"It's just a phase!"

"You can't be gay."

"Bisexuality/pansexuality/polysexuality does not exist."

All of these are common phrases that are heard by many people in the LGBTQ community, especially with the more inclusive labels like bisexual, pansexual, polysexual, and so on and so forth.

Too many people in the world today think there is only such a thing as someone who is gay and someone who is straight, and nothing in between or off the spectrum.

Being a person who identifies as pansexual, I am always told to just pick a side, with people completely dismissing that there is so much more beyond the binary.

It seems like even after years and years of fighting for normal human rights such as being married and having proper healthcare, there is still a lot of erasure of these sexual identities, especially within the LGBTQ community itself.

Now to go back to that "it's just a phase" quote.

That is often something that is used against the LGBTQ community as a form of attempting to assimilate them into the heteronormative society that we have today.

However, one thing both sides fail to understand (both sides being the straight people and the LGBTQ people) is that not everyone is gay or straight for all of their life. I can speak of this from personal experience.

When I first came out of the closet when I was 17, I identified as bisexual. However, very shortly after I came to this conclusion, I realized that I was suddenly only attracted to women.

That happened for about a year or so and I could have easily identified as a lesbian if I chose to.

Directly after that phase (yes, I said phase) of being only attracted to my gender, the other gender suddenly became the most appealing.

It was not until recently that I came full circle and genuinely identified as pansexual.

I am not rejecting the fact that many people strongly identify with who they are and are very comfortable sitting in that label, I am just simply saying that there is definitely a strong population of people who have had their sexualities expand or compress over time, or so it has been told.

With that being said, is sexuality really as fluid as it is perceived to be? That, everyone, is something that we are going to get to the bottom of here today. To what extent is sexual orientation interchangeable in today's society?

What is Sexual Fluidity?

A good thing to look at first is what sexual fluidity is and how it might come about.

For example, say there is a heterosexual man who is only attracted to people of the opposite gender for the majority of his upbringing. However, at some point, he discovers that he finds himself attracted to both men and women. That is exactly what being sexually fluid means, being attracted to one thing, then discovering that you're also attracted to the other thing or even both the aforementioned things at the same time.

"An individual with exclusive other gender attractions may never question their sexual orientation until becoming friends with a same-gender attracted individual. By the same token, a same-gender attracted individual may become more open the possibility of other-gender attraction if they are exposed to the notion of sexual fluidity in a college sexuality course." (Katz-Wise, Hyde 2).

This is a very great example of how sexual fluidity might come about. In fact, later on in the same quote, it talks about how no one truly knows their true orientation until the correct environment is in occurrence.

This makes a lot of sense, and I've seen this through my own personal experience. I did not start questioning my own sexuality until high school where most of my friends were queer in some way. My whole heterosexual demeanor did not take place until I had become a lot more involved with the friends in my life who were heterosexual. Sexual fluidity is such an interesting topic within itself because it is not something that's always talked about in the LGBTQ+ and straight community.

The Processes of Being Fluid

The label, heteroflexible, is in reference to being a heterosexual individual who is open to homosexual experiences.

On the other side of the spectrum stands homoflexible. This is in reference to a homosexual individual who is open to having heterosexual experiences.

Both of these terms could be put under the umbrella term of bicurious, but it is most often associated with being heteroflexible.

The reason I am mentioning all of this is that it can be in reference to something called the Kinsey scale. For those who are unfamiliar with it, the Kinsey scale is a scale created by Alfred Kinsey that determines just how gay or straight someone is: 1 being the straightest of the straight and 6 being the gayest of the gay.

I did an unintentional experiment with this scale and have taken the same quiz every few months for about a year and a half. At first, in about March of 2018, I had scored a 5 on the scale, which is predominantly homosexual but more than incidentally heterosexual.

Of course, I did not have much of a clear understanding of what this meant, so I left it alone for a while until I started getting more into the opposite gender. When I took the test again in August of 2018, I had scored a 3, which according to the chart means I was equally heterosexual and homosexual.

This did make a lot of sense to me since I was crushing on both a girl and a guy at the same time. Now that I had a better understanding of what the Kinsey Scale was, I could see the sudden fluidity that my sexuality was having at this point in my life.

Then came December 2018. In this particular month, I was very much more into the same gender and scored a solid 5 once again.

Recognize here that though I seriously felt a strong emotional and sexual connection to women and almost never thought about being with a man, there was still that small part of me that was into what I was raised to be into most of my life.

It wasn't until about May of 2019 when I took the quiz again, and the results were pretty shocking. I had found myself to be a 2 on the scale, which meant predominantly heterosexual but more than incidentally homosexual.

Again, this really grabbed my attention and it did make plenty of sense. I had just started going on dating apps and though I did have my settings to show both men and women, I more often than not went for the opposite sex while still occasionally gawking over a cute girl.

Now here we are in December of 2019, a whole entire year after I got that 5. On the Kinsey scale as of December 1, 2019, I currently rate a 3, back to where I was about sixteen months ago. I commonly relate to this to the experiences I have had as of late.

As far as my own sex life goes, I have only had sexual experiences with the male species, and that includes kissing, making out, and just being overall intimate. However, I have also found myself gravitating the same way towards women as I do to men.

The main reason I am talking about this is because all of these scores were based on events in my life that happened from heartbreak to just straight-up confusion.

Kinsey also recognized within this scale a difference between sexual orientation and sexual acts. (Bhugra 3). Though this is not relevant in my own situation, I have met many others like myself who have found themselves having sexual experiences with their non-preferred members of sex but still identifying with the label they had chosen for themselves previously.

Throughout all of this I still somewhat identified with a label such as pansexual or bisexual, but I definitely did fluctuate, and this can be further understood with the following study.

The Studies

A study was made by Katz-Wise and Hyde on measuring sexual fluidity. In this, the subjects were asked if their sexual attractions to others have changed over time (for example, if only attracted to men, then being attracted to both women and men). They would answer this question with a yes or no. If they answered yes to the question, then they would have to further elaborate about the age they experienced this change.

The next question was about whether the change in attractions resulted in a change in the label they were using to identify their sexuality. After that, they asked if they had experienced more than one change in attraction over time.

Lastly, the subjects were asked to rate on a scale of 1 (extremely unlikely) to 5 (extremely likely) the likelihood of their sexual attraction changing in the future. The results were interesting, to say the least.

About 63 percent of females and 50 percent of males reported a change in their sexual orientation. Of those people, 48 percent of the women involved and 34 percent of the men involved said that this caused a change in the label they used for themselves.

Twenty-one percent of females reported more than one change in attraction while 19 percent of males reported the same thing. Also, females mainly experienced changes in attraction around 17 to 18 years and men at around ages 15 to 16, given that most of these changes were recorded at the beginning of the discovery of one's sexuality.

This study mainly proves that it is more likely for women to experience fluidity than men, and they experience it at an older age than men do, as well as in a wider variety of ages.

Studies like this make a huge point that in a huge variety of people such as these, it is very possible for sexual attraction or lack thereof to make changes based on the situation, as referenced earlier in the article.

Some of the information even concludes that people have changed their own sexual orientation label over their experiences in a change of attraction. As someone who has seen their own sexual attractions change to almost the point of changing my orientation's label from bisexual to homosexual, I can confirm this as a valid study of fluidity.

Curiosity and Choice

Now, this is where we determine something else: do certain events actually play a part in one's fluidity or is it the social constructs put on by today's society?

Since sexuality, in general, is something that has been a pretty big topic of discussion amongst many around the world, it would be no surprise to find out people are now curious about their own preferences and maybe sometimes might overanalyze it to some extent.

"If I watch lesbian porn, does that make me gay?" That is up to you to determine.

"Does thinking a guy is very handsome mean I'm gay and will damage me by having me develop toxic and fragile masculinity?" No, not necessarily.

It is kind of hard to decide what makes someone some degree of homosexual, though in the same respect it is not.

According to George Kelly, a lot of the events can be misconstrued. We often take events happening in our lives and put some sort of meaning to said events, altering our constructs. (Horely, Clarke 7).

George Kelly discusses choice.

Choice is a tricky word to use, since people often interpret it negatively when it comes to one's sexual orientation. For example, "you're just choosing to be gay/bi/pan/poly/etc.!"

That is not what Kelly is referring to. He is talking about why a person chooses to do something in relation to sexual orientation. For example, why someone would choose to interact with the same gender in such a way.

Is it out of pure curiosity or is it because they actually are into that gender? People often mix up curiosity with actually being part of the LGBTQ community.

Being bicurious is definitely something that is valid in its own respect. Some people want to know what being with the other gender is like. However, whether they find being with said sex is exciting or genuinely pleasurable is the determining factor.

For example, if a woman participates in a sexual act with another woman and they actually find themselves aroused in said situation, then that is where you might find yourself in a situation where your sexuality is not what you thought it was.

I'm not necessarily saying that if a straight woman has sex with a queer woman and likes it that means she is actually a lesbian. What I mean is that they might genuinely realize that they do not have any real attraction to men and it very well could be out of social construction or maybe even be in reference to asexuality, the lack of sexual attraction to anyone.

Or this attraction might not just be a sign of hetero or homo, but possibly of even bisexual or pan. And going back to what was said earlier, it is a lot more common for women to have general fluidity when it comes to their sexual orientation.

Women!

In fact, women are actually meant to be sexually fluid simply by nature, at least according to Satoshi Kanazawa. She thinks it's because men are constantly producing their sex cells and they can fertilize at any time, whereas women have very few reproductive days of the month, which makes them a lot more inclined to want to seek pleasure from people other than men.

In all honesty, this makes a lot of sense since it is defined by nature that men are more motivated to reproduce offspring, which makes them want to have sex with their partner more.

Women have few days in the month where they are the most fertile, and every other part of the month they might find other ways of being sexually active without having to worry about getting impregnated, the best way to avoid that is for a woman to be sexually active with another woman.

Kanazawa has a good point, and this is a good way to explain why women's sexual attraction might be more fluid than men's.

Labels

The thing about sexual fluidity is that the people going through it very rarely realize that it is happening. I'm aware that I keep referencing it, but I myself did not experience different sexual attractions until this year.

Also, when this is a thing that is recognized, it is very much frowned upon by a lot of people. This can also be paired with internalized homophobia, as Dr. Donaghue states in this Mashable article.

Donaghue talks about how labels often play a big part in our sexual status. He goes on to talk about how a great example of this is that a man can enjoy having sexual experiences with other men but can still strongly identify with the heterosexual label.

In the end, sexual fluidity is something that definitely exists - it's just not nearly as recognized as other sexual identities. Everyone today likes to go by a label whether it be homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, or others. It is just something that many feel is simpler.

What if we never went by a label? Would that make it any different than it is now? In all honesty, probably not.

Labels are just easy to give people and oneself and it would be extremely difficult to just say that you a human that experiences sexual attraction or a human that does not experience any sexual attraction since there is so much variation to it.

That is why fluidity needs to be far more recognized than it is right now. When people talk about it being "a phase," it is most often used as a negative connotation referring to one's sexuality.

Fluidity is just seen as someone trying to "change-up" their sexuality just for attention from the public, which in all honesty, makes zero sense. What this society needs to understand is that, whether it's a "phase" or not, just leave it up to the individual to figure it out for themselves.