dude my literal boyfriend doesn't really fit the "born this way" narrative and we're both cis gay men, whereas i personally do. why are you being so weird about this? saying "sexuality is not biologically innate" is not actually the same thing as saying "being gay is a choice (and a bad one we should stop people from making)."
I mean, they are essentially the same thing, and the idea that there is no innate element does lead to that conclusion for many people. I’m also not sure what you’re trying to tell me about you and your boyfriend here. Like how do you agree with someone saying there’s no innate tendency toward your sexuality when you believe you have an innate tendency toward your sexuality? And you’re not really explaining how your boyfriend differs from you. Do you mean that he didn’t always feel gay? Like I didn’t realize I was gay until my teen years, but that doesn’t make me think I somehow *turned* gay when I hit puberty.
The thing is, there really are two basic premises:
1. gay people have no inherent tendency toward being gay, which means that all gay people have to be *turned* into being gay, either through their upbringing, their environment, their influences, society, or even through trauma or some kind of psychological *problem*, etc. which, I hate to break it to you, feeds directly into the argument that homosexuality is not “natural,” and that therefore it can be modified or even eliminated, if not necessarily in every given individual, then societally. Or,
2. gay people have some inherent “natural” tendency toward being gay, though obviously some will try to deny or consciously reject this tendency. This is supported by the fact that gay people have existed in all time periods and societies (even if not labeled explicitly as such) even in societies where this incurs significant negative cost to the individual, and by the fact that individuals in other species also display clear same-sex sexual and social/coupling behaviors. It also jibes with most people’s lived experience and feelings. And this inherent tendency means any effort to change this on either an individual or structural level will ultimately fail. The reason people started saying gay people were “born this way” in recent years has been less a new assertion of reality as it is a conscious push back on the first premise, which many people, especially social conservatives, still believe to be true. The fact that it appears on the left does not make it any less conservative.
Like I don’t know if it’s that you’re a leftist and that you’re open to this interpretation because you think it’s a valid Marxist interrogation of social structures and behaviors, etc. but I really want you to understand that there is nothing new about Marxists wanting to categorize homosexuality this way, and encourage you to familiarize yourself with what has happened, historically, to gay people under communism because of how they associated homosexuality with anti-revolutionary bourgeois individualism. The other option is that you’ve been listening to people who only vaguely comprehend what they’re doing, who are trying to push back on transphobia, very badly, and are conflating arguments about “biological sex” with believing in an innate (or “biological”) tendency toward homosexuality, and assuming both must be inherently and equally transphobic. I’m not “being weird” about anything, I’m refusing to accept illogical and hopefully unintentionally reactionary, homophobic arguments about gay people that do not actually do anything to fight transphobia.
