Why Can't a Woman Be Less Like a Man?

“Wouldn’t the males in the room like to think that the Y has some more enduring contribution to maleness?” It is 2001, in Bethesda, Maryland. Y chromosome geneticist David Page looks out at the audience’s young men—high school honors students. In the beat following Page’s question, they visibly twinge with anxiety and anticipation. With a beaming smile, Page breaks the tension, reassuring the boys that new research in his lab has, fortunately, “intellectually rescued” the Y from “years and years of misunderstanding.” The faces relax and nervous giggles titter around the room.

This anecdote comes from Sarah S. Richardson's Sex Itself: The Search for Male and Female in the Human Genome (Chicago, 2013, p.149 of the Kindle version).  It's followed by another anecdote from five years later, in which another researcher retails a newer improved model of the Y chromosome, thereby putting "broad smiles" on the faces of the women in the audience while "the blokes are shifting uncomfortably, unnerved by the prospect of their fundamental redundancy."  Which supports what I've been saying for a long time now: it's not a good idea to hitch your self-esteem or your politics to scientific claims, which have a way of changing with the winds of fashion.  That's especially true since as Richardson herself insists repeatedly in the book, the X and Y chromosomes have nothing to do with the social status or value of men and women, nor do they determine our behavior, gender expression, or much of anything else.  That young scientists and scientist-wannabes are being encouraged by their elders and teachers to think otherwise is not good news.

Why would "the males in the room" be stricken with anxiety if the Y chromosome doesn't make "some more enduring contribution to maleness"?  Males are males, and females females, regardless of what role the Y chromosome plays.  I presume, going by other quotations from Page in Richardson's book, that he means that the Y chromosome causes in some obscure fashion the stereotypical masculine traits and behavior that he casts as caricatures when he's not advancing them himself.  (This is common coin in masculist propaganda, of course: if you criticize male violence, you're stereotyping men unfairly and subsisting on their tears; if you celebrate male violence, you're ultra-cool and recovering primal male energy.)  So, for example, when talking to the laity, Page 

is quoted saying that “the Y married up, the X married down,” and “the Y wants to maintain himself but doesn’t know how. He’s falling apart, like the guy who can’t manage to get a doctor’s appointment or can’t clean up the house or apartment unless his wife does it [Richardson, 159].

But even in one of his journal articles:

Figures depicted X-transposed genes as pink, X-degenerate genes as yellow (representing an ancient mix of male and female—presex, neutral, or neither-nor), and Y genes as blue. X genes were characterized as "housekeeping" and "ubiquitous" while Y genes "acquire" and "maintain" male-specific functions and experience "abundant" palindromic recombination [Richardson, 162; boldface added].

That, remember, is a professional publication, aimed at his critical-thinking scientific peers, not throwing dust in the eyes of the credulous and irrational sheeple.

One of the funniest symptoms of male anxiety Richardson discusses is the reaction to a prediction, by the Australian geneticist Jennifer Graves, that the Y chromosome is degenerating and will go extinct -- in about 14 million years.  That is a prospect to keep you up nights, isn't it?  Graves seems to be Page's mirror image, with her equally loaded descriptions of the Y chromosome as a "wimp," a "genetic wrecking yard," and the like (Richardson, page 170).  The disappearance of the Y chromosome wouldn't mean the extinction of males, by the way: there are mammalian species without Y chromosomes, but they still have fertile males.  The curious thing about this emotional reaction -- you'd think they were facing execution the next morning -- is that extinction is as much part of evolutionary theory as the change of species itself.  Everybody dies, and most species eventually go extinct.  If men vanished from the planet, it would simply mean that we had lost the struggle for existence, that Nature had weighed us in the balance and found us wanting and blah blah blah. 

The ascription of sex/gender stereotypes to genes and chromosomes as if they were fully-developed organisms is about as ridiculous as anthropomorphizing subatomic particles.  (Our Friend, The Quark.)  Evidently it doesn't keep people like Graves and Page from doing valid scientific work.  Richardson argues: 

Perhaps Graves’s and Page’s research on the Y has been lively and productive at least in part because of the gendered models they have drawn on. We have here a case of competing biases, each productive in channeling particular programs of Y chromosome study. As these biases are the subject of active and open debate, they do not carry with them the same threat to scientific objectivity as do biases shared by an entire research community and thus invisible to its participants [174].

She points out, though, that Graves is avowedly feminist, while Page casts himself as a neutral, objective, just-the-facts-Ma'am "nonideological scientist" (173). The lack of self-awareness on Page's part, given how freely he throws around the most cliched Blondie/Dagwood gender stereotypes, is troubling, but also old news to anyone familiar with the history of sexism in the sciences.

One of the first things I thought of when I read about this controversy was the attitude expressed by one of my readers, that the idea that he was born gay appeals to him emotionally.  I'm not sure what that appeal is.  I'm weird, as we all know, but my own change of heart, when I was twenty, had nothing to do with any theory of why I'm gay.  It was inspired (though not caused) by the writings of people like the lesbian writer Jill Johnston, which helped me to decide that my desire for another young man was as valid as desire for a young woman would be.  I say "decide" instead of, say, "realize," because it was a decision about how I was going to regard my homosexuality, rather than an objective claim about its nature or status.  A moral decision, which is what is at issue.  Thanks to other reading I'd done, notably Martin Hoffman's The Gay World (Basic Books, 1968), I knew about the then-current dominant theory of the origin of male homosexuality, that it was due to faulty relationships with one's parents; I also knew that this theory was flawed and invalid, and that homosexuality was not an illness or disorder.  I believe I also knew about the born-gay theories of the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, and that they had been discredited too.  But it doesn't seem that I cared why I was homosexual; what mattered to me was that it was all right to be attracted to other males, and to try to find one who'd be attracted to me.

It appears that not everyone considers the born-gay doctrine emotionally appealing.  In An American Obsession: Science, Medicine, and Homosexuality in Modern Society (Chicago, 1999) Jennifer Terry wrote:

Among those gay men who are economically and socially powerful in the world, conceding that nature makes them gay is apparently less damaging than it might seem to working-class gay teenagers. A social worker who works with gay suicidal teens recently remarked that the biology-is-destiny line can he deadly. Thinking they are "afflicted" with homosexual desire as a kind of disease or biological defect rather than thinking of it as a desire they somehow choose is, for many gay teenagers, one more reason to commit suicide rather than to live in a world so hostile to their desires.

If you're born that way, after all, it's incurable.  I've noticed before how bleakly many born-gay dogmatists portray gay life: we are hated by all, rejected by our families, persecuted by the law and religion, and so on.  It's remarkable how similar this is to the 1950s' pulp cliche of the Third Sex, doomed to a life of loneliness in murky bars, trapped in the Twilight World Between the Sexes ... Far from replacing the moralizing judgments of the religious and legal approach to homosexuality, the medical model merged with them, like the joining of an egg and a sperm.

What it would mean if it were proved that we are born gay is simply that we are not morally or legally responsible for our condition.  But no one would claim seriously that inborn conditions are necessarily positive: the same science that produced the born-gay theories also "discovered" genetic causes for schizophrenia, alcoholism, and other disorders.  ("Discovered" is in quotes because those discoveries are as dubious as that homosexuality is inborn.)  When a child is born with a disabling, congenital condition, no one but perhaps a member of Donald Trump's administration would argue that it should be left untreated.  And, of course, being born dark-skinned or female has never shielded African-Americans or women from discrimination or oppression.  Facts, let alone theories or speculation about causation do not establish anything about the moral status of the condition involved.  Yet it appears that many people do feel that as long as they can't help themselves, they are not only exempt from blame but from any criticism at all -- hence the bluster of masculists like David Page: not only is the refusal to ask directions, or to put their clothes in a hamper rather than on the floor, in their genes, it is a sign of male nobility.

It's easy enough to see why people who know nothing about science would fasten onto media reports that sex/gender cliches are "natural" and therefore unchangeable, and wouldn't blink at the ascription of those cliched traits to chromosomes and genes.  Personifying the inanimate and impersonal is a widespread (perhaps inborn and natural, who knows?) human tendency, so it's not surprising that scientists succumb to it too.  But I still don't understand the emotional appeal of seeing men and women as natural (at the genetic level) opponents, even enemies.  (Richardson also discusses the claim by some geneticists that men and women are more different genetically than Homo Sapiens and chimpanzees.  In addition to the flaws she finds in this claim, it seems to overlook the fact that men also have an X, or Lady, Chromosome, so we have the genetic difference right in our genes.  The Enemy Within, I guess.)  The War Between the Sexes, contrary to some propaganda, is not an invention of radical man-hating feminists, but a cherished fantasy of gender traditionalists; and as with American Exceptionalism, Male Exceptionalism demands that the Other always lose.

Given that genetic manipulation is the Holy Grail of the genetic research establishment, the biology-is-destiny fatalism of people like Page is rather curious.  Surely Science will someday make it possible for men to ask directions, wash dishes, and get their own beers from the refrigerator, thus freeing them from dependence on the women they want to view as an alien and malignant species?  Instead it appears they want to remain as they are.  That's up to them, but Natural Selection never sleeps.

Così Fan Tutte

I've been having frustrating computer problems, still not completely solved, or I'd have written here sooner.

A regular reader sent me a mail message recently, saying that he's "a LITTLE more in favor of [the] 'some people have always been gay' argument" than I am.  I found this baffling.

"Some people have pretty much always been gay" isn't an argument, it's a claim.  Depending on what it's supposed to mean, I agree with it.  That is, I think it's as certain as any historical claim can be that there have always been some people who were interested erotically only in their own sex.  There's documentation of that from many cultures over a couple thousand years, and I see no reason to suppose that it's not true at almost all times and almost all places.  I think it's also pretty clear that same-sex eroticism isn't limited to such people, that many people have had sexual experience with partners of both sexes in varying proportions.

What I don't agree with is the other claims some people make around this one.  It's not surprising, because most people bring cultural and personal baggage with them, myself not excluded.  There's no agreement what being gay, or being homosexual, or being bisexual, means.  I didn't exaggerate too much in my Gay Christians Say the Darnedest Things post, when I wrote sarcastically that because Leonardo had no Madonna CDs and (shame!) didn't go to Judy's Carnegie Hall concert, many scholars doubt that he was really gay.  In the first place, not all gay people are alike nowadays in the US, and I see no reason to suppose that that's a new development limited to the US.  Nor, of course, does it follow that because there have always been people who were interested erotically in their own sex, that exclusive interest is therefore inborn, or genetic, or biological, or whatever.

Related to these notions, I believe, is the excuse often made for stereotyping, that "stereotypes have some truth in them" because some people do fit the stereotypes.  This line came up at the discussion group I attended last week in San Francisco, and I wish I'd thought to ask what now seems to me the obvious question: So what? What follows from it?  It certainly doesn't follow that everyone is obliged to conform to the stereotypes just because some people do.  That seems to be what is meant, however: that inside every gay man, however butch he may pretend to be, is a screaming queen trying to claw her way out, and that every self-styled bisexual is just a closet case who, if he were honest with himself, would have sex only with other males.  In his book on male prostitutes in the Dominican Republic, for example, Mark Padilla reports that local gay men told him:

“I hope you’re going to prove what we already know: they’re all closet cases [son unos tapa’os].”  This implies the existence of a deeper, more authentic sexual identity that is being actively repressed by the bugarrón, who fails to recognize his own fundamental sexuality and public mark himself in terms of his presumed same-sex erotic preference [33].

There are numerous ironies here, aside from Padilla's own frequent cluelessness.  One is that these Dominican gay men subscribe to a trade/queer model of male homosexuality, though (as always seems to be the case) with plenty of slippage.  If all the bugarrones dropped their pretensions and came out as flaming travestís, there'd be no tops to supply the all-important dick to Dominican gays.  As Padilla also pointed out of a Dominican bar's quixotic attempt to exclude bugarrones,

The policy was doomed to fail from the beginning. First, it seemed entirely incongruous with the erotic integration – and in many ways, the economic interdependence – of bugarrónes and gay-identified men. Local bugarrón-gay or bugarrón-travestí relationships frequently entail an economic arrangement in which the gay/travestí mantiene a su bugarrón (supports his bugarrón), an inversion of the typical gender division of labor in heterosexual relationships.  Further, despite the occasional tensions between them, bugarrónes still represent the erotic ideal for a significant proportion of gay-identified [Dominican] men, reflecting what [Stephen O.] Murray ... has described as the sexual system of “homosexual exogamy” in Latin American homoeroticism. Thus, in their attempts to “clean up” the bar, the owners of Tropicalia were planning to purge a primary source of gay men’s attraction to the business: bugarrónes. As many local gay men commented to me, “So, if they keep bugarrónes out, why would we go there?” [32-3]

In much the same way that many heterosexual men will try to get "nice" girls to have sex with them, in order to prove that all women are essentially whores, the Dominican gays, like the norteamericano tourists, will try to get bugarrones to dar culo, or give ass: if they succeed, they can scorn them, their stereotypes have been vindicated.  The aim is probably not to move toward a more "egalitarian" mode of homosexuality, where either partner may penetrate or be penetrated, but simply to validate their erotic cosmology.  So, as Annick Prieur observed in her study of Mexican vestidas, they despise those mayates (equivalent to bugarrones -- men who penetrate other men) who let themselves be penetrated, even when it is the vestidas who penetrate them. This connects to a fantasy entertained by some gay men, who insist that there are no straight men, that every man can be had if you go about it correctly.  Taken to its logical conclusion, this would mean that every man is, at bottom, a bottom.) If these gays really succeeded, though, and exposed all bugarrones as closet cases who really, deep down, want only to be penetrated, who would penetrate them?

This is only a problem if you insist on eliminating the middle ground, but that is what people are doing when they stereotype: there are no differences, there is no variation, everyone is alike, even if they pretend otherwise.  It's not an empirical description but a principle that overrides observation and evidence, and can't be refuted because any observation that seems to contradict the principle can be dismissed as false consciousness, misunderstanding, or failure to grasp the essence that underlies mere appearances.  (So it's related to belief in biblical inerrancy: any seeming error is due to the interpreter's misunderstanding or lack of sufficient faith -- the Bible's lack of error is the first principle of interpreting it.)  It's true that some people can be found who fit any stereotype you like, and that's not problematic.  The trouble arises when the stereotype is postulated as the underlying truth about all individuals.

*The Caribbean Pleasure Industry (Chicago, 2007.)

Born to Be Picked On?

Yesterday I read Different Daughters: A Book by Mothers of Lesbians, edited by Louise Rafkin, originally published by Seal Press in 1987 and then in updated editions in 1996 and 2001.  I read the second edition, which I found at a library book sale.  It consists of short essays by about thirty women, mostly of my parents' generation, telling how they came to terms with the discovery that their daughters were lesbian or bisexual.  It's familiar territory to me, since numerous books of this kind have been published, but it was good to brush up, and to be reminded of the attitudes lesbians faced in the first decade or so after Stonewall.

The book also nudged me toward thought on some secondary issues.  Many of the contributors told of agonizing over what they might have done to make their daughters turn away from men, and this passage stood out for me:

I remembered with guilt a debate I had many years before with [my ex-husband's] therapist, a woman, about the children's independence and their learning to do things like change their own bicycle tires.  She said I was going to raise daughters that no man would want to live with [66].

This would have been sometime in the 1960s, I believe.  Similar ridiculous ideas were expressed by other psychiatrists, according to these mothers, which is a reminder that psychiatry and therapy generally have often been hotbeds of reaction.  Seriously: changing her own bicycle tire would render a woman intolerable to men?  But yes, traces of this attitude persist to this day, and though it was never true that all men required incompetence and dependence from their wives, enough men are threatened by competence and the independence it may signal to be a problem -- especially when the official culture endorses their attitude.

But also:

One day at a beach someone threw a bottle at one of my daughters and yelled "dyke" [61].

This set me thinking.  A young woman might be assaulted by a random bigot on the beach or anywhere else whether she is lesbian or not, simply because she's a woman.  She was born that way, of course. The same would be true of people of color who are subject to harassment by white supremacists simply because of the inborn color of their skin.  Why, I wonder, do so many gay people believe that if we could just prove that we're Born This Way, bigotry would simply evaporate, when everybody knows that inborn conditions are the basis of discrimination, hostility, and violence?

All Over the Place

Dagnab it, I'm not supposed to be this busy and distracted when I'm traveling!  I guess I'm not complaining.  But I am behind.

On my flight to San Francisco I read Afrekete, edited by Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney, published by Anchor Books in 1995.  It's an anthology of Black Lesbian writing, and as usual with anthologies, it's a mixed bag, very uneven.  One of the more interesting pieces is "Revelations" by Linda Villarosa, about the former Essence editor's experience coming out as lesbian and encountering conservative Christian objections to homosexuality.

Like so many gay people who've grown up in what might be called soft-shell churches, it had never occurred to Villarosa that there might be any conflict between her Christianity and her lesbianism.  When she discovered that many people thought there was, she did a little research.  Not too much -- just enough so she could say she'd been there and done that.  And right off, she came up with one of those delicious tidbits of ignorance, like the Saint James Bible, that make gay Christians so entertaining:

The New Testament had been written in Greek and then translated into Hebrew [221].

I've never seen this one before.  As a collector of gay Christian misinformation, I'm always delighted to encounter a new specimen.  Yes, there have been translations of the New Testament into Hebrew, but they were made centuries after the originals were written, and they have nothing to do with the main tradition of the Biblical text: no English translation would use them as source material.  Villarosa seems to believe that an official Hebrew version was prepared early on for use by the church, which of course isn't true.  It's a minor error, but still revealing of the biblical illiteracy of so many American Christians.

Today there's a fuss about some remarks made about homosexuality by Texas governor Rick Perry while he was on a goodwill mission to the heathen state of California.  In the very heart of Sodom, San Francisco itself, Perry told an audience last night:

"Whether or not you feel compelled to follow a particular lifestyle or not, you have the ability to decide not to do that," Perry said. "I may have the genetic coding that I'm inclined to be an alcoholic, but I have the desire not to do that, and I look at the homosexual issue the same way." 

This inspired the predictable liberal responses: Ohhowcouldhesaysuchanawfulthing!  Lieutenant Governor Gavin Newsom, a former mayor of San Francisco, demanded on Twitter that Perry "'must apologize for (his) ignorant and hateful remarks,' noting also that it is Gay Pride month."



The trouble is that, first, there's no real yardstick for deciding whether a condition is a "destructive addiction" or "an aspect of human diversity"; and second, gay people and our allies have relied on the same highly dubious kind of science which claims alcoholism to be a genetic condition to claim that homosexuality is a genetic condition.  Much of mainstream gay apologetics holds that we shouldn't be discriminated against because we were born this way and it's in our genes, we can't help ourselves.  This, as I've argued before, does not construct a terribly positive conception of homosexuality.  It makes the bogus claim that inborn conditions are necessarily good, which is belied by the reaction when someone compares homosexuality to other supposedly inborn conditions that clearly aren't good.  It also assumes that only inborn and immutable conditions are worthy of legal protection against discrimination, which is false.  (Civil rights laws cover not only inborn conditions like race and sex, but learned and mutable conditions such as religion.)

It pains me to say it, but Governor Perry made a defensible point; it's just irrelevant to a serious discussion of the issue.  We do expect people not to give in to every natural, inborn desire they have -- to commit adultery, for example, which the advocates of same-sex marriage must surely concede.  Perry was wrong about the moral status of homosexuality, though that is not graven in stone either: it's a judgment.  Gay people who jump from the (false) belief that homosexuality is inborn to the (false) believe that it therefore is morally good or at least neutral are playing with the same set of assumptions as Perry.  Much that is "natural" is bad; much that is human choice is good.

I'm leaving aside here the question whether homosexuality is chosen, which I don't believe it is; but "born this way" and "choice" are not opposites, nor do they exhaust the possibilities.  Nor is it clear how "choice" can be assigned to sexual orientation, or to many significant aspects of the human condition.  The twentieth-century psychiatric diagnosis of homosexuality as a disease assumed that it was not a choice, but resulted from disturbed family dynamics beyond the control of the victim.  Like the nineteenth-century diagnosis of drapetomania, I'm not sure the close-binding-mother / absent-father theory was ever definitely disproved, as much as it was abandoned for other reasons.  (It made a slight comeback among the ex-gay reparative therapy movement associated mostly with reactionary Christianity -- which is ironic, because if homosexuality is a disease it can't be a sin.)  There was also, for the change therapists, the inconvenient fact their treatments didn't work.  This doesn't prove that homosexuality is inborn, though, because psychiatric treatment doesn't work in general.

In good American politician's fashion, Perry is now trying to avoid clarifying, discussing, or defending his remarks.  (See the video clip embedded above.)  So it goes.  While I was working on this post, sitting near the TV in my hotel room, I heard a soccer fan, excited about the beginning of the World Cup, say "This game, when you're born into it, it's in your genetics."  It's a reminder just how confused most people are about what it means to be "born into" anything, or what "genetics" involve.

Another Lifestyle Choice

I heard the soundtrack from this Coast Guard recruiting commercial on the radio as I was driving north today.



At least, I think it was the same commercial: I could swear I heard the narrator say "I was born this way" at one point, but it's not in this video version.  Probably I misheard.  But "born ready" is just about as funny.  Especially from a narrator who runs into traffic, endangering herself and others, just to show how tough and independent she is.  (There's also a male version, a shot-for-shot duplicate except for the sex of the narrator, and a Spanish-language version featuring the female actor.)  I'm not sure I'd trust someone who wasn't born to look both ways before crossing the street to defend my country.

You Take the Low Road, and I'll Take the Low Road

I've disagreed with the lesbian writer E. J. Graff in the past, but I agree with a lot of what she wrote in a fairly disorganized piece at The Nation last week.  "What's Wrong with Choosing to Be Gay?" is the title, and of course it set off a shitstorm of enraged comments that didn't address anything she said.  (There were about 300 of them by the time I read the article myself on Friday, and there were about fifty more when I looked again today.)  Going by many commenters' behavior elsewhere on the Internet, I think it's a safe bet that they didn't read past the title before freaking out and entering their comments.

So let me try to engage with what Graff actually wrote.  She begins by objecting to "the party line," the "orthodoxy" that gay people are born this way.  I agree with her there, of course, though I notice that she doesn't actually give a reason for objecting to that belief.  (And I'm not happy with her deployment of such terms; "gay marriage," or "marriage equality" as the party line has it, is just as much gay-movement "orthodoxy" as that we're born this way.)  She says that it's "often gay men who are more insistent on the innateness of sexuality, whereas many lesbian and bisexual women have pushed back at this argument, since we’ve often (not always) had different experiences with sexuality."  This also appears to be true; those interested could begin by consulting Vera Whisman's Queer by Choice: Lesbians, Gay Men, and the Politics of Identity (Routledge, 1995).  (It also appears to be mostly gay men who erupted into fury in the comments to Graff's article.)  Then she cites a recent article from The New Republic, "a challenge to that orthodoxy" by Brandon Ambrosino, which of course is "getting corrected by the LGBT thought police," among these "a writer I respect enormously," Gilbert Arana.

Ambrosino writes:

Whenever someone accepts me merely because she feels obligated to do so by my genetic code, I feel degraded rather than empowered. It's like saying, “You can’t help it, sugar. You were born this way. Me? I was born with astigmatism and a wonky knee. We can’t change our limitations even if we wanted to.” (As if homosexuality was taken out of the DSM only to be written into the ADA.) In a way, this sentiment of obligation comes through in Macklemore’s "Same Love," a song I enjoy nonetheless. And insofar as it encourages many straight and gay people alike to be open to nontraditional forms of love, I hope he keeps singing it for many years to come.

I agree with this too, on the whole.  (Though I disagree that same-sex love is a "nontraditional form of love."  It's too old, widespread, and well-documented for that.)  I've argued the same point, perhaps more strongly: that gay people who say they can't help it, they were born this way, are conveying the message that they hate being gay and agree with bigots that they shouldn't be That Way.  I've told before the story of a gay graduate student whom I asked what he'd do if it were definitively proven that homosexuality was a choice.  After trying to dodge the question a moment, he said that in that case someone would make a lot of money helping him reverse the choice.  I'm not sure I quite believe him, since even in the days when neo-Freudian orthodoxy (ignoring Freud's own position, by the way) held that homosexuality could be "cured," very few homosexuals showed any interest in being changed; but I think his answer was revealing.

Graff goes on to discuss what is usually called sexual "fluidity" nowadays -- the fact that many people have erotic experience in various degrees with people of both sexes, even when they think of themselves as comfortably monosexual.  And she cautions:

No one this side of the rainbow flag is arguing that people choose the direction of their romantic and sexual desires in the way that someone might, say, choose between different brands of toothpaste. Desire happens unbidden.

Most of Graff's ensuing discussion is rather garbled.  She talks about "hijra" and "two spirit" as if they were more or less conscious strategies for dealing with the discovery of one's homosexual desires in other cultures, for example; and evidently buys the notion that homosexuality is a "gender deviation," which at best is an oversimplification.  And then she writes:

Gay isn’t the desire; it’s the social identity we layer on top of the desire—and it’s only yours if you claim it. Even men who have sex with men (MSMs, in the lingo) are not gay unless they say so.

This is arguable, at best a matter of definition.  I disagree, however, because it overlooks a key factor like stigma that explains why many homosexually active people deny fiercely that they're Like That.  And among gay people ourselves, as Graff surely knows, it is conventionally assumed that we can label other people as gay based on what we think we know of them, regardless of they say about their identities.  A closet case is the folk term for those who (according to the folk) are gay, and they know it, even if they pretend otherwise.  And it can hardly be denied that there are many people who are gay and know it but pretend otherwise, to themselves and to others.  Was Ellen DeGeneres gay before she came out publicly?  Of course she was.  Was Rock Hudson gay even though he denied it publicly?  Of course he was.  As for MSMs, the term was invented in the early years of the AIDS epidemic specifically as a way for such men to evade the stigma of homosexuality in order to make them accessible to safer-sex education and practice: it's a euphemism, and as such it may be useful in some cases, but it doesn't prove anything about the person or how he sees himself and his sexual activity.  As one black AIDS activist said of "MSM":

Quite frankly it was a phrase that was created by black gay men, and we created it because we knew that the CDC would not fund black gay men.  So we wanted to create a phrase that was palatable to them.  In the beginning we created it out of the air.  There was no statistical work to quantify the magnitude of this population of black men who were having sex with other men but didn't identify.  Now intuitively we knew that they were engaged in homosexual behavior.  However, the way the behavior manifested itself was not, or did not mirror the way it manifested itself in white gay men. But now the implication that there are no black gay men out there who identify as gay is absurd.  And so there for the longest time all the programs were, like, targeted to this group of folks who may or may not be gay.  And I used to say, what are we doing?  We're marching over the dead bodies in hopes of finding a people who may not be there.  And how many dead bodies do we have to march over looking for this theoretical body?  Besides who are these men who have sex with men fucking anyway?  They are fucking men who identify with being gay, that's who they are fucking.  How else do they connect?  Somebody has to have a clue about what is going on [Phil Wilson, quoted in Cathy Cohen, The Boundaries of Blackness (Chicago, 1999), 107-8].

But all of this has little to do with the use of the word "choice" or "lifestyle choice" in the culture war over homosexuality.  If "gay" is an identity, then of course it is chosen, not inborn.  But if it refers -- and it does, much of the time -- to people who relate erotically and romantically to people of their own sex, regardless of what they think about it or how they label themselves, then we're back to square one, and where those desires came from.  The choice of the identity almost always is made after one has plenty of experience with same-sex desire, and often with overt erotic interaction.  This, I think, is the point Graff is aiming for.  She's correct, as far as I'm concerned, to argue that it wouldn't matter if we did choose to desire and fall in love and have sex with people of our own sex.  I believe we, as activists and citizens, should work from this position.  If most of us don't, I think it's just as clearly because we agree with our opponents that it does matter why we're gay.

In any case, as Graff continues:

You can be born lots of ways that society demands you suppress. If someone could prove that being a child molester or serial rapist or homicidal sociopath were genetically predetermined, would we welcome those desires into our public square? Hardly. They fail the “I’m not hurting anyone” test. Which means the argument is really “I’m born that way and there’s nothing wrong with that.”

I agree with this too, and have said so before.  As I've indicated, though, I think that the reason gay people find it difficult (impossible?) to say "I'm born that way and there's nothing wrong with that" is that they don't believe there's nothing wrong with being gay.  If they had been lucky enough to be born straight, they'd be throwing stones at queers too.  Maybe I'm wrong about this.  Give me some reasons to change my mind.

The resistance to acknowledging our own agency and choices is so strong that many gay people are trying to claim that their identity is inborn rather than chosen.  I think that's obviously ridiculous, but there it is.  It may be partly due to the confusion that reigns over what "identity" is; it's widely conflated with "sexual orientation."  We're not automatically smarter than our enemies; after all, we grew up in the same society they did.

Another problem is that, no less than "identity," "choice" is an unclear word.  Saying that homosexuality is a choice doesn't make much sense.  I've asked some people who tend to think of homosexuality in terms of a "choice" what kind of choice they have in mind.  I can't remember one who could explain it without prompting, and I tried to avoid leading questions, but when I asked, they generally agreed that they thought that gay people had been heterosexual before but decided, mysteriously, to pursue relationships with their own sex.  Why?  They have no idea.  That, surely, is the general antigay assumption: we are all naturally heterosexual, but some individuals choose to engage in unnatural perversion with their own sex.  I'd call this "folk psychology," if so many educated and more or less sophisticated people didn't believe in some version of it.  (It's not even a Biblical theory, since the closest thing to an explanation of homosexuality in the Bible is Paul's assertion in the first chapter of Romans that male homosexual desire/lust is God's punishment for idolatry.  The "choice," if there were one, would lie in being a pagan.)

Then Graff mounts the pulpit:

Because this one is the best argument we have: “Love makes a family.” That’s been our movement’s real contribution to the social discussion—that insistence that the building blocks of love needn’t be confined by sex or gender or reproduction, that how we care for each other is more important that who. And we’re winning on that one too, whether the social conservatives like it or not.

Love doesn't make a family; if anything, choice does, the decision and commitment to take responsibility for other people in certain ways.  "Love" is another propaganda word (well, so is "family"), meant to get the hearer to shut off his or her mind and subside into a big puddle of warm fuzzies.  But for all that, I agree that we're winning on more open, flexible concepts of family, because heterosexuals' families are more open and flexible too, and always have been.  If anything, the same-sex marriage movement is a reaction against such openness, intended to canonize only marriage as the sole definer of family, and to relegate other configurations to second-class status.

She concludes:

Our society protects chosen identities. One’s being a Seventh-Day Adventist, Sufi Muslim or Hasidic Jew may be strongly influenced by the culture one is born into—but it’s not genetic. People convert in and out, in a way that involves new conceptions of their core identity. In some parts of the world, and in large swaths of Western history, choosing the “wrong” religion can be a death-penalty offense. But in our era we protect your freedom of religion. It’s time to be neutral about orientation in just the same way, protecting personal freedom of choice. Because really, who cares?

Again, I agree, and have argued the point at length in the past.

None of the commenters under Graff's article addressed what she actually said.  Some asserted the certainty that we're born this way, usually without citing any evidence.  One person made claims about "hormones" as a factor, though that explanation has severe failings and doesn't really work;* another cited the work of a psychologist who, in his retirement, has become very active on the Internet arguing that our hormones did it, along with Biblical misinformation and other fun stuff.  One person dragged in social construction without really understanding the concept.

Graff hadn't addressed the question of cause; she was basically talking about the right approach to take in advocacy. So was Brandon Ambrosino, though like Graff he's confused about choice as a concept.  It appears, for example, that he accepts that the only alternative to "born gay" is "choice"; it's not.  And so was Ambrosino's critic Gilbert Arana, who wrote angrily that Ambrosino's

line of reasoning has a hip, "post-gay" appeal, but it is eye-rollingly naïve, a starry-eyed view you might expect from a college student who's just taken their first queer-theory class. From a political standpoint, it matters a great deal whether sexual orientation is inborn or a choice. Rightly or wrongly, social conservatives object to homosexuality on the grounds that it is a lifestyle choice.

I think Arana is ignorant historically, but the validity (or not) of Ambrosino's argument has nothing to do with whether it's "post-gay."  Myself, I'm not convinced that social conservatives object to homosexuality because they believe that it is a lifestyle choice.  I think it's the reverse: they assume that it's a choice because they object to it, as people also do with fat people or depressed people or others they disapprove of.  Generally their objections are more gut-level, less rational than that.  They assume that gay people can change because homosexuality offends them, so we must be doing it on purpose -- "by choice" -- just to ruin their day.  "Natural" and "unnatural" aren't truth statements, they're emotive terms of approval and disapproval.  That's why gay people want to believe that we're "natural."  Natural is good.  Except when it's not.

And as Arana admits, the born-gay claim isn't all that effective on our opponents: "Social conservatives dismiss outright the idea that homosexuality is inborn. They insist it is a choice.  From their point of view, biology is destiny."  But here the gay movement agrees with them: homosexuality is biology, so it's destiny, even if it dooms us to a life of misery and persecution.  As Graff says, though, just because our opponents say we chose to be gay, there's no reason to let them set the terms of the argument.

Then Arana falls flat on his face:

Those of us who support LGBT rights are committed to the "born this way" narrative not as a civil-rights strategy, but for the simple reason that it's true. The main problem with Ambrosino's argument is that he is conflating concepts like sexual orientation, identity, behavior, and expression. It is true that I have chosen to identify as gay, that I express myself in a way that makes it clear I am gay, and that I have gay sex. All of these are a matter of choice. But my sexual orientation—my underlying attraction for men—is beyond my control.

It's actually Arana who's conflating concepts like sexual orientation, identity, etc.  That he (and to be fair, I) do not experience my "underlying attraction for men" as something I can turn on and off voluntarily does not prove that I was "born this way."  That is, as I understand it, the whole point of social construction theory: that people experience as "natural" practices and institutions which are not built into our biology, but were invented by people.  (One analogous case is one I've been meaning to write about here: language.  As shown by the hysteria over Coca Cola's Superbowl commercial last week, many people experience their native language as natural, built-in -- and when they hear a familiar song [partially] translated into other languages, they experience that as unnatural, a violation of the nature of the song itself, which just naturally is in English.  English is in its DNA.  God made "America the Beautiful" that way, and he doesn't make trash, okay?)

Arana is simply wrong when he jumps from asserting his experience of his sexual nature to asserting that this experience is the true explanation of his desires.  The scientific evidence, such as it is, doesn't support the claim: the research which purports to show that homosexuality is inborn is at best problematic, and at worst thoroughly misconceived.  (Arana admits this, with some of the usual handwaving: we don't know where homosexuality comes from, we just know that it's Not. A. Choice.)  For that matter, gay people were claiming dogmatically that they were born gay long before this research was done, indeed before any halfway methodical research on the question had been done -- just as men claimed that women were biologically unfit for higher education, or whites made similar claims about blacks or Jews: conclusion first, evidence later if ever.  And after all, when social conservatives assert that homosexuality is unnatural, they're asserting their own equally strong subjective conviction that it's wrong.  Why does Arana's subjective belief trump theirs?  Of course theirs doesn't trump his either.  The question must be settled in other ways.

The title of Arana's article declares that "being gay isn't a choice, it's a civil rights issue", which besides being a false dichotomy, changes the terms of the argument.  And as Graff notes correctly, Civil Rights law protects certain lifestyle choices as well as inborn conditions: religious affiliation as well as "race" and "sex."  Even a lifestyle choice like interracial marriage, though not covered by the Civil Rights Act as far as I know, is protected by the Constitution according to the US Supreme Court.

And there's another issue, as far as I'm concerned.  I agree that "social conservatives" are wrong to assert dogmatically that homosexuality is a choice, whatever "choice" means -- both in fact and in terms of US law, it's false and irrelevant.  But what does it say about the US gay rights movement that it answers its opponents' irrelevant falsehoods with irrelevant falsehoods (e.g, that we're born this way) of its own?  Maybe it's politically necessary, but it's not the moral high road: it's more like sinking to our opponents' level.  And why not?  Is not one man as good as another?

---------------
*I've explained why it doesn't work at length before, but briefly, the hormonal theory -- that homosexuality is caused by overexposure to female hormones of the male fetus in utero, or to male hormones of the female fetus -- even if it turns out to have some validity, models "the homosexual" as "the invert," a feminized male or a masculinized female.  This might explain why, for instance, some men want to be penetrated by other males, but it doesn't explain why some males want to penetrate other males.  It's a theory of sex/gender, not of sexual orientation, and it is based on a reductive and impoverished model of human sexuality.  And whether sex hormones are a factor in homosexuality has still not been settled; like virtually every other scientific claim about homosexuality, it is still controversial.

Come, Let Us Reason Together

I'm reading A Skeptic's Guide to the Mind (St. Martin's, 2013) by the neurologist Robert A. Burton, and it's really quite good.  Mostly because it agrees with me, of course, but it goes beyond that into some areas I hadn't already explored as much as I should have.

Scientists from Cardiff University found genetic differences between two groups of children -- a normal control group and a group diagnosed with ADHD [attention deficit hyperactivity disorder].  According to the lead author, a professor of child and adolescent psychiatry, "Too often people dismiss ADHD as being down to bad parenting or poor diet.  As a clinician it was clear to me this was unlikely to be the case.  Now we can say with confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease and that the brains of children with this condition develop differently to the brains of other children."  The authors argue that the study proves that gene differences cause ADHD [49].

That bit about "As a clinician it was clear to me..." reminded me of an online exchange I had with a gay psychologist who declared that his training had taught him to look for biological causes for things like homosexuality, because they were always there.  I asked him why that should be, since science is supposed to be looking for causes without making advance assumptions about what they were?  He didn't have an answer, as I remember.  Burton continues:

The actual data: fewer than one-fifth of 360 children with ADHD had a particular genetic variant, while more than four-fifths didn't.  After reviewing the same data, others with equal background and expertise have come to an opposite conclusion: most ADHD must be caused by nongenetic factors [50].

I have no formal background or expertise, but I know that some others with such expertise would not have come to the "opposite conclusion."  (Burton's endnote points to a story that doesn't really back up that claim, while muddying the waters even further.)  They hold that the respective roles of the genes and the environment can't be separated, neatly or perhaps at all.  (I'd point to Richard C. Lewontin and Evelyn Fox Keller, especially the latter's The Mirage of a Space Between Nature and Nurture [Duke, 2010].)

But Burton redeems himself.  Well, partly.

What fascinates me is that the study authors would feel so strongly about the causal relationship between genes and a complex, controversial, and ill-defined condition.  Surely the authors must intellectually understand that behavior is a murky mixture of nature and nurture and rarely attributable to a single cause.  It is easy to dismiss their interpretation as mistaking correlation with causation, but let me cautiously suggest an additional possibility.  If each of us has his/her own innate ease or difficulty with which a sense of causation is triggered, the same data may generate different degrees of a sense of underlying causation in its readers.  Though purely speculative, I have a strong suspicion that those with the most easily triggered innate sense of causation are more likely to reduce complex behavior to specific cause-and-effect relationships, while those with lesser degrees of an inherent sense of causation are more comfortable with ambiguous and paradoxical views of human nature.  (Of course, for me to make any firm argument as to the cause of the authors' behavior would be to fall into the same trap).

Unfortunately for science, there is no standard methodology for objectively studying subjective phenomena such as the mind.  One investigator's possible correlation is another's absolute causation.  The interpretation of the cause of subjective experience is the philosophical equivalent of asking every researcher if he/she sees the same red that you do [50].

I think this is very good, though I think Burton could have left out words like "innate" and "inherent" without doing any harm to his speculation.  I've noticed before, and pointed out often, that people (including scientists) have a tendency to turn relative differences into absolute differences.  Whether this is "innate" or not seems to me not important, except for pricking the pride of some scientists.  "You just think that, but it's your genes talking."  That's what they are supposed to say to us!   They're above mere emotion, existing on a plane of pure reason and intellect!

I don't reject out of hand the idea that some people have more of this tendency than others, or that such temperamental differences might be partly "innate," whatever that means.  I do believe that the tendency is amenable to training: scientific training is supposed to correct our commonsense misperceptions, and I learned just from reading scientists to watch for this tendency in myself.  So even if it is innate, it's not immutable.  And even if it's a temperamental temptation in some individuals, the social environment of other scientists and peer reviewers in professional journals is supposed to correct for individual weaknesses by giving them input from their colleagues.  Even in the absence of a standard methodology for settling such questions, it's hard for me to see how a trait detected in fewer than 20 percent of an experimental group becomes "confidence that ADHD is a genetic disease".

But I liked Burton's admission that any argument he makes about others would apply to him too, and I recognize the same for myself.  And he concludes:

There is a great irony that underlies modern neuroscience and philosophy: the stronger an individual's involuntary mental sense of self, agency, causation, and certainty, the greater that individual's belief that the mind can explain itself.  Given what we understand about inherent biases and subliminal perceptual distortions, hiring the mind as a consultant for understanding the mind feels like the metaphoric equivalent of asking a known con man for his self-appraisal and letter of reference.  In the end, we should start at the beginning, with the unpleasant but inescapable understanding that the less than perfectly reliable mind will always be both the mind's principal investigator and tool for investigation [51].

And, I'd add, the mind as a tool will also often be the monkey wrench in the investigation.   This doesn't mean that we should simply give up the investigation, except for those whose temperament demands belief that the mind is a transparent window on the world; it just makes the investigation that much more difficult.  But simply pretending that the obstacles don't exist won't produce better results.  Come to think of it, one reason I seem to be more comfortable than many people with this paradox is that I encountered it many years ago in the writings of Alan Watts, starting with his book The Wisdom of Insecurity.

This indicates that I should pursue a question that occurred to me several years ago: What are the evolutionary roots of science?  It's a common assumption that a human phenomenon -- religion, say -- can be understood and discredited if scientists can construct a Darwinian origin-story for it.  We believe these foolish things because they're in our genes, because they might have served us well a million years ago, but not in modern times we must go along with Progress!  But everything we are was produced by evolution, on this assumption, so where did science come from?  How did Evolution select for test tubes and cyclotrons on the African savannah hundreds of thousands of years ago?  When I raised this question online a few years back, I got blank incomprehension.  Part of the origin myth of modern science is that Science humbles Proud Man by showing that he is part of  nature, not its head: that we are not at the center of the universe as our superstitious forebears believed, but live on a smallish planet orbiting a smallish star near but not at the rim of the vast galaxy; nor are we a special creation by the hand of the Lord but one more product of natural biological processes, like every other organism; and so on.   But many people apparently still want to believe that Science transcends biology, that it allows us to be not slaves of Nature but her Master.  This is doubtful just a priori, but the very evidence of science also undermines the fantasy.

Which reminds me of the science blogger who believed "social constructionists" should feel "uncomfortable" because "the best evidence" for their critiques of certain scientific claims comes from science.  As I wrote, I don't see any conflict here at all.  But maybe scientists should feel uncomfortable when evidence from "science" undermines their particular construction (essentialist, determinist, mechanistic) of "science."  The biggest mistake for those scientists' critics would be to cede that construction to them as What Science Is.

Acting Homosexual: Meet the New Pope, Pretty Much the Same as the Old Pope

Some people I know got all excited about some remarks the new Pope uttered on his way back to Rome from Brazil.  I'm still looking for a more complete transcript, but Democracy Now! gave me more than the National Catholic Reporter today:

Pope Francis: "Everyone writes about the gay lobby. I still haven’t found anyone who gives me an identity card in the Vatican with 'gay' written on it. They say that there are these people. I think when someone finds themselves with a person like this, they need to make a distinction between being a gay person and that of being part of a lobby. All lobbies are not good, that is the bad thing. If a person is gay and seeks God and has good will, who am I to judge him?"

That's dependent on his (or her?) not engaging in sexual activity, of course.  The NCR adds "They shouldn't be marginalized. The tendency [to homosexuality] is not the problem ... they're our brothers" right after "to judge him?"  Some writers have noticed that Francis was not saying anything new: the distinction between "the tendency" and the activity remains in place.  It's okay to be gay, but not to act on it.  As one writer at Time pointed out,

the accompanying message in the catechism that while a gay person is to be accepted, acting out on homosexual acts is to be deplored: “Under no circumstances can they be approved … Homosexual persons are called to chastity.” Francis, who cited the catechism in his answers to reporters, said nothing to contradict this. Asked for his position on gay marriage, he answered: “You know perfectly the position of the church.”

As another writer at Time explained -- a remarkable sentiment to appear at what used to be a very right-wing and antigay magazine -- Francis' remarks don't signal any change at all in doctrine.  "The Vatican’s catechismal stance regarding the LGBTs in our midst remains the same: The church may love the sinner, but it hates the sin."

A friend linked to this piece (letter or op-ed, I'm not sure which) in a Muncie, Indiana newspaper.  The Unitarian Universalist church there spoke out against "the position" expressed by a presumably Christian writer in the same paper a couple of weeks ago.  Unitarians, as you're probably aware, are much more liberal than the Catholic Church, but they don't seem to be a lot more sensible:

Sin as an explanation for homosexuality is wrong, unfair and hurtful. Homosexuals continue to be victims of discrimination and ignorance in our culture. As happened with discrimination against women and people of color, the tide is turning, and in a generation or so our great-grandchildren will wonder what we were thinking.

Each of us is born somewhere on the sexual orientation continuum. Most of us are heterosexual, some of us are bisexual, some of us are homosexual. Did those of us with heterosexual orientation decide to be straight? Was there a moment when we made a conscious decision? Of course not.

The first quoted sentence makes no particular sense, but I presume the writer is thinking of Romans 1, where the apostle Paul explains male homosexuality as the result of a refusal to believe in Yahweh.  "Wrong, unfair and hurtful"?  This is God we're talking about here, buddy -- his ways are not our ways.  "Victims of discrimination and ignorance"?  Well, that's exactly what antigay Christians want, though of course they believe themselves to have knowledge, not ignorance.  The Unitarian writer is in no position to cast the first stone, since he goes on to show his own ignorance: there is no basis whatever for his claim that "Each of us is born somewhere on the sexual orientation continuum."  Even if you grant for the sake of argument the incoherent science of sexual orientation that is current today (which I don't), it makes no claim to explain a person's precise location "on the sexual orientation continuum."  The continuum itself is a fiction, borrowed from Alfred Kinsey's work, where it was developed as a way to visualize the diversity in people's sexual history, not their orientation.  Since many people move around on that scale during their lifetimes, it cannot be about an inborn, congenital, immutable sexual orientation.

There's a lot of confusion about terminology in this area, as I've argued before.  Many people talk about "orientation" as if it were a physical trait which we know to exist; it's not.  Many people talk about "orientation" as if it could be measured and quantified; it can't.  We have no way of measuring or detecting a sexual orientation.  At best we can try to elicit someone's sexual history, but the picture we'll get will necessarily be incomplete at best.  But beyond "orientation," people talk about "being gay" as if "being" could be separated from acting on it -- which simply plays into the hands of the Vatican, accepting their invidious distinction between the acceptable disposition and the sinful actions.  Years ago, after reading and listening to various antigay people, I realized that they were using "becoming gay" where pro-gay people would use "coming out."  That is, you "become gay" by getting to know other gay people, and engaging in homosexual activity.  They prefer not to think about what you may have thought or felt before.  They also assume that if they don't know you're gay, you are by definition straight, so you become gay by coming out in the post-Stonewall sense, by beginning to tell the truth about yourself and your relationships.

But many people, gay or not, use "being gay" in a similarly confusing way.  "Being gay," for many, means not just harboring the Gay Gene in yourself, it means living your life as a gay person -- which, for most of us, means having sex with other people of our own sex.  Not just copulating, of course: "sex" and "sexuality" reasonably include romantic love and interpersonal relationships.  But in that case, trying to use "being gay" at other times as if having sex played no part in it, is dishonest.  People are not at their best or most rational when they're under attack, I know, but it is possible to do better, and to be honest about it.  Our allies do no good by fostering misinformation, as that well-meaning Unitarian spokesman did.

I think we should stop worrying about the question of acts vs. orientation.  Even if homosexuality were simply a matter of sexual acts, what would be wrong with that?  There is nothing wrong with homosexual sex per se, though of course some acts may be performed by selfish, manipulative, even abusive people for selfish, manipulative, or abusive ends.  I think a major reason many people, gay or straight, want to think in terms of a congenital "orientation" is that they still think same-sex sex (especially anal copulation) is bad, and that gay people can only be excused if our genes make us do it.  I think this is quite a horrible position to take.  No one really believes that if you're out of control and go around doing horrible things, it's okay and other people should tolerate it.  Gay people get indignant if someone compares homosexuality to, say, alcoholism; but it is gay people who've made the comparison, since they generally accept that alcoholism is inborn, even genetically determined.  They don't want to be judged negatively for being gay, though, so they reject the comparison; but they do feel ashamed of having sex with other men or with other women.  If gay people were out of control, the proper measure would be to restrain us.  Others might pity us, and refrain from judging us (like Pope Francis), but they wouldn't allow us to go around doing awful things.  The proper response is to deny that homosexual sex is awful, and to declare that it doesn't matter why we do it.

Until we can affirm our loves, our desires, and our sexual practices, we're on very shaky ground.  Appealing to biology won't do the job.  First, many people, not all of them religious, won't accept the biological explanation; second, they shouldn't accept it, because it's invalid as biology; third, it's irrelevant, because biology alone can't tell us whether we should or shouldn't be gay.  Biology -- rather like religion -- has no ethical content or moral authority.  It will be harder to fight the belief that sex between males or between females is sinful, but that's what we must do.  In the long run it may not matter, because so many people nowadays seem to be abandoning the belief that homosexual sex is a sin.  This is not, apparently, because they've been convinced by reason or by science, but because they know gay people and don't see anything wrong with us.  (A similar change has occurred in many right-wing Christians' attitude to interracial unions: where they once insisted that Scripture forbade miscegenation, they now admit that it doesn't.)  So the right and wrong of sexual behavior may not matter.  Myself, I'm not ready to go with the flow on this or any other matter.  I do think the burden of argument should lie on the bigots: it's up to them to come up with good reasons why homosexuality is unacceptable.  They've had a long time to come up with some, and so far they've come up dry.

On the Third Hand ...

I just finished reading Mad Science (Transaction Publishers, 2013), and something in the concluding chapter reminded me of this meme, which amused the hell out of me when I first saw it on Facebook.  Here's what Stuart A.Kirk, Tomi Gomory, and David Cohen wrote:

Why do so many people need assistance? The economy is stalled or spiraling down, fewer unskilled jobs are available and unemployment has increased, inflation-adjusted wages for the average middle-class family have not increased in two generations, record numbers of families have lost their homes, and services from nonprofits and local and state governments have been sharply cut in the Great Recession. Millions of adults and children, normally living in precarious circumstances, are now under enormous social stress. This stress does not result from the increasing incidence of brain defects, but from economic and policy defects. These people need opportunities and assistance, and social workers and mental health clinicians would like to help them with some of their problems so that they might seize opportunities or bear discomfort more constructively until circumstances improve. But to help an increasing number of these individuals today can only be done after fulfilling one enormously silly requirement: diagnose them with some form of mental disability or mental disorder [319].

I found the Poverty meme so funny because, going by prevailing ideas about stigma, if poverty isn't freely chosen, then by the process of elimination it must be involuntary, probably genetic.  But the idea that poverty is congenital has also been used to stigmatize the poor, and to justify doing nothing about them, since they are naturally, inescapably That Way.  (If you've ever heard someone "defend" gay people by asking rhetorically, "Would someone choose a 'lifestyle' that makes everybody hate them?", you've heard this line before.)  It's the basic argument of scientific racism, famously found in works like The Bell Curve, and in the remarks of academic psychologist Daniel Koshland. When asked whether the money being spent on the Human Genome Project wouldn't better be spent on the homeless, he replied, "What these people don't realize is that the homeless are impaired ... Indeed, no group will benefit more from the application of genetics" (quoted in Richard Lewontin, It Ain't Necessarily So [New York Review Books, 2001], 165). There was, and is, no evidence that the homeless are biologically "impaired," let alone that "the application of genetics" would have any effect on homelessness.  (On the other hand, the question Koshland was asked annoys me; it's like "Think of the starving children in Appalachia who'd love to have that old genetic material you're throwing away!"  Still, it elicited a revealingly stupid answer from him, so it's all good.)  And let's not forget Richard Dawkins, who believes that there's a gene "for having too many children" (The Selfish Gene, Oxford UP, 1976, p. 125), which leads to poverty or at least to abusive demands for public assistance.

I doubt that the people who made and shared the Poverty meme believe that poverty is the result of genetic impairment.  But most liberals I know buy into carefully selected offshoots of scientific racism, like biological causes for homosexuality, alcoholism and a proliferating lists of other addictions, and mental illness, for which there's no good evidence either. 

So what's the solution?  There probably isn't one, but biological determinism and lifestyle choice don't exhaust the possibilities.  In the case of poverty, there are certainly structural social factors: if the economy -- a vast abstraction -- crashes, many competent hard-working people will be dragged along with it.  Social programs can and have helped diminish poverty; "too many children" is not a fixed, absolute quantity but is relative to the current state of the economy, so that the number of children a family could support can, and has, become "too many" virtually overnight.  Social policy and programs, whether governmental or corporate, can and have created poverty and made it harder to escape, even when a crippled economy begins to recover.  We'll probably never eliminate poverty altogether, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try.

Just as an aside, there are other answers to "Why homosexuality?" than choice/born that way.  They're not necessarily correct -- seduction theories, neo-Freudian close-binding-and-intimate-mother theories, theories about damaged gender identity, any theory that pathologizes same-sex desire and expression. Probably the basic flaw in genetic and biological theories, aside from unresolved incoherence, is their tacit assumption that homosexuality must be a specific adaptation, which leads to trying to figure out how a non-reproductive mutation could have spread and survived.  I think that homosexuality, in human and in non-human species, arises from the unspecificity of erotic pleasure and forming bonds between individuals.  Think of autoeroticism: is there a gene for it?  Almost certainly not.  We have erotically sensitive body parts, and we learn early, long before we're reproductively mature, that touching them will give us pleasure.  It also gives us pleasure if someone else touches them.  So it's not surprising that we aren't limited to heterosexual copulation to get pleasure.  We also form emotional bonds with people other than potential copulatory partners; it has often been argued that romantic love has its roots in the mother-child bond rather than anything specific to heterosexuality.  Since bonding generalizes, as does genital pleasure, it's not surprising that some individuals will form partnerships, including erotic ones with persons of their own sex, or that many individuals will seek out same-sex partners as well as other-sex partners for pleasure.

In using the word "pleasure" here I don't mean to imply that no emotion is involved -- on the contrary, as Paul Goodman observed, it's natural to befriend what gives us pleasure.  The onetime Kinsey associate C. A. Tripp argued that promiscuous people tend to be very romantic: they simply plug their sexual partners, so to speak, into their romantic fantasies.  For other people, though not all, sharing pleasure is likely to promote affection.  And for human beings, these physiological realities are combined with our symbol-using facility, which causes us to invest everything about our bodies -- sex, birth, death, excretion -- with meaning.  I don't pretend to have given a full explanation here, partly because I don't think it's important to have one.  It shouldn't be surprising, given obvious facts about human beings and our bodies -- to say nothing of the bodies of non-human species, which often couple homoerotically; or of human history, in which homosexuality is a persistent theme -- that some individuals turn out to be lovers of their own sex, whether exclusively or not.  I don't think any more than this sketch is needed.  Biology is not destiny; but we do work with the bodies we have, and it's hard for me to understand why people are so surprised that human beings, of all species, have been creative and various in our quests for pleasure and friendship.