intersexioni.it - "When invisibility and pathologization meet"

[ithaca]

This I've posted today on intersexioni.it: (Italian) http://www.intersexioni.it/quando-linvisibilita-e-la-patologizzazione-si-incontrano/

I thank with all my heart the friend who agreed to publish her story, so that we can spread awareness and education for our cause

Translation:

When invisibility and pathologization meet

One of the most common questions people ask when they learn about asexuality is: So what? Why should they make an article about this? What problems are asexual people facing? Discriminations of any kind? And why should they form a community?. It's not generally asked with an open-minded attitude, but in a rhetorical way to imply that asexual people don't have any struggles, and/or that we're just trying to get attention.

It's true that asexual people have not faced the same kind of discrimination that LGBTIQ people have faced: we don't have a history of oppression and violence from neither a legal nor a social point of view. Some people wonder if that's just because no one knew about us, but I tend to believe we just don't draw the same kind of reactions because our stereotyped behaviour isn't sinful or disgusting as gay sexual behaviour is accused of being, or threatening (to gender social norms) as being transgender.

So what do asexual people have to struggle against? I think that asexuality has some things in common with several LGBTIQ groups, but not enough with each of them singularly for them to instantly realize it.

For example, coming out as asexual leads to all sorts of reactions, but the most common is pathologization. So you're impotent/frigid?, It's not natural, there must be something wrong with you, This must be caused by a hormonal issue, I'm sure it can be cured etc etc. Doctors will also often try to fix the problem, especially if they're unaware of asexuality as an orientation. The fact that many people's first thoughts wander in the direction of a cure is a clear signal of their idea that asexuality is an illness, and this is something that gay, lesbian and trans* people can relate to. But given the absence of violence among the general reactions to asexuality, this often seems to come as a secondary trait and not something important for most LGT people to feel a relation to asexuality. It is important, however, to keep in mind that even though asexuality itself doesn't cause, in general, angry reactions, many asexual people do face homophobic bullying, because their not being interested in the opposite sex is misunderstood as a sign of homosexuality.

Prejudice is something else asexual people have to deal with. As I mentioned in another article, asexuality is mostly grouped together with hyper-moral groups such as abstinent and celibates. This makes it so that asexual people are often pushed away by the LGBTIQ community, while at the same time they're perceived as weird enough to be alienated by the heterosexual majority. I think this is something that the bisexual community could relate to. At the same time, being kind of the opposite of each other as far as sexuality goes, the two communities have never bonded much, if at all.

But the biggest factor that I think is affecting the asexual community, far worse than pathologization and prejudice, is invisibility. Information on asexuality has started to hit the news only in the past 10 years or so, and even then, not really in any big way. Most of the population still doesn't know what asexuality is, and that means that many asexual people don't know that they just have a different orientation, and that they shouldn't feel alone, confused, sick, or look for an inexistent cure. Invisibility is a problem that affects intersex, trans* and other queer groups more than others in the LGBTIQ community, and I think (hope) this could really be the factor that pushes us together to fight against heterosexism and for more education and visibility.

The testimony of an asexual person

An asexual Canadian friend of mine, Rory, made me realize how big the risks and damage can be when pathologization and invisibility meet. Rory is a really kind girl, animal-loving (especially horses) and about to graduate from college. Next summer we'll be going together to WorldPride to raise awareness on asexuality. The other night we were randomly talking about gynecologists and doctors, and I would like to share what she told me without changing it, so I'm just going to leave it as is with as few adjustments as possible (mostly I'll remove my side of the chat).

[Minor note: to understand some of Rory's experience it's important to remember that while some asexual people have a libido (though not directed at any gender) and may masturbate to take care of it, other asexual people do not have a libido at all, and may have never experienced arousal without being stimulated. Rory belongs to the latter group.]

Rory: Have I told you my story about birth control?

Lea: I don't think so.

Rory: Wanna hear it? It's not exactly a happy one...

Lea: Ok, if you feel like sharing.

Rory: Ya, it's a big part of who I am, and it helps to recount it sometimes. I feel like every time I tell someone, I come to terms with it a little more :)

Before I knew about asexuality, I had a boyfriend. I didn't feel like sex, so after four months he cheated on me and broke up with me. We were apart for a year, then got back together. In that year, I had dated one other guy for six months, but also didn't feel like sex and ended it with him because of that. He has fallen in love with me, and one of my biggest regrets in life is that I'll never be able to tell him WHY I am who I am... But I didn't figure out myself until two years later, so I didn't want to open old wounds, and I just left it be. We never kept in touch. But anyways, take two with parter #1 goes well for a year, but I STILL don't feel like sex. By then, I have solidly become convinced I was broken, as you can imagine. And the relationship was really strained...

So I went to the doctor, I explained that I was in a long term, stable relationship, and was very happy and in love. But I couldn't get aroused, and never had any desire for sex, and that was the only thing causing issues in the relationship. So the doctor decided that it might be a low libido, or hypoactive sexuality disorder or whatever. I can't really blame her; she didn't know about asexuality any more than I did.

But anyways, she prescribed birth control for various reasons; she figured it would reduce anxieties around accidental pregnancies, and the hormones might "fix" me too.

Well, it went terribly... To put it shortly. First off, it gave me a libido, so I guess it worked. But I still had no sexual attraction, so it resulted in my boyfriend of the time getting really horny and turned on (I presume I was sending off every pheromone in the books) and me feeling that itch, but just panicking because I didn't know what it was or what to do about it. It just felt weird, like this wasn't my body any more. And I ended up, more often than not, shoving my boyfriend away and bursting into tears if he so much as touched me with a fingertip on the shoulder...

I had also never learned to masturbate, and I still haven't tried, so I just had no release. I also didn't know at the time that that was what was going on, to be honest. I was REALLY confused, to the point where I didn't even know how to ask a question.

So this all piled up and started stacking on negative thoughts, things like "Well, the doctor said that this is the best thing to fix me, and there's no other real option... so if it's not working, then maybe I CAN'T be fixed".

On top of that ran thoughts like "If I don't want sex, then maybe I don't REALLY love my boyfriend? But this is the most I've ever cared for anyone ever in my entire life, I can't even imagine caring more for someone! Well then... maybe I'm just not CAPABLE of love."

I guess I'll never have a relationship, I'll only ever hurt people I'm in a relationship with, I'll have to die alone, I'm not fully human... NONE of which I still believe, but sometimes those thoughts still feel fresh... Anyways, things weren't going well. I ended up attempting suicide once. Thankfully my boyfriend was there to stop me. He threw out the pills by flushing them down the toilet, because he knew I was stubborn enough and wanted to "fix" myself enough that I'd keep taking them even though it was obvious that they weren't working and were doing harm.

He was and is a very caring person, and I blame none of this on him. If nothing else, he's the reason I'm still alive. So I stopped going to the doctor for a few months, just focused on recovering emotional resources.

Well, the worst part was that when I finally got the courage to go back to the doctor, she suggested I try again. So I did, I tried the pills again. Not even a different brand, the exact same ones. And, surprise surprise, two months later I attempted suicide again...

The second time, my boyfriend didn't just happen to be there, but I was forewarned that this was a possibility, so when I started feeling it coming on again, I locked myself in my room and removed all anything I might have used for self-harm. I stayed in there with only a bottle of water for three days. By the time I trusted myself to leave, I was weak and had lost a lot of weight. But I'd made it through, stopped taking the pills, and decided that the doctor was an idiot. So that's the last time I've ever been to a doctor...

My sister randomly called me up out of the blue a month or two after that... "Hey Rory! Guess what?!? In my psychology class, we talked about human sexuality, and there's one group that, statistically speaking, tends to become very close with pets and animals, I think it's you!" She knows me too well; she knew that sex was a difficult issue for me right then and there, so she didn't use the word "asexual" right away before establishing that aces are awesome people first :P

I guess the moral of the story is, I googled 'asexuality' and came across AVEN. The way I describe it is that I've never met people who could describe me SO WELL, and they weren't even trying to; they were describing THEMSELVES. I've felt at home ever since.

It's important for me to talk about this for a few reasons: first off, it's why I'm so passionate about visibility and education. If I can save just one single person from going through what I went through, then anything is worth it, no matter how scary. I get a serious high out of visibility and education work, because it makes me happy to think I'm preventing that sort of thing. It's so preventable, but the legwork just needs to be done. And the second reason I bring it up... is because every once in a while I still get triggered if someone says something that implies I'm broken or somehow lesser for being ace. I thought that might be good for you to know, because if it does come up randomly during pride, I'll just go quiet. This hasn't happened in over a year, but it's still possible. And if it does happen... the best you can do is just stand there. If I'm in a bad place, touch isn't going to help because it'll just make me think about sexual contact (though on ANY other occasion, hugs are AWESOME and I can't get enough of them!) but just having another person standing there anchors me to the real world and reminds me that I'm not alone.

Sorry... wall of text, but I hope that kinda makes sense. I am finally in a place where I can and want to talk about it.

---

Dr. Anthony Bogaert writes, in Understanding Asexuality (2012): The most common type of disorder that asexual people may be diagnosed with is hypoactive sexual desire disorder, which is characterized by a marked lack of desire for sex, accompanied by, as mentioned, distress or interpersonal difficulties. Currently, we have only a limited amount of data on the mental health of asexual people, so definitive conclusions about distress or other psychological disturbance issues in this group await future research. However, the research to date does not suggest that asexual people, as a whole, are distressed by their lack of sexual interest. [] Another important issue to consider is the source of the distress. Should we pathologize someone for feeling distressed because they do not fit in with the larger group or because the majority of people do not like them? Or, alternatively, should we pathologize the society itself for not tolerating minorities and diversity?

I hope you like it. :)

(Mind, this isn't a thread to discuss whether or not asexuality fits into the LGBT community, there are other threads to do that. This is a thread about the testimony of one of our asexual friends.)

[chair jockey]

Rory sounds like she has a lot in common with all sorts of marginalized groups, many of which are still marginalized and have far less visibility than asexuals. I'm reminded of a very nice-seeming, pleasant-sounding woman in her 60s in England who cut off all contact with her high-functioning schizophrenic son because "we can't have any more upsets." Not the same thing as Rory is describing, but the same thing in terms of the lack of understanding and the isolation that often occurs because of adverse social forces. What adverse social forces? Well, in the case of asexuality, the drive of every species, insofar as it has a biological component, is to reproduce, and people often experience asexuality as a threat to the propagation of the species. In terms of mental illness, the news media sensationalize every time one of the 0.001% of mental patients turns violent, leading to a widespread perception that ALL mental patients are "dangerous psychos." I see those two things as essentially the same even if one is instinct-based and the other is profit-based (since sensationalism is what enables news media to stay in business). It seems to me there should be an alliance between asexuals and mental patients.

[Trava u doma]

Thank you for posting this, Ithaca. My guess is that even some asexuals on this site do not know to what extent it an affect other people's life. (Never-been-in-relationship me included)

[Kelly]

Thanks for posting, Ith. :vis:

This is a good article, and Rory's story is important to share. And thanks for you for being her friend and being active.

Awesome too that her sister was able to hear about and tell her about asexuality. Things looks so much better when we know about it and see that we are not in need of fixing or anything. :)

[thylacine]

Awesome article. It's sad, though, so called "experts" can really eff a person up, huh?