An Exploration of Desire: Recognising Asexuality, Alongside Illness and Trauma, as Valid

By Bee Gibson

A Small Timeline of Desire

As a teenager, I fantasised about the perfect kiss. Kissing in heavy rain, in someone’s car, in a booth in a bar I would someday be old enough to go to. I watched teen rom-coms and read YA romance – enemies to lovers, friends to lovers, slow burn – and pictured carving out a love with someone like that. I rarely thought about sex. When I did, it existed in some faraway land that I did not feel any big need to visit. 

At around sixteen, I started noticing people talk about it. During one game of Never Have I Ever, I sipped light alcohol and offered Never Have I Ever… Masturbated. Slowly, each friend took a sip. Then, stories of teenage want started being exchanged. In that moment, I realised my faraway land was much closer for other people, somewhere they were eager to stand on and take in the view.

At eighteen, I had my first kiss in a crowded bar. It wasn’t a teen rom-com moment but rather drunk, messy and largely unmemorable. There was no electricity, just curious mouths moving until they didn’t. Some years later, I visited the faraway land with a stranger from Tinder. The climb to the land was awkward and for me, felt entirely performative. Not long afterwards, very real and very loud fireworks went off in the sky outside. I fell asleep to the sound of them, feeling far away and entirely untouchable. 

At twenty, the same year I had sex for the first time, I was diagnosed with three chronic pain conditions with no cure. After that, my relationship with desire felt even more unstable. I wanted intimacy, but sex felt like the only way I could reach it. When I did decide to have sex, it was painful. My hips wouldn’t hold for long, and my exhausted body had little stamina.

What I had come to realise I liked about sex wasn’t to do with pleasure but rather a feeling of closeness that I did not have the tools to replicate outside of using my body for something I did not have any real urge for. Later, when trauma from sexual violence became inexplicably linked with my desire, navigating intimacy felt like those fireworks that first time, unreachable. 

A Small Background of Asexuality

Asexuality is typically defined as experiencing little to no sexual attraction. Oftentimes, you may see the term ‘ace’ – an informal label encompassing anyone under the asexual umbrella. This umbrella houses different identities including demisexual (sexual attraction only once an emotional connection is formed) and grey-ace (often describing people who feel they exist somewhere between sexual and asexual, such as rarely feeling sexual desire and under certain circumstances). This is why most people in the community describe asexuality as a spectrum; there is no one-size-fits-all experience that will reflect everybody. 

For a long time though when I thought of asexuality, I thought it meant somebody who doesn’t have sex or has never. I didn’t think that it could mean me – a person who has had sex, is disabled and has sexual trauma. So I stored it away to revisit some other day and set out with the belief that if I could find a way to reduce pain or heal from trauma, perhaps I could approach sex in the same way friends did.

Part of this disconnect could be due to the fact that historically, asexuality has not been recognised or validated in public consciousness. With a long timeline of being pathologised, people fitting with asexuality have been approached by society through a lens of it always being a result of sexual dysfunction, psychological issues or health issues causing low libido. This reaches back centuries, with sexologists seeking to ‘cure’ asexualities.

This still exists today, with asexual people describing hostile healthcare environments. A report called ‘Ace in the UK’ by Stonewall and asexual activist Yasmin Benoit uncovered discrimination that leads to asexual people being 50% more likely to hide asexuality from healthcare staff with a quarter being afraid of negative reactions, and almost 10% referencing a previous bad experience. 

Even with social awareness growing, asexuality is still not widely recognised as valid despite around 1-2% of the current UK population identifying as asexual. Strides have been made,  from 1972 when the Asexual Manifesto by Lisa Orlando was published, to the Asexual Visibility and Education Network (AVEN) being founded, to the ‘Ace in the UK’ report. Still, prejudice towards asexual people remains.

Asexuality, Disability and Sexual Trauma

Society often conflates asexuality with ill health and trauma. Similarly, disabled people are presumed to have an asexual identity when many disabled people would not identify with one: desexualised because of assumptions of disabled people not having the agency to be sexual beings. It is understandable, then, that asexuality and disability liberation movements have sought for asexuality to be understood as an inherent sexual orientation devoid of attachments to disability and trauma. It has been necessary to embrace asexuality as a legitimate identity.

There does not have to be an identifiable reason for asexuality. Most of the time, there never really is. Asexual people do not have to ‘wait for the right person’. We are not ‘confused’. In trying to find roots to my asexuality, I have dismissed the core truth of it. I’m just not, and have never been, especially interested in or dependent on sex. It feels healing to embrace who I am and what I love and don’t love. 

It would also be dismissive for me to say that my asexuality isn’t connected to my disabled identity or trauma. My chronic illnesses and trauma, together with my asexuality, are part of my lived, embodied experience. I am realising that this inability to definitively separate the different facets of my identity doesn’t invalidate my asexuality. It’s important for our understanding to embrace all experiences, including experiences that may have some roots in disability or trauma. Perhaps if, as Anna Kurowicka suggests, we begin to see all these lived experiences – illness, disability, trauma – as parts of life instead of through the lens of tragedy, we can more readily accept the stories of asexuality that intersect with them. 

If I could speak to my teenage self, I would want her to know that it’s okay to want what she wants. It’s okay to dream of romance without any tangible connection to sex. I would want her to know that intimacy can exist in infinite ways, and there are tools to find it in ways that don’t sacrifice our own comfort. I’m still figuring out my relationship with my faraway land. Maybe I will always be perpetually discovering. It’s a small kind of miracle to embrace the parts of our identity that have long felt unknowable, unreachable – always far away and yet, in its own time, moving ever closer.