The reason I wanted to post this is because I want to remind others that the only thing that matters is the now and then.
Why? I was not always asexual, and it has been over 10 years since I experienced confirmed feelings of being sexually attracted. No trauma, my hormones levels are the same as other people’s, and no confusion as in I can look back and confirm that I did experienced it. Essentially, my sexuality has literally changed on it own over a decade ago. I can’t explain why my sexual orientation simply changed on it own, but it did.
With that being said, I would be lying if I say I am gray-sexual as it implies a chance. It would be lying to say I has been always asexual as I can’t simply explain away what I felt and that gets more true as I try to question it.
So, I was allosexual. I’ll remain asexual for the rest of my life. I can’t change that. That’s my future. I did not chose that.
On the other site I had to leave the asexual spaces because they became oddly sexual. And that made me really uncomfortable in a space I was specifically in for the company of other not sexual people.
They even got super defensive and called you things like acephobic for pointing out that asexuality and graysexuality are not the same thing and deserve their own spaces so everyone can be comfortable.
There’s the trauma thing, too. If someone claimed that a person “became” heterosexual, homosexual, or bisexual due to trauma, they’d be rightly called out that it doesn’t work that way. And yet the asexual communities started saying that trauma can cause asexuality. No, it doesn’t, it causes trauma. Saying sexual trauma can cause an orientation is not only silly, it’s downright harmful to all because people will be told that trauma is okay and that asexuality can be “cured”. Both are horrible to imply.
I hope that Lemmy will have a more sane, comfortable asexual community. I’m here cautiously now, watching and hoping it doesn’t become a sexual community using the asexual label as a badge instead of a useful term describing a completely natural orientation alongside Hetero/Homo/Bisexual.
None of this is at you, OP. Just a bit of a vent and a hope for a better tomorrow.
Yep. Like trauma can make you sex repulsed, but it won’t change your sexuality.
It’s probably a number game. If you can redefine something to fit a larger group, you can have more people falling under that. And internalized asexophobia. Like, there isn’t anything wrong with not wanting sex at all, it should be just is.
Don’t get me on the trauma thing. I’m actually quite sick of the idea that trauma changes one’s sexuality. No, it doesn’t. We don’t even know why someone is that way since birth, or explanations to case studies of sexuality shifts or larger studies like those of Lisa Diamonds’. At the end of the day, every evidence points to no known causation of sexual orientation. Genetics didn’t fit, nor environment variables often don’t fit, and so on as in we just don’t know exactly how sexual orientation came to be. In my case, all I can tell you is that the magnitude of my sexual attraction has waned down, and then eventually my frequency of sexual attraction has waned down, and that is toward the course of a year, and it died out when I was around 16 years old never to be revived again.