I agree that one shouldn't support the genetic predetermination theory of sexuality just as a defense for oppression. That's not how science should be done.
That being said, I still doubt that people really have a choice over their sexuality. Otherwise there would be far more stories from people who have "successfully" turned straight or something, instead of stories from people who have tried to suppress their true sexuality for years and who just turned sad in the process.
It might not be genetically determined, but there are so many more immutable determinants to our behaviour that are outside of our control. The brain is a giant state machine and not all of that is plastic all of the time. It might be determined before you are even born, in the womb. It might be determined in your first few years of life. Or it might actually be genetically determined but through a complex interplay from multiple genes, something that our statistical tools can't catch yet, especially as we don't have an objective measure for gayness. Last, there might be multiple ways someone turns gay.
You don't have a choice about anything you like. The closest you can get to choosing what you like is to decide that you want to like something, and expose yourself to it enough that it starts to grow on you (i.e. you find something in it you like and use that to reinterpret the rest that you were negative or indifferent towards.)
It doesn't work that way for sexuality. Sure, you can grow attached to people close to you, even in arranged marriages. But your core circuit of which gender you like remains unaltered by it.
As for having no choice over, idk, beer vs wine, you can certainly live on beer your entire life even if you (continue to) prefer wine. But will it make you happy? Should a society of beer drinkers force it upon wine drinkers? Note that a partner is a core part of our lives, far more than which liquid you drink.
The pretty abject failure of gay conversation therapy underlines this. Lots of people went into these therapies personally wanting to change, exactly because of societal pressure and expectations.
> That being said, I still doubt that people really have a choice over their sexuality.
My response to people who argue about this is generally: "So, when did you decide you liked long legs more than large breasts?" Choose whatever pairing of sexual characteristics drives home the choice to the person involved.
Like so many things about "sexuality", at some point we notice them, but rarely do we actively choose them.
> My response to people who argue about this is generally: "So, when did you decide you liked long legs more than large breasts?" Choose whatever pairing of sexual characteristics drives home the choice to the person involved.
I feel like there is a clear middle ground. I cannot choose to believe in God, but I wouldn't call it in in-born either. It seems like some things develop through a myriad subtle interactions and subconscious inferences that in their totality add up to a sexuality.
I know my taste in women has definitely changed without a change in DNA.
That's not much of an argument. A preference for long legs vs. large breasts is just that: a preference. What if Long Legs is a meth addict and Large Breasts is the mother of your children? Or likewise. At that point it sounds pathological.
That's why I don't like the "gay gene" argument and never did, not even when it was the hot new thing among assimilationists. It's fundamentally flawed, and not only because it suggests an easy solution to the problem by just making sure no more gay people get born. It grounds the discussion in a "we can't help it" attitude that's ultimately self-defeating because it's always vulnerable to the response that "of course you can help it, even alcoholics have AA, do you have no control over yourself whatsoever?" and there's just no good answer to that.
The form of the argument cedes to the hostile interlocutor that an excuse is required for why we are like we are. I've never understood why anyone thinks that is a good idea.
> That's not much of an argument. A preference for long legs vs. large breasts is just that: a preference.
The point is that you didn't consciously choose it. It just "happened".
I don't like cooked bell peppers. I didn't make a conscious choice to dislike cooked bell peppers, and I got forced to eat them as a kid. It's still a "preference" even though I never "chose" it.
Saying that someone "chose" something simply because it isn't written in their DNA is completely off the mark.
> The form of the argument cedes to the hostile interlocutor that an excuse is required for why we are like we are. I've never understood why anyone thinks that is a good idea.
The hostile interlocutor may be someone willing to vote against your rights. You don't necessarily have a choice but to engage them and having a decent argument that hits their own experience can sometimes provoke a change of thought.
I've been thinking it over off and on for close to a week now, and I'm still no nearer understanding how casting anything about the way I am in terms akin to those of sin, deviance, or culpable personal weakness aids me in convincing a hostile interlocutor not to be so.
In any case, to vote is to exercise power. As I discussed elsewhere in the thread, when reason fails, the best thing with which to counter power is power. Arguments exist on a gradient of rhetorical power, too. And handing someone a rhetorical stick to beat me with just seems like giving a lot of that power away right up front. Why on Earth would I do that in an argument I need to win? Why would anyone?
First, you're assuming those things are preferences. We don't actually have any real evidence that your statement is true for anyone, much less that it's true for everyone.
Second, people are very drawn to having excuses for things, it's much more comfortable to say there's nothing that you can do as opposed to saying there's something you can do but you just didn't. Both of those things are more comfortable than aggressively replying that you have every right to do the thing you did.
Not everyone wants to fight everything all the time.
The problem is that if you defend your actions (regarding all sorts of things, not just limited to where you stick your dick) with "because I f-ing feel like it and I'm an individual with free will" you will be inundated with people claiming you don't or shouldn't have free will or that it should be some entity's job to make the consequences of your preference so miserable that you choose something else. Pretending like you don't have agency is just so much more pragmatic on a day to day basis.
I've found it necessary at several points in my life, not recently, to deal with people who were genuinely interested in arguing - or insisting, or enforcing - that I shouldn't behave in accord with my romantic and sexual desires for male partners. I've never found the argument under discussion here to be of any use in convincing them. In fairness, though, the "because I feel like it" argument hasn't worked any better in those cases. The only thing I've found that has, has been something much more on the order of "if you want to try and stop me, take your best shot".
That one works best when you're part of a community that's visibly willing to back you up on it - when it's evident to your interlocutor that, if they make you have to fight about it, at least you won't be fighting alone. That hasn't been the case for me as often as I'd have liked, but when it has been the case, I've found I rarely even need to say a word.
I came out as gay in a Catholic high school, and it actually went really well for me. But, one day right after Matthew Shepard's murder, our religion class hosted a speaker who wanted to talk about how it was a shame but really he brought it on himself, you know the drill. I didn't say a word because I couldn't, but it turned out I didn't have to, because everyone else in the class - all straight as far as I knew then and, with one exception, as far as I know now - they said everything I would have and more besides. Louder and more persistently than I would have, too. And yeah, in theory there was a power differential there, Authority vs. School Kids, but you know what? That woman turned out not even to have what it took to stand up to a room full of teenagers talking. She fled in disarray, and I have never in my life before or since felt more safe than I did at the end of that half hour. Or felt less alone.
That was the point of the original pride parades, maybe you know and maybe you don't. I was there - admittedly as a child, too young yet to really even understand what I was or start to wonder why, but I was there, marching up the middle of a small Mississippi town with my mom and a bunch of other grown-ups with whom I had something in common that I hadn't even realized yet. "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it."
And people did. Not always happily, and it wasn't always easy, but what it would've cost to shove all those people who marched back in the closet was more than anyone was willing to pay. Better put, it was more than everyone was willing to pay, because - as the march's primary purpose was to demonstrate - everyone was what it would've taken. So they got used to it, instead, and then it turned out never to have been such a big deal after all.
Sweet reason is wonderful, as far as it goes. But if it's going to work, you need the other guy to be willing to meet you in the middle. If he won't do that, you need something to fall back on, if for no other reason than to be able to protect yourself. What that "something" is, is power. Maybe you don't have to use it. Ideally, being seen to have it will be enough. But for even that much to happen, first you have to have it.
We used to understand that. I don't think we do any more.
> everyone else in the class - all straight as far as I knew then and, with one exception, as far as I know now - they said everything I would have and more besides. Louder and more persistently than I would have, too. And yeah, in theory there was a power differential there, Authority vs. School Kids, but you know what? That woman turned out not even to have what it took to stand up to a room full of teenagers talking. She fled in disarray, and I have never in my life before or since felt more safe than I did at the end of that half hour. Or felt less alone.
That's such a heart warming story to read. Thanks for posting it here. I read up about Matthew Shepard. He died 20 years ago, which means your story is equally old. Impressive!
That being said, I still doubt that people really have a choice over their sexuality. Otherwise there would be far more stories from people who have "successfully" turned straight or something, instead of stories from people who have tried to suppress their true sexuality for years and who just turned sad in the process.
It might not be genetically determined, but there are so many more immutable determinants to our behaviour that are outside of our control. The brain is a giant state machine and not all of that is plastic all of the time. It might be determined before you are even born, in the womb. It might be determined in your first few years of life. Or it might actually be genetically determined but through a complex interplay from multiple genes, something that our statistical tools can't catch yet, especially as we don't have an objective measure for gayness. Last, there might be multiple ways someone turns gay.