Quote:
Originally Posted by Maritime Q-Scout
Does a 16/17 year old really know their gender and/or sexuality at such a young age?
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Please don't conflate gender identity with sexual orientation, or vice versa. They are two very different things and can have have many confusing outcomes. Gender identity is pretty much formed by time we hit four or five. We discover our feminine or masculine identity early on in our psychological development. Our identity is then only confused by the environment and forces around us. Sexual orientation develops later and is just based on the attraction to others. This can begin to happen before puberty, but is cemented into us around this time. You can be attracted to men, women, or both, and depending on your gender make you asexual, heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, or pansexual. You may identify as one gender, be another, but still have an attraction to the same gender you identify with, making you homosexual in the psychological sense, but heterosexual in the physical sense. Gender identity and sexuality are tough topics for people to understand, and then when you start to talk about sexual behavior, just clouds the topic that much more. What these discussions do expose are who wound a little too tight and have been brought up in an environment of ignorance and rigid binary orthodoxy.