with other trans fems who have claimed an ace identity. These conversations sometimes include raw and harrowing discussions of past trauma, but are, overall, wonderfully intimate experiences of shared joy. For us, asexuality is a revelatory discovery, and for many of us, this discovery allows us to experience, for the first time, an entire world of beautiful intimacy that feels safe, satisfying, and natural. Unfortunately, when we try to share our joy with our allosexual friends (those whose sexuality is more in line with normative expectations), we are often met with confusion, hostility, and, worst of all, a patronizing disbelief that we could happily remove ourselves in any way from the pool of available and enthusiastic sexual resources.

Perhaps the first thing I would like my allosexual friends to understand is that when I tell them I'm ace they can't leap to any conclusions about my sex life. The only conclusion they can reasonably come to is that sex and sexuality are decentered in my day-to-day experiences and in particular in my relationships with others. And I won't reveal anything personal beyond that here!

The second thing I would like my friends to understand is that, just as transgender people often have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of gender than cisgender people because we have struggled long with our own genders, ace people often have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of sexuality than allosexual people because we have struggled with our own sexualities, made fine distinctions, and compared notes with each other. We have identified many axes of sexuality that are supposedly identical in normative sexuality, but are in fact merely correlated in allosexual experience, such as sexual desire, sexual attraction, and libido.

Allosexual people assume all ace people are sex- or even touch-averse, and I want to stress that many of us are. For some of us, though, our asexuality is defined as much or more by a positive orientation toward nonsexual forms of intimacy than by a negative orientation toward sex. We may experience great pleasure and intimacy from non-sexual physical touch, or we may experience it from different kinds of stimulation, like music and dance (I suppose I don't mind revealing that I fall in these categories: the most purely pleasurable and intimate experiences I've had with others come from touch without sex and from ecstatic shared experiences of dancing, listening to music, and making music). Some of us have neutral or positive attitudes toward sex, but our positive sexual experiences are not, for us, notably sexual, and may stem from simply an intellectual interest in sex stemming from our struggles to understand ourselves and others, or in aspects of the experiences that are not inherently sexual. Allosexual people are often surprised when I tell them that ace people are overrepresented in sex education and even kink. Indeed a few ace people I have talked to who are completely sex-neutral have more experiences that normative sexuality considers sexual, with more partners than most allosexual people.

While aromanticism, the experience of living a life where romantic feelings and connections are decentered compared to what is normative in society, is a different spectrum, or set of axes, than asexuality, it bears some consideration here. Aromantic people engage in the same kind of careful and nuanced consideration of something that cisheteronormativity and compulsory sexuality takes for granted that asexual people do. Not all asexual people are aromantic. Some of us cherish romantic relationships and experience profound desire and yearning for others without desiring to have sex with them, while others find the concept of romantic desire profoundly alien to our experience.

Many people who consider themselves allosexual would benefit from learning more about asexuality and aromanticity, and would find the exercise challenging to and informing of their own ideas about themselves. I have had more than one person react to my description of my sexuality with something like, "that's not ace, that's just normal," even as others hear the same description and do not question my ace identity in the slightest.

The third, and perhaps the most important, thing I would like my friends to understand is that struggles with sexual trauma in no way invalidate someone's ace identity. Allosexuality is really just another imposed social construct, like gender, and all forms of social compulsion are achieved through means of force that leave trauma scars. This is the only way that compulsion to behave against one's nature and desires can function. It is perfectly valid for someone to claim an ace identity as a result of trauma, and though some of us, after working through our trauma, eventually claim a different relationship to sexuality, many do not. Whether we do or do not is nobody else's business but ours.

The worst impulse someone can have is to treat an ace person's trauma as a problem to be solved. When people attempt to "fix" us they most often reinforce our traumatic relationship to sex. This attitude is dehumanizing and treats us more as resources than as people. Instead, naive allosexuals (those who have not thought deeply about their own sexuality) would benefit from listening to us and considering how much of their own sexuality is natural to them and how much is learned behavior. 

As a boy, I was told by other boys, and many men behind the backs of the women in their lives, that girls should be pursued, that the goal of such pursuit was my own sexual gratification, and that my allegiances should be to my male friends and not to the girls and women in my life. This attitude was pervasive and dominant in my social interactions with other boys and men. Some of the filthiest jokes I've heard are told among trans fems, and they are variations on the degrading jokes and scenarios we endured from cis boys and men or viewed in pornography growing up, but often inverted, with ourselves as the humiliated objects. Children of all genders are given a brutal and brutalizing education in sexuality from an early age in a system of cisheteronormative grooming that is discussed with genuine discomfort and regret by many adults, but which is culturally tolerated because it is a primary mechanism by which patriarchy is communicated and reinforced. And it's not just patriarchy.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici discusses how during the medieval and renaissance eras of primitive accumulation in Europe, through the mechanism of witch hunts and persecution of heresy, reproductively female bodies were dehumanized, stripped of their economic autonomy, and made reproductive slaves en masse to enable biologically male bodies to become the wage-laboring proletariat class. In some times and places, proletarian women were forced into public brothels, making the rape of proletarian women functionally legal.

Asexual people exemplify, on the other hand, the ideas that we are not entitled to each other's bodies or affections, that we are autonomous beings who may freely choose the number, frequency, and kinds of intimate relationships that we engage in according to our own natures and desires. Asexuality is a direct threat to the capitalist treatment of sexuality and fertility as a problem of resource allocation and labor exploitation. In fact, it is a far bigger threat to capitalism and patriarchy than that posed by the choices that transgender people make about how and whether we wish to alter our bodies in ways that affect our fertility, given there are far more people poised to discover they are on the ace spectrum than there are trans people. With the rise of global fascism, I expect panic over asexuality to become a successor moral panic to the current one over transgender people, and, as an ace trans fem, I look forward to continuing to be a reviled outlaw in the coming years, should I survive to see them.

The project of liberation is always both personal and political. The more we uncover and understand the parts of natural human variation and experience that have been denied to us, hidden from us, and traumatically beaten out of us, within ourselves and each other, the more we liberate ourselves and each other, the more we respect each other and our choices, the more we are able to form honest, authentic, non-carceral, celebratory bonds and connections with each other, the more we quietly degrade the hold that violent systems of capitalist oppression have over us and create a more just, loving, and equitable future.