this post was submitted on 12 Mar 2026
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I think that's a fair point and a reason to think there are far more people with a particular sexual orientation that are not aware of or do not identify with their sexual orientation than people with that sexual orientation who are aware and honest about their orientation.
The public health practices around targeting "men who have sex with men" as a demographic sort of confirms we're not in a neutral context where everyone who actually is homosexual will admit to themselves or others that they are homosexual (even when they're willing to admit as men they sleep with other men).
But this makes it very difficult to know what the real numbers are, and sometimes even how to define the sexualities, but regardless we don't have anything like the numbers being floated about only 10% of people are straight, at least as far as I know - like others I would like to see citations or evidence to back that claim.
I found this paper: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1529100616637616 (very low effort first citation on wikipedia) that discusses all the nuances and difficulties of estimating sexual orientation. And they mention some figures of 93% of men and 87% of women stating they are not even a tiny bit gay, so it does seem that the figures in the first comment are extreme.
Thought you might also want to know about this brilliant line in the paper: If one cannot reliably make a male human become attracted to other males by cutting off his penis in infancy and rearing him as a girl, then what other psychosocial intervention could plausibly have that effect?
(In response to 6/7 men who lost their penis at birth and were raised as girls ending up identifying as heterosexual men as adults. The last identifying as a bisexual woman.)
As far as I am aware, the evidence seems to point to both gender identity and sexual orientation as being biologically fixed and genetic, so it's not surprising when you take a cis boy and raise them as a girl they end up transitioning back to being boys.
What people don't seem to appreciate or understand is this is pretty much what is happening to trans people, and the outcomes of doing this to cis people are similar to the outcomes we see in trans people (read: lots of drug abuse, self-harm, depression, anxiety, and suicides).
Indeed, in the paper it is used to dispute the bullshit claim that exposure to non-hetero media can turn your kid gay. I found the way they stated it interesting.