This chapter provides an overview of theory and research in relation to identity development, coming out, and connecting with LGBTIQ communities. An introduction to – and critique of – stage model approaches to conceptualising sexuality and gender is provided, alongside an overview of how people come to understand their sexuality and gender. The complexities of sexual identity are exploredfrom the increasing use of plurisexual identity labels (e.g., pansexual, polysexual, queer) to the popularisation of public displays of suggestive lesbian acts and the heteroflexible ‘girl crush’. The process of identifying as trans and navigating transitioning is also discussed. Next, the chapter focuses on the disclosure of LGBTIQ identities through a review of research focusing on ‘coming out’ to families and friends, responses to disclosure, and the (often) strategic choice not to disclose. The final section of this chapter focuses on the ways in which LGBTIQ people find community, with a particular focus on the increasing use of online spaces. Some of the challenges of accessing these spaces and/or axes of exclusion experienced by some LGBTIQ people are also discussed.

The chapter reflects on four approaches to desire present in American science fiction: normalization, displacement, reification, and reimagining. Fanfiction or fanfiction-adjacent novels such as Becky Chambers’ The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (2014) are set in queernormative worlds and as such normalize queer desire. Feminist depictions of separatist women’s communities, such as Joanna Russ’s “When It Changed” (1972), Nicole Griffith’s Ammonite (1993) or Larissa Lai’s The Tiger Flu (2018), displace queer desire, situating lesbian sex and pleasures in the background of the narrative concerned with the social and political implications of a world without men. In Samuel R. Delany’s “Aye, and Gomorrah” (1967) and Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Book of Joan (2017) desire is reified as it serves as a condition of full humanity. Finally, stories of human/nonhuman encounters seem to lend themselves particularly well to the efforts to reimagine desire. In Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy (1987-9) and Annalee Newitz’s Autonomous (2017), alien and robot characters experience desire and pleasure as diffused and independent of binary sex/gender systems.

Situations when people experience a lack of sex or interest in sex and reasons for this, including contribution of relationship status, stress, differences in drive, and mental plus physical health conditions. Hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD). Treatments for these conditions and sources of support.

Evolution by natural selection is not a process by which objects called “species” change over time under selective pressures. There are no such objects. It is a process by which organisms that are related in salient ways, by which they are specific we might say (as opposed to being members of a species), are replaced by others. There is more than one way in which they can be specific. One is related compatibility, which some organisms, the xs, exhibit just when they have common ancestry, when they are reproductively compatible, and when every organism so related to one of the xs is among the xs. Given this way of understanding specificity, we current humans, the Homo sapiens presently inhabiting the planet, could give way to future humans that resemble us only insofar as they are reproductively compatible with us. What is more, our humanity is not essential to us. Neither is our origin, in that we might have originated in a different time and place. So in theory – given technology that is currently out of sight – we could change ourselves into creatures that are very unlike us.