careless/clueless/closeted
It isn't that she'd describe herself as asexual, necessarily. Or, at least, she gets the sense from all of her fairly-conservative-despite-its-liberalness upbringing that if she were to be asexual, she'd be completely repulsed, put the whole thing completely off her radar.
She'd either have time for it, or she wouldn't. She's friends with whales because she doesn't judge (observably) sentient beings by their intelligence any more than she'd judge those whose experiences seem completely removed from her own, and because she likes helping people.
Men? Women?
When she's friends with men, she often finds it's them who're being helped, whether they know it or not.
She helps herself by hanging back.
Women like her. Her senses of self, selflessness, self-expression - very pretty, but not too bold, because everybody needs palatable, at the end of the day. Not that she should bow to people who step back if she gets a little too into the whale talk and the whaling ire, but she understands if it's...intimidating.
Gosh, how many beautiful women filled with beautiful curiosity, about marine biology or otherwise, has she seen and been just a little bit too afraid to reach out for?
Men aren't like that. They present as they are: sometimes there's something special about them, sometimes not. They're free because...something about the patriarchy.
Gosh.
How many?
By the time she leaves the twentieth century, she's got more than just "nobody here" to make her grateful for it. Really, there's only so much abandoning of bras underneath pastel pink turtlenecks with khakis and keds she can do to signal her particular relationship with femininity and those who possess it, or certain absences thereof.
Pretty likely, the kind of company she kept, with the amount of thinking she's done, could have lead her to some pretty safe confidants. It'd have been nice, to have a real two-way conversation about it, while it was still something that needed talking about.
Still. The HMS Bounty isn't going back. Neither is she.