Читать книгу Living in Love and Faith - Bishops of the Church of England - Страница 47

The first area of identity that we want to cover is sexual orientation. A person’s orientation is their tendency to feel sexual interest in, or attraction to, people of particular sexes or genders, or to feel such interest or attraction to people regardless of sex or gender. Asexuality, which describes people who are not sexually attracted to anyone, is not a ‘sexual orientation’ as such, but a reality that is important to bear in mind in these discussions.

Some resist the language of ‘orientation’, or resist describing it as a matter of ‘identity’, preferring to keep the focus on patterns of attraction, behaviour, and sexual relationships, without making assumptions about how central these are to a person’s identity.

Various terms are commonly used to name different kinds of orientation. To give a list that is certainly not exhaustive: a person might be called

• ‘heterosexual’ to the extent that they are predominantly attracted to people of the ‘opposite’ sex;

• ‘homosexual’ (normally lesbian or gay) to the extent that they are predominantly attracted to people of the same sex as themselves;

• ‘bisexual’ to the extent that they find themselves attracted to both men and women and possibly other gender categories (and since this is about the experience of attraction, someone might be in a lifelong monogamous sexual relationship and still be bisexual).

As mentioned above, the word ‘asexual’ is not a sexual orientation, nor is ‘gender fluidity’, which is discussed in the next section.