IS SEXUAL ORIENTATION A SPECTRUM?
IS SEXUAL ORIENTATION A SPECTRUM?
Peter Tatchell thinks so! In an article published in 2016, and in subsequent talks he has delivered, he has argued “The future is bisexual – get over it!” The gist of Tatchell’s argument is that there is a spectrum at one end of which are people who are 100 percent straight, at the other end people who are 100 percent gay, but “most of us are somewhere in between.” In other words, sexual orientation is not a simple binary of gay/straight or even three fixed orientations - gay, straight and bisexual. The notion that sexual orientation is a spectrum is tempting for gay activists who need to pump up the volume in order to get politicians to support reform. It enables them to make statements referencing YouGov polls that have shown 23% of the population don’t identify as exclusively gay or straight – so we’re a big minority and a big voting block.
As a gay man who came out over 50
years ago, I initially accepted this narrative, but now I really don’t think it
stands up to scrutiny. If we take a step back and look at what sex researchers
have tried to measure and the criteria they have used to define a person’s
sexuality, it turns out that the analysis is almost entirely quantitative. And
they measure the wrong things. Let me explain: In 1948 Dr. Alfred Kinsey and his
research partners published Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male. This was the first landmark study to suggest that
people didn’t fit exclusively into the categories homosexual and heterosexual.
Kinsey proposed a scale from one to seven – the Kinsey Scale - with one being
exclusively heterosexual and seven being exclusively homosexual:
- Only heterosexual
- Mostly heterosexual, sometimes
homosexual
- Mostly heterosexual, but more than
sometimes homosexual
- Equally heterosexual and homosexual
- Mostly homosexual, but more than
sometimes heterosexual
- Mostly homosexual, only sometimes
heterosexual
- Only homosexual
The most famous
statistic that arose from this study is that 50 percent of males aged between
16 and 50 years had experienced at least one same-sex encounter leading to
orgasm. The implication drawn from this is that these men were not exclusively
heterosexual – they were on a spectrum.
Subsequently there have been other sexual orientation spectrums – the Klein Sexual Orientation Grid and Storms Sexuality Axis being the best known. Notwithstanding the fact that these later attempts to define a spectrum of sexual orientation were more sophisticated, they all suffer from the same fault: the proposition that a person’s place on a spectrum could be defined numerically by reference to the ratio of same-sex, compared to opposite sex encounters. The problem here is the failure to place sexual experiences on a timeline or to understand how people discover their own sexuality.
If we were to look into the sexual histories of Kinsey’s famous 50 percent, I would wager that most of these men attained a heterosexual orientation as mature adults and their homosexual experiences were in their mid to late teens – subsequent to Tanner stage-3 puberty. This is what might colloquially be described as ‘gay curiosity’ experiences. The idea that atypical experiences in adolescents are the defining factor in adult sexual orientation ignores the fact that the discovery of sexual identity for many is a process. If you simply measure process without qualifying it, then you end up with the wrong conclusions. What needs to be measured are outcomes – specifically, the outcomes of early sexual experimentation.
So, who
measures outcomes – the settled sexual identities of adults? The answer (in the
UK) is the National Census. The National Census conducted in 2021, along with
its predecessor, asked respondents to answer whether they were heterosexual (straight),
homosexual (gay or lesbian), bisexual (neither wholly straight nor gay). It
also gave people the option of not answering the question or of saying ‘other’
and defining what that meant.
This does not support the idea that sexual orientation is a spectrum or “The future is bisexual – get over it!” On the contrary, it supports the proposition that the population is overwhelmingly heterosexual, and that homosexuality is very much a minority sexual interest. We don’t know the sexual orientation of the 7.5% of respondents to the Census who refused to answer the question, or why they did so. It seems unlikely they all closet gays. Perhaps they were just people who thought that their sexuality was none of the State’s damn business!
Why a very small minority of the adult population are same sex oriented remains a mystery. My own view is that there may well be factors in utero that partly explain it. It seems unlikely to me that there is a ‘gay gene’. A gene is simply the way in which a protein is expressed, and it seems highly improbable that one gene can explain something as complex as same-sex attraction or behaviour. Hormonal imbalances have long been discounted as an explanation. Research into fraternal birth order does demonstrate a high correlation between being the second or middle brother and being gay. But there is not a similar correlation between birth order among females. It may be that male and female homosexuality have different explanations.
I suspect there is a partial physiological explanation combined with early learning – the polymorphous sexual experiences of children and prepubertal sexual experimentation and ideation.
The wellsprings of sexual desire remain largely a mystery. A further layer of confusion is added by the emergence of ‘Queer theory’ and the anti-science mumbo-jumbo of gender ideology that denies that sex itself is a binary and asserts that male and female are on a spectrum. The answers to all these questions lie with science. But it is hard for science to cut through in the context of the development of the cult of gender which functions as a kind of quasi-religion and is paedophilic to its core.
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