Welcome Back Ley!

Let's talk about the sexual spectrum with our favorite educator, Ley David Elliot Crey, PhD!

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Welcome back to another episode of come with Casey. We are your cohost. I'm Dr. Casey Sanders and I'm Carrie Sanders and we are pleased. We are ecstatic. We are in love. We are so fucking happy to welcome back our good friend and one of the most highly educated and respectable people that we have ever met. We want to welcome back to the show, this lay David Elliott Cray, PhD, by the way, welcome back. Hey everybody. Thank you so much for being here. This is really exciting. It's been a long time since we chatted and it's so great to see you both. I know you've become my like secret mentor, which I haven't even told you this, but I'm like infatuated and I'm like, they are totally my mentor and this is how it is and they don't know it, but this is just how it's going to be and maybe after you spanked me, I'm not exactly sure, but I know that's what I'm like. Are we allowed to reveal that information? I think so. We can edit it out later. It's fine. You're the master of edits. Let's say we, we got consent. If you ever listened to our episode it was season two that we did it. We went to a sex party. Yes. And that was, we had discussed. You going and experiencing impact play for the first time. Yes. And it was just an honor. Reveal. It was our good friend here. That was the person behind the paddle. And that was a lot more than a paddle too. That was everything. Oh, the after pictures were great too. Black and bruised. But so it's been a year since we last. Talked and we had such a good time chatting with you last time. And after the show, we had people that were just, pouring in their love of being like, wow, this was really eyeopening for me. This was done in such like an exquisite way. So we were very pleased with that. And we just want to give our personal gratitude to you for providing us with such a plethora of information. Well, gratitude accepted and reciprocated, but, we invited you back for a very specific reason. And we've discussed this off camera and we're going to bring it in today. We have. Witnessed over the past and our experience, probably the past year or two this changing landscape, this transitional landscape of sexuality and of all of the seminars and meetings and things that we've attended, we've had a lot of eye opening conversations in regards to things like sexual fluidity and what it means to be a various orientations and one of the ones that we landed on was a sexuality. And you yourself, I believe, before we go into this, I want to take a second to, to discuss what we have talked about on our Instagram page and that is GSRD. If you haven't heard of that stands for gender, sexuality and relationship diversity. I would love to be able to say here's who it was coined by and here's the evolution of it. But the important part about it is it's a really good way to get to. Know someone in terms of their interests, orientation, and what they're really looking for in terms of relationships. So I wanted to pose that question to you first. Would you mind sharing us with your your GSRD with us? Absolutely. So in terms of my gender sexuality and relationship diversity, where I fit on that whole landscape. So I am a non binary transgender feminine person. I am. a sapphically oriented, aromantic, asexual relationship anarchist. And that term GSRD coined by Dr. Meg John Barker to my understanding and knowledge. Okay. See, there you go. Already learned. That's like the most punk rock answer I ever heard. Thank you for, so we want to, we go. A lot of that, and that's been a term that's been closer to us because now we're able to sit down with people whenever we first meet them and say, if we ask that consensually ask this question, it provides us with what I feel is like this whole bit of information right up front and so like the foundation of who they are and then allows us to build from that. And it has been very helpful and I feel people. Connect further or more immediate when you give them the opportunity to express who they are within those. Absolutely. Absolutely. It's like when you're going to see a band and you want to know what kind of music do they play? What genre are they? This is getting that similar information because it's like do I want to stick around for the next band? What genre are they? Are they shoegaze? I'm really into shoegaze, but I don't know, black metal, I might want to split, situating these things in these different genres is so helpful. Absolutely. Yeah. A 100 percent and it gives us a good look at you. I feel like it's like like pulling back at the curtain, especially because as a relationship or as a relationship as it directs towards the person relationship style and all of that, because you consider yourself a relationship anarchist, correct? I do. Yeah. So let's clarify that a little bit for me, please. Yeah, absolutely. As you'll see from tattooed on my palm, I have a thing for anarchy and for me, anarchy isn't this edgelord rejecting authority just because it's authority, sort of chaos and nonsense kind of thing. Instead, I see anarchy as A rejection of unfounded authority. It's a doing not what you're told, but doing what you feel is right. And listening to credible sources and supposed authorities that can help you inform and shape what you believe is right, but never just following along with an authority because it's an authority and relationship anarchy is just applying that to our relationships. Is there an official authority in our culture on relationships? There are experts, but there are no official rules, but there are unofficial unspoken rules that are taught to us through the stories that we are taught as kids, through the dreams we're supposed to have, through the movies we watch about how our relationships are supposed to go. Yeah, order of events, the number of people that are supposed to be involved, the kind of people that are supposed to be involved, the sorts of things you're supposed to do, the sorts of feelings you're supposed to have. And once you deconstruct that, and you realize, oh, no, you can customize your relationships, you can build them to fit the people actually involved. Rather than bending the people around to fit what a relationship is supposed to be. To me, that's relationship anarchy and my shift. In my life from a more standard relationship practice into the relationship. Anarchist framework is one of the most freeing shifts I have ever made. I know. I feel like there's so many more people that could benefit from really taking a look and it's difficult because these relationship norms have been so drilled ingrained into people's heads. It's almost become like our just template. This is what has to happen. This is what we've seen and this is what we do. And there is no like free from artistry. It's just, this is it. And this is what you follow. Yeah. People are told that they don't get to decide. What their relations look like they're told that it must be this way and it must be this way because it's successful But then we turn around and look at the data of the success of those relationships and we go wait a minute These this data is it's not supporting your claim. Yeah, like even a little bit Yeah, we I mean they're like The relationship norms are like scripts, and we're told that we have to hit every note in order to play that piece. And I prefer to go off script, and in fact, I prefer to take that script and instead of treating it as some thing handed down by the geniuses that we're all supposed to play and conform to, I treat it as a jazz chart. It's a starting point that I can then riff off of, and take what I like and leave the rest, and then improvise and express. That's a beautiful thing. Absolutely. Yeah, I love that. So when do you think you came to this realization in your life? At what point where you're like, fuck this. This is who I am. This is what I'm being. I'm really curious because I feel like that takes a lot of strength to realize that about yourself. Yeah. Thank you. It's been a gradual process, so like when you asked me about like where I am on the GSRD landscape, I gave you like a million words, like non binary, transgender, feminine sophically oriented, aromantic, asexual relationship, anarchist, like that's a mouthful. And I can say each one of those came at a different time in my life. That's an accumulation of realizations that have also informed each other. And I'm not done. That's my answer. If y'all interview me next year, I might give you a different list because these things, they're not boxes we put ourselves in. They're lenses that we see the world through. And sometimes our prescriptions change. So who knows what I'm going to be in the future, but like the order there, I think I first figured out there's a difference between knowing and knowing, like knowing your gut that you. that you are a certain way, but it takes a while for you to accept that with the rest of yourself, I would say I accepted myself as non monogamous first. Okay. Non monogamy came first. That was probably 2007. I was teaching polyamory workshops at anarchist bookshops in Columbus, Ohio back then, so it was long time. I haven't been like consistently non monogamous that whole time, but it's been like a pretty reliable thread. I would say after that, I started exploring kink, but not so much formally. I would say I was really involved in kink, but not like BDSM community. Then I leaned into queerness. And there it was, I figured out I was trans first. That got the ball rolling. Once you go through a gender transition, you can't help but deconstruct your sexuality. Sure. Part of that process. And that's when I realized, oh I'm asexual and there it was aromantic. And then realizing more about what those words meant to me, I started including that qualified at the beginning, sapphically oriented, asexual, aromantic. And what I mean by that is. Look, I don't like sexual attraction toward other persons, romantic attraction toward other persons. It's not part of how I move through the world. It's not part of how I experience myself, but I'm still attracted to people in other ways. And I tend to be attracted to femininity and women. That's why I say that I'm sapphically oriented because I still do in certain directions, but I wouldn't describe it as sexual romantic. So I think. That's and then along that whole stretch of clarifying that stuff I just said is when I did my deep dive into kink and BDSM form of alternate exploration of intimacy and embodiment and even partnership. Yeah, it's been a long evolving process. It is a long and evolving process. And I hope it continues for the rest of my life. If I'm at like full, complete self understanding now at the age of 40, I peak too soon. I want to figure out more shit about myself every year. So to, to our viewers or listeners that don't necessarily know what asexuality means can we just go back and break down just like the simplest of terms of asexuality and then and then again, romanticism as well. Yes, exactly. Thank you. Yeah, please. Absolutely. So asexuality is. It's an orientation, just like heterosexuality, just like homosexuality, bisexuality, pansexuality. It's one of those. And the name is a little bit misleading, because A, the prefix means no or none. So it makes it sound like no sex. Yeah. It's for some people it's not, but that's not the best way to think about it. A better way to think about it is as I mentioned in my description earlier, someone who experiences little to no sexual attraction toward other persons, right? So if the way you understand yourself and the way you understand how you move through the world and relate to other people, If thinking of yourself through this lens of asexuality as someone who experiences little to no sexual attraction toward other persons, if that helps you make sense of all that, then you're asexual. That's all there is to it, right? And it's a spectrum, because that phrase, little to no sexual attraction toward other persons, there's gray area there, and there's fluidity there. So a lot of times people talk not just about asexuality. But they'll talk about the whole asexual spectrum. Yeah. Pretty broad place. Yeah. That's like the, there's an infinite amount of numbers between zero and one. Yeah. Yeah. And what I think is really interesting about it is. You know how we think of, we already do think of sexuality oftentimes as on a spectrum, and we might think there's like being fully straight over here, being fully gay over here, and then all that stuff in the middle. And someone might wonder where is asexuality on that? The answer is it's another line. It's another dimension on that. So it turns it from a line into a grid. So now we're thinking in three dimensions. When I say that I'm asexual. I'm still attracted to people, but it's not a sexual attraction. And I don't think that's a deficit. It's not a struggle for me. It's just my expression of myself, including my full. Realized sexual expression doesn't involve sexual attraction toward other persons. I love powerful conversations. So then you are some of the, you don't, you, as you say, you don't necessarily experience a sexual attraction. Whenever you do experience attraction, this is going to be a big question. And if you're comfortable answering it, then great. How do you define the attractions that you experience to others? Yeah, so there's this model that's talked about in asexuality informed sexology, which should be all of it, but isn't all of it yet. A lot of the field is still playing catch up, but it's called the split attraction model. And what the split attraction model does is it divides our notion of attraction up into different flavors. A lot of times, when we say we're attracted to someone, we treat it like that's just, it's one, one thing. It's just attraction, right? And it's romantic and sexual and everything thrown in. And if you're attracted to someone, it's you want them to be your best friend and you want to have sex with them and spend all your time with them and probably you're eventually going to bicker with them and hate them. But, it's not Laughter. But we can divide it up. So there's to take an easy one, divide sexual attraction from romantic attraction or divide both of those from emotional attraction. So there might be someone who you're really emotionally attracted to. You feel safe. You feel comfortable with them. You're drawn to them. You want to be in their presence. You don't want to fuck them. Yeah. You just don't feel that way about them. Or maybe there's someone who like you really enjoy going on dates with. But the idea of being sexually intimate with them, just, it doesn't appeal to you. Or to flip it around, one that's perhaps relatable to a broader section of the population. Think about people you want to have sex with, but you're not attracted to romantically. Yeah. Yeah. That's the split attraction model, right? Okay. You can divide it up. There's sexual attraction. There's romantic attraction, emotional, spiritual. Creative attraction. Sometimes you're like, I want to collaborate with you and I want to write music. That's a form of attraction. There's aesthetic attraction, right? Sometimes you just think someone is beautiful and you love their style and you like gazing at them, but that doesn't mean you want to have sex with them. Like the sunset is beautiful. I don't want to fuck the sun. I could admire the beauty in it, but it doesn't mean I want to be inside it. Yeah. And one of the things. About really leaning into this split attraction model is, how, like when you start to get attracted to someone, you might feel like those little butterflies in your tummy. That thing that we've been described as what it means to be, feeling infatuation and feelings of love. Now, the thing with butterflies is there are a lot of different species, but to the untrained eye, butterflies is butterflies. They all look the same, but you get an entomologist in there who can start to tell the difference between a monarch and a polymorpho. They can start to say this is this kind of butterfly. This is that kind of butterfly. And then your appreciation of the different kinds. Becomes like it's enhanced because you know what you're looking at, what you're looking for. So I still feel butterflies. It's just, I feel like blue morpho butterflies, not Monarch butterflies. Yeah. I can differentiate between them at some point. And yeah, you're the queen of analogies over here. Fuck literally like I open Oh my God. I thought I liked blue, whatever, and I like monarchs, I didn't fucking know, but no I fucking love that analogy, That's great. That's very eye opening. But that's, to me, that is such a clear depiction that it is something that can be utilized by people that do live within this binary system this narrative that's been fed to them. The nuclear family model who you can say, listen, you feel an attraction, differentiate the type of attraction you're feeling because the only thing that you've been told you are able to expand. Is you look on your attraction. It means that you'd sexual attraction. It means that there's some form of eroticism there. And now you either a need to feel shame because you're partnered up and you're not supposed to feel that or B it means that you're now fucking things up. Exactly. It gives us a much more rich variety of relationships. Yeah. The implications for communication alone are expansive in that matter to be like, Oh wait, listen this is a common one that we see amongst people that we talk to where they're like is it okay for me to look at someone else? What are you feeling whenever you look at this other person? Are you feeling a sexual attraction to them? Are you just admiring their aesthetics? Define the attraction that you're having so it can be then converted into conversation with your partner, with your spouse, whatever that is in a safe way so it doesn't have to be like, oh, you're looking at someone else means that you're trying to sleep with them. So expanding that out. This is one of the things that I want to get through to our listeners. So much of why it's such an important thing to me to have people such announced people such as yourself to be on the show is because this is what's needed. This is like that missing link between. Being able to communicate in such a way that's the, what would be in quote normal and what is expansive. This level of communication allows people to really have a deeper layer of communication and be able to do it in a safe way that allows them to feel secure in their relationships. Absolutely. Yeah, I think so. When I'm working with like clients of my own, right? I always tell them, look, even if you're monogamous, learning about non monogamy is going to help you understand your own monogamy better. Even if you're vanilla, learning about BDSM and the like negotiation and consent protocols, that's going to help you in your own quote unquote vanilla sexual practice, right? Here, even for, here's a word. Yeah. Allosexual people. What? It's an allosexual person. You're allosexual if you're not asexual. So if sexual attraction toward other persons is a substantial part of how you understand yourself and move through the world, we call you allosexual. Allo is a prefix. That means other. Like other directed. So even for allosexual folks, learning about asexuality will enrich your own understanding because it helps you place yourself on the actual landscape rather than on this fake limited landscape that we thought was the be all and end all sexuality before. Yeah. I love that sexuality used to be like, like a wizard of Oz back in the day when it was black and white. And then the very first time it cut to color, it was like, holy shit, that is what I feel sexuality has become. And I feel like there still are a vast majority of people that see in black and white and that's okay, but I really feel like that's part of what we're doing in the show and talking with you is can we get people to see in fucking color? For the first time, like there's so many colors out there. It is not just what are like perceived notion of what relationships or sexuality was. It's the color in which we are now. And I just wish other people would see that. Yeah, and I love that way of putting it, like that switch from black and white to color. I love that. Maybe it's also like the switch that we got from the late 80s to the early 2000s of 2D to 3D in film, though that one wasn't as smooth. That one wasn't as smooth. I was just re watching Friday the 13th part three in 3D the other day. So bad. Wait, is that one that you're having to watch like with 3d glasses still? Like, how are they doing? How are you doing that? I watch it on, I watch the 2d version, but you're, you can tell Oh yeah. And it's coming up and it's Oh God. That's like all the movies. They tried to have a resurgence of it in the early 2000s with like My Bloody Valentine and a few others. I was just thinking of that damn movie. That's so funny. Where you can watch you watch like an axe flying at the screen and going, Oh, I see what they were trying to do. Exactly. Exactly. Now, one thing I'll clarify if it's all right with y'all, because I think it's an important thing to note about asexual folks too, is that some of us, Have and having sex. I'm so glad, I was just about to ask this question. And I was like, I don't know if I'm overstepping by asking and I'm so glad you're saying it. You did not overstep. Challenge me. But, I feel like Leigh is the person you can have these open conversations with and we don't have to worry about any backlash. Yes ma'am, I will absolutely challenge you. Okay, continue. So some asexual folks really don't like sex and they're not sex negative. Some are, of course, because people from all groups can be sex negative, but some are sex averse, right? And you can be sex positive and believe that like people should embrace their full sexuality and all that and yourself still be averse. to sexual contact, and I think, in fact, if we're really going to practice a sex positive culture, we need to validate people who are themselves averse to sexual contact, right? But then we look at the other asexual folks who are sex welcoming, and here's how that works. Notice when I was talking about asexuality, I kept saying, I kept describing it in terms of sexual attraction. Attraction is not the same thing as desire, which is not the same thing as behavior, right? Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, I'm hungry, I want a snack I have a desire for food. I go to the fridge and nothing looks good. I'm not attracted to any of the stuff. So being asexual doesn't mean you don't have a libido. Okay. You can be asexual and still have a high degree of sexual desire, but you just don't experience that attraction toward other persons. If that sounds frustrating. Yes, it can be. I was about to say Jesus various techniques of self love and such. But there's also then the difference between sexual. desire and sexual behavior, right? So there's lots of reasons people have sex other than attraction or desire. Consider like a couple that's trying to get pregnant. They might not really want to have sex, but they're doing it for another purpose. So asexual folks sometimes will have sex for various reasons that don't involve attraction to their partner at all. What are some of them? It feels good. Have you ever stimulated that your genitals? That shit's nice, right? It feels good. That's a reason to do it. Another is it can be a way of bonding with your partner. It can be a way of expressing appreciation. And the way I like to think of it is by analogy with massages. So when I'm in a relationship with someone, I like to give them massages because it makes them feel good, and it makes me feel good to know that I'm making them feel good. And it's also a way of spending quality time. It's a way of being intentional about our contact. And I also like to receive massages. Because of all that and also because it just feels good. Yeah. Yeah. But I've never been out at a bar and looked at someone and thought, damn, I want to massage that girl. It's just never popped in my head. Yeah. And so for me, just tell that whole story again, take out the word massage and put in the word fuck. Yeah. Yeah. I've never looked at someone and thought, Oh, I need to have sex with that person. But in the context of a relationship, it's a way of expressing, it's a way of expressing affection. It's a way of bonding. It's a way of feeling good together. It's important though, that we have the conversation so they know, Hey, I'm asexual. And like actual sexual attraction towards you is not part of my motivation here. Conversation for some people. I think that's refreshing as shit. Be nice if we could all actually have those honest conversations with people, not just saying asexual or not, but that's such an honest conversation to have with someone and to know how you feel about that. That's refreshing. It can be scary too. Because, asexuality is like one of the new kids on the block in the whole discussion of orientation, just like people you say bisexuality isn't real, it's just, it's bad. People still say that, but it was really bad, like back in the nineties, if you're a girl and you're bisexual, you're actually just. straight girl looking for attention. If you're a bisexual, you're actually just gay and in denial, but no one's really by people say that it's asexual people now, so even though we make up between 1. 5 to 2 percent of the population, according to current research, people don't believe we exist. So when I'm starting to talk to someone and I tell them, yeah, I'm ace. Which is a common shorthand for asexual. I gotta tell them 99 percent of the time, I gotta have this conversation we're having right now with them, just to get them up to speed. Got it. Yeah, and it would be so beautiful if we were in a culture where sex education actually taught people about this stuff, so that dating me didn't come with A bookshelf worth of homework. Yeah, that's, that's something that we talk about often is the current, like the current landscape of sex education and the fact that we're not teaching about like multiple sexualities, even it's so limited. We just had. So even the seminar that I was on last weekend, where, which was led by Dr. Joe court, where he was talking about a lot of this, where he was saying. You take a group of young boys into a room to do sex education for them. And you're talking about wet dreams and masturbation. You're talking about all these things. And then you turn around and you talk to the group of girls that are in there. And first of all, I'm going, okay sex education is still at this point, completely binary, 100%. And then on top of that, you're teaching the boys about their sexuality. And you're teaching the girls about. maintenance, biological maintenance at the, like the most, it's being like, here's what a period is and here's how to, here's how to cope with it. Yeah. And then we're going, this is so fucked across the entire landscape that you, they don't even have the opportunity to get in some of the more of the in depth conversations about what is sexuality and is it static or is it fluid? What does it mean to be attracted to someone? And what are these things? Entail. And so it's been this frustrating existence to see. So I can't even imagine how you feel as someone who is every time I fucking go and have a conversation with someone, I have to explain and pointed a fucking pile of books and say, read this so you can even enter in the conversation that I want to have. It's you need to walk around with a pamphlet yeah, here you go, read this. And then if this even remotely interests you, then come find me later. Yeah. It's so I joke with my friends sometimes. As a gender expansive, asexual, aromantic relationship anarchist, who's also Kinky AF. I moved to a small desert town. My prospects here, let me tell y'all this is a, I live in a literal desert. Finding someone who aligns with all of those things can be really tricky. But, the thing is, I know myself and I know what I'm looking for. And why would I compromise? Why would I pretend to be something I'm not? Just to settle in a relationship. That's not going to go well. And when I do find people who mesh, and I have people, it's just they're scattered around, when we mesh. And it's if your only conversation is, Hey, do you like sex? I like sex. Do you have a penis? I have a penis. Do you have a vagina? I have a vagina. Let's do it. There's not going to be a lot of actual integration and like reflective compatibility, right? But when you can really locate yourself on that GSRD landscape and have that conversation and meet someone, it's you're like, The all the puzzle pieces interlocking at once and that can be a really beautiful and deep connection and that's available to everyone, right? It's not, I'm not saying with the penis vagina joke that like straight people don't get it. It's just it's about not how you identify or who you're attracted to, but it's about the depth of understanding and how much of that engagement and conversation you're willing to let yourself explore. Yes, absolutely. That's 1 of our big points that we try to make to people. Whatever we're saying, these conversations are things that should be had early on. We have this conversation with our daughter. We do, we tell her all the time, like who you like, be who you are. Like, don't be afraid to explore what that might mean for you. But she comes to us with conversations all the time. And it's so cute to see a 10 year old so confused. And I'd like to tell her that it gets better. I, and I loved what you said earlier. Like you're not in a box. This is our, your, these are your lenses for right now. And I feel like her lenses change daily. But I, but, and that's fine. And I love one. I love the fact that she comes to us and we all talk about this and we give her that safe space, but it's so interesting to see someone as young as 10 years old to go through all of these different concepts of who and what and when and where she feels like she wants to explore herself with, and. I love that she has that opportunity and I just think it's like crazy and sad and also beautiful all at the same time that there are people in their thirties just exploring this, just figuring the same conversation with 10 year olds as we are with 40, 50 and 60 year olds. It's just, it's crazy to me and I thought, and I find it so liberating for these younger individuals to and we think that the information is not out there, but it is when I have her friends come to me and tell me that. I feel like I'm lesbian. I feel that this is what I want, but I could never tell my parents that like we are giving our daughter to the safe space. And I do feel like things are slightly starting to change. And I think that people are starting to have this understanding, but yeah, it's crazy to me that I hear the same conversations from 10 year olds as we do from 50 year olds. Yeah. It's so it's interesting. We're seeing a real shift, and I think there's this, regardless of generation, of course, it's more common amongst younger folks, but it's trickling upward. There is this. Culture wide deconstruction of sexuality. Yes. And it's been an ongoing process people have always been deconstructing sexuality. But I think it's accelerating. And I think it's accelerating in part because people are more connected now than they have been before. They're able to find other people like them. Like me growing up in rural Pennsylvania, surrounded by no one like me. There was no way I ever would have known that I was any of the things I listed earlier. Cause I had no precedent. I had no example. I had no one to talk to who could talk back to me about having a similar experience. And now I get on the internet within five seconds, I can find someone who is like my clone. Yeah. And then we can relate and learn from each other. And there's this idea that somehow, TikTok's making the kids all gay or something like that, or like asexuality is just a Tumblr trend from people who want to feel oppressed. So they invented a new label so that they count as queer based on just like not having sex. It's nonsense, right? That's a very cynical and uninformed approach instead. These discussions that we're having in online communities that bring people together without the artificial barriers of like geography brings them together under shared experience. So they can start developing a language of shared identity and understanding, and that's we should absolutely embrace. That is a wonderful thing. Yes it's difficult to look at stuff like this and say why are there people that are saying, no, we shouldn't do this? It goes back to the whole what was that? The, like the, I don't remember the name of the study or the project or whatever it was, whenever it became okay to be left handed and it was instead of being like, okay here they all come out of the woodwork. Of course, there's a lot of us. We always existed. We were just told it's not okay. And now that there's a platform in which to get this out, you would even get your own scissors. I still don't. You don't even get your own scissors. You're left handed. I am absolutely left handed. So here's the thing about left handedness, right? So in like 1906, about three and a half percent of the population was identified as left handed. And then that number gradually increases. And plateaus off around 1960 at around 12 percent and it's stayed there ever since and you can imagine, this is the point you were just making people being like, oh, it's those newspapers. The kids are reading today. They're making them all left handed. Yeah, it's no, we stopped beating them, we stopped behind their left hand behind their back, forcing them to use their rights. So it's not that only three and a half percent of people were left handed. It's that three and a half percent of people were allowed to be left handed and the rest of that 12 percent weren't. Yes. But even now you might think we've reached total equality for left handed people, but as a, like an educator, when I write on a chalkboard, I wear that shit. Yeah. The swipey card at Target or something like, I love making him pay out. I love making him pay out because he has to get all awkward and move it over. And I'm like, this is just not meant for you, baby. And as people, we know that we live in a right handed world. Who doesn't know that is most right handed people to come across like my favorite point. This is look listen. And now he goes on his tangent as a cisgendered heterosexual male. This is the only connection that I have to any world outside of my own. And I, and so I cling to it because I could never ever. Hope to understand what other people have to go through, but I try to on some level empathize. And if this is all I have, then I'm going to fucking ride that wave as long as I can. I'm going to do you solid. As someone who has authority within the queer community, as someone who calls the shots, we're going to change the acronym to S. R. E. A. L. From here on out, it is l. G. B. T. K. A. Plus. For Lesbians, Lefties, Welcome to the community, my friends! I love it! One of us! Oh, I appreciate that. Of course. I do. Then, I don't know. Oh my God. And in these topics the of asexuality and going through all this, I have a very important question for you. And this comes to me from conversations that I've had with people about how things just look right now. And this is I hate to. Say the question, but it I feel like it's necessary and it's something along the lines of How do you respond to someone that says that asexuality is a portion of is a mental illness? Yeah, that's a good question It's an important question and it's one that I understand where it comes from, right? Because you might think someone who is mentally ill or deeply traumatized might become sex averse and given that like Asexuality is not normalized In popular sexual discussions, it seems a little alien. So you might think, yeah, that's a defect. It's an acquired defect, the result of mental illness or some kind of wound, right? I get that, but it's not true. And here's why it's not true. So we do have research that pretty clearly shows that sexual orientation is not connected to. any sort of trauma in any way. Nothing, no experience that you go through is going to make you gay, going to make you straight, going to make you ace, going to make you buy any of these things. What trauma, mental illness and the like can do, though, is it can affect the way that you identify, right? So think about this difference between your orientation, which is who you're actually attracted to, and your sexual identity, which is how you interpret that. How you yourself would describe it. So someone who's say gay, but still not accepting that about themselves, they have an incongruent sexual orientation and identity, right? They're gay, but they interpret themselves as a straight person. Someone who is really traumatized by say abusively religious upbringing might be gay, but unable to accept that about themselves. Have that mismatch, right? And there, the religious trauma is not affecting the orientation, but it is affecting the identity and what we see is that those effects of any of these factors, they're going to typically make our interpretation of our identities. More conservative, not in a political sense, but in the like sense of being more restricted rather than more open, you're very rarely you're going to see someone who's actually gay, but identifies as straight because of trauma more often than you're going to see the inverse adverse. Okay. Yeah. Okay. Identifies as gay because of trauma or whatever. That's far less frequent. Got it. Asexuality. One, we just, yeah. We have no data that it is an exception to this to say that it is just conjecture, right? If you got data on it, I'd love to see it. Exactly. Now, our trauma can put up blocks to intimacy, right? But that's having. Difficulty expressing and receiving intimacy because of mental illness or trauma is different from asexuality. Asexuality is sexual attraction toward other persons doesn't, is, doesn't play a part in how you understand how you relate to yourself and others. In fact asect. The American Association for Sexuality Educators, Counselors, and Therapists, the kind of overarching ruling organization in the US for all of those occupations declared a few years ago that no ASEC certified therapist or practitioner is allowed to pathologize asexuality and treat it as a condition to be cured. We don't do that. So I do have one question and this is just a personal question for myself. Because I remember growing up, I actually labeled myself as asexual because I struggled with having general attraction for either gender. I always struggled with that and it was, and so I got a little bit older and I started diving further in that I then said, maybe I am more pansexual than I am asexual. But I'm curious, what is the difference between the two then? Between pansexual and intersexual. Asexual, yes. Ooh. And I'm sorry if I'm sorry if I misunderstood it earlier. No. But I am wanting my own clarification, but between two, I, I wanna hear this. 'cause I'm like, to me, I'm like the all or nothing. I just, I don't, but I wanna, I don't even hear an expert on this. I, yeah. I love this question, and if it's cool, y'all, I'm gonna loop the answer into it. To a second answer to the question y'all asked about mental illness stuff. Yes. Because there's a story to tell here about all of this. Okay. Autism. Autism is not a mental illness. It's a natural variation in human experience. Autistic folks are more likely to be queer. Okay. About 70 percent of Autistic folks identify as non heterosexual, whereas in the general population, 70 percent of people identify as heterosexual. Autistic folks are up to three to four times more likely to identify as trans or gender expansive and about eight times more likely to identify as asexual. This might be where some people get the connection between asexuality and mental illness. Because they're like, they're thinking of autism in this medicalized model, like it's somehow a disease or something, it's a condition to be cured but it's not. Now, why might it be that autistic folks are more likely to identify as asexual? Because sexuality is socially constructed and our norms of engagement are socially constructed and autistic persons, like myself, sometimes relate to those norms in different ways. So there's a lot more reflection typically on sexuality and the terms we use to understand ourselves and maybe a bit more of a desire for clarity and precision in our language. So we, we get that by introducing more nuanced language. Then there's. There's, you can continue telling that story. Now, to tie it into your question about pansexuality, because, hey, get this, I'm asexual, but sometimes I'll call myself pansexual instead. Here's why. I don't know what sex is, right? And in part because As an autistic person, I want clarity. I want conditions. I want understanding. I'm not gonna anytime anyone asks me like, where was the last time you had sex? My answer is always, what do you mean by sex? Define it for me and then I can answer because I don't know. It's a really messy, murky concept and there's a lot of things that it could mean. Sometimes depending on who I'm talking to I'll say that I'm asexual because when the dominant notion of sex that I have a grasp on I have a, I understand that most people mean my sex. I don't experience that kind of attraction. Yeah, this broader notion of sex. I've had partnerships that have lasted years where we have never had genital. Contact, but we've been intimate. It's just that intimacy involves rope and knives and blow torches and not orgasms, but subspace and maybe that counts. I don't know if it does or doesn't, but if that does, then I'd call myself pansexual, with a preference for feminine presenting folks. My autistic need for clarity on things, which again, is not a disorder. It's not a deficit. It's not a mental illness. It's just I have a different neurotype. And this brain works leads me to not know what sex is with any sort of satisfaction. So I typically just go with the definition whoever I'm talking to has. If they have a more conventional understanding of sex, I'll speak their language. I'll say I'm asexual. If they have a broader notion of sex, that's a little more inclusive and sexual. Really, it's whatever lens helps in the moment. Yeah. Okay. If only we had a universal definition. Which, for legal purposes and for things like figuring out what qualifies as sexual assault and everything, it would be really good to have one of those. But it'd be really hard to get it. Yeah. In the same way that we try to continuously find some unified theory of physics, swear. Here comes the unified theory of sex. Yeah. I would say, this question of am I asexual or am I pansexual? There's no fact in the matter. It's just it's not like you're going to look in at your soul and find the little label that gives you that clarity. Yeah, you give them a storytelling devices in the story that you're telling with your life, which is a better plot device, which makes more sense of the narrative. And I can change, I think my misunderstanding toward asexuality before I really got focused into to what it. Our studies and what it is that we're doing and what we aim to achieve was that just asexual meant that no sexual, no, and not in a course, no sexual, anything happened, but that's actually really not the case. And so that's super interesting to dive in because we had talked about wanting to speak with you and wanting to do this episode. And I was talking with my clients about asexuality and they immediately were like doesn't that mean that they just don't have sex at all? I'm like. No, that's not what that, that's not necessarily what that means, but it's so interesting that even these like definitions are still so misunderstood. Yeah. Go ahead. I'm sorry. I'm rambling here and the language is always evolving too. So like the language is always being negotiated, you talk to a different. Asexuality educator on here and they might tell you a different story, right? I don't, this is not the asexual gospel I'm giving y'all. This is my perspective on it as someone who studies it, teaches about it and lives it, right? Some asexual people, no sex ever. No dating, no sex, no touch, but that's a spectrum, and like I said before, this just takes what we used to think of as a line and turns it into a grid and eventually into a cube. It's just depth that everyone benefits from understanding. And yeah, the amount of conversations so much, the amount of times I've talked to people about asexuality. Like in big groups and at least one person comes up to me afterwards and we're like, I never thought about it, but I think this is me and then they walked away with more self understanding. That's such a beautiful thing. Yeah, because what happens whenever we have a greater sense of self understanding is we have greater amounts of happiness. We have less instances of confidence. Yeah, everything. If you can do anything to increase someone's happiness and sense of well being in their place within the world and fuck. Yeah, rock on. Go for it. One fewer voice in your head telling you that you're broken. Yes. God. Fuck. Yes. That's going to be the caption of this episode. Oh yeah. That's the kind of shit that we're trying to put, to move towards our move, our audience towards is open their eyes to the understanding that. You're not broken. You're not fucked up. Exactly. And your normal is just that it's your normal, but your normal doesn't define your partners or your peers or anybody. Like when you sit in a group of people and you listen to them talk about their in quote normal lives and you feel less than because you don't fit into their box. Yeah. It's okay. It's entirely okay to feel that. Maybe you haven't found the exact person that you should be talking to. Yeah. Be you and figure yourself out and learn that sexuality is fluid and learn that we're not living inside some sort of binary system. This isn't the fucking matrix. We're not comprised of zeros and ones. Yeah, not anymore. We're fucking breaking through that shit. where it's water and we need to move like water and we can go back and forth and just have this whole fluid experience and it would be so much, we would all be so much better off if we experienced love and life like this. Yeah. And I forget if we talked about this last time I was on here, but the matrix, it was written by two trans girls. Yes, it is. The, which now the Wachowski sisters. Yeah. And the red pill, the fabled red pill that is like. Taken over Reddit subcultures. It was Estrogen. There you go. Is it really? That was the metaphor. And in the 90s, he came in a red pill, and the choice there was for Neo, chose that name but was consistently deadnamed by the bad guys throughout the whole film who refused to call him by his affirmed name. Mr. Anderson? Yeah, the choice was about whether to transition or not. Whether to stay in this fake world or to take the risk. And move into reality. And the red pill was starting hormone therapy. And I just love the way that whole cultural narrative has evolved. And it's it's like people who think Tyler Durden was the good guy in Fight Club. It's no. No. No, that's not how that works. Yeah. I fucking have chills from that. I'm literally, I was like, I don't know I like that perspective. I love that. I want to, I now want to know more. Watch it again with this lens. You'll see it. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, I didn't know that. That's crazy. And yeah, the movie before the matrix, they directed bound with Jennifer Tilley and Gina Gershwin, super hot lesbian noir films. And people were all like, How did two men direct this hot? It's because they were lesbians. Men don't know how lesbians have sex like that. No, no idea. See, that's such an interesting perspective to me because we you've had the, like the, that, like mainstream narrative about the Wachowskis, about everything that they've been through and about, there's just so much to their, like involving with terminator and with the matrix and everything else. So it's a whole universe to even get into that discussion. I feel like this is a different podcast episode that y'all are getting into right now. It's like a whole different podcast. Oh, we, we've been talking for a while and we super appreciate it. In fact, we didn't even get to cover one of the topics we wanted to. Whenever we're talking about like asexuality and kink and building relationships on that, I guess we're just going to have you on again. Oh, no, dang it. Listen, we're going to be shooting for the next time that we see you are the next time that we have you on the podcast is going to be in person. That's going to be what we want to do. We have some things working behind the scenes in which we're creating some relationships with some very great people that are going to allow for things like that to happen. So we would love to extend that invitation to you prematurely. Yeah. Person podcast with us, where we discuss some of these things. And bring your paddles. I love it. Accepted. I'll tell y'all if I'm traveling to your neck of the woods, I am bringing. My whole pop up dungeon in my backseat, which I'll tell you driving through border control, which I have to do when they peek in my backseat and they see like a folded up St. Andrew's cross. It's fun. That's for, Oh my God. It's been a pleasure as always. We, you're, one of our favorite guests to have. So thank you very much for being on the show today. We're going to close it off by saying, Oh, we really hope this sparks some sort of deeper thought within you. We hope this evokes some sort of power within you to really take some exploration and some self reflection. So for another episode of come with Casey, we are your hosts. I'm Dr. Casey Sanders and I'm Carrie Sanders. We'll see you next time.