Sexual orientation is a choice debate highlights

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PEARL DORTHYSaturday, August 3, 2019 1:28:26 AM

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Is sexuality purely the result of our biology?

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Brandon Ambrosino argues that simplistic explanations have ignored the fluid, shape-shifting nature of our desires. You so obviously cannot be gaywas her implication, because this is good sex. If you happened to engage in activity that ran counter to your sexual identity, then you had two options: The sexual categories were rigid.

My sexual journey through college was anything but run-of-the-mill. I came out at a conservative Christian college in the US and was in a gay relationship for around two years with a basketball player who ended up marrying a woman. I even went so far as to fall in love with one.

As a writer, this kind of complicated story is incredibly interesting to me — mostly because it shows that my own personal history resists the kind of easy classifications that have come to dominate discussions of sexuality. Well, you must have been gay the whole time Sexual orientation is a choice debate highlights, some might think, and because of some religious shame, you decided to lie to yourself and experiment with a girl.

But that was nothing more than a blip in the road. How do I explain that I was honestly in love with a woman? Some people might argue that I am innately bisexual, with the capacity to love both women and men. View image of Credit: People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often cast as homophobic, and their thinking is considered backward.

As Jane Ward notes in Not Gay: In a interview with New York Times Magazine, the actress casually mentioned that homosexuality was, for her, a choice. The blogger John Aravosis was one of many critics who pounced on Nixon. For Aravosis, and many gay activists like him, the public will only accept and affirm gay people if they think they were born gay.

And Sexual orientation is a choice debate highlights the available research does not support this view. Patrick Grzanka, Assistant Professor of Psychology at University of Tennessee, for instance, has shown that some people who believe that homosexuality is innate still hold negative views of gays. In fact, the homophobic and non-homophobic respondents he studied shared similar levels of belief in a Born This Way ideology.

As Samantha Allen notes at The Daily Beastthe growing public support for gays and lesbians has grown out of proportion with the rise in the number of people who believe homosexuality is Sexual orientation is a choice debate highlights at birth; it would be unlikely that this small change in opinion could explain the spike in support for gay marriage, for instance. Instead, she suggests it hinges on the fact that far more people are now personally acquainted with someone who is gay.

In spite of these studies, those who push against Born This Way narratives have been heavily criticised by gay activists. Drowning out every voice that dares to question dominant cultural narratives is not the same thing as invalidating the arguments those voices are making. In other words, the question of the efficacy of conversion therapies is a non-issue.

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The question of what leads to homosexuality in the first place, however, is obscure, even to the experts. True, various eye-grabbing headlines over the years have claimed that some scientists have found something like The Gay Gene.

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You can spot the problem with this study a mile away: LeVay himself pointed this out to Discover Magazine in Another landmark paper on the origins of homosexuality was published in by a geneticist named Dean Hamer, who was interested to learn whether homosexuality could be inherited.

He then recruited 40 pairs of gay brothers and got to work. What he found was that 33 of those brothers shared matching DNA in the Xq28, a region in the X chromosome.

Sexual orientation is an enduring...

But not everyone finds the results convincing, according to Science. For one thing, the study relied on a technique called genetic linkage, which has been widely replaced by genome-wide association studies.

If you are enjoying this story, take a look at the other pieces in our Sexual Revolutions special series, including:. Besides the individual critiques leveled against each new study announcing some gay gene discovery, there are major methodological criticisms to make about the entire enterprise in general, as Grzanka points out: All science is doing is waiting to find the proof.

How then could they be rooted in our genome? Why, then, do some men who have sex with men identify as gay, and others identify as heterosexual?

Ward stresses that not all straight-identifying men who have sex with men are bisexual or closeted, and we do a disservice if we force "Sexual orientation is a choice debate highlights" words on them. Even if you accept that sexual desire may exist on a kind of spectrum, the predominant idea is still that these desires are innate and immutable — but this runs counter to what we know about human taste, says Ward. In fact, the straight-identified men Ward studied for her book sometimes found themselves in situations that sparked the desire for homosexual sex: Ward thinks this question is the next frontier of queer thought.

When I first said I chose to be gay, a queer American journalist challenged me to name the time and date of my choice. But this is an absurd way to look at desire. You might as well ask someone to name the exact moment they began liking Chaucer or disliking Hemingway. When did I begin to prefer lilies to roses? What time did the clock read at the exact moment I fell in love with Sexual orientation is a choice debate highlights partner?

All of our desires are continually being shaped throughout our lives, in the very specific contexts in which we discover and rehearse them. I want to be very clear: These desires suggested to me a queer identity, which I at first reluctantly accepted and then passionately embraced.

This new identity in turn helped reinforce and grow new gay desires within me. Granted, none of this means that there were no genetic or prenatal factors that went into the construction of my or any other sexual orientation.

It just means that even if those factors exist, many more factors do too. So why not encourage conversations about those other things? So what are we to do with the Born This Way rhetoric? There are several reasons for this. The evidence to date offers no consensus that the Born This Way argument is the beginning and end of the story. We should stop pretending that it does. For that matter, why play their game and pretend the only forms of difference that deserve justice are those we were born with?

Finally, I would argue that the Born This Way narrative can actively damage our perceptions of ourselves. In my sophomore year of college, I attended a Gay Student Alliance event at a nearby campus. It was the last meeting before Thanksgiving break, and the theme was coming out to your families.

Student after student, while sobbing hysterically, said something like this: This is just who I am! Because we are beautiful and fabulous. Ward sees this as a self-hating narrative. Perhaps it is time to look to the beginning of the gay rights movement. Gay and lesbian activists, says Ward, used to draw on religion parallels to argue for inclusion. But there are still legal protections for them. Fortunately, we have now made enormous strides in understanding and affirming our queer sexualities.

A recent UK poll from J. More than a third chose a number between one and five. In response to the poll, one of my Facebook friends quipped about how natural selection must be working in overtime, what with making all of us gay! I was born the way all of us are born: This story is part of our Sexual Revolutions series on our evolving understanding of sex and gender. Brandon Ambrosino is a freelance journalist. He Tweets as BrandonAmbro.

Ignacio Lehmann is an Argentinian photographer who has travelled the globe for his World Kisses project. What is BBC Future?

I am against the notion...

Best of BBC Future. If you are enjoying this story, take a look at the other pieces in our Sexual Revolutions special series, including: The complex circumstances that decide your gender Was Darwin wrong about males and females? The sexual orientation no-one is talking about He, she, or they? Why we need Sexual orientation is a choice debate highlights gender-neutral words Should six-way marriage be legal?

Story highlights While same-sex marriage and other equality debates soak up political and media attention, the Employment Non-discrimination Discrimination based on sexual orientation has no place in America today. In a interview with New York Times Magazine, the actress casually mentioned that homosexuality was, for her, a choice.

“I understand that. I am against the notion that a person's sexual orientation is a choice. I would like to debate this topic with an opponent and see what has to be.

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