Sexual and gender orientations can be a tricky topic

Some people want to suppress or kill individuals who are not heterosexuals. Other individuals are outraged about the way people with their sexual orientation are treated by society.

I will take the scientific ground, as best I understand it. I asked a friend, who is of the right age to know, what my orientation is called in modern terms. She said: "cisgender heterosexual male."

That means I was born biologically male, I think of myself as male, and I am sexually attracted to females.

How old-fashioned, you might say. But I give myself a letter in the world of LGBTQIA. I claim the A, which sometimes means ally of individuals who are one of the other letters. But A can also mean asexual, indicating a person has little or no sexual attraction to others. Also, A might mean autosexual - individuals primarily sexually attracted to themselves.

L is for Lesbian, a female attracted to females. G is a male attracted to other males. B is a male or female attracted to both males and females. T stands for transgender, someone who is biologically male or female but identifies with (feels like) the other sex.

Q stands for queer, which has often been used as a slur. However, individuals who identify as not being cisgender heterosexual sometimes apply this term to themselves as a protest. Q can also mean individuals are questioning their sexual orientation or identity.

I stands for intersex, meaning the person biologically has at least some sex organs or sex chromosomes typical of both males and females.

There are varieties of sexual orientation that I have not mentioned. Pansexual means a person is attracted to others regardless of sex or gender identity. A demisexual person experiences sexual attraction only after forming an emotional bond.

Some individuals have sexual interest in specific objects, such as a statue. This kind of interest is sometimes called objectum sexuality.

With more than seven billion humans, what would you expect?

Even animals vary in sexual orientations. Some animals are heterosexual; some are intersex; some show sexual interest in members of the same sex.

For the most part, sexual and gender orientations are created by genetic and biological forces. Height and hair colour also are produced mostly by genetic factors. I will resist the urge to ask you what your sexual orientation is. But I am curious.