Thoughts on Gay Rights

This is something I've been thinking about for awhile, and that is how the arguments for gay rights are framed. Personally, I think they should be re-framed. I think the gay rights movement should adopt a completely different tactic when answering the anti-gay movement.

Now, the anti-gays generally approach the issue from a Christian standpoint, sometimes backed up with pseudoscience, and claim that homosexuality is deviant and ungodly. In counterpoint, the gay rights movement says they were born gay and cannot change. That their being homosexual (or transgender, or bisexual, or whatever the case may be) is not a choice.

Of course, the anti-gay crusaders respond that while same-sex attraction is not a choice, having sex is. That's what the dialogue in this country is all about, after all - questions of choice and consent.

Now, there's a sizable body of research which supports the idea of homosexuality as an immutable personality characteristic. For instance, there's a gland in the brain called the amygdala, which regulates aggressive behaviors. Men who identify as heterosexual have larger amgydalas, while both women and men who identify as homosexual have smaller amygdalas. Homosexual behavior has also been documented in nearly every species in the wild.

However, I think the fact of 'born with it' or not doesn't matter. For one, it does bisexuals a disservice - there's still a bias against bisexuals in both straight and homosexual communities. Bisexuals are confused, selfish, or gay people who are trying to keep the prerogatives reserved for heterosexual couples. For the record, I certainly don't believe that. I firmly believe that sexuality is a fluid characteristic, which can change over life and is certainly influenced by society.

For instance, a man who is born as a Kinsey 2 but raised in a strictly heteronormative society will probably behave and identify as a Kinsey 0 or 1. If he's raised in a much more open and permissive society, he will perhaps behave more like a 2, or even a 3 if he's exposed constantly to the idea that homosexual sex is desirable and enjoyable (author's note: this is totally not supported by any specific study, is just my personal opinion). Women who have been abused by men have a tendency to become lesbians. Lastly, fetishes - it's impossible to develop a fetish to something you haven't been exposed to. Foot fetishes are pervasive because feet are pervasive. In the Civil War era, some men had fetishes involving women wringing the necks of chickens. Nowadays, fewer people are exposed to that, so there aren't groups of men (and women, but by and large men have fetishes) with chicken-neck-wringing fetishes. Ten years after a car commercial aired featuring a giant woman, men popped up with giantess fetishes. So society at least has a nominal influence over our sexual development.

But all this doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter if gays or transpeople were born that way.

Because they're adults, and have the perfect right to choose whom to have sex with, whom to fall in love with and whom to spend the rest of their life with. This is the tack which I think the gay rights movement ought to adopt. It's a basic human freedom to love - that whole 'pursuit of happiness' thing. Even if a human being is perfectly capable of loving and being attracted to both genders, they should be free to choose to love, fuck and marry whomever they wish, of any gender.