The quality or state of being sexually attracted to people of a different sex, or sexual orientation toward the opposite sex.
Formed from 'hetero-' (Greek for different) + 'sexuality' (from Latin 'sexualis'). The term was coined in the late 19th century as psychology and medicine began systematically classifying human sexual orientations.
Interestingly, 'heterosexuality' was invented as a scientific term at the same time as 'homosexuality'—before the 1890s, scientists didn't need a special word for opposite-sex attraction because it was considered the default!
Heterosexuality became medicalized and marked as 'normal' in late 19th-century sexology, while homosexuality was pathologized—encoding a power hierarchy into language that historically enforced reproductive norms and stigmatized non-conforming identities.
Use descriptively for orientation without implying normativity or default status. Avoid positioning opposite-sex attraction as the baseline against which other orientations are measured.
["same-sex and opposite-sex attracted people","people with diverse sexual orientations"]
LGBTQ+ scholars and activists reframed sexual orientation as identity rather than pathology; credit Kinsey, Magnus Hirschfeld, and contemporary queer theorists who dismantled the heteronormative hierarchy embedded in sexological language.
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