One of the most harmful and pervasive arguments against gay
rights is this:
“Being gay is a choice.
It’s a preference, not an orientation.”
This argument has always bothered me, but not for the
obvious reason. The obvious reason being
of course that sexual orientation generally isn’t considered a choice, and it’s
absurd and vile to try and force someone to change something they can’t.
But what if they could?
Would that make it right? I don’t
see how. To me that only would make it
more vile.
It’s my thesis that orientation is occasionally chosen, and does
occasionally change. And that in
itself isn’t an argument against diversity, but rather for it.
Let’s Talk Definitions
As the world’s laziest academic, I’m going to turn to Wikipedia. They already did all the citations for me,
and came up with this statement:
“Sexual preference may
suggest a degree of voluntary choice, whereas the scientific consensus is that
sexual orientation is not a choice.”
Scroll down and you will read this:
“Sexual identity and
sexual behavior are closely related to sexual orientation, but they are
distinguished, with sexual identity referring to an individual's conception of
themselves, behavior referring to actual sexual acts performed by the
individual, and orientation referring to "fantasies, attachments and
longings.’”
So, according to these definitions:
- Sexual orientation: Fantasies, attachments and longings.
- Sexual behavior: What a person actually does.
- Sexual identity: How a person perceives themselves.
- Sexual preference: A leaning toward one thing or another with a degree of choice. This is indicated as a rather casual thing, like preferring blue over red or vanilla over chocolate or going to the grocery store on Tuesdays instead of Wednesdays.
These definitions are far from useless, but they still seem a
bit incomplete to me. I mean, for
example, what about actual desires,
which overlap but sometimes differ from fantasies? I’m willing to wager lots of people have
fantasies they’d never want to act on. What
people are comfortable doing in imaginary realms does not always mix with what
they are comfortable doing in the real world.
What about the man who fantasizes about sex with strangers, but in real
life feels zero attraction to strangers and zero urge to ever have sex with
them (he could even be demisexual)? What
about the woman with dubious consent fantasies, who placed in the same
real-life situations would feel utterly traumatized? Or what about someone who fantasizes about a
certain person, but presented with the possibility of actually being with them
sexually, discovers they have no real-life interest?
Anyway, the page goes on to add the following useful observations:
- Sexual identity, behavior and orientation do not always match.
- The page is not entirely clear on whether sexual identity is hard-wired or chosen, but the implication is that conscious decision-making does play a role. Clearly it also plays a role in behavior.
The Contradictions Start …
Here’s where things get interesting.
- According to the APA, “Most people experience little or no sense of choice about their sexual orientation.”
Most people? This is the APA talking here. The same Wikipedia page also mentions,
“Studies have reported that choice is
considered an important factor in orientation for some people.”
Wow. Why don’t I ever
hear about these studies?
Sometimes I think it’s because the LGBTQA+ community worries
that talking about choice in relation to sexuality will supply ammunition to
the other side—that side that argues “gay is a choice,” and that “gay people
can and should change.” I don’t believe
talking about choice is ever ammunition
for oppressors. After all, it isn’t just
the natures we were born with that oppressors want to take away; it’s our
choices too.
Sex researchers admit they don’t even know how orientations
form—whether they are nature or nurture or some combination thereof. But that means that aside from any hard-wired
biological components that go into determining orientation (which indeed would
be outside our control), assuming nurture plays any role at all, choice must come into play on some level. That’s my assertion. Why?
Because inputs from our environment and other people inform our
development. The choices of other people
can impact our orientations. And on top
of that, we make choices every day of
our lives, even as small children. Perhaps
not very conscious ones, but well, mileage does vary. Those choices affect others, and ourselves.
Researchers believe that sexual orientation manifests for
most people during mid-childhood and early adolescence—counter to what I’ve
usually heard, that people are born a certain way. This is interesting to me, because this is
around the time in most peoples’ lives when choices do start becoming conscious and meaningful. Nothing in our lives develops in a
vacuum. Everything during that crucial
stage is formative. Our genetics have a
formative impact on our thoughts and choices, but our choices and resulting
experiences in turn have a formative effect on our neurons and future
psychological and biological growth.
I’m not asserting that I believe choice plays a major role
for all or even most people with
regards to sexual orientation. But for
those it does … it is wrong to pretend these people don’t exist, and don’t
carry the same rights as everyone else.
Can Orientations Change?
I also believe sexual orientation may change throughout a
person’s life, that it is something which is not always something fixed and
innate, but sometimes quite fluid and alive.
Despite the APA’s implication that choice may play a role for some people with regards to orientation,
they are pretty clear about their assertion that once the mortar has set, it’s
set in stone. Here’s what they have to
say:
“There is no sound
scientific evidence that sexual orientations can be changed.”
They do add that awareness of orientation is fluid and that
people may become more or less aware of their innate orientations at different
points in their lives.
While I agree 100% with the assertion about shifting awareness,
I still don’t agree with the first part of the statement. Why?
Just as our experiences play a formative role in our adolescence, they
continue to do so throughout our adult lives.
While most people may find their sexual orientations fixed in their
younger years, who is to say there are no late bloomers (I myself am probably
an example of that)? And who is to say
that a person’s experiences and choices over a lifetime cannot lead to the
formation of a new orientation later in life by the same processes that formed
their initial orientation?
I want to share a few anecdotes. These are real people with real life
stories. I know that it’s hard to
quantify lives and turn them into data, and I’m not trying. The uniqueness of these stories is what is
important.
Esther
I know a woman, call her Esther, who describes herself as
“having been a lesbian.” I asked to know
more, and she described a more complicated situation.
When Esther was younger, her body only responded to
women. She didn’t experience arousal in
response to men. Contradictorily, her
mind didn’t respond to women at all, and only was attracted to men. The idea of having sex with a woman was
completely off-putting to her; the idea of sex with a man was appealing, but
didn’t translate into her body. It
wasn’t that she was bisexual, attracted to both men and women. In essence, her body was homosexual, desiring
women, and her mind was heterosexual; it was men she longed for and fantasized
about. As her cerebral desires and
fantasies were more compelling to her than her body’s needs, Esther would have
preferred to be strictly heterosexual. She
described it as a feeling of being “torn apart.”
Years later, Esther went on hormone replacement therapy for
PCOS, and suddenly discovered her body was responsive to men, and no longer to
women. Her psychological draw to men
remained unchanged, so she actually became fully heterosexual. Lucky Esther?
Esther thinks that the change was half chance, half choice. She believes the change in her body
hormonally accounted for part of it, but she also believes wholeheartedly that
her psychologically needs eventually drove her physical needs to “catch up”
with what she wanted in her heart.
I’m not sure what sex researches would say about
Esther. I suppose some might assert
she’s a latent, permanent lesbian who has suppressed her “real” orientation
under a false heterosexual identity, and that she merely has a “preference” for
men or is going through a phase or that her PCOS therapy is muddying the waters. But this is blatantly disrespectful of
Esther’s psychological needs. Not
wants—needs, the needs which were always there and still are. Who has the right to say that this is a case
of repression when she now feels complete ease with her orientation? She no longer feels torn in two.
Others might argue that she is and always has been bisexual,
but again, this would disregard the fact that she had two splintered orientations.
Part of her was distinctly heterosexual and part of her was distinctly
homosexual. I suppose another sex
researcher might propose that Esther has always been fully heterosexual and
that her PCOS was somehow “obscuring” her sexuality. While hormones clearly play a role in
sexuality, this assertion would ignore the fact that hormones change many times
throughout a person’s life. What if
someone like Esther were to undergo another hormonal change (perhaps not
related to a health condition at all) and experience another shift in bodily
needs in the future? What if she shifted
back to desiring women? Would the same
researcher then argue she was always a lesbian after all?
Esther's story suggests orientations can exist on multiple levels,
even in the same person. Not only that,
but whether the body’s, mind’s or spirit’s orientation is most compelling might
vary from person to person. Another
woman wired similarly to Esther might have found her body’s needs more
compelling than her mind’s, and would have been relieved if her mind could
“catch” up to her body and allow her to be fully lesbian. Another might have been relieved to be able
to become fully bisexual.
But in Esther’s particular case, her cerebral needs were
outpacing her physical needs even before the shift in her body. I find this fascinating, because “the body
determines the mind” seems to be the default with researchers. I guess this shouldn’t be surprising, being
as no one is even sure scientifically what “the mind” is, but Esther’s story
should give anyone pause. Sometimes, the
mind determines the body, or as Esther puts it, “the spirit was stronger than
the flesh.”
Eva
Now let’s talk about Eva.
Eva is a transgender person, born as a man. Eva’s gender identity is complicated and
doesn’t fit in a binary, and sums up as, “my goal is not to become a woman, but
to become the feminine person I would be comfortable as.”
Originally, growing up as a man, Eva perceived himself as
heterosexual, and experienced life that way.
He was attracted to women and fantasized about women. As Eva became more comfortable with her/his
transsexual identity, her/his interests started to broaden. The porn Eva used to download featured men
and women, and Eva would relate to the porn from both sides—as the male and
female participant. Even though Eva
continues to find women attractive and still fantasizes about them, s/he
noticed the porn videos s/he has been downloading in recent years feature more transsexuals and fewer
women. “Right now, my ultimate fantasy
is being my female self. And since this
is my fantasy, it shows up in the videos I download,” s/he explains. “I can obviously relate more to transsexuals
as I’m closer to them than I am to women, physically.” She goes on to explain that that even though
she’s always found women attractive, she also has long been drawn to activities
and situations that people “traditionally associate with women.”
Eva adds, “It’s not like my interest has shifted because I
still like women, but rather I embraced the notion that a sexual organ isn’t
necessarily an identifier of whether someone is male or female and I learned to
associate the penis with more than male.
That’s important, because I came to realize it’s not my penis I’m
uncomfortable with but my maleness.”
I asked Eva whether s/he would say her/his orientation
actually changed, or had simply been discovered. “I think I may have discovered it. On the other hand, it’s not like my
appreciation for the notion of women who were born as male was inherent. I do think my sexuality could have gone
different ways in that regard … I think the point is that your sexual identity
and orientation may actually be changing constantly.”
Eva’s situation is too complex for me to dissect, but it’s
another excellent example of fluidity in sexual experience as well as
choice. It’s a less unusual situation
than Esther’s according to the definitions outlined earlier in the sense that
this story followed a pathway of discovery more than actual conscious change,
though Eva has experienced a genuine
shift in fantasies and longings. That
seems to go beyond the definition of identity and wander into the territory of
orientation as well. Both have shifted
for Eva.
Eva’s words on this are interesting as well: “I did notice a conscious shift, but looking
back at my past … I have to wonder to which extent my choices were
predestined. If my life would have gone
differently, I think I would still be transgender and would likely still be in
the position I am now … Nature already defined me, and I just took a long time
to make sense out of what I was given.
I’m quite convinced people can consciously alter their sexual orientation
… though I think if you can make such a shift, there was something inside you
that you’ve been ignoring. I think
nature defines you in rough terms, and the personal and sexual sophistication
you ultimately get to is a culmination of experiences and developments based on
and restricted by what nature gave you. I
think you can create minor neurological pathways and have some control over it
as well, but you can't completely reprogram your brain. With the analogy of
computers, I think you can change some of the software as long as they fit on
the hardware in the first place. You can't install Windows software on a Mac,
but the software you use certainly changes, and sometimes consciously so.”
Me
I feel like my own situation is nebulous, but it seems
relevant to this discussion. In this
entry, I talked about how the internet had a formative role in the development
of my pan(gray)romantic and pansexual identity—and how the choices I made in
that time helped construct that identity.
To be clear, I consider my orientation demi-pansexual.
As a demisexual (and yes, ace spectrum identities are sexual orientations; let’s try and
remember that who you aren’t attracted
to matters as much as who you are attracted
to), love is a prerequisite to me to form any serious attraction. My chemistry comes more from my personal
connection to someone and their particular energy and less from their physical
body. Because of this, I feel the people
I chose to love in my youth influenced
my sexual development during those formative years. And yes, love is a choice.
I think it’s also worth mentioning that I have a hard time
with physical contact altogether.
Handshakes and friendly hugs from strangers and even most acquaintances
make my skin crawl. With close friends I
can often get comfortable with physicality.
It’s still rare for that to proceed to sexual attraction. And often for me, simply not being repulsed by the idea of sexual contact
with another human being (not just as a fantasy, but as a seriously considered
reality) actually qualifies as something resembling attraction—or at least a
basis for it. I’m happy when I find that
level of comfort in any form it takes.
I talk in that other blog entry about how I felt a bit like a
“blank slate” sexually in some ways stepping into the world. That probably is a reflection of the fact
that attraction is so rare for me. I
went through childhood and puberty without being attracted to anybody. I had a sex drive, but I suspected I might be
entirely asexual, since there was never an urge to act on it. Assuming orientation indeed isn’t 100%
genetic and does generally develop during adolescence, did that mean I had no particular
sexual orientation (beyond my latent unknown demisexuality) until sometime in
high school or even college? A very
curious thought.
Anyway, the strange result of my extremely rare attraction
was the fact that by the time I started to feel any sense I might be a sexual being, I was so
self-aware of my decisions that it all felt very logical and structured to
me.
My pansexual development went something like, "Well,
emotionally I can latch on to any person who is really fantastic and meets all
my criteria for being an awesome human being, and there aren't going to be a
lot of those, so I would be silly to limit the pool of candidates to men or
women, so okay, I will potentially be open to whomever impresses me as a
person. And since persons of any sex or
gender can impress me, persons of any sex or gender are potentially
attractive."
Because of the above logic, I look for persons, and not for men or women.
It sounds a bit like a math equation, but it’s worked for me and I feel
very comfortable with it. Why does this
sound like that equation was built from the ground up? I’ll
share more on why I didn’t feel like I had a reliable “default” in my head as
an adolescent in just a second. I did have a default, but it wasn’t from my
heart—it was from my upbringing. It
didn’t reflect desire so much as social expectations.
Eva told me a story about meeting a somewhat androgynous
child when s/he was a child and still identified as a boy. The child wanted to kiss him, but Eva didn’t
know what to do about it. Eva recalled
feeling confused about the situation (and not kissing), and not being sure
whether the kissing was desirable or not.
S/he adds, “Thinking back, I might have wanted to kiss but didn’t think
it was right. And I don’t mean morally
right. I mean right as in, I didn’t
think it was a possibility in this reality.”
I related to this story because as a child, even though I do
recall fantasies pertaining to women as well as men (though most of my early
fantasies of intimacy of any sort were in more of an asexual kink vein), I was
literally unaware that being gay or pansexual or anything other than
heterosexual was possible, much in the same way that if you’re brought up
religious, it’s a while before you realize atheism exists or that it’s possible
not to believe in a supernatural deity. I
just literally had no conception that LGBTQA+ people existed, or that I could potentially
be one.
So I do recall my earliest thoughts (before the ones
described previously) were something like, “Well, I ought to find myself a
boy/man.” I just thought it was “what
was done,” though I wasn’t much interested in “finding” anyone at that juncture
(again because of a lack of attraction).
That essentially random default was quickly supplanted by my pansexual logic when
I realized women and transpersons (who I didn’t fantasize about as a child also
for the simple reason I didn’t know they existed!) were on the menu, so to say,
and that I could open my sexuality to anyone I damn well pleased.
Despite how pragmatic and coolly rational that whole process
might sound to someone reading it, I didn’t feel free to be myself and be happy
until that revelation. To draw a quote
from the film Cloud
Atlas, “Knowledge is a mirror and for the first time in my life I was
allowed to see who I was and who I might become.”
The “delayed” nature of this process (as a result of my demisexuality
as well as my upbringing-induced ignorance) means that logic and choice did have
an unusually prominent role in informing my sexual development. Like Esther, my cerebral mind and spirit had
more of an influence on my overall development than my body, though in a very
different manner. My body had little to
say on the matter of my sexuality at all; it was essentially neutral beyond a
desire for rare comfort. My mind and
spirit effectively told my body what they were interested in, and my body
agreed since I derive my physical comfort from my psychological comfort.
I have no clue if a sex researcher would say that I’m
latently pansexual and had to discover it, or say that I have no natural
orientation at all and simply have a “preference” for pansexuality developed in
lieu of one. All I know is that my
choice to open myself to love with any sex or gender also opened me up to
potential attraction to any sex or gender.
I have yearnings and longings and fantasies, just like the next
person. If someone were to try to take
away my rights, I would suffer as deeply.
I might prefer vanilla (don’t laugh) over chocolate ice cream—most of the time. Something like whom I am attracted to or can
enjoy a sexual relationship with is a lot more serious than that (though I'd still be pretty miffed if someone tried to take my culinary rights away). No one has a right to call that a
preference. It’s a need. And yes, it’s a need that consciously
developed, influenced by my choices and values.
Innate or not, my decisions played a role. That I know.
Why Do We Draw Such a Sharp Line Between Orientation and Identity?
One of the points I hope these anecdotes conveyed is that
terms like orientation, identity, behavior, and preferences are helpful—but only up to a
point, and all of them are more complex than they appear on the surface. It is easier to scientifically study what
comes from the body than it is to study what comes from the mind, since
scientists do not even agree if the mind or free choice exists. And the soul? Science doesn't want to touch that with a thousand-foot pole.
Anyone who has ever been “in the closet” knows just how big
a role choice can play in sexual orientation.
If orientation is comprised in part by fantasies, attachments and
longings, and you have long been repressed, you have to choose to engage those fantasies, attachments and longings. It is not automatic, even if it is
innate. In that sense, something can be
destined and chosen at the same time. And what about people who go most of their lives without something, try it, and find out they can't live without it ever again? I know there are a lot of vanilla people for example who go clear into middle age without even thinking of kink, only to discover after they try it that it's a core part of them for the rest of their lives. Many of these people might have been latently kinky, but many probably were not.
Another interesting observation about fantasies (as an
aspect of orientation) is that they also change. Eva pointed out that s/he was reminded of the
notion that when you call a memory, you rewrite it. Ironically, this means that even (and perhaps
especially) the fantasies that are called up time and again are constantly
being rewritten, sometimes in big ways, other times in minute ways—but they are
always in flux with the course of our lives.
Some Concluding Thoughts
My goal with this essay isn’t to draw a lot of
conclusions. I think it’s too big and
complex a topic for that. Mostly I just
want to draw attention (as usual) to the fact that we live in an incredibly
diverse world, and it isn’t just sexuality which is a broad spectrum, but also
the phenomenological human experience of it, and that too deserves our respect.
Whether we’re talking about orientations or identities—who
creates the definitions, the labels and the categories? We do.
Human beings. One person’s
“lesbian” is another person’s “bisexual.”
One person’s “asexual” is another person’s “sexual.” It’s important to recognize that we not only
have differences in behavior, but in perception. If someone identifies one way and then behaves
in a way that you don’t expect, there is a reason. If it’s not understood, the best approach is
to ask, not assume or slap your own label on that person.
We are not closed systems.
We don’t live in a vacuum, and every nuance of our lives has some kind
of an impact on our sexuality and everything else about us. I’ve never been Deepak Chopra’s biggest fan,
but I love one of his recent statements,
suggesting that even biology, including our genes and neurons, and not just our
psychology, is malleable:
“Here is where a new
view of free will is needed. The paradox is real. Genes determine the color of
your hair and eyes, but thanks to the emerging science of epigenetics, we now
know that genes are also fluid, malleable, and in fact responsive to everything
we experience in the world. The same is true of the brain. Its processes follow
strict laws of physics and chemistry, yet neurons, synapses, and brain
circuitry are open to change simply by the way we lead our lives.”
I don’t wish to delve deep into the question of whether
choice or free will exists, but I have to call into question whether there is
really a difference between “chosen” and “destined,” and whether these are perhaps
just words—incomplete models for the complete and ultimately unknowable reality
behind both.
When our choices are
consciously and intelligently made, we do what
we feel is right for us. But what
creates that sense of “right for us”?
Biology? Environment? Psychology?
The needs of our immortal souls?
A combination? I doubt anyone can
positively answer that question.
I question why something which is chosen or fluid
necessarily should be treated as less valid or less of a fact than something innate or fixed. Another of Eva’s observations is, “As far as
I know, there is no principle in nature that says lasting things or fixed
things should be valued more than the things that don’t and aren’t. The projected hierarchy seems to be a human
construct. We like to define and label,
and it’s hard to define and label something that keeps changing, hence in many
contexts we value fixed notions higher than fluid ones.”
I personally feel this is a genius observation, and reflects
the limits we impose on ourselves and others—and maybe we shouldn’t. As human beings, we become uncomfortable in
the face of ambiguity, but much if not all of life takes place inside that
uncertain realm. There is much to be
celebrated there.
The Bottom Line: We All Deserve Respect
One conclusion we can draw
from this discussion is that everyone’s sexual
orientations, identities, behaviors, and experiences deserve our respect. And more importantly, the people behind those
surprisingly variable labels and categories do.
Whether you believe sexual identity and sexual orientation
are two distinct concepts or overlapping traits, whether you believe they’re
fixed and innate or flexible and chosen, those beliefs shouldn’t alter the way
you treat your fellow human beings.
Let’s come full circle and return to the argument from the
beginning of this essay, and answer it:
“Being gay is a choice.
It’s a preference, not an orientation.”
I think I’ve covered enough ground to say that while most
sane and reasonable people would not agree with the first part of the above statement,
allowing them to easily reject the rest, we can infer that some people hearing
that statement might feel violated by it from quite a different angle—as I
myself do. What about the person who
hears that statement and does believe
his sexuality was partially or
totally a choice—and still far more than a “preference?” Why should that serve as a foundation stone
to discriminate against him or “re-educate” him or “cure” him or in any other
way impede on his rights as a human being to live the life that is best for him, as determined by him?
And even if you still believe despite everything I have
shared that only sexual identity (not orientation) can change, why is sexual
identity considered fundamentally less
true or less sacred than
orientation? Oftentimes, the most
compelling aspects of our lives aren’t what we “arrived” in the world with—but
the choices we made along the way. What
is most compelling and important depends on the individual, and that’s always a personal choice.
Whether choice plays a role in establishing a person’s
sexual orientation or not will not lessen the damage to that person’s body,
mind and soul if others try to take that person’s rights away. The result is just as devastating in every
case, because in every case, we are talking about fundamental integrity and
freedom of will being violated. Our
choices reflect our will when they serve our best interests (again, as
determined by us), and sometimes choosing is itself is an innate human need. What if that is part of a person’s
orientation? What if that is the aspect
of a certain person which is fixed, changeless and timeless?
Choice isn’t a
negative. Choice makes us human, and
choice should carry rights. We should
not devalue people for the packages they came into the world in—their
hard-wired orientations, wants and needs.
But we should value them for
their choices when those choices empower themselves and others to live
fulfilling, happy, meaningful lives.
I want to share a wonderful quote from this absolutely fabulous article over at New Republic by Brandon Ambrosino. You should head over there and read it next:
"The re-inventiveness of our human condition is one of our greatest traits, and it’s worth protecting both legally and philosophically."
