Why Lesbians Switch Sexual Identities | Lisa Diamond | Big Think

Why Lesbians Switch Sexual Identities

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Lisa Diamond has undertaken a 13-year longitudinal study of gay women. The surprising trend? The overwhelming amount of fluidity and transition.

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Lisa Diamond:

Diamond's research focuses on two distinct but related areas -- the nature and development of affectional bonds and the nature and development of same-sex sexuality. The common thread uniting these lines of research is my interest in the psychological and biobehavioral processes underlying intimate relationships and their influence on emotional experience and functioning over the life course.

Her primary research questions are as follows: (1) what are the basic psychological and biobehavioral processes underlying the formation and functioning of affectional bonds; (2) how are these processes related to sexual desire and sexual orientation; (3) what are the implications of affectional bonding for mental and physical well-being at different stages of life? In addressing these questions, she uses a diverse range of research methods, including in-depth qualitative interviews, controlled social-psychophysiological experiments, and assessment of naturalistic interpersonal behavior.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Question: What has the study taught you about sexual identity in women?

Lisa Diamond: I think it's a moving target. I think one of the major findings is that there is no single definition of identity. Probably the most surprising finding of the study was how often women changed the way that they thought about their sexual identity over time. When I began the study, the conventional wisdom in the field was that the main development path for a sexual minority individual is to figure out what their identity is, to embrace it, to accept it, eventually to disclose it to others, and to just sort of integrate it into your sense of self. And that once you complete that process you're pretty much done. What I found instead was that between two waves of data collection, so I collected data about every two years. And every wave I would find that somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of the sample had changed their identity label, from lesbian to bisexual, from bisexual to lesbian, from lesbian to unlabeled. Some folks switched to heterosexual, and then they switched back to bisexual or unlabeled.

So I found an unbelievably common experience of variability and transition that certainly ran directly counter to a lot of the conventional wisdom in the field at the time. And even I was unsure of whether it was, you know, absolute. Every time I would collect data I would think, surely things will settle down at this point. But they have continued to show that sort of variability. Even 10 years out, the proportion of women changing identity labels between waves of data collection still is between 20 and 30 percent. And at this point, 13 years into the study, about 70 percent of the sample has changed their identity label at least once since that first interview. So that we used to think that change was really freaky and that stability was the norm. And now we know that we had it upside down. Stability is actually pretty uncommon, and transition and change are actually the norm.

Question: Why has this instability become the norm?

Lisa Diamond: I think there are a couple of things that account for it. I've found that on the individual level the only thing that consistently predicted a woman's likelihood of changing her identity was the degree to which her attractions were actually more in a bisexual range than in an exclusively sort of same-sex range, which makes a lot of sense, right? If you're attracted to both women and men, that creates just more possibilities for your relationships and for how you're going to see yourself. And certainly there were women who would describe themselves as being, for example, you know, 75 percent attracted to women. And some of them would say, well, that makes me a bisexual, because I'm still somewhat attracted to men. And other women would say, well, I'm mainly attracted to women, so I'll call myself lesbian. So women with similar patterns of attraction could actually find that different labels would comfortably fit the way that they saw their identity, but because of that wiggle room, that interpretive wiggle room, that created a lot of space for change and transition over time.

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