When Sophie was hospitalized for kidney problems in January, her doctor insisted on ordering a pregnancy test. This is standard practice for many patients presenting to the emergency room, but Sophie knew it was unnecessary for her. At 24, she had never had sex and wasn’t planning to.

As someone who identifies with the asexual community, she is averse to sex. Yet her doctor wasn’t familiar with asexuality and didn’t believe her until a case manager was assigned to handle the dispute, she said.

“I understand that for a CT scan, you can never be too sure, but the way it was approached was absolutely not okay,” Sophie, who is using a pseudonym to protect her privacy, told Salon in a phone interview. “He absolutely would not believe me, and the way he worded it was like, ‘Well, everyone lies about that.’”

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Ultimately Sophie, a musician pursuing her master's degree in criminology, was given nephrostomy tubes to treat her kidney problems and discharged. But the experience stuck with her. The doctor’s office is a vulnerable space, and to be disbelieved after disclosing her sexuality there left her feeling like her identity was invalid.

Sophie’s umbilical cord never closed when she was born and scar tissue build-ups have left her with urinary problems that worsened over the past decade. As someone who has been in and out of doctors' offices throughout her life, her experience in January wasn’t the only time her asexuality has been dismissed or misunderstood. During another kidney treatment, doctors were concerned she was hemorrhaging but waited three hours to get a CT scan because they were waiting for pregnancy test results.

“It just makes me feel really invalidated and helpless,” Sophie said. “It feels like if I make one wrong move, they’re going to discharge me because of my sexuality.”

"It’s important to study asexuality because it allows us to understand sexuality better."

People who are asexual experience little or no sexual attraction to others. The ace spectrum includes asexuals, who experience no sexual attraction to others; demisexuals, who experience sexual attraction but only after forming a close bond; graysexuals, who may experience infrequent sexual attraction; and other identities. Asexuality is distinct from aromanticism, in which people experience little or no romantic desire, although there is some overlap between these communities, says KJ Cerankowski, an American and gender sexual studies at Oberlin College who studies asexuality.

“There are different ways people experience their asexuality,” Cerankowski told Salon in a phone interview. “Some experience it as something that feels innate and something that might be lifelong, whereas some people experience it in a temporary period of their life.”

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Anecdotally, people in the asexual community report their identities are pathologized by medical professionals, who order unnecessary tests or fail to perform necessary screenings because patients report feeling little or no sexual desire. When people on the ace spectrum turn to their doctors for help understanding their identities, they can be met with stigma and stereotypes. Some are misdiagnosed with conditions like depression and their asexuality is seen as a symptom that needs to be fixed. Flibanserin, a drug prescribed to increase sex drive, has been described by bioethicists as the "asexual equivalent of conversion therapy."

One percent of the population was thought to identify as asexual based on a 2004 survey by Anthony Bogaert, a professor at Brock University who authored one of the first books on the subject, "Understanding Asexuality." However, that data didn’t include other people in the ace community who identify as demisexual or graysexual, and other data sets have........

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