How Political Correctness Kept Me From Understanding My Sexuality
For a long time, I felt like a piece of my sexuality was missing. I am a bisexual man in his mid-20s who feels as fully attracted to men as possible. However, I only experience about a third of the attraction to women that I do to men, which wasn’t always the case. For years, I searched for answers on the Internet. But LGBT activist dogmas on message boards and advocacy websites provided me with little insight apart from vague bromides about how I’m fine the way I am. I only learned that changes in sexual attraction over time are normal and well-established in the scientific literature after AI chatbots were made available to the public.
offered no clarity, as same-sex attraction was never addressed. In my confusion, I believed I would either become gay or straight, and that my mind and body had simply not decided on a sexual orientation yet. By the time I entered high school, I understood bisexuality through media representation, specifically from Doctor Who’s Captain Jack Harkness, an immortal man and notorious bisexual. By high school graduation in 2017, my attraction to women had waned, but not disappeared, a shift that confused me.
As a teenager, I sometimes turned to online forums and advocacy websites for answers. They all gave similar responses: I was “born this way” and there’s no need to ask questions about the origin of one’s sexual orientation. This is the protective rhetoric around questioning homosexual attraction. The “born this way” argument posits that homosexual attraction is biologically determined — an immutable characteristic that activists leveraged to help establish anti-discrimination laws. However, “born this way” also serves as a simplistic answer to a complex question. The problem is, it has become so well-subscribed and politically important that it effectively shuts down and shuts out good-faith discussions about the genesis of same-sex attraction or how attractions may shift over time. To many, such conversations undermine the LGBT movement’s PR.
The hesitation to explore the origins of homosexuality and bisexuality is understandable, given the legacy of conversion therapy and old-fashioned bigotries about same-sex attraction as a mental illness. Mainstream society now rightly regards same-sex attraction as natural and non-pathological to protect gay and bi folks from psychologically damaging and unproven pseudo-therapies meant to turn us straight. But the idea that sexual orientation is completely immutable is an ideological position that is not backed up by research.
In 2016 — four decades after musicians Valentino and Carl Bean first used “born this way” in their pro-LGBT music, and five years after Lady Gaga popularized it in 2011 — sex researcher Lisa Diamond published a paper called “Sexual Fluidity in Males and Females.” The paper, along with some of her other research and public advocacy, reported a growing body of science showing that there is much greater “sexual fluidity” than previously thought. As Diamond explained, “Over the past several decades, researchers have documented numerous cases in which individuals report unexpected changes — sometimes transient and sometimes lasting — in their sexual attractions, identities, and/or behaviors. The capacity for such change is denoted sexual fluidity.”
The percentages of LGB people who experienced sexual fluidity as measured by multiple studies. Source: “Sexual Fluidity in Male and Females” by Lisa M. Diamond.
Diamond reviewed research that found a staggering 25% to 75% of lesbian, gay, and bisexual people “reported substantial changes in their attractions over time.” Diamond found that it’s common for bi people to become more or less attracted to one or both sexes over time and for gay men and especially lesbians to manifest some degree of opposite-sex attraction over the course of their lives. She concluded, “Such findings pose a powerful corrective to previous oversimplifications of sexual orientation as a fundamentally stable and rigidly categorical phenomenon.”
In her 2018 TED Talk, Diamond presented the striking statistic that when one identical twin is gay, the other twin only turns out to be gay 30% to 40% of the time. Of course, this rate is still much higher than for non-identical twin siblings, which is 9% to 12.5%. However, these findings show that non-genetic factors like cultural and social influences, prenatal hormone exposure, epigenetics, and random developmental variation play a larger role in sexual orientation than politically correct assumptions about biological determinism suggest.
This research maps closely onto my own experience. As a young child, I displayed outward signs of homosexual tendencies in my speech, mannerisms, and dress. Family and friends gossiped behind my back about their assumption that I was gay. I used to run around in a skin-tight Peter Pan costume and even believed I was transgender around the ages of six or seven (80% of trans kids end up as gay adults). No one was surprised when I came out.
Yet, I liked girls as a pre-pubescent child and did not begin experiencing attraction to men until about the onset of puberty. Then, my attraction to women declined somewhat through adolescence and has remained relatively constant since. These types of changes in sexual attraction are common among LGB people, with over 60% of lesbian and bisexual women, 47% of bisexual men, and about 10% of gay men experiencing sexual fluidity. It even occurs among straight people, too. Sexual fluidity shows that for many people, their sexual orientation is not 100% set at birth, though in some cases, strongly identifying with a particular LGBT identity might prevent folks from noticing or accepting these shifts.
While Diamond was fighting against the “born this way” argument in research and public talks, I was struggling to find answers to my questions through conventional web searches. Despite being strong LGBT allies, the work of Diamond and other sexual fluidity researchers, such as Ritch Savin-Williams and Sabrina Katz-Wise, never came up in web searches when I sought answers about my changing sexual attraction to women. Or, if it did, it was buried within layers of generic and unsatisfying activist platitudes. Friends mistook my continued curiosity about my shifting attractions as a sign that I was insecure and discouraged any further exploration, believing that ending the discussion was in my best interest.
Researchers were publishing work that would have answered my questions at the very time I was asking them. The difficulty was in discovering that work. It was only once I had access to large language model AIs such as ChatGPT that I finally found answers to a question I had long since stopped asking after repeatedly hitting intellectual dead ends online and in person.
Traditional search engines offered me inferior answers because they simply provide a list of links based on matching keywords. If I search for “bisexual attraction changes over time”, I’m much more likely to spend hours combing through message boards or tangentially related results for answers. Large language models enable users to ask specific and niche prompts and receive tailored answers that instantly synthesize information from various sources. That is why ChatGPT gave me immediate, detailed, scientifically sourced answers to my questions about what I now understand to be sexual fluidity.
ChatGPT also exposed me to a concept called the “Kinsey Scale.” It was developed in the 1940s as part of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey’s exploration of human sexuality, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). The 0-6 scale was designed to measure exclusive homo- and heterosexuality, and various degrees of bisexuality in between. Until discovering the Kinsey Scale — which neither health class, sex ed, nor Google searches had ever mentioned — I thought it was abnormal for a bisexual person not to feel full attraction to both sexes. Ironically, research regarded as controversial by conservatives — both at the time of publication and still today — later became obscured by progressive norms.
Social taboos often reside within a shroud where information is either restricted or not easily accessed by laypeople, such as the reality of sex differences in the discourse around transgender issues, or the statistics showing that police killings of unarmed black men are rare. Of course, this happens on the political right as well, as with the removal of references to Jim Crow and the Ku Klux Klan from history curricula in the American South. These all deprive people of comprehensive access to historical and scientific information.
I am not a tech-utopian. I recognize the potential downsides of how AI influences people. Chatbots often flatter users, reinforce biases, and exhibit troubling ethnic stereotyping from both the political left and the right — not to mention more apocalyptic concerns. However, the fear that LLMs may one day conquer the Earth and eliminate white-collar jobs often overshadows the potential benefits this technology can bring to the advancement and spread of knowledge and well-being.
AI not only has the potential to produce purely academic research — with one such accomplishment being the now-famous AlphaFold AI’s solution to biology’s elusive “protein folding problem.” There are also potential benefits for curious users to significantly enhance their self-understanding by engaging with a technology that has more direct access to the whole of human knowledge than standard search engines.
The protective silence around sexual fluidity was meant to affirm my sexuality and empower me. Instead, it left me feeling incomplete. When I finally gained access to the facts through chatbots, I realized that what was missing was access to mainstream science, which was gently suppressed and drowned out by social taboos and soothing niceties. I discovered that what I thought was a sexual abnormality was a well-documented phenomenon in the scientific literature. Of course, there is a strong innate component to sexual orientation, and no one can choose their attractions. In this sense, “born this way” gets at something true, even though it has become a misleading slogan. I know that I never chose to be attracted to both men and women, nor to what degree I am attracted to each. And thanks to the research on sexual fluidity, I know that’s perfectly natural. I know that human sexuality is not static and that bisexuality doesn’t have to mean being 50/50 gay/straight. And I know that simplistic rhetoric, no matter how well-intentioned, doesn’t help people accept themselves.
Published Sep 18, 2025
