Why sexologists swapped sexual preference for sexual orientation, and what else changed
The phrase sexual orientation was coined by the sexologist John Money as a deliberate replacement for sexual preference. His point was that attraction is not something people simply pick. Later the American Psychological Association went further, flagging the older wording as carrying a heterosexual bias because it implies a voluntary choice.
Psychologists define orientation as a lasting pattern of romantic or sexual attraction toward the opposite sex, the same sex, or more than one. The usual categories are heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual, with asexuality, meaning little or no sexual attraction, sometimes counted as a fourth, although researchers debate whether it is an orientation at all. Orientation is kept separate from identity, which is how someone sees themselves, and from behaviour, meaning what they actually do. When those three fail to line up, scientists speak of discordance. The core attractions typically surface somewhere between middle childhood and early adolescence.
Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century thinkers bundled attraction together with a person's own gender. Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld and Havelock Ellis, and later Freud and Jung, tended to assume that a woman drawn to women must be somehow masculine, an idea known as sexual inversion. It was contested even then, and over the second half of the 20th century gender identity came to be treated as a distinct matter. A gay, straight or bisexual person may be masculine, feminine or androgynous.
Behavioural scientists sometimes prefer androphilia, attraction to masculinity, and gynephilia, attraction to femininity, because those words describe the target of desire without labelling the person feeling it. The psychiatrist Anil Aggrawal argues this avoids confusion and offence when describing transgender people. The sociologist Johanna Schmidt notes that Western categories fit poorly with Samoa's fa'afafine, in a culture that recognises a third gender. Milton Diamond suggested using heterosexual, homosexual and bisexual as adjectives for behaviours rather than nouns for people.
On causes, no single theory has won broad agreement, but scientists lean toward biology, particularly for men. A leading hypothesis points to hormones shaping the fetal brain before birth, and no substantial evidence links parenting or early childhood experience to the outcome. In every culture studied, most people are heterosexual, and individuals can fall anywhere along a continuum between exclusive attraction to one sex and exclusive attraction to the other.
Source: Sexual orientation
