Mining the Gaps: Rethinking Divergence Between Biological and Self-Report Measures in the Study of Sexual Diversity

Over the past several decades, scholars have conducted hundreds of studies investigating potential biomarkers of sexual orientation, such as genes, neuroanatomical features, and patterns of physiological response to sexual stimuli. The findings have been inconsistent: Biological measures sometimes converge with-but just as often diverge from-individuals' self-reported sexual attractions, behaviors, and identities. For example, numerous studies show that individuals' biological responses to erotic stimuli frequently diverge from their self-reported sexual identities and self-reported arousal to such stimuli. I argue that such cases of "biodivergence" warrant a shift in our conceptualization of sexual orientation, from seeing it as a singular and coherent phenotype to seeing it as a constellation of multiple biobehavioral patterns, with multiple and divergent causes and effects. I show that this perspective concords with recent findings from genetic research on sexual orientation, which show there is no single genotype underlying patterns of same-gender expression, and also concords with recent population data showing increasingly varied and fluid forms of sexual diversity around the globe that challenge the notion of sexual orientation as a singular and coherent sexual phenotype.