Asexuality has been criminalized

Transcript

Courtney: Hello everyone, and welcome back. My name is Courtney, I’m here with my spouse Royce. Together we are The Ace Couple, and today we’re talking about a very, very serious issue. Because for the first time in history that I personally am aware of, a country on this earth of ours has outright criminalized asexuality. There is a new penal code in Niger which, if a majority of the news articles out right now, if their titles are to be taken at face value, it just criminalizes homosexuality. This is new for this country. Of course there is a lot of stigma and prejudice in this country around the queer community in general.

Courtney: But it is the first time it has been outright criminalized with such penalties here. Almost every article I’m seeing says things such as, military in Niger bans homosexuality, Niger criminalizes same-sex intimacy, arrests made over anti-gay law. But according to AP News, The new penal code punishes anyone who, quote, commits or attempts to commit an immodest or unnatural act, or practices lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, or asexual acts. So this is a blanket criminalization of all queer people. All queer acts. They go on to report, quote, this same penalty is applicable to persons who officiated the marriage, to the witness of the alleged spouses, as well as to persons who have given their consent for the celebration of the marriage and to the organizers. So this is extreme and far-reaching. Not only are they criminalizing queer people, they are criminalizing normalizing the marriage of queer people, and anybody who just celebrates?

Royce: Is in the vicinity?

Courtney: Yeah, anyone who knows a queer person.

Royce: Well, these are broad-reaching and vaguely written enough that they can basically use this as an excuse for whatever.

Courtney: Exactly. Because I have already, over the last couple of days, told some people in my personal life that, hey, yes, it is on the law books now, asexuality, among other queer identities, is criminalized in Niger now. And you wanna guess what every single one of them has said? Some variation of, how do they prove that? Or, how do they define that? And the fact of the matter is, as with any anti-queer laws, any anti-ace laws, that’s certainly not a gotcha. It’s not like, aha, I dare you to prove that I am asexual, because it’s never been about the act or the lack of an act. It is about the people who are not stepping in line and conforming to what those in power want them to do? Because that’s often what we hear, right? When we do talk about— even though I don’t know of any other countries who have explicitly criminalized asexuality as an identity, asexual people as humans, there are certainly pieces of legislation that affect us, some more directly than others.

Courtney: But we’ve talked about here in our own country how over half of the states still have marriage consummation laws the book. And that’s the same thing every time we talk about that as an issue that should be addressed. Everyone goes like, well, how would they even know? How would they even know? How would they even prove it? And very often this does come from— sometimes it’s just from a place of bafflement, but sometimes it comes from sort of a bad faith questioning of, well, no one’s going to take this law seriously. No one’s ever going to start enforcing these laws. And with how many articles and quotes I’ve seen from actual legal professionals— lawyers, judges, scholars of the law— who will write about how, oh, people who are marrying platonically might not understand the legal ramifications of this, there are legal scholars in our country who are talking about this.

Courtney: And although I don’t know of any instances where this has been directly litigated on an individual or a couple level, it’s an example of a prejudice framework that is in place. So as with any law that people consider to be antiquated, people aren’t enforcing it until they are— until they do. And that is why protection laws are so important for communities who face prejudice, who are more likely to have their rights infringed upon. I will never stop talking about Roe v. Wade being overturned in our country. So many people who were raising the alarm bells about how there were still anti-abortion laws in individual states that were in place. Several people would say like, oh, well, you know, it’s, it’s federally protected now because of Roe v. Wade. So that’s not a problem. It’s just an antiquated law. It’s basically dormant.

Courtney: But the second Roe v. Wade got overturned, all of those laws triggered right back into place. And now we have far too many states who have abortion bans. You think the same doesn’t apply to cases of gay marriage? Think again. You think there aren’t still sodomy laws on the books in various places? Think again. The reason why people do get complacent with some of these laws is because they see protective laws, newer protective laws that have been put in place, anti-discrimination laws, Supreme Court decisions like Obergefell v. Hodges, they see these protective acts as overriding the previous discriminatory legislation that might still be on the books in a variety of places.

Courtney: But one thing that I think is unique when we talk about asexual identity as compared to, say, gay identity is that asexuality doesn’t have protective laws in almost any places, certainly not at the federal level. There are a couple of cities, not even statewide, but cities in the US that include asexuality in a broader sweep of the full queer community. But that’s certainly nowhere near enough, especially when we think about all of the other concerns that our community might face. We’ve talked at length in the past about conversion therapy being something that the ace community is at an extremely high risk for undergoing or being offered. And yet, most conversion therapy bans or protections don’t explicitly include us. But that’s of course going back to our own country and just drawing some threads between the anti-ace discrimination that we’ve been talking about for years.

Courtney: But let’s go back to this law in Niger and see what these penalties include. And again, I suppose for the sake of argument, let’s do the thought experiment real quick about what is an asexual act. Most people are going to think, well, they can’t prove a negative, they aren’t literally gonna be in your bedroom. But look. If this is a blanket ban on queerness, we’re talking about queer social gatherings, nonprofits that help the queer community. Is proudly displaying the ace flag considered an asexual act? I’m sure a comp— a country as punitive as this one would say that yes, pride flags almost certainly would count as an LGBTQIA+ Any sort of open identifying or organizing is kind of obvious there, but it also makes abusive relationship scenarios especially dangerous. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Courtney: Is an asexual act not getting married by the right time, by the right age? Is an asexual act a woman who doesn’t want to have sex with her husband? Is that now potentially punishable by— let’s see here— 5 and 10 years in prison, up to 10 years in prison and a fine. I actually want to look up what that fine is. Let me see if I can see. It doesn’t say so here in the AP article, but I did find it here on Frontline Defenders. And all of the articles I’m referencing will be linked in the usual places, the show notes on our website as well as the description box if you’re listening on YouTube. So I’m gonna have to do a currency conversion here. The fine is up to 100 million francs, which is over $174,000 US dollars. And actually, according to this article, the LGBT acts are, yes, up to 10 years in prison, up to 100 million francs. Or managing, operating, or financing an organization supporting the LGBTQIA+ community with up to 20 years imprisonment and fines up to 500 million francs. That is over $870,000. And twice as much prison time. Not for being queer yourself, but for supporting the queer community. Financing any organizations that want to help the queer community. Wow.

Courtney: In some sense, does that mean it’s— the criminal penalties are even more severe for being an ally than being queer yourself? Yikes. So on this article at the Frontline Defender, if you want to dig into it a little bit yourself, it tells a little bit about the recent history of politics here in Niger and sort of some key pieces of information leading up to how this criminal code got enacted. But it seems like there were two young women who had been charged with public indecency after their private personal relationship became known to the broader public. And last year, August 2025, a judge actually acquitted the 2 young women and subsequently lost his job for doing so. And so it is always, you know, the good old slippery slope. I mean, when there is a rise in hate, when there is political persecution, those who hate those who are in power are going to use whatever tools are at their disposal to oppress the people they hate, their political opponents, anybody deemed inconvenient.

Courtney: This often does happen through personnel overturn, through the court system, legal systems, or slowly repealing various rights before outright criminalization happens. And while our hearts are with all of the queer people of Niger and the people who love them, it is very important that we do become more aware of what our communities are up against internationally. Because even though it may not ever feel like enough, even though it may feel like we don’t necessarily have opportunities to directly help from where we are in our personal experiences, there are other things we can open our minds to, to be aware of, to try to help mitigate the harm in any ways we can.

Courtney: I’m recalling now, we have talked about this before as well, how there was an asexual woman whose family had lived in Guinea and Senegal who was facing forced marriage and threats of corrective rape. Her name is Jade. At the time, she was 26. She is a self— a sex-repulsed asexual woman and attempted to flee her home country to go elsewhere, attempting to seek asylum on these grounds that based on her identity, she was under threat. She was facing corrective rape. She was facing forced marriage. But when she tried to look into her options for seeking asylum in other countries, she found she was not the first asexual person who had attempted to seek asylum in the Netherlands.

Courtney: This was a case of someone trying to flee from Algeria, and the Dutch council ruled that asexuality is not punishable. So it doesn’t count. It doesn’t— it’s not criminalized enough. It’s not punished bad enough for us to grant you asylum. And remember when I mentioned earlier that there are a handful of cities in the US that do mention asexuality? Well, New York is one of them. Their Sexual Orientation Nondiscrimination Act, dating all the way back to 2003, actually explicitly does mention asexuality. That I would consider a very early example of specifically naming asexuality in some attempt at a protective law. So Jade attempted to go to the US, New York specifically, where she was told asexuality is not grounds for asylum.

Courtney: So just because this is a very blatant, new, and specific way in which asexuality is being criminalized on the law books does not mean that asexual people have not been put in danger, that they have not had their human rights infringed upon, that they have not faced a decreased quality in life from the social stigma in the places they grow up in. And we have a history of people attempting to leave countries for better places. But whereas other areas in the queer spectrum might have laws on the books where countries would gladly accept, accept them in, under asylum, asexuality has been specifically excluded, and that is why we need more protections.

Courtney: And I would argue vehemently that these protections should be put in place before we reach the bottom of the slippery slope. I think everyone— allies, other people under the queer community umbrella, lawyers, judges, lawmakers— need to listen and take seriously our concerns when our community asks for what we need, when we ask for help, when we talk about the ways in which we are treated as lesser, when we warn people about how things are tangibly getting worse in a lot of places in the world right now. The rise in far-right fascism, not only in our country but throughout the entire world, is devastating. It is terrifying. You know, I, I also remember having a conversation a few years back telling someone that asexual people may not be able to get driver’s licenses in Russia. This was someone who, before this conversation came in, said asexuals are not discriminated against. Blanket statement: nowhere on earth are asexual people discriminated against.

Courtney: And unfortunately, when someone’s coming at it from that extremely wrong of a viewpoint, they are not looking to hear about social issues or stigma. They want laws on the books. They want to hear, you are criminalized. You are a criminal just for being who you are. But when I do say, no, as written, people who are transgender, bigender, asexual, or cross-dressing may be banned from driving. They may be denied a license, or their licenses may be revoked. Now, this was a particularly bad faith conversation I had, so that amounted to, well, that’s in Russia, so that’s not even here, and that’s probably not even real, they probably aren’t even enforcing that. That good old-fashioned, the law might be there, but they’re probably not enforcing it.

Courtney: There’s always gonna be a goalpost to move if someone is hell-bent on not taking your legitimate legal and human rights concerns seriously. And that was many years ago now that Russia enacted this. And at the time, revoking someone’s license based on who they are, completely unheard of here in the US. That would never happen. Now, just this year, Kansas, the state we live in, revoked hundreds of licenses of transgender Kansans. I have personal friends whose licenses were revoked. Outright canceled overnight because they are trans.

Royce: For those of you living outside of the United States, a driver’s license over here is the most common form of government identification.

Courtney: You need it for just about anything. Like, you need it to vote. All of a sudden, all of these transgender Kansans who, unless they go and get their license reinstated with an incorrect gender marker will be ineligible to vote. They did birth certificates as well, which is something that you need in order to get a license. And these are issues that I do take incredibly seriously since this is a place where I am directly right here. I know the people being directly impacted by this bigoted legislation. Of course I was doing everything I possibly can for my immediately surrounding community and speaking out against this hateful law.

Courtney: I did, however, this year have someone with the audacity to tell me as I was speaking out against asexual-specific issues to calm down ’cause it’s not as if anyone’s revoking your license. This was, by the way, not a trans person even. This was, this was ally of a person who’s like, why are you talking about ace issues when clearly trans people are the ones being targeted right now? Yet another bad faith argument that I don’t think— well, you know, in Russia they did it to asexuals first, now over here they’re doing it to transgender people.

Courtney: And I don’t, for all of these reasons, recommend just like arguing and debating people who are going to have this mindset. Because as I said, if they are intent on diminishing your very real legal and human rights concerns, they are going to move the goalposts every single time, and it is not worth it. But for us in our community, we do need to be very aware of these things. Every time hateful legislation in or out of our country is enacted, it didn’t happen in a vacuum. There were warning signs leading up to it, and there were communities at risk who were speaking out against it, or at the very least terrified. About it. Obviously not everybody is safe to speak out against these concerns if they’re right in the heart of it.

Courtney: And it is so upsetting because so many of these people who will deny and diminish and so many people who will look at all of these news articles talking about how Niger has criminalized homosexuality, which is only a very small sliver of the reality of this. We’ll often look at it and say like, well, that’s horrible. That’s horrible. But at least it’s not happening here. Or what could I possibly do about this? But so many areas of law within our own countries can have international implications. And just as I mentioned asylum laws being one where asexual people have a recorded history of not being taken seriously. Equally so, see immigration laws.

Courtney: Obviously immigration is an enormous concern, a growing concern in the US right now, because anti-immigrant sentiment is rising alongside anti-queer sentiment. You starting to see how maybe all of this is the same picture. But we’ve talked about this before as well, that for many marriage-based green cards or visas, not only in the US but also in the UK, we’ve talked about it out of Australia, a myriad other countries, immigration officials asking invasive questions about the sex lives of people immigrating. Because of all of the allonormative understandings that come with a traditional view of marriage, that it is to be sexual.

Courtney: That normative stance has not gone away just because, in our country, same-sex marriage is federally legal. Because that marriage is still implied and understood to be a sexual one. And because we have talked about this in several episodes, I believe at this point, I’m not going to get into all of the details right now. But if any of our newer listeners are here and any of this is a surprise or a concern to you, definitely recommend going back. 2023, July 2023, no less, 3 years ago, we did an entire episode called Marriage Consummation Laws: Sham Marriages, Immigration, and Asexual Inequality.

Courtney: And the show notes on that have over a dozen links that we reference to cite our sources. So do I expect that there will be more laws like this enacted? In different countries? Unfortunately, yes. Do I expect that there is also going to be an equal reaction of political energy and protection trying to make safety nets for asexual people to be able to claim asylum, to make it easier for asexual people to immigrate based on marriage, to remove all of these harmful notions of what a marriage is and needs to be, or what a person is and needs to be? Unfortunately, no. I did talk about recently following the report from the Human Rights Campaign that shows that asexual adults in the US are feeling noticeably less acceptance than we were even a year ago.

Courtney: I have been really feeling it lately. I have. And I have been feeling it from other queer people more and more. I have found myself in more rooms of predominantly queer people where blatantly acephobic things are stated. And when I challenge them, I have felt more pushback than historically I have. I wish that in situations where our queer community is having our rights taken away, much like the licenses being revoked for transgender Kansans, I wish the entire queer community could all come together and rally around each other and form protections for each other. And there are wonderful, beautiful, magnificent pockets of places where that absolutely does happen.

Courtney: But sometimes in marginalized communities like ours, as things start to get worse, everything starts to feel like even our human rights or our activism or our attention is a limited, finite resource. And if we’re giving it to one, then the others won’t have it. It feels like a big piece of pie. And as things do get worse and things do get scarier, unfortunately, sometimes people do, at least here in the US, go back to our individualistic ways of I’m going to fight for me and mine first, when I think a more communal net of protection and education and awareness is how we’re going to get through these times. As they get worse before they get better. A rising tide lifts all ships, as they say.

Courtney: That is true for positive concepts, but unfortunately it is also true for bigotry. It does grow like a contagion, and that’s why we need to stick together. So that is going to do it for today. I am going to leave you all off as usual with our featured Marketplace vendor of the week. Today we are giving a huge shout-out to Portal Mania, a collection of speculative short stories that explore love, relationships, asexuality, motherhood, and of course, portals, by ace author Debbie Urbanski. Really, really charming little book. Links to find it are gonna be in the show notes on our website or the description box if you’re listening on YouTube. And that’ll take you to a bookshop.org page.

Courtney: So I highly encourage you to consider using one of our fabulous ace-owned bookshops as your go-to bookstore when you order through Bookshop. Our options are Main Street Books Monroe, based in Washington, Rainy Day Paperback Exchange, based in Connecticut, and Tea Berry Books, which at the time is exclusively virtual for ordering through Bookshop, but the goal and dream is to open a physical bookstore one day. Because my goodness, all this talk of asexual discrimination and— we didn’t even get into all of the asexual book bans. But we’ve talked about it before, so you can always go back and find those old episodes. And inevitably we’ll talk about it again someday. Because the problem isn’t fixed yet and we have much, much work to do. As always, thank you all so much for being here and we will talk to you all next time.