Massive trigger warnings for sex, SA, overall trauma, and generally vaguely adult themes.
PSA:
This post intends to represent only my personal experiences as one singular individual. Any attempts to take ideas or language expressed here and use it to attack or question asexuals who are happily living their best lives in our community or elsewhere is absolutely in bad faith and would be completely misconstruing my points and words. Do not do that - if you do, you are disrespecting me just as much as you are disrespecting the ace community. Thank you.
Okay!
First, let's go ahead and take a quick step back in time. The year? 2020, with the New Year fast approaching. I, a woman seventeen years of age and filled with enough poorly managed rage to kill a large and robust Viking berserker, am in the midst of a catastrophic breakdown after being hurt by someone I had very wrongly trusted... again. At the center of this breakdown is a simple idea - that my relationship with sex and with my originally healthy sexuality had become so irrevocably damaged by the misconduct of adults in my life online that I couldn't bear the thought of intimacy with the boy I was now swiftly falling head-over-heels for. After realizing much too late that vengeance against random people who had done, like, literally nothing to me was not the path to inner peace, I resolved to set off on a journey to heal myself and find a way to reclaim the healthy sexuality I had been wrongfully denied. This beautiful journey of healing and self-rediscovery ultimately reached its resolution toward the end of February 2021, when I started identifying as asexual and simply put the whole topic in a little box that I never needed to open or think about again! Wait, hold on - what??
That's right, gaymers of Smogon - you might have guessed it by now, or maybe you're one of the people close enough to me to already know, but after nearly three full years of identifying as a strictly sex-repulsed asexual, I've completely abandoned the label in favor of something a little more honest, a little more fair to myself, and a little more fluidly Me. I've decided to write this post because I hope that maybe, someday, somebody in a similar situation might read it and take something away from it, and also because I think it's extremely important to always be willing to accept changes in your understanding of self, and this story is a great example of why.
This whole thing began (again) in June of this past year. Having been on HRT for a little over a year at that point, one might say I was experiencing something of an incomprehensibly massive glow-up, and I was simultaneously beginning to have some confusing thoughts about my sexuality. The previously very liberating asexuality that I had found constant comfort in for years at that point was beginning to feel terribly restricting, horribly dishonest, and remarkably flawed as a descriptor of my feelings and experiences regarding attraction and sexuality. I attended my first major Pride event that month, and leaned into celebrating my transsexuality quite a bit, deciding to dress in a way that, despite being relatively mild all the same, even the year before would've been far "too much" for my sensibilities - would've threatened the crystalline, rigid rules of the "asexuality bubble" I had put myself in. I would be lying if I said that then and there I understood everything completely, but I can't deny that day had a massive lasting impact on me. Eventually, my boyfriend (remember the guy from earlier?) and I found a cute little vendor tent set up by a local organization of asexuals, and though we got to talking, I quickly and immediately realized that I simply had no common ground with these people anymore. Everything I said felt slightly dishonest, and everything they said felt slightly foreign - I felt more genuinely Me amongst the several shy lesbians trying to flirt with me the whole day, and
that was definitely a surprise. I now can look back on these moments and realize that they were the first instance of cracks starting to show in a protective facade that I had truly once believed to be just as real as the experiences of the asexual folks in that tent.
I think, were it not for one additional thing going on in my life last summer, I might never have developed those thoughts any further than they progressed that day, and instead would have simply buried them even further. Thankfully, at the same time that I was being confronted with new and confusing thoughts about an identity I had avoided ever questioning, I was also debating adding Progesterone as a supplementary HRT medication. As anyone familiar with transfeminine HRT might know, P has potentially massive long-term health benefits, with one small caveat: it can also notably increase sex drive. I was, frankly, kind of embarrassingly now, terrified. That fear of being somehow forced to reckon with the trauma and the difficulties I had buried immediately shone a light on how remarkably fragile my concept of my sexuality had become, and how, in my case, it was largely formulated as a means of stepping outside of a system that had harmed me, rather than as something innate or representative of how I wanted to live or be. I immediately got to work trying to figure out a better way forward, deep-diving feminist theories of sexual liberation, queer theory, endless amounts of introspection, and most of all, starting P whether I was scared of it or not. Months went by, and though I became a well-read and formidable feminist, I can't say I was able to salvage asexuality. No matter how I looked at it, my understanding of my sexuality was ultimately broken down into something like this:
- I had been a victim of sexual misconduct and exposure to pornography by adults starting at the age of 13 and then repeatedly for the rest of my teenage years by different people at different times.
- As a result, my sexuality developed in a malformed and toxic way that left me to always subconsciously equate sex with violence as is commonplace in pornography, and sexuality in general with the mistreatment I had received.
- When I was faced with overwhelming trauma in 2020 at the realization I had again been mistreated by someone I thought was my friend, I turned to a "false asexuality" as an escape by simply opting out of the normative sexuality that had harmed me.
- This felt liberating for a time because it meant that I was wholly separate from sex, and could heal however I wanted without the fear of ever going back to the (objectively despicable) concepts I had intrinsically associated in my mind with sex and sexuality.
- Now, at the age of 20, having become more comfortable in myself and much further out from my trauma, just as sex and sexuality had once felt like concepts that would restrict me to a life of pain and mistreatment, especially as a trans woman, asexuality now also felt like a concept that would restrict me to a life of feeling unfulfilled, dishonest, and overly filtered in my behavior and personality, because it didn't allow me any room for the continued growth I was now experiencing.
This framework was wonderful! It made sense, it gave me everything that I needed to understand where I started, how I got here, and why I had taken the steps I did along the way. Unfortunately, it did not give me a clear idea of where the fuck to go from "here." I understood now that, for all purposes, my asexuality was a "lie," that I needed to get out of it if I was ever going to be happy, and that I had been living like this for nearly three years and everyone in my life saw me as something I wasn't. Ouchie. I became increasingly frustrated by this fall - I started noticing small realities that had previously escaped me, like the way my friends filtered or changed their behavior around me, or the way that people close to me seemed to be reacting strangely to my increased confidence and changes in behavior, like they expected me to be reserved and modest. It was as though they saw me as a fragile creature with an inherent negativity around sex, while I saw myself as a strong and liberated woman, coming at certain topics with a fairly unique perspective. I wasn't sure what to do, so I simply sat on it for months, refusing to acknowledge the changes in my self-concept even to my partner, who sincerely deserved to know sooner. I finally broke down last month and admitted I was Having Some Problems in a somewhat desperate, late-night plea for help, where I said I felt "stuck" in a "gigantic sexuality crisis," and thankfully a couple of people reached out to talk through it with me, one of whom really got through to the core of what I needed to do now (you know who you are). A couple of days later, lying in bed with my partner, I finally told him that I didn't think I liked the rigidity of asexuality anymore and that even though I didn't know what that meant yet, I felt restricted by it and I would be happier without the label hanging over me. The conversation went stunningly well. There are no words that can express the relief that comes when you've wanted, for months, to ask for some very small, specific thing from the man you love and are deeply into and now you feel like you actually can without fear of breaking a rigid status quo you've imposed almost entirely on yourself.
So now I'm here. It feels almost as impossible that I've entirely abandoned asexuality as it does that I ever thought it was an accurate label for me in the first place. I owe my life to asexuality and the ace community, and that is something that I cannot overshadow or neglect to say. Although it turned out in the end, even though I'm a little butthurt to say it, that I was just a teenager with a lot of trauma who found a label that gave me comfort and respite, it was still a label that gave me comfort and respite, and I have nothing but respect for those for whom it is something much more. Personally, though, it doesn't work - I just need feminism I think, and gradual,
active healing, not to stay outside the paradigm entirely. For me, just as the world of sexuality once felt like a harmful prison, the world of asexuality does now. It feels like something that, despite the incredible diversity of identities under its umbrella, can only restrict me. I want to celebrate the complicated sexuality I
do have, and the healing that I continue to do to find something fully divorced from what I was exposed to as a teenager. I want to be an unfiltered, honest version of myself, dressing how I please and engaging with others in ways that work for me. I want to be seen as the person I have become, rather than as a label that defines me. I will always have a complicated and difficult relationship with sex - I will always have needs that are hard to meet, but gosh it's kind of great to think that I can still navigate that if I want to, and how I want to. I'm empowered with the force of several years of experience and feminist rage that will let me be strong, confident, and clear about what I want. To never, ever be at either end of the violence I once saw as synonymous with sex. I think that's the true moral of what I am trying to say here. Always be willing to reexamine and reevaluate your identity, and when the rigid label starts to feel like less of a firm philosophy and more of an oppressive prison, toss it to the wayside and live your best queer life without it and you'll be happier for it - you owe it to your younger self to do that. You never know, your seventeen-year-old self's "absolutely never" may just turn out to be your Current You's "weekend plans..." ;)