Monosexuality

Monosexuality describes a pattern of romantic or sexual attraction directed toward only one gender. It is not a distinct orientation in its own right but an umbrella, analytic category: the two most widely recognized monosexual orientations are heterosexuality (attraction to a different gender) and homosexuality (attraction to the same gender), which the American Psychological Association describes, alongside bisexuality, as durable, non-chosen patterns of attraction (APA). Youth-mental-health researchers apply the same technical boundary: The Trevor Project defines "monosexual identities" as "gay, lesbian, and straight" (orientations involving "romantic and/or sexual attractions to one sex and/or gender") and uses the category specifically to distinguish this group from multisexual (bisexual, pansexual, queer) youth in its research (The Trevor Project).

The term functions mainly as a point of contrast rather than a self-chosen identity label. It sits opposite plurisexual (the umbrella covering orientations directed at more than one gender, such as bisexuality, pansexuality, polysexuality and omnisexuality) and is used by researchers and by the bisexual-plus (bi+) community to name the assumption, embedded in much everyday language, that everyone's attraction is confined to a single gender (Wikipedia).

Because it groups two otherwise unrelated orientations (straight, and gay or lesbian) under one label, many people who identify as heterosexual or homosexual do not describe themselves as "monosexual"; the word appears far more often in academic, clinical and bi+ advocacy writing than as a personal identity term (Wikipedia).

Examples

Monosexuality is an analytic category rather than an identity, so what it covers is best shown by who it groups together and who objects to being grouped.

What the term covers. Heterosexuality and homosexuality, the two orientations directed at a single gender. The Trevor Project uses exactly this boundary in its research, defining monosexual identities as gay, lesbian and straight in order to compare them with multisexual respondents. The word also names an assumption embedded in ordinary language: that everyone's attraction is confined to one gender.

What the term does not cover. The plurisexual orientations (bisexuality, pansexuality, polysexuality, omnisexuality) sit opposite it. It is also a different axis from asexuality and allosexuality, which concern whether sexual attraction is experienced at all rather than toward how many genders.

How the word is used. Almost never as self-description. It appears in academic, clinical and bi+ advocacy writing, where it was repurposed in the 1990s alongside "plurisexual"; Kenji Yoshino's 2000 Stanford Law Review article "The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure" argued that both monosexual groups share incentives to treat orientation as an exclusive binary, an argument behind the term "monosexism". Some gay and lesbian writers object to being filed with heterosexuality in one category, and read the word as loaded.

History

The vocabulary has two distinct lives. "Bisexual" and its opposite pole entered English sexology in the late nineteenth century with meanings quite different from today's: writer Karl Maria Kertbeny coined "homosexual" and "heterosexual" in a German pamphlet in 1869, and Richard von Krafft-Ebing's Psychopathia Sexualis, rendered into English by Charles Gilbert Chaddock in 1892, supplied the first English-language use of "bisexual" for attraction to both men and women; Sigmund Freud went further in 1905, proposing that an original, undifferentiated bisexuality was the developmental baseline from which "monosexual" heterosexuality or homosexuality later emerged through repression (Wikipedia).

The term's present sense dates to the bisexual-rights movement of the 1990s, when U.S. and U.K. bi+ activists repurposed "monosexual" as a plain description of anyone attracted to no more than one gender, pairing it with "plurisexual" to name the opposite. The same period produced the movement's central piece of legal-academic scholarship: in "The Epistemic Contract of Bisexual Erasure" (Stanford Law Review, 2000), law professor Kenji Yoshino argued that self-identified heterosexuals and self-identified homosexuals (the two monosexual groups) share overlapping incentives to treat orientation as an exclusive binary, an argument later folded into "monosexism," the bi+ community's structural parallel to homophobia and biphobia (Yoshino, 2000; Wikipedia).

Demographics & research

No survey tracks "monosexuality" as a self-reported identity, since almost no one adopts it as one; the figures that exist compare monosexual and plurisexual shares of the wider LGBTQ+ population. Gallup's 2025 U.S. tracking poll found bisexual adults are the largest single group within that population (more than half of all LGBTQ+-identified adults, versus 17% who identify as gay and 16% as lesbian), with bisexual identification concentrated among younger cohorts and roughly on par with gay and lesbian identification among older ones (Gallup). The Trevor Project's research brief on multisexual youth found measurable mental-health gaps between the two groups: 44% of multisexual (bi+, pansexual, queer) youth reported seriously considering suicide in the past year, versus 33% of monosexual (gay, lesbian, and straight) youth, with comparable gaps in rates of depression, anxiety and self-harm (The Trevor Project).

Terminology & related identities

Monosexual and plurisexual form a paired vocabulary: monosexual orientations (heterosexuality, homosexuality) are directed at one gender, while plurisexual orientations (bisexuality, pansexuality, polysexuality, omnisexuality) are directed at more than one. The distinction is separate from the allosexual/asexual axis, which concerns whether sexual attraction is experienced at all rather than toward how many genders.

"Monosexual privilege" is used in bi+ scholarship and advocacy to describe social advantages (visibility, legal recognition, and freedom from having one's stated orientation questioned or disbelieved) that are broadly available to heterosexual and homosexual people but not consistently extended to bisexual, pansexual and other plurisexual people, including within LGBTQ+ spaces (Wikipedia).

Because "monosexual" encompasses both heterosexual and homosexual people, some gay and lesbian writers and communities have pushed back on being grouped into a single analytic category with heterosexuality, arguing it can flatten meaningfully different lived experiences and social positions; the term is, correspondingly, sometimes read as derogatory or ideologically loaded by the gay and lesbian people it is applied to (Wikipedia).

Common misconceptions

A related misconception, documented by GLAAD in its bisexual-erasure guidance, holds that bisexuality is a transitional "phase" on the way to a stable, monosexual (gay, lesbian, or straight) identity. GLAAD states that for the vast majority of bisexual people this is inaccurate (bisexuality is not evidence of confusion or an unresolved stage but a distinct, durable orientation), and that treating monosexual identities as the default "resting point" of attraction is itself a form of bisexual erasure (GLAAD).