Sexual orientation

Sexual orientation describes an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and sexual attraction: toward a different gender, the same gender, more than one gender — or little to no sexual attraction at all (the asexual spectrum). It is the “SO” in the SOGIE framework, answering “who am I drawn to” — a different question from “what is my gender,” which belongs to gender identity.

The mainstream medical and psychological consensus is that orientation is not chosen and cannot be changed by outside pressure. The World Health Organization removed homosexuality from the International Classification of Diseases in 1990; China’s own psychiatric classification, CCMD-3, stopped treating homosexuality itself as a disorder in 2001. For a fuller walkthrough, start with Orientation basics.

Register note: in Chinese, 性倾向 (xingqingxiang) is the standard term in academic and advocacy writing, while 性取向 (xingquxiang) is the everyday variant — they mean the same thing and are used interchangeably.

Common misuse: calling it a “sexual preference,” which implies a swappable choice; and conflating it with gender identity — being transgender is not an orientation, and trans people may be straight, gay, bi, or asexual.