Skoliosexuality

Skoliosexuality is a sexual orientation describing attraction to people who are transgender or nonbinary. The term itself is contested and imprecisely defined: some usages restrict it narrowly to attraction toward nonbinary or genderqueer people specifically, others extend it to anyone who is not cisgender, and a looser third usage folds in cisgender people whose gender expression is nonconforming (Healthline, WebMD).

The label emerged from, and remains most visible within, informal LGBTQIA+ online communities rather than clinical or advocacy literature; it has not been adopted into the published terminology guides of major organizations such as GLAAD or the American Psychological Association, and clinical-sexology literature more often frames attraction to trans people as a general research question — who is attracted to trans women, trans men, and nonbinary people, and why — rather than by way of a discrete orientation label (Wikipedia). Because the term is comparatively new and lacks a single authoritative definition, people who identify as skoliosexual may describe their own attraction somewhat differently from one another (WebMD).

Skoliosexuality is also conceptually distinct from broader multi-gender orientations. Pansexual, polysexual and (for some speakers) bisexual identities are typically defined as attraction across genders in general, and people using those labels may separately note that trans and nonbinary partners fall within that attraction; skoliosexuality, by contrast, names the attraction to gender-variant people specifically, as its own defining axis rather than as one case within a wider pattern (Wikipedia).

History

The word was coined in 2010 by a DeviantArt user known as Nelde while building a diagram intended to catalogue the full range of sexual-orientation categories (Dictionary.com). It draws on the Ancient Greek σκολιός (skoliós), "bent" or "crooked" — the same root found in the medical term scoliosis — attached to -sexual (Wiktionary, Dictionary.com). From 2010 onward, usage spread mainly through Tumblr, Reddit and other community-run spaces devoted to cataloguing orientation and gender vocabulary, well before the word saw any use in academic writing (Healthline).

The etymology quickly drew criticism. Because skolio- denotes deviation from a straight or typical line, critics argued that applying it to attraction toward trans and nonbinary people implied that those genders are themselves abnormal, or in need of being "fixed or straightened," relative to a cisgender norm (WebMD). A second, etymology-independent criticism holds that defining an orientation around a partner's not being cisgender — rather than around their actual gender identity — treats trans men and trans women as something other than men and women, and some within LGBTQIA+ communities have argued the label is difficult to separate from the fetishization and stereotyping of trans and nonbinary partners (Dictionary.com). That concern sits alongside a broader, peer-reviewed evidence base: a 2021 qualitative study of transmasculine, transfeminine and nonbinary participants published in Archives of Sexual Behavior found fetishization to be a common and often distressing experience, most frequently described as a form of sexual objectification rather than genuine attraction to the person (Anzani et al., 2021).

In response, ceterosexual was proposed as a replacement term, built on the Latin cetero- ("the other, the rest") in place of the Greek root, to describe the same attraction to nonbinary and genderqueer people without the connotation of deviance (WebMD). Related coinages such as allotroposexual (from Greek roots for "different" and "mode of life") pursue the same goal with a milder etymology (Healthline).

Terminology & related identities

Skoliosexual and ceterosexual are used by different speakers to describe the same underlying attraction, and many current sources treat ceterosexual as the preferred term precisely because it avoids the "bent" connotation, even though skoliosexual remains the more widely recognized and searched-for form (WebMD, Wikipedia). The corresponding romantic-orientation label, formed on the same pattern as biromantic pairing with bisexual, is skolioromantic (also rendered ceteroromantic).

The identity is grouped with other gender-based orientation terms — such as androsexuality (attraction to masculinity) and gynesexuality (attraction to femininity) — that define attraction by a partner's gender expression, rather than by the speaker's own gender relative to the partner's, the way monosexual and plurisexual labels do. It is not a clinical or diagnostic category. Dictionary sources still mark the adjectival use as rare outside LGBTQIA+ community writing, with citations from the mid-2010s largely confined to sociological and cultural-studies discussion of online identity vocabulary rather than clinical usage (Wiktionary). Skoliosexuality is also distinct from attraction to a specific binary trans identity — for example, exclusive attraction to trans women or to trans men — which speakers more often describe using ordinary gendered-attraction vocabulary rather than a dedicated umbrella term.