ABSTRACT
The terms ‘sexuality’, ‘sexual identity’, and ‘sexual orientation’ tend to be used fairly interchangeably, and the latter two terms help to unpack what we generally mean by sexuality. It’s a key feature of a person’s identity which is defined by who they orient towards sexually: in other words, who they are sexually attracted to. Towards the end of the nineteenth century various scholars began the project of classifying and categorising sex. At that point psychology was still in its infancy, and many of the early sexologists were psychiatrists or other kinds of medics rather than psychologists as such. Sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, and Henry Havelock Ellis, applied the approach of classification which was popular in medicine and science to the field of sexuality. Generally they attempted to categorise different types of sexual deviance.
