Outness and social–emotional adjustment among asexual and demisexual adolescents

Abstract

Adolescents who identify as asexual (i.e., do not experience sexual attraction) remain understudied despite a recent increase in studies carried out among asexual adults. The present study provides data on the frequency of asexual identities among adolescents with attention to diversity across the asexuality spectrum, including a focus on demisexual adolescents. We utilized a national sample of 17,112 LGBQA + adolescents aged 13–17—of which 773 (4.5%) identified as asexual and 105 (0.6%) identified as demisexual. We compared those identifying as asexual and those identifying as demisexual on outness and social–emotional adjustment. In addition, we tested differences between asexual adolescents and allosexual sexual minority youth (SMY) on their sexual identity outness and social–emotional adjustment, and whether the associations differed by sexual identity. We found that asexual adolescents were out to significantly fewer people and experienced fewer depressive symptoms than demisexual adolescents. Asexual adolescents reported lower outness, greater depressive symptoms, and lower self-esteem compared to allosexual SMY. Greater outness was associated with higher self-esteem across asexual and allosexual SMY. These findings suggest increasing identification as asexual among youth compared to previous generations and point to greater social–emotional adjustment challenges for asexual compared with allosexual SMY.