Kinsey scale

From ArticleWorld

Part of Dr Alfred Kinsey's famous reports in the late 1940s-early 1950 was the idea of a heterosexual-homosexual continuum or spectrum, now called the Kinsey scale. The scale, informally known as 'How Gay Are You?', plots people's responses to a lengthy questionnaire and on the basis of sexual history and preferences and ranks them from 0-6 on a scale the ends of which are same-sex and opposite orientations.

The idea was revolutionary because instead of positing that people were either homosexual or heterosexual, it suggested that at different times in people's lives they could have different sexual preferences. Also, 'normal' heterosexual people who had the odd gay fantasy were fit into this conception. On the basis of this scale Dr Kinsey posited four types of sexualities: homosexuality, heterosexuality, bisexuality, asexuality. This went a long way to normalise homosexual preferences.

However, the scale does not take into account another set of possible presentations and preferences of sexuality called transgender, including transsexualism and transvestism. Unlike homosexuality, which is about sexual, romantic and aesthetic attraction to members of the same sex, and degrees of which can be determined on the Kinsey scale, transgender is about gender identity. A person may identify with a gender other than that they were assigned, or with none at all, and feel attraction for any people of any gender. This cannot be fit into the Kinsey scale, the seven points of which correspond to the following:

• 0 - Exclusively heterosexual experience(s)
• 1 - Predominantly heterosexual experience(s), only incidentally homosexual
• 2 - Predominantly heterosexual experience(s), but more than incidentally homosexual
• 3 - Equally heterosexual and homosexual experience(s)
• 4 - Predominantly homosexual experience(s), but more than incidentally heterosexual
• 5 - Predominantly homosexual experience(s), only incidentally heterosexual
• 6 - Exclusively homosexual experience(s)