The assumption of disabled people as being asexual further manifests in the material conditions of disabled people’s lives where economic discrimination and exclusion can reduce and deplete opportunities for sex, intimacy and love, and where their living conditions deny space for autonomy, agency and adulthood.

Pepperdine University

There is a presumed assumption that people with disabilities are always already asexual – an assumption that further relies on impressions of disabled people as inevitably undesiring and undesirable.

Presumed assumptions about people with disabilities regarding their sexual desires

Loeser, C., Pini, B., & Crowley, V. (2018). Disability and sexuality: Desires and pleasures. Sexualities, 21(3), 255–270. https://doi.org/10.1177/1363460716688682


Disability and sexuality: Desires and pleasures

Issue arising from the assumption of disabled people as being asexual - (2)

 The ways that the assumption of disabled people as always already asexual has led to processes of desexualization, including denial of access to sexual assistance, contraception and sexual education, and a lack of access to opportunities for sexual engagement in institutional settings. 

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