Sexuality is a broad term that covers far more than who you’re attracted to or what you do in the bedroom. It encompasses your sexual orientation, your sense of intimacy and desire, how you experience pleasure, and how all of that intersects with your identity, relationships, and culture. The World Health Organization describes sexuality as “a central aspect of being human throughout life” that includes sex, gender identities and roles, sexual orientation, eroticism, pleasure, intimacy, and reproduction. In other words, sexuality is not one thing. It’s a web of biological, emotional, and social factors that shapes how you relate to yourself and others.
The Core Dimensions of Sexuality
Sexuality shows up in thoughts, fantasies, desires, beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and relationships. Not everyone experiences every dimension, and that’s normal. Someone who rarely feels sexual attraction still has a sexuality. So does someone in a long-term monogamous relationship and someone who is single and uninterested in romance. The concept is broad enough to hold all of these experiences.
What influences your sexuality is equally wide-ranging. Biology plays a role, but so do psychological factors, cultural norms, religious upbringing, economic conditions, and even legal frameworks. A person raised in a community where certain expressions of desire are stigmatized will experience their sexuality differently than someone in a more permissive environment, even if their underlying attractions are identical. Sexuality is both deeply personal and deeply shaped by the world around you.
Sexual Orientation vs. Gender Identity
These two concepts get conflated often, but they describe different things. Sexual orientation is about who you’re attracted to. It covers emotional, romantic, and sexual attraction, along with how you identify and behave in relation to those feelings. Gender identity is about who you are: your internal sense of being a man, a woman, both, neither, or something else entirely.
The two are linked in one important way. Sexual orientation is typically defined by the relationship between your own gender and the gender of the people you’re attracted to. A woman attracted to women is a lesbian. A man attracted to women is heterosexual. But being gender-nonconforming doesn’t tell you anything about someone’s sexual orientation, and vice versa. A transgender man can be straight, gay, bisexual, or any other orientation, just like a cisgender man.
Types of Sexual Orientation
Sexual orientation exists along a spectrum rather than in neat boxes, but several common identities help people describe their experience:
- Heterosexual: attraction primarily to people of a different gender.
- Gay or lesbian: attraction primarily to people of the same gender.
- Bisexual: attraction to more than one gender, though not necessarily equally or at the same time.
- Pansexual: attraction to people across all gender identities and expressions. Sometimes shortened to “pan.”
- Asexual: little or no sexual attraction to others, or a lack of interest in sexual activity. Asexuality exists on its own continuum, from people who feel no attraction at all to those who experience it only under specific conditions.
- Queer: an umbrella term some people use to describe any non-heterosexual or non-cisgender identity. Once considered a slur, it has been widely reclaimed, particularly by younger generations.
These labels are tools for communication, not rigid categories. Many people find that no single term captures them perfectly, and some prefer not to label themselves at all.
What Shapes Sexual Orientation
The short answer: biology matters, but no single gene or hormone determines who you’re attracted to. Twin studies consistently show that identical twins are more likely to share the same sexual orientation than fraternal twins, which points to a genetic component. Researchers have also linked male sexual orientation to several regions of the genome, though no “gay gene” has been identified.
Prenatal hormone exposure also plays a role. Women with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, a condition that exposes them to higher levels of testosterone in the womb, have significantly higher rates of non-heterosexual orientation compared to women without the condition. Animal studies suggest these hormonal effects work through epigenetic mechanisms, meaning the hormones change how genes are expressed rather than altering the DNA itself. The picture that emerges is one of multiple biological influences interacting with each other and with a person’s environment, not a single switch that gets flipped.
Sexuality Can Change Over Time
One of the earliest attempts to capture sexual fluidity was the Kinsey Scale, developed in the late 1940s. It placed people on a simple 0-to-6 spectrum, with 0 being exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual. It was groundbreaking for its time because it showed that many people fell somewhere in the middle rather than at either extreme.
Later models added more nuance. The Klein Sexual Orientation Grid, introduced in 1985, asks people to rate themselves across seven different components: sexual attraction, sexual behavior, sexual fantasies, emotional preferences, social preferences, self-identification, and lifestyle. Crucially, it asks for ratings in the past, the present, and the ideal. This captures something the Kinsey Scale couldn’t: that your attractions, behaviors, and identity can shift across your lifetime and that where you are today may differ from where you were a decade ago or where you’d like to be.
This fluidity is normal and well-documented. It doesn’t mean orientation is a choice. It means that human sexuality is complex enough that some people’s experiences genuinely evolve over time.
How Many People Identify as Non-Heterosexual
About 9% of U.S. adults identify as LGBTQ+, according to 2025 Gallup polling data. The generational differences are striking. Among adults under 30, 23% identify as LGBTQ+. That drops to about 10% for those aged 30 to 49, 3.1% for those 50 to 64, and 2.3% for those 65 and older.
Whether this reflects a genuine increase in non-heterosexual orientation or simply a greater willingness among younger people to use these labels is debated. Likely both factors are at play. Reduced stigma makes it easier to explore and name your experience. At the same time, broader cultural vocabulary (terms like pansexual, demisexual, and queer were far less available to older generations) gives people more precise ways to describe attractions they may have always had but previously filed under “straight” or left unnamed.
Why the Definition Matters
Understanding sexuality as a multidimensional part of being human, rather than reducing it to a single behavior or identity label, has real consequences. It means that someone who is asexual isn’t broken. It means that a person whose attractions shift in their 40s isn’t confused. It means that sexuality includes intimacy, emotional connection, and pleasure, not just the mechanics of sex. The WHO’s broad definition exists precisely because narrower ones left too many people out. Sexuality is not something you have to earn or prove. It’s something you experience, in whatever form that takes for you.