In Euripides’ play, Medea, the Ancient Greek playwright wrote that, if one’s sexual life is good, “you think you have everything”. But if things are out of place in that area “you will consider your best and truest interests most hateful”. The idea that a person’s sex life defines their health and happiness persisted through the dark ages, the enlightenment and even the sexual revolution of the 1960s. In 1942, for example, Philip Wylie wrote that the sex instinct is “one of the three or four prime movers of all that we do and are and dream”.

The inference is, then, that a person devoid of sexual appetite is also devoid of dreams, of action, perhaps even of being. A 2002 article published in an annual magazine from the National Religious Vocation Conference in the US made the viewpoint explicit. ‘What do you call a person who is asexual?’ posed the article’s author. “Answer: Not a person. Asexual people do not exist. Sexuality is a gift from God and thus a fundamental part of our human identity.”

Coyness around asexuality is, then, understandable. A recent study from researchers at Yale University asked 169 self-identified asexual people to write an open-ended account of the development of their asexual identity and the disclosure of that identity to others. In many cases, the people interviewed described their revelations being met by friends and family with disbelief. One respondent was told: “You’re not a tree.” Another that it was “just a phase” and that they’d feel differently once they met the “right person”, an argument long and damagingly used to try to convince homosexual people that they are, in fact, lovelorn heterosexuals.