Trigger warnings for conversion therapy, rape, and acephobia in general.
Recently, a woman published this article about her experience in couples' therapy. Her experience matches with what most asexual people say is normal for therapists and doctors to put them through: conversion therapy and repeated rape to try to make them stop being asexual (needless to say, it did not work, because conversion therapy is pseudoscience and does not work).
All the therapists responsible for this, in this woman's case, self-described as liberal and LGBT+ friendly. This is why asexual people say that the current LGBT framework and LGBT-inclusive education for healthcare providers is not enough to stop conversion therapy, and demand that asexuality be included in these programmes.
[...] I figured out I was asexual. My husband, at first, was fine with this, though he insisted that we continue to have penetrative intercourse, as he considered such sex to be the ultimate connection and a necessary form of love. But penetrative intercourse made me want to vomit.
I never wanted to have it again and, instead, I needed us to find new ways of connecting. On our own we couldn’t figure out where our two realities might intersect so we decided to try couples counseling. I had done individual therapy on and off for decades and found it immensely helpful. I assumed couples counseling would be helpful as well. And so, between December 2014 and October 2017, my husband and I took part in a cumulative 26 months of therapy across three therapists (one LMFT and two psychologists who specialized in family and relationship issues).
This, looking back, was one of the worst decisions of my life.
I do not use the word trauma lightly when I say that my time in couples counseling was traumatic. Here is what I heard in those spaces over and over again from people that my husband and I had approached as experts: I was not okay as I am. My husband’s wants were normal while my wants were unimportant. It didn’t matter that intercourse made me feel like I was being raped. It didn’t matter that, to me, having sex with my husband was the same as having sex with a stranger or a relative or a child—that it felt just as wrong, just as nauseating. It didn’t matter that the only way I could get through sex was by imagining I was repeatedly cutting my throat or hacking at my wrists (I found those visualizations more comforting than inhabiting my body during sex). Sex between spouses was essential to any healthy and committed relationship, said our therapists, and we needed to fix what was wrong with me. The only alternative offered was divorce which was, for me, out of the question due to economic, family, and mental health reasons.
Many of us in the ace community have been told by family members, significant others, and popular culture that we’re broken, that something is wrong with us, that we’ll be fixed or cured if we just have sex with the right person (or, maybe we need our hormones adjusted, or maybe we need sex therapy and sensate focus exercises). But I had not imagined hearing this from therapists my husband and I had turned to for help, just as I did not expect the focus of couples therapy to become the erasure of my sexual orientation.
I’m guessing my husband’s needs were prioritized over mine because his were familiar to the therapists. They understood my lack of sexual desire as something that needed adjustment (to be fair, the DSM had medicalized asexuality via “hypoactive sexual desire disorder“ up until the DSM-5 in 2013). One therapist told me I was making my asexuality up as a way to control my relationship. She said she was knowledgeable about LGBT issues and she had never heard of asexuality. How did I know it existed? She told me that in New York, intercourse is an expectation of marriage by law. It wasn’t just her: none of the therapists were familiar with asexuality as an orientation. [...]
Part of surviving that time of marriage counseling—and I use the term surviving literally, as with each therapy session I slid further down the steep slope of depression and suicidality—was writing in my journal after those sessions. Some entries drift into notes about ways to kill myself [...] Eventually I knew I wouldn’t be okay—I would probably in fact be dead—if I continued these sessions.
[...] The number of young people who are identifying as asexual is striking and worth noting. Ten percent of LGBTQIA+ youth identified as asexual or ace spectrum in a 2020 Trevor Project survey. What this means, in my mind, is that therapists will soon be encountering asexuals in greater numbers—and this concerns me. Are marriage and family therapists ready to help asexual clients, particularly those who may be in mixed-orientation relationships? [...]
The therapists my husband and I met with presented themselves as liberal and progressive. They positioned themselves as LGBT supportive, a safe space, because they allowed that men can want to have sex with men, and women can want to have sex with women—but they could not imagine other queer possibilities, such as a committed and deep love without intercourse. [...]
When people ridicule raising awareness about asexuality's existence (and it's not only JK Rowling), when they claim asexuality shouldn't be included in the queer community, these are the results it leads to.
My heart hurts for this woman, how could somebody end up getting prescribed therapist-mandated rape.
The elephant in the room for me though is divorce being out of the question for her, when her husband was basically raping her and didn't care that she didn't want to have sex. It's awful that these therapists helped him abuse her instead of pointing out that he was abusing her, but like, the dude not giving a shit about her is a pretty significant factor
Agreed. And--she says that it is "due to economic, family, and mental health reasons," but I would guess that if the economic were addressed, she would find a way to balance the other two. Or at least she would be much more likely to.
It is hard to overstate the ways in which our society traps people by denying them resources... every time I turn around, I find another one.
(Although her therapists also deserve a space between the E and the R! 🤬)
Oh what's my gender? It's where lies the strangling fruit that came from the hand of the sinner I shall bring forth the seeds of the dead to share with the worms that gather in the darkness and surround the world with the power of their lives while from the dimlit halls of other places forms that never were and never could be writhe for the impatience of the few who never saw what could have been. In the black water with the sun shining at midnight, those fruit shall come ripe and in the darkness of that which is golden shall split open to reveal the revelation of the fatal softness in the earth. The shadows of the abyss are like the petals of a monstrous flower that shall blossom within the skull and expand the mind beyond what any man can bear, but whether it decays under the earth or above on green fields, or out to sea or in the very air, all shall come to revelation, and to revel, in the knowledge of the strangling fruit—and the hand of the sinner shall rejoice, for there is no sin in shadow or in light that the seeds of the dead cannot forgive. And there shall be in the planting in the shadows a grace and a mercy from which shall blossom dark flowers, and their teeth shall devour and sustain and herald the passing of an age. That which dies shall still know life in death for all that decays is not forgotten and reanimated it shall walk the world in the bliss of not-knowing. And then there shall be a fire that knows the naming of you, and in the presence of the strangling fruit, its dark flame shall acquire every part of you that remains.
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