Plural form: people who are sexually attracted to people of a different sex.
Standard English plural of 'heterosexual,' formed by adding '-s' to the noun form. The singular term originated in late 19th-century scientific literature.
The invention of this plural noun reflects a social shift—once scientists categorized human sexuality, society needed language to discuss people in these categories as groups.
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.
["people attracted to opposite sexes","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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