'Sexual identity'

[PermanentTemporary]

Look, I genuinely don't know. Is 'sexual identity' a commonly used term now? What would you think it was?

I read this article. Then I clicked through to the research it is reporting.

I'm a Grauniad subscriber and not likely to stop being so. But is this reporting as bad as it looks? I'm not a researcher.

The article says

• 'sexual identity' is very fluid
• older people are even more likely to change sexual identity than younger ones
• coming out is something that happens multiple times for LGBTQ folks
• men's sexual identity may be less fluid than women due to toxic masculinity/rigid gender roles

Then the research says

• we studied data on sexual orientation only, but we're going to call it sexual identity (the subjects were asked about orientation)
• there is no exploration of gender identity in this paper
• nearly all the 'huge amount of sexual identity change' over 6 years is women moving from declaring their orientation as bisexual to a heterosexual'. Also older people moving from 'prefer not to say' to 'heterosexual'.

I'm absolutely flabbergasted at this directly misleading reporting. It's plain lying tbh.

oops link

At least there's a different interpretation of the findings than the one the Guardian offers: Much of the change, as you point out, is people reverting to choosing heterosexual as their orientation.

I think this is the term used now. When discussing with DC, I said surely people don’t identify as gay, but rather they are gay (or whatever). But was corrected in that when people say they ‘identify’ it means that later, they might not. No discussion of gender in the conversation at all.

OK [defeated sigh]

It's not even that I don't think sexual orientation can evolve. I've only figured out that I'm bisexual in recent times. I'm fully signed up to the idea that compulsory heteronormativity keeps a lot of us from discovering our sexuality.

But if you find that 6% of your very large sample evolves from bisexual to heterosexual, and thats the single biggest fluidity you find, then people reporting that should tell the bloody truth.