For a long time, a lot of the most dominant voices in the asexual community said over and over, ‘I was not abused, I was not traumatized,’ because there’s such a desire to distance oneself from abuse or trauma being a cause of asexuality, as that would mean asexuality is a problem that could be fixed or cured,” KJ Cerankowski, a professor of gender studies at Oberlin College and coeditor of Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives, tells me. “The result is that people with sexual abuse or trauma histories—who aren’t sure how that relates to their asexuality—are dismissed.”
