Cults, Culture & Coercion with Dr. Steve Hassan Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire with Lisa Diamond
Dec 8, 2025
Lisa Diamond, psychologist and researcher of sexual orientation development, offers a brief mini bio and explores sexual fluidity and human neuroplasticity. Multiple short sentences cover relationship-driven shifts in attraction. They discuss political threats to LGBTQ research. Conversations touch on adolescence, gender-affirming care, detransition stories, and building social safety.
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Human Plasticity Explains Sexual Fluidity
- Human plasticity is the defining trait that makes sexuality and gender fluid rather than fixed.
- Lisa Diamond ties this to our evolutionary need for fast adaptation and prolonged developmental immaturity that keeps brains changeable.
Born That Way Began As A Tactical Argument
- The 'born that way' argument arose as a tactical response to 1960s anti-gay claims about seduction, not as a complete scientific truth.
- Diamond explains the strategy made sense then but overlooked later discoveries about development and epigenetics.
How A Rolodex Became Decades Of Data
- Diamond started an unfunded, longitudinal study in the 1990s by tracking young women's phone numbers and reinterviewing them over decades.
- That small, persistent method produced 30+ years of rich data and became the basis for her book Sexual Fluidity.
