Gender & Sexuality dictionary
skoliosexual
[skoh-lee-oh-sex-shoo-uh l]
What does skoliosexual mean?
Someone who is skoliosexual is sexually attracted to people who identify with a nonbinary gender.
Where does skoliosexual come from?
The skolio- in skoliosexual comes from a Greek root meaning “bent” or “curved,” seen in the word scoliosis.
The term was coined in 2010 by a DeviantArt user, Nelde, who made a comprehensive diagram of sexual attraction.
Skoliosexuals are attracted to people who identify as nonbinary (i.e., a gender identity that doesn’t fit into traditional male/female and heterosexual/homosexual divisions). Attraction between two people who are nonbinary, for instance, may be described as skoliosexual.
Many in the queer community prefer the term ceterosexual, with cetero- (think et cetera) based on the Latin for “other,” given how “bent” and “curved” can imply something is wrong with nonbinary people.
Examples of skoliosexual
Who uses skoliosexual?
The term skoliosexual has seen spread with the greater awareness, inclusion, and visibility of nonbinary identities in popular culture. Major publications like Refinery29 and HuffPost have written about the term.
Discussion of skoliosexuality, including self-identification, is popular on blogging and social-media platforms like Tumblr, sexuality forums, and Twitter.
Some within the queer community argue that being skoliosexual is problematic because they feel it is impossible to tell if someone is nonbinary without stereotyping them or fetishizing them.
I'm not even gonna read this but if huff's answer to "what is a skoliosexual" isn't "a lot of ableist bullshit" I'm gonna log off for a few days https://t.co/z4nhe27Kpq
— Eliot Dowens 🍞🌹👨🏫 (@queertactics) July 4, 2018
Note
This is not meant to be a formal definition of skoliosexual like most terms we define on Dictionary.com, but is rather an informal word summary that hopefully touches upon the key aspects of the meaning and usage of skoliosexual that will help our users expand their word mastery.