I wouldn't say I was shocked. Sadly I grew up in a very conservative church, parents, etc. So I was taught inherently that it was wrong. Luckily I broke out of that pretty quickly, and can't even fathom why I didn't sooner. But when you're a kid I guess you don't question. It's pretty scary to think I was conservative once just because I was told/taught to be.

As for my own personal preferences. I found out I was straight after I honestly forced myself to have an honest discussion with myself about what I like, what I found attractive, etc. Before that I was just guessing I was.

I appreciate learning every day. I must admit I learn so much just from the people on this site. Today I learned the term: cis hetero! Thank you. You made me look it up!
Side note: I am so fortunate in that I was raised by a single ( widowed) Hispanic mother who was highly liberal. So growing up, having seen my first transgenered person live about in our neighborhood, while interesting to me as a young child, was not a big deal or even a discussion in our houshold. My mom is 78 years old and still today, she has the same "live and let live" attitude.

I tried desperately to be male for 26 looong years..that was my surprise...smh

This very thing occured for my friend. She thought guys were what she was supposed to be with, had kids, etc. But when her second marriage ended she started thinking and noticing how she REALLY felt and as she put it, 'I realized I'd been shopping down the wrong aisle'. She has found her woman and after dating for several years have just moved in together. I, myself, have been questioning my sexuality, especially since I saw this young woman at the salon. She was very andrognous in her appearance and I was totally taken with her, one of those can't take your eyes off of them moments. Right now all I worry about is getting someone's gender 'label' correct, I do not want to offend someone. I know I love rainbow colors and it don't mean anything beyond that for me. LOL

I saw gender as a spectrum, back in my youth, and was perplexed that stating as much made some people violently angry. I had numerous gay or bi relatives and at least one trans relative. So, it also made sense that attraction was likewise a wide spectrum. I automatically am attracted to whom I am attracted to. There was never any plot or grand plan. I am very relieved that society more openly accepts nuances, rather than pigeon holing people into preconceived, inflexible roles..

Sexuality is about as important as one's taste in cuisine.

They have my support.

Not shocked. Slightly raised eyebrows about homosexuality. Bewilderment at homophobia. Amazement at the broad range of orientations etc. now discovered by science. Saddened to think that it may be rather difficult for some to meet compatible partners or associates.

I now look at sexuality as a spectrum and not a black & white subject. As a teenager I was confused by my occasional sexual attraction to females and lack of desire to have romantic relationships with them. I thought maybe that made me bisexual, but that label never felt like a true fit. I have come to understand that sexuality is way more fluid than just gay or straight, and heteroflexibility isn't uncommon in all genders. I don't necessarily need a label, but it felt good to discover this. It made me feel less weird, I guess.

Sort of? My sexuality has always been a complicated matter for me. I once identified as asexual as the few partners I'd been with simply didn't do much for me, I wasn't interested in sex, only in cuddling or kissing or just talking. Ended up getting married because I figured why not? Everyone else was and I liked my ex well enough. We were together ten years and during that time we had countless arguments over my disinterest and ended up separating after I came out as ace to him.

It wasn't until just this past year that the term demisexual came into my life and it cleared up so many questions I'd had. As I'd never experienced a true sexual attraction before, I was taken aback by how badly I desired both of my new partners. Knowing them on a deep, personal level made me far more comfortable than I'd ever been with anyone before. Their genders don't matter, but for the sake of full disclosure, I am pan-demi sexual and neither of them is a cis male.

I am shocked how many things for which there are now names. Why did we dispose of that ol' stand by: normal?

I think things can change and also, it can be the person not the gender that attracts us.
I have a friend, she is gay, she has always been gay, She is almost 60.
30 years ago, she met a guy and fell in love, they had a son now 22.
She really did love him, but after about 10 years, she realised she was still attracted to women, and not to him, though she loved him. He never knew she was gay, but when she was about to tell him, he was diagnosed with cancer and died less than 2 years later. So he never knew. She has a female partner again now.

I used to think I was straight. I just kind of ignored my feelings for girls until I moved out of my home state entirely in order to get away from abusive family and had the complete mental collapse that'd been looming for a long time. While putting myself back together I realised I was in love with my roommate, and she with me, and that I was much more attracted to women than to men. I've accepted being a lesbian and look back on all that time dating guys as yet another symptom of my real self being repressed.

I thought I was cis hetero for the longest, but with some encouragement and understanding from my boyfriend, I was able to really look inside myself and find that I'm trans homo.

Yup, that's me off to a tee.

From first becoming sexually aware, I was interested in boys rather than girls. I put this down to having little exposure to girls. As I got older, I was interested in girls too. But never in the lustful way towards female strangers that my peers seem to exhibit. I was never "Phwoarrr! Look at the arse on that!" I'm not someone who really notices strangers. I begin to notice (and sometimes develop feelings for people) once I start to get to know them. I've had a lot more crushes on males than I've had on females.

I had a few same sex experiments in my teens. Tried to come out to my mum as having a huge crush on a male friend and got a very bad reaction. I knew I could love women too, so I knuckled down and started to do that. And whenever I've been happy in a relationship with a woman, and the sex has been reasonably frequent, I've stopped thinking about intimacy with males. Yet whenever that's gone off the boil, it's always been male intimacy that I've fantasised about, unless I forced myself to fantasise about female intimacy (and yes, I used to do that.)

A failed experiment with a guy in my early 30s left me believing I was heterosexual with kinky fantasies about men. It was years later, when I was actually with a male I had feelings for, that it all fell into place. I suppose what's missing is a point of reference. People don't discuss the deepest, what they perceive to be darkest, parts of their sexuality. I thought perhaps it was normal for a heterosexual male to have kinky fantasies about being with other males and that sexuality was defined by what you did, not what you thought about.

The gender variance started as a brief phase around age 7 or 8. I didn't have access to girls' clothes that would fit me, but I used to take off my trousers, tie a cardigan around my waist and imagine that it was a skirt. Again, is this outside the parameters of normal experimentation for a cis male? Then it went away completely for many years. Once or twice, I'd experimented trying on my wife's underwear, and it did absolutely nothing for me. The idea of being any flavour of trans didn't even occur to me. It was a friend's fetish fairytale themed party that set the ball rolling for that. I did a sort of 'Goth fairy' thing (latex top and shorts, fishnets, platform boots, fairy wings, all black) and I was getting compliments left right and centre about the way I looked. I wanted those compliments again. So I bought my first skirt, top and pair of heels, and the rest is history.

And when I started doing it, and stopped trying to be 'a man', a lot of other things just seemed to fall into place. It moved from being purely a sexual thing, to being a comfort and social thing, and I found my niche identifying neither as a man nor a woman, and expressing as masculine or feminine as suited the situation and my mood.