What Asexual and Autistic Communities Share in Common

There is huge overlap between the Autistic and asexual (aspec, aroace) communities, not just in raw numbers but in experience.

If you’re tempted at this point to interject with: ‘Autistic people are sexual beings, actually’, please read on.

Human creativity stems from the ability to combine and recombine existing ideas in novel ways.

— Douglas Hofstadter, American cognitive scientist, author, and professor of computer science

OVERLAPS BETWEEN AUTISTIC AND ASEXUAL COMMUNITIES

• Both asexuality and Autism are spectrums meaning every single person within that spectrum is different from others you may have met.
• More than that, the heuristics people use for allistic/allosexual people definitely won’t work on these minorities because a defining feature of both is that the range of experience is massive. The “aspectrum” (asexual and aromantic) community is arguably the most diverse letter of the LGBTQIA+ acronym. You can hardly get two experiences more different than someone who is romantic and asexual compared to someone who aromantic and allosexual. Yet they both belong to the aspec community. Likewise, a defining feature of Autism is ‘spikiness’ — being very much one thing, not about another thing. Autistic people tend to accumulate at the ‘extremes’ of any given aspect of humanity.
• A ‘non-sticky’ gender is common to both Autism and asexuality. Many Autistic people identify as genderqueer or agender. For the asexual community, more people identify as genderqueer than cis male.

• On the topic of gender imbalance, both groups are thought to be gender imbalanced, when the reality is more likely this: The current understanding of both groups favours one gender while excluding another. As definitions shift over time, the trend is that the groups become far more gender balanced. In the case of Autism, Hans Asperger (the Nazi) believed that no women could have Aspergers as it correlated with genius and women cannot be geniuses. Then it was thought that one in four Autistic people were girls. Then it was thought it’s more likely two to one. You can see where this is going. In contrast, the asexual community is geared towards a definition which includes more women, girls and genderqueer people, especially those assigned female at birth. As time goes on, it’s likely we’ll come to realise that asexuality in fact includes far more cis men than we initially realised.
• Asexual and Autistic people come to their identity only after long, hard reflection, and are generally more reflective than the broader population, yet are regularly not trusted to know their own mind.
• Indeed, self-reflection can backfire. Both aces and Autistics are seen as creepy for putting ‘too much’ analytical thought into things dominant culture deems ‘natural’.
• On the topic of ‘too much’, both Autistics and asexuals can come across as ‘too much’. This comes down to experiencing the world differently. Things just hit different. For asexuals, this might mean speaking blithely and pragmatically about a sexual topic because, for them, there’s no experience of arousal while talking about sexual matters. Young asexuals may not realise yet that such talk is arousing for the allosexuals in the room, because they have never experienced arousal from sex talk themselves. Also, asexuals like to remain in close contact with their friends even when those allosexual friends meet a romantic partner who want to put friendship on ice and spend more time with their new romantic partner. Alloromantics, who almost always prioritise romance over friendship, will oftentimes perceive this as needy. For Autistics, being perceived as ‘too much’ might be about volume of voice or not reading body language, or sometimes it comes from suffering a meltdown in a public space due to too much sensory stimulation.
• Society tells Autistics and aces alike to ignore their own feelings in uncomfortable situations. (For aces that would be in romantic and sexual scenarios, and a great number of situations in which everyone is expected to share sexual experiences, or pretend they have experience. This is a type of masking.)
• The obligation to pretend relationships and sex are easy. That word again: “Natural”.
• Being out of the loop in conversations. For aces, that’s because many, many social conversations involve talk around sex. So, oftentimes, do workplace discussions which take place over drinks or at the water cooler. There’s a feeling, in general, that you are operating on a different plane from peers.
• Learnt shame, not about what you did, but about who you are.
• Imposter syndrome. Am I Autistic/asexual enough? This person who shares my label seems somehow ‘more’ Autistic/asexual than me by comparison… Do I deserve to take up space? Am I diverting resources and attention away from someone more deserving?

• Pressure of performance, and experiences which are fine for others but which for you have led to trauma, and the notion that these experiences shouldn’t cause trauma at all. If you were a stronger, better person you’d simply shake it off. The Eggshell Skull principle at work.
• Mirroring, which when it’s very slightly ‘off’ creeps people out. (For asexuals this might be limited to sex, as aces do their darnedest to perform as expected by the dominant culture. For Autistics this could be a general coping masking mechanism across various aspects of life.)

Both Autistic people and aspec people are not very legible to The Common Man(TM) and when something or someone is unfamiliar, that too often means ‘creepy’.

• Condescension which comes from disclosure of your identity to loved ones and acquaintances. The assumption you won’t understand jokes, even though sex jokes are most often about as sophisticated as poo and fart jokes.
• Disclosure of your identity has both a positive and negative consequence. Short term: You achieve one-on-one understanding followed by a backing off. But long term, in groups, results of disclosure vary, and highly dependent on how well the group understands Autism/asexuality.

• Deriving pleasure from unexpected places e.g. from textures and stimming, sounds and other sensory sensations which seem heightened (for Autistics because of sensory processing differences and for aces because there’s no sexual attraction over-riding other sensual pleasures).
• Continuing a childhood interest into adulthood, often becoming expert in areas of interest.
• Difficulty being seen as A True Adult.

“You can’t make them — whoever your particular them is — do anything, really,” said Ekaterin slowly. “Adulthood isn’t an award they’ll give you for being a good child. … You have to just…take it. Give it to yourself, I suppose. Say, I’m sorry you feel like that, and walk away. But that’s hard.”

Lois McMaster Bujold, A Civil Campaign

• Medicalisation of what is actually a normal and healthy human variation.
• Wondering what caused it.
• Invisibility
• Always feeling like you’re on the periphery of any group, including, at times, feeling on the periphery of your own subcultural group.
• People think they know what the word means, but very few know, really. You’re constantly giving 101s to the point of exhaustion or non-disclosure.
• People think they can read someone’s sexuality. Both aces and Autistics are regularly read as ‘gay’, because any difference at all is put down to gayness by bigots. Anyone decoded as gay, whether gay or not, is susceptible to hate crime. Gay is the most widely understood queer minority, hence queer illiterate masses will default to ‘gay’ when attempting to describe someone who is illegible to them.

• In-fighting in the communities about terminology. For Autistics, problematic words are: high-functioning, Aspergers, Aspie and people who use the phrase ‘a little bit autistic’. For aces the issues are slightly different but are still around wording which some consider unnecessarily divisive e.g. ‘aspec’ (asexual spectrum) and so-called microlabels which, again, some people find useful and others find divisive and without scientific backing.
• Lack of true diversity within the community. BIPOC are under-represented in both groups. Asexual communities often have a problem with disabled communities and say things like, “There’s nothing wrong with us, we’re not broken.” Meanwhile, as shown above, disability activism is often focused on persuading the abled community that (all) disabled people are sexual. In reality, the asexual community is home to many disabled people and vice versa. Disability is very common across the human population and will of course include quite a few aspecs.

• Stereotypes about what Autistic looks like tend to match what stereotypes of asexual looks like, namely, unattractiveness. The idea that no one would want to have sex with you anyway. This has a very dangerous realworld consequence: Not being believed when you are assaulted. Or being assaulted, but it’s not considered assault.
• The hermeneutical injustice of not knowing who you are before diagnosis/self identification, and the revisioning of your life that happens post facto. (“Oh, so that explains why…” followed by grief for what might’ve been had you known earlier.)
• The testimonial injustice of not being believed when you share your experience. (These terms come from Miranda Fricker who has written about various forms of epistemic injustice.)
• Constant microaggressions which remind you of your difference daily, hourly. For aces, it’s compulsory sexuality and amatonormativity which is noticeable whenever there’s any interaction with humans, on TV, film, in books, songs… For Autistics, manifold issues arise from the reality that the entire social world is made for the comfort and enjoyment of allistics (non-Austistic people).

• For aces, it can feel like most people’s ‘special interest’ is sex, especially in the teens and twenties. Any other interest that comes anywhere near approaching allosexuals’ interest in sex is outright pathologized. Both Autistic people and asexual people tend to have deep and abiding interests that are (mostly) not sex related (though sometimes are).
• Bullying is frequently overt, but ‘relational bullying’ is also very common to both groups. Relational bullying: exclusion, gossiping, rejection, “nasty-nice’ behaviour and freezing-out.
• Infantalization is a big problem for both groups. “You can’t possibly understand” (what it’s like to feel love/have sex/get a joke).
• Onus of understanding the dominant culture falls upon you, not the people who belong to the dominant culture. As a consequence, you know more about the dominant culture than the dominant culture know about you.

Both Autism and asexuality are measured relative to whatever culture exists around it. This is not just true for minority human identities, but can also be seen in the field of physics.

Theoretical physicist Isabel Garcia Garcia is talking about quantum field theory (QFT) when she says the following:

We can only measure differences in energy relative to the vacuum energy.

Does Nothingness Exist?, The Joy of Why podcast, Wednesday 26 July 2023

There’s no way for physicists to measure the absolute value of vacuum energy, which is an infinite number. How do they deal with this? Physicists are used to doing it as part of their work: “Hide it under the rug until we have something better to say.” In the context of quantum field theory, “before we introduce gravity into the description of nature, we cannot actually measure the absolute value of the energy of the vacuum. All we can hope to measure, experimentally, all that is physical, are differences in energies between different states.”

In the context of identities such as Autism and asexuality, we can imagine social contexts in which these ways of being are default. In a world set up for and by Autists, there would be no such thing as autism. In a world set up with asexuality as default, there would be no such thing as asexuals.

Although there is no such world set up for asexuals, there do exist temporary micro-environments in which asexuality is not revealed. Case in point: A Victorian unmarried teenage girl from an upper-class family, who is not expected to be sexual until marriage, and seldom even then. In that case, an asexual individual would not be seemed as such.

IS IT MY AUTISM OR MY ASEXUALITY?

Any distinction between Autism and asexuality is a false binary. Spectrums are complex — overlapping, intersecting and unique to every individual.

ONE BIG DIFFERENCE

In many but not all Autistic communities, there is little tolerance for shades-of-grey labels. You’re either Autistic or you’re not. There’s a (very justified) intolerance for the phrase “a little bit Autistic”. Among other problems, it feels minimising.

This is in direct contrast to most but not all asexual communities, which is chocka-full of microlabels. Some people feel there are far too many: Granular labels fragment community solidarity and end up confining rather than freeing. This is similar to the Autistic argument against shades-of-grey labelling.

Greysexuality is not a “microlabel”, but is instead a widely accepted asexual orientation which describes a range of experiences in which the speaker feels their sexuality sits somewhere between asexuality and allosexuality.

That said, where there’s a linguistic hole, speakers will fill it. I’ve started to see the word ‘neurospicy’ gain in popularity, which may be the neurodivergent version of grey aro/ace.

See also: How getting diagnosed with autism helped me embrace my asexuality by Rebecca Dingwell

Larre Bildeston is the author of a contemporary (aromantic) asexual romance The Space Ace of Mangleby Flat (2023), set in Australia and New Zealand.