Very recently, I came to the conclusion that I am grey-asexual. It's somewhat embarrassing to be changing my sexual orientation labels around this late in life, as someone who had come out as gay at age 14 and trans at 18, but here I am. Looking back at things, it's somewhat obvious. Exes I've told have been like, "yeah, that makes sense. You seemed way more into the not-sex parts of sex than the sex parts of sex." The question of course is then, why did it take me so long to come to an asexual-spectrum identity? If I already knew that my relationship to sex is the way that it is, why didn't I parse that as being asexuality?
Recently, when I was trying to figure out what kind of asexuality label best fit me, I had some incredibly frustrating conversations with asexual people that drove me absolutely bonkers and made it incredibly difficult for me to understand what the fuck "asexual" is supposed to mean and if I am it or not. The problem, to me, is that the asexual community defines asexuality in a way that is philosophically unlike how any other LGBT-etc. identity is defined. In order to accept these definitions of asexuality, one must accept some extremely grand and impossible to prove assertions about supposedly universal human experiences. I've known that my sexuality is different in these ways my whole life but I never took on an asexual identity because the way it was defined to me just didn't make any sense
Social Scripts and Subversions
All queer identities come together as a set because they represent someone not following the social script as dictated by Western cisheteropatriarchal society.
- You are assigned a sex and corresponding gender at birth based on the appearance of your genitals to the naked eye. Some babies may be operated upon to make their genitals better conform to one of the two options.
- The two sexes are male and female, and their corresponding genders are man and woman respectively. Both binaries are socially constructed, although the former has some biological basis that the social construct further constrains and exaggerates.
- You are not to change your assigned gender or sex at any point in your life.
- There is a set of behaviors that are acceptable and desirable for men and only men.
- There is a set of behaviors that are acceptable and desirable for women and only women.
- Some behaviors are forbidden to men.
- Some behaviors are forbidden to women.
- There is a set of activities that men are only to do with other men.
- There is a set of activities that women are only to do with other women.
- There is a set of activities that men and women are only to do with each other, and not with other people of their shared gender.
- Men and women must participate in the set of activities that they are to do with each other. It is treated as the ultimate and most important part of life itself.
- The way that they do this is also heavily restricted and scripted.
- I hope you want to do all of these things in these particular ways because even expressing dissatisfaction with it is socially punished. You should perform being happy with this script. But not too happy, if you're a man. Men aren't supposed to express strong emotions like that.
LGB
Despite western society (and many other cultures too, in their own ways) have written out the story of your entire life before you were even born, the true reality is that human beings are infinitely diverse. Even if 90% of humans are able and willing to fully conform to their assigned stories and be a performative happy man and happy wife with happy children (and this is a big If!) there will always be people for whom this is so difficult, so miserable, so unnatural to their nature that they will ultimately refuse to conform.
Alfred Kinsey famously found in his research that 46% of men are to some degree bisexual, and 10% are exclusively homosexual. 11.6% were perfectly bisexual, with equal attraction to both men and women. While 37% admitted in confidence to having had a sexual encounter to a man, we of course observe that far less than 37% of men identify as gay or bisexual. Most men identify as straight and even the most progressive straight men will often admit to a level of heteroflexibility but not consider it salient or important enough for them to assume a queer or bisexual identity. They are content to ignore the parts of themselves that are not aligned with the heterosexual social script in order to maintain a self-image that is fully acceptable to society. His research on female sexuality was less fruitful because women at the time weren't comfortable discussing this sort of thing with a man. Some topics should only be discussed amongst your own gender.
We do not typically consider 46% of men to be "closeted bisexuals." The closet only applies when someones desires are so strong that they are not content to ignore them. When not pursuing those desires make them actively unhappy. The desires which do not conform to the heterosexual script are the first component to a gay, lesbian, or bisexual identity, but it is acting upon those unacceptable desires in some manner that cements that they are not merely naturally sexually fluid in the way most people are, but actively gay, lesbian, or bisexual.
In this manner, I do not truly need to understand how someone experiences their desires to observe their gay, lesbian, or bisexual identity. Their identity is in conflict with society and thus meaningful and defined because they are expressing forbidden desires and acting upon those desires. And I consider expressing those desires to be a form of acting upon them, even if your desires go unfulfilled. To say "I actually want to have sex with men, and not women" is acting upon that want. I don't really need to know why you want it, or how you experience it, that you want to do something society does not allow you to want or pursue draws the contrast between you and the average person. It makes you abnormal.
There is certainly some level of biological wiring that determines sexual orientation, and some level of nurture-driven emergence of desires as well. But what defines the category, how you know that you are in this category, is that these desires are clearly contrasting with the observed desires of others. You cannot freely share these desires. They are forbidden.
T
Transsexuality, gender non-conformity, non-binary identity, and gender transition follow the same pattern as sexual orientation but broader. Desires and actions around relationships with others is one component of the script, and another component is how you express who you are as an individual, how you shape your body, and all the sets of behaviors permitted and forbidden to your assignment.
Again, most people appear to be content to accept their sex and gender assignments, ignore the parts of themselves that desire something that is not permitted, and to align their behavior with their assignment. However, due to the infinite diversity of humanity, once again there will always be people whose desires and subsequent behaviors do not conform to the script. Some people are so dissatisfied with their assignment that they experience the misery we call dysphoria.
Jane Schoenbrun, among other artists, creates films that try to communicate what gender dysphoria feels like. Ultimately, though, it is not the experience of dysphoria that socially marks the T. Nobody needs to know why we ultimately desires to cease conforming to our assigned gender or sex. We become socially marked when we express the desire to be something different, or that we feel like we are truly something different, and when we take actions to become different than we are "supposed to be."
It is not merely the desire to wear a dress that makes someone assigned male into a trans person. It is when that desire is so strong that it becomes unacceptable. I don't need to know how that desire is experienced. It is merely the resulting failure to conform to the script that creates the contrast and abnormality.
The "closet" in this case again only exists for those whose desires are so strong it makes them unhappy. I don't need to know the internal understanding of how that unhappiness is felt to understand that someone is unhappy. The contrast is drawn by the discontent being so severe it cannot be ignored. Subsequent actions, whether it be expressing this discontent, or actions being taken to change one's gender expression or sexed body traits, are what mark someone socially and make them transgender/etc.
We don't need to know what it feels like to be cisgender, we only need to know what we desire in life and to pursue it.
Let's talk about the A
"Asexuality Handbook" dot org has a very extensive glossary that feels pretty indicative of how most asexuals seem to like to define things.
asexual:
adj. Of or relating to asexuality. n. A person whose sexual orientation is asexuality.
Well that doesn't mean anything to me. Let's look up "asexuality" next.
asexuality: n. A sexual orientation where a person doesn't experience sexual attraction towards anyone.
Now this is different. The other definitions are based around the presence of desires (and subsequent actions) which go against the social script. It is not defined by a subjective experience, but an objective expression and behavior. Others can observe you as different from the outside, and you can observe yourself as different on the inside. You know what you desire is "wrong."
The asexual community does not define itself based on if they desire sex, or if they have sex. They define it based on if one "experiences sexual attraction." Asexuals will tell you that you can be asexual and still:
- Have a sex drive that makes you want to have sex
- Be attracted to someone of specific genders romantically, aesthetically, emotionally, physically, and "sensually."
- Desire sex (just not with a specific individual?)
- Have sex
- Have a preference for who you have sex or romance with based on gender
- Want to have sex with your romantic partner
So what remains that makes someone asexual? It is the absence of the internal experience of "sexual attraction." Which is not the same thing as liking how someone looks, wanting to have sex, wanting to have sex with a specific person, having sex, etc. etc. it's not something you can infer whether someone experiences it or not based on their behavior it is entirely a subjective internal experience. It exists only in their mental phenomena.
The issue here is that since it is an absence of something, we must then declare that allosexuals do experience this thing described as "sexual attraction." You cannot merely observe that 90% of people seem content enough to have reproductive sex, you must make a statement about not just that those people actively desire to comply with that directive but also how they experience it internally. You must describe that which you by definition never experience, and define it based on entirely internal attributes you've never felt, and then say that's how everyone else is.
The social dictate relevant to asexuality has been labeled amatonormativity. Queer theorists have other terms for it as well. It is the social script about which social bonds you should value most and what you should do and not do in those relationships. It is tied into the heteronormative script pertaining to getting married and having kids. It is tied into monogamy and patriarchy. The insistence on the necessity of sexual virility of men to be valuable men and the mandate of sexual availability of women to be valuable women. To refuse to conform to this social script will result in social consequences. Some pretty violent ones.
So if like the other two categories, asexuality is in reference to people having desires which go against this social dictate and acting upon those desires, then this is very easy to understand. But this is not how the asexual community generally definea asexuality.
They define it as "not experiencing sexual attraction." This is an absence of an imagined internal experience shared by people who are not you.
So what is sexual attraction? When I asked the asexuals whose advice I sought in determining where I fall on the asexual spectrum, one of them literally said "I define sexual attraction as sexual attraction." Well, buddy, how do I know what sexual attraction is if it's an entirely internal experience that I, perhaps, have never experienced?
Most LGBTQ glossaries have no definition for sexual attraction. The Asexuality Handbook gives us this.
sexual attraction: n. An urge to have sex with a specific person.
So an asexual person can desire sex, have sex, enjoy sex, have a romantic partner, and consent to having sex with said romantic partner because they want to please their partner and want to have sex (which... implies a desire to have sex with their romantic partner...) but this is still asexuality because of their entirely internal subjective experience of not having had an urge to have sex with specifically their romantic partner.
Now bring in that it's a spectrum. Bring in the abro, grey, flux, and demi identities and this becomes soooo narrowly distinct from just... what allosexuality possibly is? Someone who does experience an urge to have sex with someone they're emotionally close to? So they can experience a desire to have sex, and romantic attraction, they just don't feel an "urge" to have sex with a "specific" person if that specific person isn't someone they know very well. And then you have "it fluctuates if this is experiences or not" and well... this is when we start getting into my big philosophical disputes with the asexual community.
The asexuals who I talked to when trying to figure out my own asexuality were not making claims about how they live and experience the world, they were making claims about how allosexuals live and experience the world. They told me that what they don't experience is "looking at strangers and imagining having sex with them right away." Now, since when is it universally agreed-upon that the vast majority of people in the world are immediately imagining having sex with every single person they see of their preferred genders? They described having "a desire but not an urge." Now since when was it universally agreed-upon that the vast majority of people experience the world in this way?
Doesn't this imply that the western cisheteronormative script is in some manner innately biological to 90% of the human population? Is this not rooted in the infinite diversity of humanity? It feels like it asserts a natural homogeneity to humanity with asexuals as being some sort of special more rational type of person.
The more and more I asked them to unpack their language, the more they made universal declarations about the internal human experience of the world to the level of thoughts, feelings, and emotions completely detached from any observable behavior or actual statements on behalf of the people who are being described. If asexuals don't experience sexual attraction, then how can we define what sexual attraction is or how it is experienced? Or what is feels like? If by definition we do not experience it? How can you define yourself by the lack of an experience only you have described as existing for anybody else?
When I tried to describe my own experiences and feelings that have led me to question if I am on the asexual spectrum or not, I was told how I experience the world in ways that just didn't ring true. My own subjective internalities were rejected authoritatively. I was pushed to sort things into if they are "attraction" or not, and which kind. Not if they are desires, or enjoyed, or done. But if I experience it as an "attraction."
This led to bizarre sentences like "You can be allosexual and not enjoy sex" and "maybe you're just traumatized" which to me feel like entirely perpendicular to if I am living an asexual life. Isn't this the kind of thing asexual people often complain about being told? Why should the cause of one's desires determine their validity, as opposed to whether those desires align with the social script or not? This brings us to the social function of identity labels.
And this is besides the point that, under the traditional conservative western cisheteropatriarchal script, you actually are not supposed to desire sex outside of very specific circumstances with a very specific person. "Marital coitus" isn't even supposed to be enjoyed depending on your sect of Christianity. What draws the contrast with asexuality?
The sociolinguistic pragmatics of identity
When I tell someone I am heteroflexible, it serves a clear social function. It is not merely descriptive of my experiences, but it tells someone something that might be relevant to them.
I am mostly only interested in doing the sexy romantic kinky things with men. But I'm not making any promises that I exclusively stick to this. There may be exceptions. Non-binary people exist and can be attractive to me.
Now, if you were attracted to me yourself, or interested in doing this or that to me, you now know if you're possibly in my pool of candidates or not. This might be relevant to some people. There is a social function to this. I am expressing to you my desires. I am telling you something about myself in relation to social scripts.
When I tell someone I am transgender, there is also a social function.
I had a certain experience of gender. I was assigned something different and may have different biology than you expect in some regards. The ways I want you to refer to me might be different than you assume.
If I don't think me being trans is relevant, I might not mention it. But there are times when it serves a social function. I might be explaining that I am infertile, or face discrimination. When I was pre-op, it may have been important to explain to a prospective sexual partner what organs I had. At a doctor's appointment, it matters what organs I have, or what meds I'm on. "Transgender" serves a function when I tell someone that that is what I am. I am expressing something about myself that is relevant.
If I define "asexual" based not on my behavior or desires but entirely based on if I have a vague internal experience or do not have that experience in this very nebulous and narrow way that I can never truly know if anyone experience this thing how we are defining it let alone the majority of humans... then what social function does the identity even hold for me? If this nebulous internal experience doesn't imply anything about my desires on what I would like to do with other people, or on what I am willing to do with other people, then what does it communicate?
Hey, I am telling you that when I look at strangers, I do not immediately feel an urge to have sex with them, and I don't suddenly imagine having sex with them either.
If you said this to most neurotypical allosexual people, they would have no idea what you are saying. What social function is this? I think most allo NTs, especially straight people, would just say "that's normal" or "I don't usually do those things either?" I'm not sure if they'd be entirely honest but... that's certainly what they'd say. You aren't supposed to tell people if you did experience something like that. Sex is a cagey topic. I don't think anybody would say "What?! No, it's a universal human experience to always think about fucking every single person you look at and to want to fuck them, constantly, no matter who they are to you or how you're feeling, or the time and place, so long as they're pretty and the right gender."
I think mostly people would categorize it as normal to only sometimes have that experience, or to have "high standards" for who you find attractive, or to only really do that with a spouse. Culturally, I think that it's seen in most western and east asian cultures as impure, wrong, or immoral to fantasize about having sex with strangers upon seeing them, especially if you're a woman. The standard is you're only supposed to want to have sex with your spouse after you marry them. What is labeled as demisexuality might not actually be normal, but it's what is supposed to be normal.
And, importantly, what is actually accomplished by telling me this? OK so you're not imagining fucking me, but you want me to know you theoretically could still want to date me and/or have sex with me, you just don't feel an "urge" to "upon seeing me"? Well, there's nothing for me to do with this information. As an identity, it has no function.
De jure and de facto definition
Oddly, even though the asexual community tends to be very adamant that this "sexual attraction" concept is how asexuality is to be defined, without any variance for weirdness around sexuality, I don't think most asexuals are actually using the identity this way. When you see memes about asexuality, usually they orient around the not-having of sex, the not-thinking-about-sex. The not-knowing-about-sex. They are quick to affirm that you are a valid asexual if you have sexual fantasies, everyone is very taxonomically valid here, but the identity and community serve a true function of de-prioritizing sex.
I think a descriptive definition of asexual people, and the asexual spectrum, when factoring in how people use these identities and what they mean to you when someone identifies as such, calls for a very different definition. When we consider the parts of the social script that we are going against and contrasted against, we end up with different definitions.
How I would like to define asexuality, and my place on the asexual spectrum
I think it would be most accurate and useful to define asexuality by how one values and desires sexual intercourse. I use "desire" here not in terms of sex-repulsion but just in terms of like, if someone literally wants to do it or not, for whatever reasons that they want or don't want it. Whether it's experienced as "attraction" or not is not my concern, just if you want it.
Asexual: I do not value sex in my life and relationships, and do not desire to have sex. If I went my entire life without sexual intercourse, I would be fine with that. It's not important to me. I may still desire other forms of intimacy with other people, it's just sexual intercourse that I'd rather leave out.
This now has a very clear social function and it's defined by something that is clearly understandable and observable without having to make assumptions about how someone experiences their own cognition of the world. It doesn't matter why they don't desire sex, or in what manner they experience the lack of desire. They don't want to do it. It's not something they want. That's all you need to know. It also fits in very neatly with the other LGBT-type labels without telling allosexuals how they're supposed to experience their attractions with split-attraction model stuff. It's intuitive to understand an asexual gay man as a man who is gay... but just doesn't want to have sex. We don't need to know the rest.
If we define asexuality based on value and desire then all those other labels fall neatly into place how you know if you are them or not via the ability to observe other people and if you are like them or not.
I can look at the asexual up there and think... well... I wouldn't say I have 0% desire for sex, but it's certainly not something I value or want as badly as other people seem to, in such a manner that it's worth communicating to prospective partners that this is the case.
Outside of the asexual community, I think the normies would call this "being high libido" or "low libido" honestly, but I think that identifying it as a place on an identity spectrum can make a lot of sense. It's a little more firm and specific. Feels less negotiable.
It's also contrasted with the social script. We can then clearly see how this is not in alignment with the way virility is a scripted value-measurement of manhood, or being a sexually-available object is a scripted value-measurement of womanhood. This way of living is out of alignment with the marriage-and-children script. It is out of alignment with what forms of intimacy are supposed to be valued.
Demisexual: I do not value or desire sexual intercourse most of the time, but it might be something I'd like to do with someone who I am very emotionally close to. It's not something I can do casually or quickly, and I'd like to not be pressured into doing it. There are other kinds of intimacy I'd rather participate in.
I think this definition better covers how most demisexuals I know use the label functionally. It sort-of functions as a "please let me lead this conversation" request. If you're going to be disappointed if you can't have sex with someone a lot and quickly, then you should avoid courting a demisexual, who is communicating that while it might not be entirely off the table someday, they'd really rather focus on emotional intimacy. Someone courting a demisexual should be content to not be having sex indefinitely.... even if maybe someday it happens.
Phrasing this as an identity amongst the LGBTetc. also functions to tell someone "I don't want to follow the script. I want to write this together like gay people do." It's a cultural shift.
Abrosexual/Aceflux: It's very strongly inconsistent if I want sex or not. I can't really explain why I sometimes do or don't. Sometimes there are long stretches of time where I feel one way or the other. Sometimes it changes moment to moment. But I'd like to not feel bad about not wanting it when I don't.
This is closer to how I've seen people use abrosexual/aceflux in terms of its social function. That they do not want to be dependably seen as a sexual person, but that they are sometimes. They want to set expectations that while they do want to be asked, the answer will often be no. If this is a problem for you, then move along. Given that frequent sex is a socially valued component of a relationship, this draws a contrast. Someone who simply, for very long stretches of time, actively wants to not have sex, and to not have that seen as a relationship failure.
Grey-Asexual: I do not value centering sex/sexuality in my life/relationships. It's not something I desire in a way that I'd position over other things as important to me. Whether I'll enjoy it or not has nothing to do with emotional closeness to someone, it's just that in general I like other forms of intimacy a lot more than this one. But still, it's not something that I never enjoy or never want. It's just one of many things someone might do. Being expected to do it all the time gets tiring or boring to me. Sometimes I want to eat pasta, but I don't want to put pasta on a pedestal as the food, and I like garlic bread a lot more.
This is how I define grey-asexuality for myself and what I am socially communicating by identifying this way. I would like things to not always be about sex. Sex, to me, is not a must, and I'd like to often pass on it. I'm not saying I'll never do it or enjoy it, but it would be tiring to me to do it all the time. It's not my favorite. I'm happy to eat a waldorf salad. It is not my favorite food and I would not enjoy eating waldorf salad for every single meal. I enjoy waxplay, but it's not fun for me for every single intimate moment to lead to waxplay all the time every time. The are some things, like cuddling or kissing, that I just enjoy quite a bit more than sex and probably would enjoy doing every day if it did not have an expectation built-in of it leading to sex.
This is something observable (my ex-partners certainly noticed it) and it affects my relationships to others. There's a contrast with the social script, and it affects my desirability and social status. It doesn't matter what my internal experiences are when I do or don't experience a desire to participate in the activity called sex. What functionally matters to other people is what I want or don't want to do with potentially them/other people; and any subsequent behaviors as an expression of those desires or lack-thereof.
I realized that I'm grey-ace because, when I was doing stuff with an asexual person recently, which is new to me, I kept having the thought "it is so wonderful how I get to do all of the parts I like the most without the pressure to do the stressful parts I don't like that much." This, to me, is certainly indicative of some form of asexuality, but according to the classic definition of asexuality based on "attraction" it would be irrelevant. I hope you can see my perspective on this.
There are other ace-spectrum labels but these are the ones that seem to be most common. The other side of the split-attraction model, the aromantic/demiromantic/etc. labels, are not ones I feel comfortable trying to redefine because I truly don't understand them. They confuse me even more. I didn't understand what a romantic relationship really was until I was 25 because of autism, and then at 28 felt like I once again was questioning and relearning what it is or can be. Most importantly, I am still exploring what I want it to be in my own life. Understanding what "romantic attraction" means is thus even more confusing to me. I can't call myself aromantic. I do desire romance. But I don't see romance as something innate and biological to me; but as something I've logically concluded seems enjoyable and pleasurable and worth pursuing. I can't possibly fit this into the existent label boxes on the aro-spectrum. It makes more sense to me to just say "I'm autistic." What would I be communicating with an identity? I don't see what I'd be communicating with aro-boxes as things I want to communicate, even if the asexual community would look at my descriptions of my internal experience and say "you don't experience romantic attraction. You are aromantic-spectrum." How can you say what I do or don't experience? You hardly know what you experience yourself.
Conclusion
I highly doubt my new definitions for these labels will catch on, especially since they're paragraph-long definitions written in the first person. But sometimes I feel like I can do something better and then feel the need to do it, especially when it pertains to how I express my own identity.
Here is a shorter attempt at writing definitions.
Asexual: Someone who does not desire sex nor values sex as central to life and relationships. Demisexual: Someone who does not desire or value sex without the context of a close emotional bond. Abro/Flux: Someone whose desire for sex may be frequently absent, or absent for long stretches of time, and does not see sex during those times as valuable. Grey-asexual: Someone whose desire for sex is substantially diminished compared to allosexual people. They do not value sex as something worth centering in their life or relationships any more than one would value and center eating a delicious waldorf salad.