When this word first entered the English language in 1879, it referred to the capacity of someone to have sexual feelings. It recognizes that one’s sexual feelings are not predestined; the fact of having a body does not determine how one can or will experience that body. In the nineteenth century, when the term was first used, its purpose was to medicalize sex and shift it from the realm of religious discourse to that of medical discourse. Disease replaced sin as the principle way apparently nonconforming (i.e. non-procreative) sexual practices were classified and understood. When the word ‘heterosexual’ was first used in 1892, it described these nonconforming, non-procreative sexual practices and was therefore used to classify a particular kind of perversion. It was not until the mid-twentieth century that it gained its present meaning as the ‘standard’ model of sexuality that stands in opposition to all other forms. What is important to note in this change, though, is the way the terminology shifts from naming specific sexual practices performed by individuals to classifying those individuals as particular types of people. In the latter half of the twentieth century this became the dominant meaning of the notion of sexuality: it identifies a sexual identity, a way of being in the world. As such, sex has been shifted from the realm of the biological to that of the psychological---sexuality is a state of mind in the twenty-first century. But it is undecided as to whether it is voluntary or involuntary. There are strong arguments for both views.