Sexual Orientation: What It Is, What It Isn't

Everyone has heard the phrase “sexual orientation,” yet few people ever get a careful explanation of what it actually means. Pin the definition down first, and many arguments suddenly have somewhere solid to stand.

What it is: an enduring pattern of attraction

Sexual orientation is a person’s enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, or sexual attraction to people of particular genders. The two load-bearing words are attraction and enduring.

It is not the same thing as behavior. Someone who has never dated, never had an intimate relationship, still has an orientation — the way a person who stays silent still has a native language. And behavior in a particular situation doesn’t determine orientation either: a fleeting crush on a same-sex friend in adolescence, a dare at a party — none of that defines anyone.

Nor is it only about sex. What many people notice first is who they want to be near, who they daydream about, whose message they wait for — emotional and romantic attraction are part of orientation too. For some people, sexual and romantic attraction don’t even point the same way, which is exactly why later models began measuring them separately (more on that below).

What it isn’t

Not a choice. You can choose whom to date and whether to tell anyone, but you cannot decide your way into or out of attraction itself. Try the thought experiment: think of the last person you were drawn to. Was there a moment where you decided? Straight people never chose to be straight; gay people never chose either.

Not an illness. The WHO removed homosexuality from its classification of mental disorders in ICD-10, adopted in 1990. China followed with CCMD-3 in 2001, which no longer treats homosexuality itself as a disorder — a detail worth knowing, since many people assume China never took this step. These were not concessions to politeness; they were professional conclusions drawn from decades of clinical evidence that homosexuality itself involves no impairment. The full story is in our myth page on “is it an illness”.

Not correctable. What isn’t a disease needs no cure. Mainstream medical and psychological bodies do not endorse so-called conversion therapy and have stated plainly that it causes harm. The evidence is laid out in the conversion therapy myth page.

Born this way, or made this way? Science’s honest answer

This is the most-asked question, and it deserves an unhedged answer: science has not found a single cause of sexual orientation. There is no one “gay gene,” and no style of parenting has ever been shown to determine a child’s orientation. Current evidence points to a complex interplay of innate biological factors and environment, with the mechanisms still under study.

But “cause not fully understood” is not the same as “nothing is known.” Two things are well established: orientation is not something a person chooses, and not something anyone is talked, taught, or seduced into — not a parent’s fault, not caused by media, not the result of an encounter. Handedness makes a good analogy: to this day we can’t fully explain why someone is left-handed, but nobody thinks they chose it — and nobody still argues for tying the left hand down to “fix” it, though history did try exactly that.

One more thing worth noticing: the premise that “only inborn traits deserve respect” is itself shaky. Religious belief isn’t inborn, and it is protected anyway. Respect does not require proof that you had no choice.

Does it change? On fluidity

Some people’s pattern of attraction stays remarkably stable for life; others find that it shifts over the years. Psychologist Lisa Diamond and other researchers, following people over long periods, named this phenomenon sexual fluidity.

Here is the sleight of hand to watch for: fluidity means spontaneous change, not changeability by outside force. Weather changes, but you cannot order tomorrow to rain. A person’s attractions may drift naturally with time, yet no method exists to bend them to someone else’s will — which is precisely why conversion practices fail and injure. The longer discussion is at “can orientation be changed?”.

From a line to a grid: how the maps evolved

The history of orientation models is a history of looking more closely.

The binary era. For a long time the map had two boxes — “normal” and “not” — and bisexual and asexual people simply did not exist on it.

The Kinsey scale (1948). Drawing on thousands of interviews, Kinsey’s team proposed a continuum from 0 (exclusively heterosexual) to 6 (exclusively homosexual), with a wide middle ground and a separate category X for those with no sexual responses. Its message was radical in its simplicity: this is a spectrum, not two boxes.

The two-axis model (1980). Psychologist Michael Storms spotted the Kinsey scale’s blind spot: it puts same-sex and other-sex attraction at opposite ends of one line, as if more of one must mean less of the other. Storms split them into two independent axes — a person can score high on both (bisexuality) or low on both (the asexual spectrum). For the first time, asexuality had its own place on the map.

The Klein grid (introduced 1978). Fritz Klein went further: attraction alone is too crude a variable. His grid measures seven dimensions — sexual attraction, sexual behavior, fantasies, emotional preference, social preference, lifestyle, and self-identification — each rated for past, present, and ideal. It acknowledged something quietly liberating: these dimensions can disagree with each other, and they can move over time, and both are normal.

Remember, though: the map is not the territory. The maps grew finer to help you see where you are — not to hand you more boxes to squeeze into.

Want to see your own coordinates?

If you’re curious what these models look like applied to yourself, try the orientation exploration test (a gentle start), the attraction axes test (the Storms model), or the Klein grid (the most detailed). None of them is a verdict, and no answer is ever locked in — you can retake them, and you are allowed to change your mind.

If exploring this brings up stress or loneliness, support resources are here whenever you need them.