Recently, Miley Cyrus told Elle UK, “I’m very open about it . I’m pansexual.”

In June, she’d told Paper Magazine:

“I am literally open to every single thing that is consenting and doesn’t involve an animal and everyone is of age. Everything that’s legal, I’m down with. Yo, I’m down with any adult . anyone over the age of 18 who is down to love me.”

There was something about the casual, carefree-ness of the statements that I found both charming and revolutionary. It took a happy-go-lucky sledgehammer to the must-fit-a-box binary that constrains and restricts our understanding of the complexity of human sexuality.

As much progress as has been made in the acceptance of L.G.B.T.-identified people in society, there is still a surprising level of resistance to people who identify as the B in that list of letters (bisexual) . or pansexual or omnisexual or even asexual . and that resistance comes from straight and gay people alike.

I wrote in my memoir, “Fire Shut Up In My Bones,” about identifying as bisexual because “in addition to being attracted to women, I could also be attracted to men.” I also wrote about the tremendous amount of agitation, and even hostility, that people . particularly men . so identified can engender:

“Even the otherwise egalitarian would have no qualms about raising questions and casting doubt. Many could only conceive of bisexuality in the way it existed for most people willing to admit to it: as a transitory identity . a pit stop or a hiding place . and not a permanent one.”

Yet, I don’t feel in any way defective or isolated in my identity. If fact, I feel liberated or and even enlightened by it.

And, more young people like Cyrus appear to be joining in that enlightenment. The market research firm YouGov asked British adults last month to plot themselves on the sexuality scale created by Alfred Kinsey in 1940s, with zero being exclusively heterosexual and 6 being exclusively homosexual.

The survey found that while 89 percent of the respondents overall describe themselves as heterosexual, “The results for 18-24-year-olds are particularly striking, as 43 percent place themselves in the non-binary area between 1 and 5 and 52 percent place themselves at one end or the other. Of these, only 46 percent say they are completely heterosexual and 6 percent as completely homosexual.”

YouGov then released data from the United States where respondents were asked to do the same self-rating. The American data found that “29 percent of under 30s put themselves somewhere on the category of bisexuality.”

Obviously, these ratings weren’t meant to measure sexual activity, intimate histories or label identification, but they were meant to measure “the possibility of homosexual feelings and experiences.”

YouGov is not the only group that has tried to get a handle on the fluid middle. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Survey of Family Growth presented data from 2006-2008 in a 2011 report that showed that 16 percent of American women and 5 percent of men under 45 refused to say they were attracted to only one sex, instead admitting that they were only mostly attracted to one sex, were equally attracted to both, or were unsure. In that survey, 21 percent of women 20-24 years old and 7 percent of men in those ages said that they were somewhere in the middle.

And remember, 2008 is forever ago on the rapidly changing issue of L.G.B.T. acceptability. For instance, according to Gallup, only 48 percent of Americans in 2008 found gay and lesbian relations morally acceptable. That number has now jumped to 63 percent, and among those ages 18-34 it is now at 79 percent.

Attraction is simply more nuanced for more people than some of us want to admit, sometimes even to ourselves. That attraction may never manifest as physical intimacy, nor does it have to, but denying that it exists creates a false, naive and ultimately destructive sense or what is normal and possible.

Furthermore, different people can experience attraction differently. For some, the order of attraction starts with body first. That’s fine. For others though, it starts with the being first, the human being, regardless of the body and its gender. That’s also fine. And yet, the idea that one can have a physiological response to something other than gendered physicality seems to some antithetical to their rigid, superannuated notions of attraction, or even heretical to it.

But it seems more younger people are liberating themselves from this thinking and coming to better understand and appreciate that people must have the freedom to be fluid if indeed they are, and that no one has the right to define or restrict the parameters of another person’s attractions, love or intimacy.

People must be allowed to be themselves, however they define themselves, and they owe the world no explanation of it or excuse for it. They have to be reminded that the only choices they need to make are to choose honesty and safety.

Attraction is attraction, and it doesn’t always wear a label.