In 2006, researchers at the University of Canterbury in Aotearoa New Zealand ran a nationwide study on ethical consumption. It was a study about shopping. What people bought, what they refused to buy, what they would pay more for.
Somewhere in the responses, a group of people started answering a question nobody had asked.
They were mostly women. What they volunteered, unprompted, was that they had sexual relationships and long-term partnerships only with other people who refused to use animals. Not as a rule handed to them from outside. As a description of who they actually wanted.
Annie Potts (opens in a new tab), now a professor at the University of Canterbury and co-director of the New Zealand Centre for Human-Animal Studies, gave the thing a name. The word was vegansexual.
By August 2007, it was everywhere.
What happened next
The coverage was a fortnight of jokes.
The story that travelled was simple: vegans refuse to have sex with meat eaters. It was framed as absurd, as sanctimony, as the obvious endpoint of an ethics already suspected of moral superiority.
It moved fast. A survey of 157 people in New Zealand reached an American magazine on 31 July, and two US national news outlets the following day.
Forty-eight hours in 2007
- 31 July The rise of the “vegansexual”(opens in a new tab) Salon
- 1 August Report: Vegans Shun Sex with Meat-Eaters(opens in a new tab) Fox News
- 1 August ‘Vegansexuals’ Do It With Each Other(opens in a new tab) ABC News
Potts and her co-author Jovian Parry went back over the reaction in a peer-reviewed paper three years later. Their summary of what the backlash called vegansexual women is worth reading in the original: “(sexual) losers, cowards, deviants, failures and bigots” (opens in a new tab).
And in all the noise, the actual finding vanished.
From a shopping survey to a word with no symbol
Twenty years, one misreading
- 2006 A study about ethical consumption asks what people buy
- Aug 2007 A fortnight of jokes, worldwide
- 2010 The peer-reviewed paper lands. It is about women's desire
- 2026 A word since 2007, and still no symbol
What the research actually said
The paper Potts published with Parry in 2010 has a title that tells you exactly where the argument sits: Vegan Sexuality: Challenging Heteronormative Masculinity through Meat-free Sex (opens in a new tab), in Feminism & Psychology 20(1), pages 53 to 72.
It is a paper about women’s desire.
The argument runs roughly like this. Eating animals in Western culture is bound tightly to one particular idea of manhood. Steak as reward. Barbecue as ritual. Protein as proof. To be a man is, in that story, to eat animals, and to decline to eat animals is to be diminished as a man. You can watch the same logic running today every time someone types “soy boy”.
So when a woman says she does not desire men who eat animals, she is not being fussy about menus. She is declining an entire model of masculinity, and she is doing it in the one arena where women’s preferences have always been policed hardest. Who they want. The paper argues that vegan sexuality resists the heteronormative and heterosexist policing of female desire.
Read that way, the 2007 pile-on stops looking like a funny news cycle and starts looking like the entirely predictable response to women setting terms.
First, the thing everyone gets wrong
Veganism is not a diet. It is an ethical position about not using animals, and it does not stop at the plate. It covers the wool jumper, the leather sofa, the shampoo tested on a beagle, the day at the races.
Two words people use interchangeably
Plenty of people are one without being the other, but they are not the same thing, and the difference is the whole reason vegansexuality exists as a concept at all.
If veganism were only a menu preference, refusing to sleep with someone over it would be roughly as reasonable as refusing to sleep with someone who puts pineapple on pizza. Funny, but not a serious position.
The difference is why the question is interesting at all.
Preference, not orientation, and why the distinction matters
Potts framed vegansexuality as a disposition or an inclination, arrived at on ethical grounds. Not an orientation in the way that being gay or bisexual is an orientation.
That is descriptive, not a downgrade. Being vegansexual sits alongside your sexuality rather than replacing it. You can be a vegansexual lesbian. A vegansexual straight man. Someone who is vegansexual and completely uninterested in any label beyond that one.
Nor does it mean chosen and therefore trivial. Plenty of things people arrive at through experience and ethics turn out to be immovable in practice. Ask anyone who has tried to talk themselves back into an attraction they no longer have.
Where the distinction genuinely earns its keep is the discrimination question, which comes up every single time and deserves a straight answer instead of a dodge.
Refusing someone because of their race, disability or gender identity targets something they did not choose and cannot change. Vegansexuality responds to something else: what a person actively does, and the ethical position behind it. That is a stance, not an accident of birth, and people are already allowed preferences about a partner’s stances. Most of us would not blink at someone who could not fancy a person whose politics they found cruel. This sits in that category.
The preference is defensible. How someone holds it is a separate question, and the same word covers quiet self-knowledge and contempt for everyone outside the tent.
What it looks like in an actual life
Strip out the theory and here is the practical shape of it.
Vegansexual people are not, in the main, auditing anybody’s shopping. What they describe is more basic. Intimacy involves bodies. Bodies involve what goes into them and what goes on them, and for some people the connection between the two does not politely switch itself off at the bedroom door.
You are entitled to find that strange. You are not in much of a position to tell someone they have got their own attraction wrong.
The daily difficulty is not rejection anyway. It is repetition. On an app built for everybody, a vegansexual person has the same conversation several times a week, forever. Explaining. Justifying. Watching someone decide whether to be offended. Not one dramatic incompatibility, a hundred small ones, until the whole exercise stops being worth the effort.
That is the honest argument for a dedicated space. Nobody is claiming to be better than anyone. They are tired.
There has never been a symbol for it, so we made one
Every identity in this territory has a mark. Venus and Mars for gender. Doubled and interlocked for who you are drawn to. An X on a stroke for non-binary. These symbols are old, they are mostly unowned, and they work precisely because anyone can draw one on the back of a receipt.
Vegansexuality has had a word since 2007 and no symbol at all.
So we designed one, built inside that same glyph family rather than as a flag: two interlocking circles under a single sprout. Two plant people, drawn to each other, genders unspecified, because a vegansexual person can be any gender and drawn to any gender. One sprout between them rather than one each, because the thing they have in common is the point.
Like the glyphs it sits beside, it is meant to be drawn rather than licensed: on a profile, at the end of a message, on the back of a receipt.
Where we come into it
We should be straight about our interest, given this is a piece about a word published by a company.
Grazer is a dating and friend-finding app for vegans, vegetarians and plant-based people. Everybody on it already sits on the same side of this. Which means the conversation a vegansexual person has been having on repeat for years is a conversation that never has to start.
That is the product. The rest of this is history that deserved better than it got in 2007.