Many people have misconceptions about it. It is important to know what asexuality does not mean. Many refer to themselves as “ Aces.” Asexuality is a type of sexual orientation like heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual or pansexual (the latter, attracted to people regardless of sex or gender). Asexuality simply means that a person prefers not to have sex. I will decode the meaning of these words and, as usual, as in all science involving behavior I will start with definitions. And some of these words actually are Greek. The words in my label may be Greek to you and they were to me as I sifted through the numerous qualifier words for asexuality on the AVENET Site (Asexual Visibility and Education Network) and other sources. Not to be outdone by other sexual orientations or gender categories despite our small size, we gyne-romantic folks even have our own flag. I am only interested in what such labels may bring to science. I began to consider my own past behavior and am now entertaining the notion that my label should be gyne-sapio-romantic asexual stone butch transgender lesbian, despite the fact that I hate labels. But taking the numbers at face value why would a non-transitioned transgender person be uninterested in having sex, or go through transgender transition, only to lose even more interest in having sex? Are these reports due to clinical bias or some sort of sampling error? Those are good questions for future research.
Change in sexual orientation after transition occurs in about 64% of transgender people and asexual is one of the categories that increase. Studies for trans men, although involving considerably fewer people, are 7% before transition and 13% after transition. Studies for trans women report 4, 6, 7, 10 percent before transition and 23% after transition. (Asexuality, like being transgender is not a disease or illness, so the word prevalence does not apply.) But the population frequencies of around 1% for asexuality is considerably lower than the rates reported for non-transition people and strikingly lower than those frequencies after transgender transition. The general population frequency of asexuality is 1-1.3%. There has been considerably research done on asexuality, and some specifically for asexual transgender people. Just as transgender people demonstrate dissociation of sexual capability from gender, can transgender asexuals help tease apart potential factors underlying asexuality? At that point, I had the nagging feeling that asexuality was something that I needed to study and, in particular, to examine potential causal factors that could be analyzed in light of its frequency in transgender people.
Then a cisgender friend of mine said that she thought that she was asexual. I thought that she might just be dodging the question of sexual orientation. Later when Caitlyn Jenner came out, transitioned and said that she was asexual it brought the subject up again to me. I was surprised to see that many transgender people were asexual and that there was some suggestion that this percentage actually increased during transition. The first time I heard about asexuality was when I was looking at a survey of the sexual orientation of transgender people.