Nature vs. Nurture: It doesn't matter.
Please stop using the argument that ‘gay is not a choice’. You may be right, but it’s beside the point. Here’s the anti-gay ‘MrSluagh’ on christianforums.com making my point for me:
From a pro-gay perspective, there’s no accounting for taste. If someone likes redheads, do people always ask them “Why is that? How long have you felt this way? Do you think you could change?” It doesn’t matter why a person has a certain preference as long as he or she is happy with it and isn’t hurting anyone.
From a Christian anti-gay perspective, people being born with sinful tendencies is nothing new. It’s called “original sin”. Even if homosexuality is genetic, that doesn’t change anything.
Yep. But let’s go deeper.
The Problem with Categories
The hetero-normative perspective assumes that you can define what is ‘normal’ and what is ‘other’. Men are normal and women are other. Straight is normal and gay is other. Men who like pink are other. Women who think are other.
The (western) gay movement has focused on creating new categories and trying to get them added to Team Normal. First Gay and Lesbian, then Bi, then Trans, Queer, Questioning, Asexual, Intersex, and on and on.
This splinters the non-hetero movements. Each category-group has to do their own work to achieve a ‘normal’ status. Gays and Lesbians are getting closer, bi people not as close, trans people are way behind, and no one even knows what intersex is.
There are also inter-cultural problems with this approach, explained so well by Akshay Khanna (Aid conditionality and the limits of a politics of sexuality) that I won’t go too far into them. In brief, the movement can’t handle cultural differences in how those categories are drawn.
When we argue that we were ‘born’ one way or another, we are invoking nature to give legitimacy to our claim of normalcy. To confirm it, science runs out looking for a ‘gay’ gene. Gay rights hang in the balance while science struggles to answer the question.
Saying that you personally had no choice may or may not be true, I don’t care. But when you use nature as The Reason It’s OK To Be Gay, you’ve created a litmus test for ‘normal’. Preferences you are born with are normal, and preferences you choose are not.
How did you come to that conclusion? Why are we against people making choices for themselves? Is it good to love another man if I’m predisposed, but bad if I choose it? Who gets to decide if I’m telling the truth?
I don’t want to play that game. There is no ‘normal’, so stop trying to be part of it. All the categories are arbitrary. They can be useful shortcut descriptions, but they are only shortcuts. You don’t have to pick a team.
No one is attracted to All Women or All Men. Bi people are not attracted to Everyone Ever. Categories fall apart, and only attraction is left. People are attracted to their own very-small subgroups of mix-and-matched humans, each one unique.
Male and Female are arbitrary as well. Ability to give birth? Some ‘women’ can’t do that, are they no longer women? Sexual organs? Some people have both, or neither, or undefined, so what are they? Chromosomes? Those don’t always match what you see, so how do you know who you love?
We can’t keep playing the game. We have to quit. Refuse to play. Loudly declare ourselves non-believers, and live how we want. Love who we want. Fuck who we want (if they also want). We have to stop fighting for our rights one-at-a-time, and start fighting for a new game. The right to make the choices that we want to make, and the choices we were born into, and the choices we were socialized into, without feeling bad about any of them.
p.s.: Some categories, like sex and race, remain important in relation to our experiences and oppressions, whether or not they are arbitrary. No matter how much I do or don’t identify as male, no matter my chromesomes and sex organs, I grew up with male privilege and socialization. Categories don’t just go away when we realize they are false. We still have to deal with them, but that dealing-with can look a bit more like rejecting.
