Philosophical question about Sexual orientation

[mika.m]

I have read so many things about sexuality and sexual orientation in many books and websites. I've been learning about sexual orientation and I noticed people have two different opinions on this subject. Someone says it's changing and another one says we're learning it.
I have different opinions about both of them.
"Changing" seems queerphobic and I don't like this idea. Basically it's a good excuse for queerphobes who are trying to say that your sexual orientation is changing by the environment and if your environment is gay then you'll be gay too, so your sexuality is being controlled by the media and other people. Well it's absolutely wrong we have born with our sexual orientation and we're exploring it.
But as we explore, we sometimes identify ourselves with so many labels even the repeat ones and it never ends. Also we can't ignore the fluidity of sexual orientation.
These are make me confused.

Is our sexual orientation changing over time, or are we just getting to know it better?

[Heather]

Hey there, mika.m. I think this is a really interesting thing to talk about!

My two cents as both someone who has studied sexuality and observed people with it for decades -- and as a queer person entering their late 50s -- is that it is, indeed, fluid, rather than fixed, with us just discovering it as we go. To suggest it's fixed, and we are just finding out about it, dismisses an awful lot of people's life experiences. For example, someone who has a life phase where they are attracted to everyone, then one where it's mostly or only women, then one where it's mostly or only men, then another where they go back to it being mostly everyone, then another where it's only women...well, to say all of that was just about getting to the last stop on the orientation train during life really discounts the relationships and experience of someone like that, you know?

It also discounts the impact what interactions or relationships -- and the people involved -- people have during their lives, and how much sexual identity often has a lot to do with who those people are, and what interactions/relationships someone has with them. For instance, I have known so many people in life and work who will say that they don't even feel like they have an orientation so much as that they are attracted to the individuals they are attracted to, whoever those people are, whatever their gender. If someone like that only ever had one partner, you'd be assuming a lot to define their orientation on who that one partner was, if you catch my drift. Unless you believe all of our relationships and sexual interactions are pre-destined, or that our identities aren't influenced by those people and experiences (something we know to be true for most people: in fact, one big thing we know from the study of human sexuality is how much influence things in our childhoods tend to have on our adult sexuality), it just doesn't make sense to suggest our sexual identities are somehow fixed at birth.

If it helps to hear something personal, I can tell you with certainty that there's no "end" sexuality or orientation for me I am going to tell you was my orientation's final resting place when I'm done with life -- my sexual life and my sense of sexual identity has simply been too varied over all that time, something which will be the case for many people by the time they at least reach the second half of life. There only has ever been fluidity of both how I feel and how I understand myself and my relationships, something that has been the case since I was at least 10 years old.

I also don't think we have to worry that the understanding of sexuality as fluid makes things easy for people who are anti-queer. After all, we're not just talking about queer people when we talk about fluidity and sexuality, we're talking about everyone. It's also usually fluid to at least some degree for people who did or even always will identify as straight. How we frame sexuality and our sexualities should be based on what's real for everyone and for us, not on what we think will give us the best fuel for arguing with bigots. <3

[Straif]

Hi mika.m
The answer to your question is "Yes." Sexuality is indeed fluid, but it's also true that we may feel more connected to different aspects of our identity at different times in our lives. It's not a linear process. Fortunately, we can use whatever words we want to describe ourselves, and they can change or overlap however we want. We don't have to pick one. For example, I'm pretty ambivalent about whether I describe myself as nonbinary, gender non-conforming, genderqueer, or genderfluid since I feel like they all apply to me, but the distinctions between those labels might be important to someone else. What matters in all of this is agency. Every person has the right to make decisions about their gender and sexuality, including how to talk about it. If you want to read more on the subject, we've got a lot of great articles written by folks with smart stuff to say about it. We actually did this really cool series a few years back called The Answers (For Now) It includes people writing about their experiences questioning their sexual identity as well as a link to one of our broader primers on questioning. You might also like The Rainbow Connection: Orientation for Everyone. Happy Reading!