I consider myself asexual, because I don't believe I experience sexual attraction or desire in the common senses of those words. But as a trans woman, I worry that my asexuality is rooted in a fear of being seen as sexual by others.
Even as a pre-teen, I recognised that social interactions between boys and girls had a power dynamic to them that I found unsettling. I was privy to the ways boys talked about girls in their absence, and I didn't want to be associated with that in any way. The fact that my own interactions with girls were very different didn't seem to occur to me, because I didn't realise that the other boys did not think of girls as people with full humanity. I just knew that when I saw boys sexualising girls I found it unpleasant.
And in my interactions with other boys, there was a power dynamic there too that I didn't understand. I now recognise it as early-onset transfeminisation, but at the time I only saw that there *was* a power dynamic, and that made any hint of sexual interaction uncomfortable. The fact that I had heard these boys talk about sex with girls in a manner that made it clear that for them it was a ritual of subjugation rather than fun activity between peers only made me more averse to partake in it.
So I came into adulthood regarding any sexual desires in myself as inextricably linked to unhealthy power dynamics in one way or another, and thereby inherently shameful. A shame that would have vanished if I'd been able to conceptualise myself as a girl rather than a boy, but back then to me the idea of transition was a joke from Ace Ventura and not a serious thing that real people did.
The transfeminist writer Monica Maldonado proposed a eunuch/rapist dichotomy for trans women, that somewhat parallels the virgin/whore dichotomy. Any expression of a sexuality from a trans woman is read as some kind of rape, even if only in the Janice Raymond-esque sense of "appropriation" of women's bodies, symbols, culture, and social position. The flip side is that a trans woman who desires social acceptance in the cis world (even the cis queer world) must make herself sexless.
I have found myself putting any sexual jokes, sexual references, sexual statements of any kind, in a figurative box in the corner and not letting them out of my mouth in any social situation. Clearly, this is born of fear in some way, because I can well imagine the social consequences for a trans woman who tells a sex joke that lands badly.
I am at a point now where I experience basically zero sexual desire or attraction. Have I made myself into a figurative "eunuch" in order to avoid the social consequences of being sexual? Is it a choice that I have made? Or is it just a natural part of me, that I shouldn't try to "fix"? I don't know.
