Autism and sexuality, as a subject, has mostly been written about by people who were not autistic and who were worried about someone who was. The result is a literature full of sex education for teenagers and almost nothing for the autistic adult who is trying to work out, at thirty or fifty, who they are attracted to, whether the word they have been using for themselves is the right one, and how to say any of it to a partner. That is what this post is for. It stays with identity: orientation, gender, and asexuality, and the particular ways an autistic mind arrives at them. Everything about what happens between two bodies, from desire to touch to consent, lives in the post on autism and sex.
I’ll call her Sigrid. She is forty, identified as autistic at thirty-seven, and had been married to a man for twelve years when she came to me with a question she had never said out loud: “I don’t think I’ve ever been attracted to anyone. I thought everyone was pretending.” She loved her husband. She liked sex with him well enough, on the days her body was available for it. What she had never had, and had assumed nobody really had, was the thing other people seemed to mean by attraction. When I told her there was a word for that, and that it was an orientation rather than a problem, she cried, not because it was sad, but because forty years of a private conviction that she was faking something had just ended.
In this blog post I want to lay out why sexual identity is often harder to name when you are autistic, what the research actually says about orientation and gender in autistic adults, what asexuality is and is not, and how to tell a partner about any of this, whether you are newly dating or twelve years married. I’ll also say something about what happens to identity after a late diagnosis, because for many of the adults I see, the diagnosis and the question arrive together.
3 Key Takeaways
- Autistic adults are considerably more likely than non-autistic adults to identify as something other than heterosexual, and more likely to identify as asexual. This is a finding about diversity, not about deficit.
- Autistic sexuality is often harder to name because the usual route to naming it, comparing your inner experience to other people’s, is exactly the route autism makes unreliable. Many autistic adults have spent years assuming everyone was pretending.
- Telling a partner is a translation problem more than a courage problem. The words that work are specific and unapologetic, and the right partner is curious rather than alarmed.
Why Sexuality Is Harder to Name When You Are Autistic
Most people find out what they are by comparing themselves to other people. You notice that your friends are looking at someone and you are looking at someone else, or at nobody. You notice that the thing everyone seems to feel at fourteen is either happening to you or is not. The comparison is mostly unconscious and it mostly works, because the people doing it share a rough sense of what everyone else’s inner life is like.
Autistic adults do not reliably have that shared sense. In my practice, one of the most common things I hear from late-identified clients is some version of what Sigrid said: “I thought everyone was pretending.” They assumed the attraction other people described was a social performance, because so much else that other people did turned out to be one. Or they assumed their own experience was the universal one and everyone else was exaggerating. Either way, the comparison that lets most people name their orientation by twenty was not available, and the naming waited.
Two other things get in the way. Masking, which teaches an autistic person to perform whatever the room expects, including desire, until the performance is indistinguishable from the inside. And alexithymia, the difficulty many autistic adults have in reading their own internal states, which makes “what do I feel when I look at this person” a hard question, not a rhetorical one. A person who cannot easily tell hunger from anxiety is not going to find attraction obvious either.
None of this means autistic people do not know who they are. It means the knowing often comes later, comes through words rather than through comparison, and is frequently the first thing that makes sense after a diagnosis explains why the comparison never worked.
Orientation: What the Research Shows
The numbers here are consistent across studies, and they are large.
George and Stokes (2018) surveyed an international online sample of 309 autistic adults and 310 non-autistic adults about sexual orientation. Around seventy percent of the autistic group identified as something other than heterosexual, against around thirty percent of the non-autistic group, with higher rates of homosexuality, bisexuality and asexuality across the autistic sample. That is a self-selected online sample and skews toward women, so the exact figures do not travel to the whole population. The direction, though, has been replicated: Weir, Allison and Baron-Cohen (2021), in the largest survey of autistic adults’ sexuality to date, found the same wider spread of orientations, and roughly eight times the rate of asexual identification among autistic respondents.
I want to be careful about what these findings mean, because they get used badly in both directions. They do not mean autism causes non-heterosexuality, and they do not mean that an autistic person’s orientation is a symptom to be explained. What I think they show, and what I see in the room, is that autistic adults are less bound by the default. A person who has never absorbed social norms as automatic is also less likely to assume heterosexuality as automatic, and more likely to keep looking until they find a word that actually fits. That is not a pathology — it is a kind of honesty that the rest of the population does not always manage.
For a partner, the practical meaning is this: if your autistic partner tells you, at any age, that the word they have been using for their orientation is not quite right, they are more likely than most people to be telling you something true and long-considered, and less likely to be going through a phase.
Asexuality and the Ace Spectrum
Asexuality is the orientation most often confused with something else, so it deserves its own section.
An asexual person experiences little or no sexual attraction to other people. That is the whole definition. It says nothing about whether they have sex, want relationships, enjoy touch, or have a libido; all of those vary across asexual people as much as they do across anyone else. Some asexual adults are in sexual relationships and enjoy them. Some are romantically attracted and not sexually. Some are neither and are content. The spectrum includes people who feel attraction rarely, and people who feel it only once a deep bond exists, and the community has words for those too.
What asexuality is not, and this is the distinction that does the most damage when it is missed, is low desire. Low desire is a state: a person who would, under other conditions, feel sexual attraction and currently does not, because of burnout, medication, sensory load, or a relationship that has gone quiet. It can change. Asexuality is an orientation: stable, not caused by anything, and not a thing to be fixed. I have written about that distinction from the desire side in the post on autism and sex drive; from this side, the thing to say is that an asexual autistic adult who is treated as though the right conditions would fix them is being told their orientation is a malfunction, and that is not a neutral thing to tell someone.
Sigrid’s marriage did not end when she found the word. It changed. She and her husband stopped treating her lack of attraction as a problem she was failing to solve and started treating it as information about how their sex life actually worked, which, it turned out, had never depended on her being attracted to him in the way he had assumed. That is not every asexual person’s outcome. It was hers, and it was available only once the word was.
Gender Identity and Autism
Autistic adults are also more likely than non-autistic adults to be transgender, non-binary, or otherwise gender-diverse, and to describe their gender as something they arrived at late or are still arriving at. The research on this is younger than the research on orientation, and I would rather describe the pattern than quote a figure I cannot stand behind.
What I see clinically is the same mechanism as with orientation. A person who does not absorb social defaults automatically is also not going to absorb gender as a default, and a person who spent decades masking is often, after diagnosis, taking apart the mask piece by piece and finding that some of what they thought was them was the performance. Gender is frequently one of the pieces. It is not unusual for the two questions, “am I autistic” and “what is my gender,” to arrive in the same year, because the second was waiting on the first.
For a partner, the practical guidance is the same as for orientation, with one addition. Believe it, and do not treat it as a symptom. And know that a partner’s gender exploration after a late diagnosis is not, in most of the couples I see, a threat to the relationship. It is a person becoming more accurately themselves, which is the thing the relationship was supposed to be for.
Telling a Partner
Whether you are on a third date or in a twelfth year, the question of how to say any of this comes down to two things: what words, and when.
Milton (2012) described the double empathy problem: the way misunderstanding between autistic and non-autistic people runs in both directions, rather than sitting on the autistic side. It matters here because a disclosure is a moment where the two rulebooks collide. The autistic partner tends to say the thing plainly, as information. The non-autistic partner tends to hear it through their own rulebook, in which such things are said only when they are a crisis. Neither is wrong. Knowing the collision is coming lets you plan for it.
The words that work, in my experience, are specific and unapologetic, and they say what is true rather than what is missing. “I’m autistic, and I’ve realised I’m asexual. I still want to be close to you, and I want to tell you what that looks like for me.” “I’ve been using the word straight and it isn’t right. I’m bisexual. Nothing about us changes because of it, and I wanted you to know me accurately.” The shape is: the fact, then what it does and does not mean for us, then an invitation to ask. Leaving out the middle part is where partners panic, because they fill the gap with the worst case.
When: earlier than feels comfortable, later than the first conversation. For a new relationship, once you like the person enough to want them to know you accurately, and before the first time it would matter. For a long one, as soon as you have the words, because a partner who learns something true about you years after you knew it feels the years more than the fact.
And for the partner receiving it: the right response is curiosity. “Tell me more about what that means for you” does more than any reassurance. A partner who hears a disclosure and asks a question has told the autistic partner that honesty about their own mind is safe here, and that is the thing that determines whether there will be a next disclosure.
When Identity Changes After a Late Diagnosis
A last section for the adults who are reading this in the months after being identified, when everything is being re-examined at once.
It is common, in my practice close to universal, for a late autism diagnosis to reopen questions the person thought were settled. Orientation, gender, what they actually enjoy, who they have been performing for. This is not the diagnosis causing change. It is the diagnosis removing a reason the person had for not looking. Sigrid had a theory for forty years about why she felt no attraction: everyone was pretending. The diagnosis took the theory away, and the question underneath it, which had always been there, could finally be asked.
Two things I say to clients in this stretch. First, there is no clock on this — the question waited this long; it can be answered slowly, and the answer can be revised. Second, a partner who is also adjusting to the diagnosis may find the identity questions frightening on top of it, and it helps to say plainly that you are looking, not leaving. The two can sound the same from the outside, and only one of them is true.
Where This Leaves You
Autistic sexuality is not a category of problem. It is a population of people who are more likely than most to have found, or to still be finding, the accurate word for themselves, often late, often after a diagnosis explained why the usual route to the word never worked. The research shows more diversity of orientation and more asexuality, and what I see in the room is people relieved to discover that what they thought was a private failure to feel the right thing was an orientation with a name.
Nobody in this post is broken. Some people arrive at themselves through comparison and some arrive through words, and the second route is slower and no less true.
If you are in the middle of finding the word, or you are the partner of someone who has just found it, you can Book a FREE 20-minute “Clarity & Connection” Zoom session. Clinical, unhurried, and without judgment.
I work with neurodivergent adults and neurodiverse couples, and a great many of them found their own word later than they expected to.
Barbara (Blaze) Lazarony, MA, LMFT #151788
Client stories referenced in this post are composites, with identifying details changed to protect privacy.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can autism affect your sexuality?
Autism does not determine orientation, but it changes how a person comes to know it. Most people name their orientation by comparing their inner experience to other people’s, and that comparison is exactly what autism makes unreliable, so autistic adults often name theirs later and through words rather than through comparison. Autistic adults are also more likely than non-autistic adults to identify as something other than heterosexual, and more likely to be asexual.
Is asexuality common in autism?
More common than in the general population. The largest survey of autistic adults’ sexuality found roughly eight times the rate of asexual identification among autistic respondents. Asexuality is an orientation, meaning little or no sexual attraction to others, and says nothing about whether a person has sex, wants a relationship, or enjoys touch. It is not the same as low desire, which can change.
Are autistic people more likely to be LGBTQ+?
Yes, across every study that has asked. One survey found around seventy percent of autistic respondents identified as something other than heterosexual, against around thirty percent of non-autistic respondents. These are self-selected online samples, so take the exact figures loosely, but the direction is consistent. My reading is that autistic adults are less bound by social defaults and more likely to keep looking until a word actually fits.
Does autism cause gender dysphoria?
No. Autistic adults are more likely to be gender-diverse, but the relationship is not causal, and treating a person’s gender as a symptom of their autism is a mistake in both directions. What I see is that a person who never absorbed social defaults automatically is less likely to have absorbed gender as one, and that after a late diagnosis the questions “am I autistic” and “what is my gender” often arrive together because the second was waiting on the first.
How do I tell my partner I’m asexual, or that my orientation has changed?
Say the fact, say what it does and does not mean for the two of you, and invite questions. “I’ve realized I’m asexual. I still want to be close to you, and here is what that looks like for me.” Leaving out the middle part is where partners panic. Say it earlier than feels comfortable, and if you are the partner hearing it, the response that helps most is a question rather than a reassurance.
References
George, R., & Stokes, M. A. (2018). Sexual orientation in autism spectrum disorder. Autism Research, 11(1), 133–141. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.1892
Milton, D. E. M. (2012). On the ontological status of autism: The ‘double empathy problem’. Disability & Society, 27(6), 883–887. https://doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2012.710008
Weir, E., Allison, C., & Baron-Cohen, S. (2021). The sexual health, orientation, and activity of autistic adolescents and adults. Autism Research, 14(11), 2342–2354. https://doi.org/10.1002/aur.2604
