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I understand where you're coming from - but I also think you've had this explained to you in a confusing and inappropriate way, and as a historian who happens to be a man in a long-term romantic relationship with another man, perhaps I can explain.

I want to begin by explaining just what most people mean when they use the term 'social construct'. In popular culture, people tend to think that when someone says something is a 'social construct' they mean it doesn't really exist - that it's something human beings have imagined without any grounding in reality, and so we could just as easily do away with it. That's an over-simplification of what social construction is. Social construction is perhaps better explained as the shared understanding a society has of a particular thing or experience, regardless of how real that thing or experience is. Some social constructs have very clear and obvious roots in physical experiences; others are completely fabricated. Social construction is about the relationships human beings have with each other, with ourselves, and with the things and lifeforms we share our world with.

The gendering of colours is the classic example of a social construction that has no obvious base in any kind of physical reality. Today we stereotype blue as a colour for boys and pink as a colour for girls, but this has not always been the case, and there's no obvious reason why blue should be the colour of a boy and pink should be the colour of a girl. This is the kind of social construct you're thinking of: a completely arbitrary assignment of meaning to something that has no obvious meaning, but which society as a whole has nonetheless gotten behind (though that's changing quite radically today, obviously). There's no inevitable reason why we decided to say blue is a boy's colour and pink is a girl's colour - we could have just as easily said purple is for boys and yellow for girls, or that light colours are for boys and dark colours are for girls, or (much more ideally) that it's silly to say one colour suits a particular gender better.

But what about other gender stereotypes? I don't want to get too bogged down into a nature vs nurture argument here because that's not what this is about, but there does seem to be a general scientific consensus that your average male is more predisposed to aggressive behaviour biologically than your average female, and we also know that the average male body is going to have superior upper body strength to the average female body. Now if we want to go very far back in human history, or even back in our biology to before we could be described as human, we can see an obvious explanation for why it's an advantage for human beings to be strong and willing to engage in aggressive behaviour. But in an office block in Manhattan or London in the year 2020? Less so. Yet our popular culture nonetheless idolises male bodies that are physically strong, particularly in the upper body, and our popular media is filled with examples of male characters who engage in physically aggressive behaviour, even though the vast majority of people born male in the western world don't have any obvious environmental pressure on them that requires the development of upper body strength or the cultivation of aggression.

These things are part of a social construct of masculinity; of what it means to be a man or man-like. The fact there's almost certainly a biological role in play here doesn't matter - there are others areas of life where we purposefully choose to challenge our biology as a society because we believe, collectively, it is beneficial to do so, and a lot of the research on gender difference is complicated by the fact that unpicking nature and nurture is a very difficult thing to do indeed. And even when something is clearly biologically rooted and self-evident, that does not mean we need to attach worth or value to it as a society. The western construction of race is a very powerful example of this: obviously, human beings have differing skin tones, ranging from a very dark skin colour to a very pale one. But in the grand scheme of human history it is a very, very new thing - only a few centuries old - that we have ascribed strong meaning to these distinctions in skin colour.

Consider the difference in saying "I am White" versus "I have white skin" in English. The latter sounds odd, doesn't it? It's not the kind of thing you would expect someone to say - it feels just that literal bit unnatural compared to "I am White". That's because even if you are the least racist person in the world, terms like 'White' and 'Black' have rich, complicated historic meanings. Even if you don't think of being White or Black as remotely important to your identity as an individual, society has been ascribing meanings - open and subtle - to skin colour for centuries. But we could just have easily decided that race should be based on hair colour, or eye colour, or height, or the presence of birthmarks, or one's season of birth. There is no inherent reason for us to think that skin colour is so much more remarkable than hair colour or height, but though we do have stereotypes about those things, they pale in comparison to the strength and harm done by classifying human beings according to skin colour. 'Race' is real in the sense that skin colour is real, but everything about the meaning and values we attach to those skin colours is constructed. As a social construct it is so pervasive that even if we try to reject it, we have to accept it exists in society at a large, and that the enormous damage its existence has done needs to be repaired before we can even begin to think about the idea of a truly post-racial society. But none of this means historians think that until the 15th century, human beings were all one skin colour or there was no cultural contact between Europe and Africa. We simply say that race as we know it did not yet exist as a concept.

Sexuality is very, very similar. People who experience exclusive same-sex attraction have always existed, do exist and will always exist - the evidence that this happens in thousands of species, including our own, is overwhelming and irrefutable. You will not find any respected historian today arguing that homosexuality is an invention of the human mind. But sexuality - the way we describe our sexual behaviour and preferences - is a social construct. In the 21st century west, we usually think of sexuality as something based fundamentally on attraction - on your capacity to be aroused by another person based on their sex or gender. A straight man is defined as straight because he experiences exclusive attraction to women; a lesbian or gay woman is defined as such because she also experiences exclusive attraction to women. Anyone who experiences attraction to both sexes or genders is said to be bisexual. These are terms that describe real phenomena we know have biological roots: there have always been men in history who, if they lived today, would probably look at what we mean by the word 'gay' and go "yes, that's me". But they did not necessarily live in a time or age when sexuality was based on attraction, and nor is the attraction model the only way to understand sexuality.

If a woman describes herself as straight and only ever have sexual relationships with other men, with the singular exception of having sex with another woman once, is she still straight? Most people would perhaps say 'yes'. But there are some people who would say 'no', or 'not fully straight'. Even though some people use terms based on attraction, they make the assumption that sexual behaviour is always linked to attraction, and so behaviour outside of the attraction someone says they experience must therefore mean they are wrong about their attraction. These people have subscribed to a different social construct where sexual behaviour is the proof of an otherwise unknowable attraction, and thus the construct is fundamentally behavioural. Bisexual people often experience a weird kind of prejudice whereby it's assumed that regardless of what sex or gender they are or what experiences they have, it's assumed they will ultimately end up with a man - bisexual men are stereotyped as being really gay and bisexual women as really straight. Those stereotypes betray the existence of a third social construct of sexuality that some people in our society subscribe to, whereby sexuality is a pure binary between 'straight' and 'gay'. For those people behaviour is irrelevant and all people are classified according to one of two attractions they see as possible.

In the 1940s, a biologist by the name of Alfred Kinsey pioneered a then hugely controversial piece of research into human sexual behaviour and attraction. He came up with the 'Kinsey Scale' - a measurement of human sexuality, which challenged the idea that most people were purely heterosexual or homosexual. His scale described 7 categories of male sexuality ranging from 0 ('exclusively heterosexual') to 6 ('exclusively homosexual'), with 5 intermediate positions describing different degrees of mixed attraction. His observations were based both on attraction and behaviour, and though there's a lot to talk about in how problematic and ethical his research was or was not, the representation of human sexuality presented in Kinsey's scale is arguably much more nuanced than anything that has been widely accepted in popular culture in the western world with our three boxes of 'Straight', 'Bisexual' and 'Gay/Lesbian'. If Kinsey's ideas about human sexuality are essentially sound, then there are probably a good number of people described or self-describing as 'Straight' or 'Gay' who do not fit on Kinsey's scale.