paper-machine comments on Holden's Objection 1: Friendliness is dangerous - LessWrong
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There's more historical data than you might think-- for example, the way the Catholic Church defined sexual sin in terms of actions rather certain sins being associated with types of people who were especially tempted to engage in them.
There's also some history of how sexual normality became more and more narrowly defined (Freud has a lot to answer for), and then the definitions shifted.
A good bit of the book is available for free at amazon, and I think that would be the best way for you to see whether Blank's approach is reasonable.
Oh, so her thesis is that in the west, orientation-as-identity dates back to 1860-ish. I can imagine that being defensible. That's way different from what you originally wrote, though.
You see, the first thing that came to mind was Aristophanes' speech in the Symposium, which explicitly recognizes orientation-as-identity and predates the Catholic Church by a couple centuries.
Thanks for the cite.