nderstanding your sexual and gender orientation involves a certain amount of self reflection. You have to honestly assess your actual thought and feelings. This can be especially hard when those feelings are at odds with the expectations of your family, friends, and society.

As you do this self reflection, it can sometimes help to read about the wide variety of ways in which homosexuality and transgenderness are understood in the world. You will find that there are many more perspectives on your orientation than what you may have been told thus far. But knowing these different perspectives can help you to begin to determine where your own thoughts and feelings fit with the many understandings.

The different approaches to sexual and gender orientation can be broken up into four basic areas, and for each one we provide a lot of information and research on its page:

When one examines the evidence from so many different sources, it is easy to see that lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender persons are not substantively different from everyone else. Although sexual and gender orientations are understood very differently by different religious and cultural traditions, those understandings undergo a constant revision over time and some of them are becoming very affirming and accepting. As is increasing evident from the truly scientific evidence, one can readily conclude that homosexuality and transgenderness are simply part of the natural and normal variation of human sexual and gender orientation. And, perhaps most important, the field of psychology is demonstrating that we all have the same capacity to form strong families and live good and happy lives-especially when our society affirms us for who we really are.

Our resource library has all of the texts mentioned in the four sections above (as well as many more), and the texts mentioned in those sections are included in the 'Works Cited/Works Consulted' page.