In my previous opinion column I looked at the difference between “sex” and “gender”, and how, rather than being binaries, they exist on a spectrum. In short, sex refers to one’s physical or biological characteristics, while gender refers to the social/cultural representations or “performance” of how society expects one’s sex to be manifested in terms of social behaviour.

I noted how the reality of biology, be it in terms of physical form or chromosomes, is far more complex than a clear-cut binary between male and female. Similarly, I gave some examples demonstrating how gender is fluid, in the sense that what we consider masculine or feminine changes over both space (geography and different cultures) and time (within a single culture over time), and as such the notion that masculinity or femininity is inherent to one’s sex is illogical.

All gender is essentially performative — we seek to perform according to how our cultural norms say we should according to our sex. However, the reality is that all of us are a mix and on a spectrum as much (if not more so) as we exist on a spectrum of biological sex.

Sexuality, or, more specifically, sexual orientation, is even more complex than gender (which itself is more complex than sex, which itself is more complex than a binary). I reckon there are as many sexualities as there are people. Especially if one makes a distinction between sexual orientation and romantic orientation — while often conflated, sexual orientation would more strictly speak to one’s attraction to others in terms of physical intimacy, while romantic orientation speaks more to one’s attraction to others in terms of emotional connection and intimate relationships.

My understanding is that academics who have formally studied sexuality in our species have identified some 47 possible terms for describing the spectrum of sexuality our species engages in in terms of sexual attraction, behaviour and orientation. The use of the acronym LGBTQ+ serves as a catch-all, but really for economical reasons, with the “+” doing a lot of heavy lifting. While we may think of sexuality in pure binary terms of heterosexual (attracted to the opposite sex) and homosexual (attracted to the same sex), the reality is that, just as with sex and gender, sexuality exists on a spectrum and not in binaries.

In fact, the idea of a binary between heterosexuality and homosexuality, and even the concepts of “gay” or “lesbian” are relatively modern concepts within Western thinking, and are far from universal concepts throughout the world — but a prism through which we in the West approach our own and other cultures, leading to much cultural misunderstanding, as they don’t necessarily translate into the lived realities of other cultures.

To be clear, I am not saying that there weren’t people that we would today define as heterosexual or homosexual in the past! Only that conceiving of sexuality in those terms is truly a very recent conceptual development, within the past 100 to 200 years. Even the idea of restricting homosexuality to a gay/lesbian binary is relatively more recent (becoming a dominant paradigm only since the Second World War).

Just as sex and gender in reality are far more diverse, complex and beautiful than an artificial and simplistic binary, so too is the reality of sexuality.

While there is, to me, no question that one’s sexuality is in large part intrinsic to the individual — in the sense that I am not aware of anyone having consciously chosen their sexuality, be it heterosexual or homosexual and more, I am doubtful that we can (or even should) look to identify the genes involved. Human behaviour is complex and is a mix of both biology and culture for one thing — as should be clear by my point above that the concepts of homosexuality and heterosexuality are relatively novel concepts within our culture.

The existence of same-sex behaviour in diverse species, far beyond our closest relatives (the great apes), and even beyond our class Mammalia, being present in birds (class Aves) and reptiles (class Reptilia) indicate that it is likely an inherited trait going back to the last common ancestor of these three classes, about 315 million years ago.

I reckon there are likely multiple genes that control sexuality. Beyond that, I question the utility of trying to identify the specific genes, especially in light of our species’ recent history of eugenics and ongoing prejudices. I fear that identifying the “gay gene” would open the doors to a dystopian future of either discrimination by genetic testing or eugenics in the womb of either genetic modification or embryonic selection. I have similar fears around the use and abuse of genetic technology for other issues, from disability to skin colour. As important as our scientific knowledge is, when married with prejudice it can lead to a dystopia.

For me, what is far more important than proving the genetics of sexuality — which to me is self-evident from its presence in mammals, birds and reptiles — is combating prejudice itself. This is why education is key. The more one understands the complex reality of things such as sex, gender and sexual orientation, the more one clearly sees prejudices for what they are — a fear- based response based on ignorance and exploited by some for the purpose of power, to divide and exploit others, either directly, through the creation of an exploited class, or to distract people from the true source of their exploitation through the use of scapegoats.

Education, then, is an inherently emancipatory exercise, in the sense that it helps to dispel ignorance and thus prejudice. I do not mean education in the strict institutional sense of the academy, although that is certainly key. I mean more in the sense of understanding reality as it is, rather than what some authority declares it to be.

Thus the importance of questioning everything as fundamental to the command to emancipate oneself — in this case from ignorance and prejudice. To the degree that reality clashes with received knowledge from an authority, I feel it is our duty to look to reinterpret that received knowledge. And if it is impossible to reconcile the two, then we have a choice to embrace reality or to deny it.

Myself, I find the complexity and diversity of life, including that of sex, gender and sexuality as inherently beautiful. And I hope you do too.

• Jonathan Starling is a socialist writer with an MSc in Ecological Economics from the University of Edinburgh and an MSc in Urban and Regional Planning from Heriot-Watt University