1904 Med. Age (Detroit) 25 Sept. 692 The desexualizing of criminals and degenerates was urged as a sure way to rid the world of undesirable members of the future race.

1952 Jrnl. Amer. Folklore 65 16 As Iroquois women did participate in the torture of prisoners, this story seems to say that doing so amounts to an imaginative desexualizing.

1999 A. Coffey Ethnogr. Self v. 87 This desexualizing of the naturist club reflects a particular aspect of fieldwork and ethnographic writing.

2015 Vancouver Sun (Nexis) 19 May a6 ‘There's a desexualizing of people with disabilities,’ Jesse said. ‘Our society is so uncomfortable with sexuality generally.’

1885 Englishwoman's Rev. 15 Aug. 354 Nor do we need to lend a strained, attentive ear to the laments of those..who believe it [sc. the exercise of the vote] to have a desexualizing power, and dread the time when the grace of womanhood will have disappeared from contact with the ballot-box.

1900 F. E. Bolton Secondary School Syst. Germany vi. 379 Medicine..was looked upon as the ultimatissimum of desexualizing occupations... Experience shows that the womanliness of women physicians is in no danger.

1908 Lit. Digest 18 Jan. 96/1 Some..are beginning to wonder if..the increasing celibacy and decrease of offspring are not symptoms of just such a desexualizing and degenerative process.

1977 S. Sontag Illness as Metaphor ii. 13 Cancer is considered to be de-sexualizing.

2003 N.Y. Mag. 17 Nov. 53/1 The current revival has a scrupulously dedicated Maggie in Ashley Judd, despite an unflatteringly desexualizing wig.