People aren’t all straight, gay, or bisexual. Scientists have begun taking notice of a significant number of people who identify as asexual. Writing for the Scientific American, Jesse Bering descries asexuality as, “the absence of desire and no sexual interest in males or females, only a complete and lifelong lacuna of sexual attraction toward any human being (or non-human being).”

An estimated 1 percent of British residents describe themselves as “never having a sexual attraction to anymore,” according to a 2004 study cited by Bering. That’s just slightly lower than the 3 percent of people who identified themselves as attracted to the same sex. An aversion to sex can stem from childhood trauma or chemical imbalances, but some research points to asexuality as being a true fourth sexual orientation that’s “due neither to genetic anomaly or environmental assault.”

One 18-year-old asexual described her feelings to the University of Michigan saying:

I just don’t feel sexual attraction to people. I love the human form and can regard individuals as works of art and find people aesthetically pleasing, but I don’t ever want to come into sexual contact with even the most beautiful of people.

Source: The Scientific American

The vast, fleshy diversity of human gender identity and sexual expression is certainly amazing, and so is the human ability to create ever-longer acronyms. Thus have we arrived at the construction LGBTSTGNC, the most extended variant yet on the already sprawling sexual identity descriptor LGBT.

Some of us were just getting used to the interchangeability of LGBT and GLBT, depending on whether you were talking to gays or lesbians, and to the occasional tacked-on Q to reclaim the beloved “queer.” But this LGBTSTGNC thing has us confronting a whole new level of acronym intimidation.

LGBTSTGNC refers to lesbian, gay, bisexual, two spirit, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people, according to an article in Left Turn magazine’s April-May issue (original article available here). The odd thing is, the piece refers to “LGBTSTGNC people of color” without taking the whole enterprise to its logical conclusion:

Don’t they mean LGBTSTGNCPOCs?