Nearly 16% of people changed their sexual identity over a 12-year period, according to a new study I conducted with my colleagues, involving around 35,000 residents of Stockholm County. This challenges long-held beliefs about sexual identity being largely fixed.
Between 2010 and 2021, we found that 15.7% of people aged 18 and older in Stockholm experienced shifts in their sexual identity. Bisexual people had a high rate of change, with 52% reporting a shift during the study period. Within this group, 33% changed to identifying as heterosexual in 2014 or 2021 and 9% moved towards a homosexual identity.
