Wait, Am I Ace?

Content warning: Discusses sexuality and has clinical descriptions of sexual feelings

Lately, I've been pondering the question: am I asexual?

It's a really complicated question to answer. This is mostly about exploring why that is, but be ready for some explicit descriptions and frank talk.

Let's start at the beginning: what is asexuality? Very briefly, it's when someone doesn't feel sexual attraction for others. It doesn't mean that person never has sex, or never enjoys sex, or never masturbates, or anything like that. It's about attraction. Keep that in mind. It's frequently abbreviated as "ace" or "ace-spec" for asexual-spectrum.

Let's start at a different kind of beginning: me as a child. I'm trans, and was raised to believe I was a boy. As a boy, it was of course expected that I would be attracted to girls. It would have been ok, in my family, if I'd also been attracted to other boys, but I wasn't. However, the possibility that I could actually be a girl was never entertained, in the same way that we never thought about living in a space station, or asking John Lennon over for dinner. It was just outside the realm of plausibility, and didn't warrant the extra thought.

So, I was attracted to girls. All good so far. I had lots of sexual thoughts about girls, though from my current standpoint, it's clear that my thoughts were as much about being the girl I was fantasizing about, as it was about being the partner of the girl I was fantasizing about. Still, looked like a pretty normal heterosexual attraction at the time, and no one went around talking about exactly how they were attracted to other people; there was an assumption that we all did it about the same way as everyone else.

As I got older and went to college, I finally started going out with women (for the sake of this discussion, all my partners were women, though some may have since come to other realizations about who they are). And we had sex. Oh my yes we did. I was very into it, so to speak. Not as much as some of my fellow collegians, it seemed, but it was fun, and I surely was attracted to those women.

However, there was a problem that cropped up, the longer the relationships became: my sex drive dropped off to almost nothing after some period of time. I can see now, there was a period of novelty, where I was very into the other person, and we'd have sex fairly frequently, but then that would fade away, and sex became infrequent.

This hewed so closely to the half-joking narrative of all heterosexual relationships that I didn't think anything of it. It seemed everyone had this situation. It was only the rare couple that actually stayed seriously into each other for any length of time, or so I thought.

Fast-forward with me to my coming out as a trans woman, in 2022: it took me a few months of reflection, but I fairly quickly figured out that I was attracted to women because I wanted to be them. Not entirely, but that was most of the physical attraction. I guessed at the time that 90% of my attraction was of the "want to be them" variety. Only now, I was one of them (sort of; different discussion), and I noticed that my attraction had tapered off significantly.

Early on in transition, I was distressed to find that the mere act of putting on some piece of affirming clothing would give me a raging boner. I ended up calling these "euphoria erections," because they seemed to coincide with gender euphoria.

About a year and a half into my transition, I started going out with another trans woman, who we'll call Celeste. Celeste and I got along quite well, and were quite sexually active with each other. She gave me a lot of very encouraging feedback both in bed and out of it, and frequently had multiple orgasms under my ministrations. However, I noticed that I had had zero orgasms with her.

It didn't bother me much. I was having fun, sex was never a chore, and being able to provoke the reactions I was getting from her was very gratifying. At some point we both noticed I wasn't reacting the same way, though, and this started us reflecting. She was also worried that she wasn't being a reciprocal partner, and assured me that I was in exactly the same position she'd been in 6 months previously. It would just take some practice, and I'd find all the good things my body could do, she said. I was resistant to this narrative, because it smelled like a let-down waiting to happen; comparing myself to other people has always been a recipe for failure, in my experience. But I desperately wanted to be like her: free in her joy during sex, capable of multiple, mind-blowing, full-body orgasms at a stretch, and vocal about all of it.

By the time we broke up, it was clear that I was definitely not on the same path as her: my ability to orgasm with her was exactly the same as it had been 9 months earlier, when we started going out.

A couple months after we broke up, I started dating another person, who we'll call Rose. I find Rose very attractive, but we followed my pattern of previous relationships: a lot of sex early on, which then tapered off over the course of a few months. My attraction to them didn't diminish, but sex still became much less frequent.

I noticed, with Rose, that my body still had sexual reactions, but they were divorced from any mental readiness or desire for sex. This had also happened with Celeste, though I wasn't as consciously aware of it. In reading Come As You Are by Emily Nagoski, I had learned that bodily reactions and mental arousal are separate things for women: your body can be "turned on" because it's received the stimuli that suggest sex is imminent, whereas mental arousal, readiness for sex, works on completely different mechanisms. So my body was having these reactions, but my mind wasn't in the right state to have sex. I came to realize that this had long been the case with me, and guessed that running on testosterone might have distorted the effect, practically meaning that when my body was turned on, my mind was dragged along by force. Switching my body to estrogen severely weakened that association.

I started seriously pondering whether I might be asexual. I'd figured out that I was demisexual around 2015, but the idea that I could be asexual seemed completely incorrect. So what had changed since then?

I had had enough time with my transition that I'd been able to fully integrate some important things:

• I was trans, therefore a woman
• I had been attracted to women because I wanted to be them
• I wasn't sexually attracted to almost anyone
• My body has sexual reactions that almost never line up with my mental state
• My libido is very low, nearly non-existent, particularly on estrogen
• Early in transition, I had erections when I experienced gender euphoria

I can see precisely how I could have been asexual this whole time, and still lived the comparatively sex-filled life that I had. Because I was attracted to women, and because I was "male," I had a socially-celebrated identity as a heterosexual man. This was further strengthened because my reaction to gender euphoria was, at least sometimes, a raging boner. Being near a woman was a euphoria event for me, thus erection. I didn't really understand that my body's reaction and my mental state could be different, so I assumed every time I had an erection, it must be that I was turned on. Testosterone surely reinforced this feeling, as I'd long felt a daily desire to masturbate and have an orgasm.

In other words, society's expectations and my body's (incorrect) dominant sex hormone dragged me into sexual situations whether I wanted to be there or not. I enjoy making my partner happy, and sex frequently had that effect. There was no impetus to examine whether I really wanted to be in those situations or not until very recently.

And what I'm realizing is that, in fact, I feel essentially no sexual attraction to anyone. This is very much an internal situation, though. No one observing my behavior would assume that I was asexual: I was and am actively having sex, I find some people very attractive (just not, I think, in a sexual way), I flirt a lot now that I've come out, and I enjoy sex when it happens.

However, my internal motivations for these things seem to be different from most other people's: having sex now is largely about pleasing my partner, and the few times I've had orgasms with other people have been alright but not particuarly compelling compared to every other part of the process. Orgasms for me are short and sharp and frankly still feel fairly masculine, which is off-putting and can be dysphoric (a sure mood-killer). I get distressingly overstimulated immediately afterwards, and basically require no further stimulation or things go bad, which in either situation brings all activity to a grinding halt.

Does all of this add up to asexual? I don't really know, but it would certainly explain a few things, and importantly, it's given me some "Oh wait, you mean I'm not just broken?" feelings. Putting a label on something serves to define it, but also to make it explicable to others. I have to be careful to not let the label take over my understanding of the thing it's attempting to summarize, but still: saying "I think I'm some variety of asexual" is a relief.

I surely felt (and now feel) in all those relationships where the sex tapered off, that there was something wrong with me. The pattern was so consistent. I'd only had one partner (out of around a dozen) with whom the pattern was disrupted, and she had an insatiable libido, so was always initiating sex. I felt like I was the key broken element. Being able to twist the scene slightly and view it from the angle of "What if I was ace the whole time?" has been a surprising revelation for me. It means that I'm not broken, I'm not a bad partner. I'm not some kind of liar, promising a normal relationship then delivering a nearly sex-free one. I'm just ace, and it comes out in these ways.