A suggestion I've seen which makes sense to me in today's linguistic landscape, is to describe the biological sex of people that a person is sexually attracted to, rather than focus on the match or mismatch of the sexes of the people involved.
Thus: one's sexual orientation might be "androphilic", "gynephilic", "biphilic" and perhaps "ap…
A suggestion I've seen which makes sense to me in today's linguistic landscape, is to describe the biological sex of people that a person is sexually attracted to, rather than focus on the match or mismatch of the sexes of the people involved.
Thus: one's sexual orientation might be "androphilic", "gynephilic", "biphilic" and perhaps "aphilic" for those with no sexual interest in any sex.
Why leave out "gender identity"? Few to zero people seem to have a deeply ingrained psycho-biological sexual attraction to others based on the other person's self chosen "gender identity" (tho they might have idiosyncratic lesser preferences like just as some people have a "type" in regard to height, weight, hair color, nationality, etc). Also "gender identity" has become very semantically confusing, with an ever expanded set of supposed "genders" about which few people agree. (Ask a thousand people for the dozen most common gender identities and see how many have the same list and mean the same thing by the terms they use). Trying to describe attractions by having words for each combination (or set of combinations) of gender identities involved would be a nightmare. So let's stick to SEXual orientation.
Classifying one's sexual attractions by reference to one's own sex may be becoming obsolete, as it seems deeply rooted in old taboos rather than being cleanly descriptive. We can observe that the majority of biological males are gynephilic and the majority of biological females are androphilic, without needing to bake that observation into our very terminology.
A suggestion I've seen which makes sense to me in today's linguistic landscape, is to describe the biological sex of people that a person is sexually attracted to, rather than focus on the match or mismatch of the sexes of the people involved.
Thus: one's sexual orientation might be "androphilic", "gynephilic", "biphilic" and perhaps "aphilic" for those with no sexual interest in any sex.
Why leave out "gender identity"? Few to zero people seem to have a deeply ingrained psycho-biological sexual attraction to others based on the other person's self chosen "gender identity" (tho they might have idiosyncratic lesser preferences like just as some people have a "type" in regard to height, weight, hair color, nationality, etc). Also "gender identity" has become very semantically confusing, with an ever expanded set of supposed "genders" about which few people agree. (Ask a thousand people for the dozen most common gender identities and see how many have the same list and mean the same thing by the terms they use). Trying to describe attractions by having words for each combination (or set of combinations) of gender identities involved would be a nightmare. So let's stick to SEXual orientation.
Classifying one's sexual attractions by reference to one's own sex may be becoming obsolete, as it seems deeply rooted in old taboos rather than being cleanly descriptive. We can observe that the majority of biological males are gynephilic and the majority of biological females are androphilic, without needing to bake that observation into our very terminology.