As an Ace Old, I struggled for a long time with this aspect of the identity. No, I was not subject to religion-based coercion into accepting sex, and no doctor ever offered me hormone treatments. (I wasn't complaining about low libido because low libido wasn't a problem.)
But always, always, in every psychotherapeutic relationship I entered, there was the assumption that I was there to be "cured of being single". And I colluded in that project! What else was there for me? I was unhappy, depressed, and of COURSE it was because I was a woman without a man. No therapist, not even the one who I suspect was probably Ace himself, even knew the term asexual.
So while these well-intentioned professionals did help me in some regards and I'm grateful for them, we were all working together in unconscious support of a program Sherronda J. Brown calls cisheteropatriarchy, and it took me till my 60s, and the rise of asexual awareness, to understand that. Was it "conversion therapy" per se? I'm not sure. But it was damaging.
As an Ace Old, I struggled for a long time with this aspect of the identity. No, I was not subject to religion-based coercion into accepting sex, and no doctor ever offered me hormone treatments. (I wasn't complaining about low libido because low libido wasn't a problem.)
But always, always, in every psychotherapeutic relationship I entered, there was the assumption that I was there to be "cured of being single". And I colluded in that project! What else was there for me? I was unhappy, depressed, and of COURSE it was because I was a woman without a man. No therapist, not even the one who I suspect was probably Ace himself, even knew the term asexual.
So while these well-intentioned professionals did help me in some regards and I'm grateful for them, we were all working together in unconscious support of a program Sherronda J. Brown calls cisheteropatriarchy, and it took me till my 60s, and the rise of asexual awareness, to understand that. Was it "conversion therapy" per se? I'm not sure. But it was damaging.