Undergraduate Research Symposium

People who identify as asexual use this label because, rather than a sexual orientation like “heterosexual,” “homosexual”, or “bisexual,” which labels attraction by gender, they experience a lack of sexual attraction. Previous psychological research on the topic of asexuality is limited, but one conclusion agreed upon by several studies is that people who identify as asexual differ from those diagnosed with hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) in several ways. he most notable of these differences is that asexual people were shown typically to have little or no distress related to their lack of sexual desire, whereas distress is a key part of the diagnosis of HSDD. The question guiding this research is: do physical and mental health care professionals perceive their asexual clients as having a mental or physical disorder related to their asexual identity? To answer this question we will survey individuals who self-identify as asexual about their experiences with healthcare practitioners. We expect to find that in at least some cases, asexual people who did reveal their sexual identities to health professionals would encounter negative reactions from the practitioners, due to pathologizing attitudes still present in the medical establishment toward asexuality.