A study of 1,513 Swedish adolescents from age 14 to 17 reveals a surprising degree of variation in sexual orientation during this developmental phase. Most striking is the fluidity of those who at some point in their trajectory identify as lesbian or gay: only 17.6% of girls and 29.4% of boys who so identify did so for the entire period surveyed. This suggests a high willingness to experiment with labels and identities among contemporary adolescents who at some point feel same sex attracted. Less surprising is that those who identified as “nonsexual” at age 14 (about 10% of both girls and boys) tended not to by age 17, when only 2-3% did.
Similarly, a U.S. team studying young people involved in the Trans Youth Project concluded, “today’s youth are defying assumptions about gender and sexual orientation from decades of developmental research, considering gender and sexual orientation to be relatively flexible social identities rather than ones that are fixed, and view gender as having more than two categories.”
