Are asexual people more likely to question their gender?

[Starbogen]

19 hours ago, Remmirath said:

I think there are a couple of things at work here.

 

For some people - myself included - realizing that there's one big, obvious thing about oneself that isn't 'normal' (being asexual) can lead to the thought that if that's so, then perhaps it's not the case only for sexuality, and thus to re-examing other assumptions that one has been making about oneself. Perhaps especially true of people who, like me, have trouble figuring out that whatever they experience isn't relatively normal, because realizing that's not true for one thing definitely led to accepting that maybe it's also not true for other things, like gender.

 

Then I know that there are people who are trans and not actually asexual, but feel that they might be before they completely realize that they're trans or begin transitioning. There have definitely been some people in this category around here, and there are probably more.

 

And then there's the third thing, which is that this forum is pretty obviously accepting of trans and gender questioning people (with this big ol' Gender Discussion forum and the place to put gender and pronouns in the profile and all), and that probably attracts some people to this site - subconsciously or not - and also makes it a lot more obvious looking at a topic how many people are trans/nonbinary. Even having to fill those things in the profile might cause some people to get thinking about it, and certainly after being on here for a while nobody is going to not know about nonbinary identities - and not really knowing about that possibility is I think what tends to take nonbinary people the longest to come to that conclusion (well, certainly for me it was; I may be making that faulty assumption that I'm relatively normal again).

 

So I'd hesitate to say that asexual people - especially those who are heteromantic, I think Snao's got a good point there - are necessarily more likely to question their gender than anyone else, but it probably does set off a line of questioning for a decent number of people, and one has to take into account that the userbase of this specific site may be skewed one way or another.

This is pretty much everything I would have wanted to say on the matter. 

I agree that once you've been on AVEN for a while you're going to notice how many nonbinary people there are.. and if you were a gender nonconforming person (which a lot of asexual people might be due to already not conforming to other societal norms, plus having no interest in being sexually attractive to anyone) then that might cause you to start questioning if you're actually cis.

 

It also makes sense that maybe it's not so much that asexual people are more likely to question their gender but just that they're more open to idea of it since they had thought they were just "a weird (or broken) sexual person" before but it turned out they were ace, so maybe they're also not "a weird (insert agab)" but actually trans. In my case I'm one of those people who started questioning their gender because of I saw how many nonbinary people there were here and I learned more about being trans in general and saw that you didn't need to have the usual "I always knew/ I was a tomboy/ trapped in the wrong body/ have a strong sense of gender, etc" narrative to be trans, and that sort of gave me the confidence to experiment and figure things out. But yeah there's definitely people who were just trans but not ace and the lack of desire for sex was just because of dysphoria. I don't identify as sexual but I'm also not 100% ace, so I guess I'd kinda fall into that group. 

 

It does seem like a lot of aces end up questioning their gender but that might just be because of some coincidences like being somewhat gender nonconforming plus noticing the huge nonbinary presence here plus being more open to questioning things about yourself in general now that you've discovered something new.. it just seems natural to at least wonder. So yeah basically I agree with everything Rammirath already said better.