Ambiguity Tolerance Toward Nonbinary Sexuality Concepts: Evidence from British Newspapers

Humans tend to construct their worldview via binaries, that is, two distinct, nonoverlapping elements, such as the juxtapositions of human–animal, human–machine, or male–female. Our research focuses on the binary categories of “heterosexuality–homosexuality” and explores how stable or malleable they are. For this, the authors analyze newspaper coverage of sexuality concepts in the United Kingdom from 1995 to 2010 and quantify if and how tolerance toward ambiguous concepts including “bisexuality” vary across time as well as with gender, political opinion, and expertise. Our findings indicate a distinct “millennial effect” of intolerance toward sexual ambiguity, suggesting that resistance against ambiguity rears up during periods of instability. Conversely, we found higher levels of ambiguity tolerance in left-wing newspapers, broadsheet publications, female journalists, and expert writers, as opposed to right-wing newspapers, tabloid publications, male journalists, and novice writers. Our results can help to better understand to what degree concepts related to human sexuality are relatively hard-wired or rather fluid social categories.