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Correlation between asexually and disability.


LittleGoody2Shoes

Correlation between asexually and disability.  

24 members have voted

  1. 1. Are you disabled?

    • Not disabled and ace
      10
    • Disability (mental,physical,etc)
      13
    • Non asexual.
      1


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LittleGoody2Shoes

I know asexuality is not considered a mental illness itself, but I wonder if there's a correlation between it and disability.

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LittleGoody2Shoes
14 minutes ago, TheAP said:

I am autistic and asexual.

Do you know a lot of other people with disabilities? Do you think it's common for them to be asexual?

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LittleGoody2Shoes

When I first realized I was asexual I blamed it on my mental health and neurological problem. I almost felt lucky in a way to have an excuse to not have sex. Then I realized that asexuality is an independent orientation. I still have a feeling it might correlate to other problems.

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2 minutes ago, LittleGoody2Shoes said:

Do you know a lot of other people with disabilities? Do you think it's common for them to be asexual?

I do know many people with disabilities, but I don't know if they're asexual or not, since I don't ask them about their sexual orientation. I think I only know one asexual person for sure in real life.

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LittleGoody2Shoes
Just now, TheAP said:

I do know many people with disabilities, but I don't know if they're asexual or not, since I don't ask them about their sexual orientation. I think I only know one asexual person for sure in real life.

Does your asexual friend have a disability?

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Just now, LittleGoody2Shoes said:

Does your asexual friend have a disability?

They're not really a close friend, so I don't know for sure. I think they have synesthesia, but that doesn't really count as a disability. Their brother is autistic, but I don't know if they have any disabilities themselves.

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I'm asexual and disabled.

I have BHJS, dysautonomia, OCD, ADD, PTSD, Panic disorder, AN (full remission), GAD, psychosis, and chronic insomnia. I also suspect Autism and I'm a synesthete.

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I have cerebral palsy but I don"'t feel there is a connection with my asexuality, it has a slight affect on my co-ordination

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everywhere and nowhere

I recall an interesting text by Swankivy about asexuality, disability and the problem how sex-positive rhetoric on disability erases disabled aces.

(Emphasis mine)

Quote

Anonymous asked: The disability community is constantly trying to make people understand that "Just because we're disabled doesn't mean we don't want/can't have sex!" The asexual community is always saying "Just because we don't want to have sex doesn't mean we're disabled!" What advice would you give a lifelong wheelchair-user who's recently realized she's ace, but feels like admitting it publicly would be a betrayal of her fellow disabled people and harm the "disability =/= no sex" message they're preaching?

 

Hi! Thanks for asking. This is a really important question for both communities.

You are a wheelchair user and asexual. If you feel like you can’t comfortably be both without making either community “look bad,” both communities need an important wake-up call. As a person who has disabled friends but isn’t a part of that community, I can’t comment on what goes on inside, but I can certainly say the ace community needs to step it up with authentic disability inclusion, and that starts with removing phrases like “aces aren’t disabled!” from our vocabularies.

I know the sexuality of disabled people is consistently erased, and that many of them want to combat this message by saying “No, that’s wrong, we ARE interested in sex and do NOT lack sexual attraction.” I understand that to a degree, desexualization being fought with oversexualization or strong sexualized statements makes sense. It’s how reclamation sometimes works. But that means the community fails people like you. Especially if you feel like you have to hide part of who you are because it might embarrass them or send the wrong message. But what about you? You’re as important as the rest of them. I don’t feel comfortable telling the disability community how they “should” be raising awareness about their disability-specific issues, but I do think I’m qualified to say they can and should find ways to do it without throwing asexual people under the bus. They should support and encourage sexual agency, not sex itself, and respecting sexual agency demands that equal respect is afforded to those who abstain.

If the one percent figure for asexual folks is right (though I’m not going to get into whether it’s accurate here), that would be one in every one hundred people who’s ace. Some of those are also going to be disabled. It’s just how the numbers work. It would be awful to say that everyone who’s disabled is categorically not ace or everyone who’s ace is categorically not disabled. And there are some disabled folks who DO feel that their disability has something to do with their feelings on sex and their attraction experiences, and they should be allowed to talk about that in their communities. It’s true that asexuality isn’t a disability, but it isn’t true that asexual people can’t be disabled without “admitting” the asexuality as a result of or element of their disability and making it less authentic. It’s true that disabled people don’t automatically lack sexual desires or experiences or attractions, but it isn’t true that disabled people can’t be asexual.

Unfortunately, people both inside and outside disability communities may react to a disabled asexual person with some of the same nonsense the rest of us have heard: Oh no, you have a hangup about something; no dear, we’ve got to help you overcome that; no, don’t say that about yourself; it’s okay, you can wait for the right person, etc., and they may incorporate your disability into their erasure and dismissal of you because it’s (for them) an easy answer. Many of us non-disabled aces are frequently told we must have a disability somewhere to explain this, after all. For someone with a known or visible disability, they just find it easy to blame it, since it’s there.

If you want advice from me on this, I don’t know that I have much encouraging to say, but given how you worded your question, I want you to understand and internalize that you are not not not “betraying” anyone or anything by living your own truth, and if someone in either the ace community or the disability community implies that you are harming them by living with such an intersection, they are the problem, not you. We need more people like you discussing your asexual experience–not only just because other disabled people need to hear narratives like yours, but because everyone else who is not disabled needs to stop processing asexuality as an orientation that can only be applied if one’s identity is uncomplicated.

Right now, many believe that asexuality can be conceded as a “real” orientation only if nothing else “explains it,” and so for people like me, they want me to go through the Unassailable Asexual checklist: I have to be between 20 and 40 years old, I have to be conventionally attractive and thin, I have to be non-disabled and not physically or mentally ill, I have to have no history of abuse or assault, I have to be outgoing and friendly, I have to be neurotypical, I have to be cisgender and gender conforming and non-intersex, I have to be sex-positive and/or supportive of others’ sex lives, I probably have to be white, and I probably have to be aromantic or heteroromantic (but definitely not any same-sex attractions). If I “fail” any of those checklist items, that failure is “why” I’m asexual. That checklist is failed by almost everyone in this community, usually on multiple axes. And everyone both inside and outside the asexual community needs to see that asexuality is still valid and still a reasonable possibility for those who “fail.”

And it’s not an accident that most of the people who have been selected repeatedly for asexual media – like me – mysteriously don’t fail this checklist, and continue to perpetuate a “sanitized” version of asexuality because of how we’re portrayed. I’ve had articles about me open with a physical description– “Ivy, svelte and fair-skinned with waist-length blond hair”–to make sure nobody thought I might be “too ugly” to get sex. I’ve had interviewers present me with just like any normal woman qualifiers to make sure everyone knows I’m feminine and totally not a secret lesbian or a gender nonconformist. They rush to remind their readers that I’ve never been abused and I totally dated boys when I was younger, and announce that I’m confident and funny. They do this stuff to me and I don’t even fail the checklist–and they’re trying to make damn sure that nobody thinks I do. God forbid they ever imply an “ugly” person or a person with illnesses or a shy person or a person with attractions to same-sex people might be asexual. They continue to hammer home this idea that asexuality is only valid if you have literally investigated every other possible explanation for it. It’s a last resort.

That needs to stop yesterday.

We’ll only stop perceiving asexual orientations as a last resort if we begin having more varied populations speaking on it. I know I can’t do anything about what the media chooses to present, and even when I do get a chance to talk about intersectional issues during interviews it almost always gets cut (but even then it’s me trying to point at issues that aren’t my own experience so it’s less than ideal anyway), but what I can do is encourage others to speak wherever they’re comfortable and encourage my communities to welcome these voices. Aces, it’s fine to speak out against conflation of disability and asexuality, but take great care to avoid saying or implying that disabled people aren’t asexual. Disabled aces, I want to hear you, I want your voices, I want your stories to be part of our quilt and not in some side category that’s processed as a footnote or an exception. Disabled aces, I don’t want you to feel like you have to represent if you’re not into that, but I would (and do) find it heartbreaking if you felt you couldn’t participate because we find your voice embarrassing or unimportant. You are absolutely, completely NOT “betraying” us or our message by being who you are. You ARE what our community is, not some aberration that hurts our legitimacy.

Sorry I got a little ranty there but this respectability nonsense pisses me off.

It seems like your question mostly focused on how to speak about aceness within the disability community, and I don’t think I’m quite qualified to anticipate the exact dynamic you deal with in those circles, but I hope my answer gives you some perspective on why your voice would be appreciated and why voices like yours are necessary in both communities. Specifically, I would just urge anyone who deals with this issue to contradict messages about compulsory sexuality for disabled people as an attempt to reclaim sexuality for desexualized populations, and to choose words that support sexual agency in general (which explicitly includes supporting people who say no, without interpreting them as repressed). And please, ace community, work hard to avoid erasing disabled aces or speaking about disability in a way that’s dismissive or misleading to people who are both.

 

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everywhere and nowhere

I'm not disabled, but I am chronically ill (allergy and atopic dermatitis) and, to be honest, I believe it is the cause of my asexuality. I'm grateful of this aspect, I wouldn't want to be allosexual. But anyway, it makes me very sensitive to issues such as the "born this way" rhetoric (I don't support it, I believe that people who claim that their sexual orientation isn't inborn should at least have the basic right not to be attacked by minority communities), "The Unassailable Asexual" (I too fail this "checklist" on multiple axes: apart from being chronically ill, I'm also homoromantic, sex-averse and physically unattractive), or - on the positive side - something the asexual community has fortunately accepted: that people have a right to their self-identification "even" when there is something to "explain" it.

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Janus the Fox

Being a Tourettes/Asperger with a range of physical/mental illness does not give weight to any reason why I am asexual.  Some aspects maybe relatable in people who are already sexual, experiencing a range of aspects of asexuality with their disability/illnesses, does not mean they become asexual either.

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I've a few learning/mental disabilities, and if my asexuality and my disabilities are caused by life events, then yeah I would say they could be correlated, otherwise I have no reason to think they would be.

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How is being autistic a disability? Isn't it just another way of thinking? People thought that being homosexual was a mental illness which is obviously incorrect, so how is this any different than that?

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15 hours ago, nate-1234 said:

How is being autistic a disability? Isn't it just another way of thinking? People thought that being homosexual was a mental illness which is obviously incorrect, so how is this any different than that?

It depends upon the severity of autism.  My daughter is autistic and is definitely disabled -- she cannot live independently and has severe communication and behavioral problems.   

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8 minutes ago, Sally said:

It depends upon the severity of autism.  My daughter is autistic and is definitely disabled -- she cannot live independently and has severe communication and behavioral problems.   

Oh, I see.

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LittleGoody2Shoes
On 1/7/2018 at 12:54 PM, Flower Boy said:

I'm asexual and disabled.

I have BHJS, dysautonomia, OCD, ADD, PTSD, Panic disorder, AN (full remission), GAD, psychosis, and chronic insomnia. I also suspect Autism and I'm a synesthete.

Bless your heart!

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LittleGoody2Shoes
On 1/7/2018 at 1:25 PM, Nowhere Girl said:

I'm not disabled, but I am chronically ill (allergy and atopic dermatitis) and, to be honest, I believe it is the cause of my asexuality. I'm grateful of this aspect, I wouldn't want to be allosexual. But anyway, it makes me very sensitive to issues such as the "born this way" rhetoric (I don't support it, I believe that people who claim that their sexual orientation isn't inborn should at least have the basic right not to be attacked by minority communities), "The Unassailable Asexual" (I too fail this "checklist" on multiple axes: apart from being chronically ill, I'm also homoromantic, sex-averse and physically unattractive), or - on the positive side - something the asexual community has fortunately accepted: that people have a right to their self-identification "even" when there is something to "explain" it.

Bless your heart. I'm sure you have a courageous soul.

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StartedWithAQuestion

I was medically discharged from the Army and have a disability rating from the US government, but beyond that I don't have any form of disability so personally speaking I do not believe there is a correlation between the two.  I feel the same about those who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community as well.

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LittleGoody2Shoes
2 hours ago, StartedWithAQuestion said:

I was medically discharged from the Army and have a disability rating from the US government, but beyond that I don't have any form of disability so personally speaking I do not believe there is a correlation between the two.  I feel the same about those who identify as part of the LGBTQ+ community as well.

How do you feel about LGBT?

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