“You choose to be gay.”
Is homosexuality a choice or is it biological? Is there a problem with the way this question is formulated?
What exactly do people mean when they claim “You choose to be gay”❓ Let’s try to deconstruct 🔐 and understand it a bit deeper through the following thought experiment, deliberately a simplistic one.
Person A (a cis-gendered male) finds the following traits in a person attractive 😍:
- that the person is of the opposite sex as A (duh! 😑) 👫
- has curly hair, bluish-green eyes, & a ‘chubby’ body type,
- is well-read, articulate, compassionate and kind.
Person B (a cis-gendered male) finds the following traits in a person attractive 😍:
- that the person is of the same sex as B (duh! 😑) 👬
- has curly hair, bluish-green eyes, & a ‘chubby’ body type,
- is well-read, articulate, compassionate and kind.
Person C, for some strange unknown reason, asks A and B to do the following:
- C to A: “Change your liking for the second trait in the list of traits — curly hair and bluish-green eyes and ‘chubby’ body type. And start liking straight hair and brown eyes in a woman.”
- C to B: “Change your liking for the first trait in the list of traits — a person of the same sex.”
Question: What would a sane ✅ reaction to C’s asks be in each of the above cases?
Answer: Any sane person would find C’s ask from A to be ludicrous and “none-of-his-business” ❎.
But many many MANY people might not (and do not, in the real world) see a problem with C’s ask from B. ✔️
Question to ponder: Why is it OK for C to ask B to change his liking for a trait that he finds attractive in a person, if it is not OK for C to do the same with A? 😒
When you claim that one chooses to be gay, you are essentially saying that it is possible for them to choose to be otherwise, i.e., straight. But what does the above case study show you?
Love doesn’t work that way. You just like someone. You can’t actively change that liking. You can’t actively control what you like or choose what to like, especially when it comes to something as strong and potent as love. 💛
As Arthur Schopenhauer, the German philosopher, had said “A man can do what he wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” For example, if you like apples and dislike oranges, it would seem bizarre if someone told you to actively stop liking apples and actively start liking oranges. If you like apples, you just…like them. Simple.
“Lifestyle 🚤”, “choice 🍧”, “lifestyle choice 👽”.
People from the LGBT community often hear these words —and many more, from the seemingly civil ones to vile & hateful ones (common eg; “pervert 😖”) — meant to describe and discuss their sexual orientation and gender identity 👥.
For some unknown reason ❓, people from the heterosexual community don’t hear these words. They also don’t have their sexual orientation and gender identity discussed and debated about in public 😶.
Far from it. Straight people seem to have “lives 🙇”, whereas gay people seem to have “lifestyles 🚤”. Straight people seem to have “love 💛💑❤️”, whereas gay people seem to have “lust 😈🍌🍑🍆”.
(Yes. Read that ^ again. And see for yourself the false picture propagated against the LGBT community.)
Anyway, be that as it may, these comments thrown around in public debates led to the LGBT community and allies embracing the phrase — “Born This Way”. So much so that Lady Gaga’s song of the same title has been touted as a gay anthem by many! 💃
It was meant to oppose the vicious propaganda 😩 against the community that their sexual orientation was their “choice”. They knew that it wasn’t — they felt that their sexual orientation was a deep reality of them and most of them had felt it for the longest time they could recall.
So if it wasn’t a “choice”, we must have been “born this way” obviously.
There are logical loopholes on both sides of the argument and in the debate’s formulation itself. Let’s examine that.
“You choose to be gay.”
No points for guessing, absolutely NO gay person just wakes up one day 🌞 and says, “Oh hell yeah, I want to be gay”.
After all, no straight person wakes up one day 🌞 and says, “Oh hell yeah, I want to be straight” either.
There are 3 points I’d like to make here.
One, let’s assume that the statement is true — that “you choose to be gay”. The question that naturally follows is — so what? The statement only says that it’s a choice. It says nothing about whether it’s a good choice or a bad choice.
Two, given the extent of discrimination and false propaganda against the gay community, who would “choose” to be gay? It’s inane to say that gay people (or anyone) would willingly “choose” to struggle through the experiences they go through (for days, months and years!) and all the other forms of discrimination against them, to say the least.
Three, the subtext behind saying “it’s a choice” is that homosexuality is a chosen and considered act of deviance & defiance. It seems to subtly suggest that heterosexuality is the “normal” or “default” setting, and it’s only by some act of willful deviance that people become gay. As if they are willingly choosing to be so in order to be difficult, or in order to upset their parents whom they love so much.
This subtext is patently false. It ignores the struggles most homosexual people go through as they become aware of their sexual orientation. It ignores the fact that many spend years fighting against or hiding their sexual orientation from their family and the society — far from embracing their sexuality.
As an example, I’d urge the readers to watch this documentary and then ask yourself the same question as above — “WHY would any gay person “choose” to be gay given the amount of hardships they face in this world?”
“Born this way”
How would one know exactly what way they were born? One can’t just pin-pointedly know that by some introspection right ❓
What we do know though, is that these constitute the deepest of one’s feelings that can’t change or be actively changed. That these feelings are not one’s or anyone else’s willful doing or “choice”. That these feelings have been felt for a very very long time.
But, the more crucial logical point in this argument is this — the logical leap from “I don’t choose my feelings” to “I was born this way” is a non sequitur. “I was born this way” does not logically follow from the previous argument or statement “I don’t choose my feelings”. This kind of a formulation creates a false dilemma — it forces me to decide between (A) voluntarily chosen and (B) genetically predisposed, without entertaining possibilities like, say, acquired but nonvoluntary. It’s almost as good as saying that if you don’t like apples, then you must like oranges — a simplistic false dilemma.
Hence, such a formulation is best avoided.
What is the problem with how this debate is formulated?
The question before us is this — “Is homosexuality a choice, or is it biological?”
This question itself is fallacious and confusing. It intertwines together the following two distinct questions for no apparent reason and suggests as if they depend on one another:
- Question 1: How do people become gay? (Genes? Hormones? Nurture? A combination of the above?)— this question essentially asks what “constitutes” one’s sexual orientation.
- Question 2: Can gay people change their sexual orientation (i.e., choose to be otherwise)? — this question essentially asks how one experiences one’s sexual orientation.
These two questions are distinct and they vary independently.
Philosopher John Corvino illustrates this through this example: one’s hair color is genetically determined (read “born this way”), but one can change it and again change it to another.
The two questions shouldn’t be intertwined. Formulating the debate in this manner indicates that we are trying to judge the moral status of an activity by looking at the cause or origin of the disposition to that activity, without providing a reason to do so. Remember that judging morality on a biological basis can be a slippery slope and hence must be done with caution — and certainly must not be done without sufficiently convincing reasons to do so.
The fact that one’s sexual orientation feels deep and unchangeable has nothing to do with how it got there.
So the problem with how this debate is formulated is this — to answer the question of how one experiences and feels about one’s sexual orientation — an integral part of one’s identity, one needn’t care about the origin of it.
Which is why this debate should not even exist in the first place.
Trivia: I would urge the readers to watch this documentary as a starting point to understand the biological bases of homosexuality. And while you watch the documentary, also notice how difficult it is to tease different contributing factors apart.
The falsehood against the LGBTQ+ community needs to stop.
If the “choice” in the question is in the sense, “Do people choose their attractions towards the same sex?” the answer is NO: we only discover our feelings; one doesn’t invent or actively choose to be gay.
But if the “choice” in the question is in the sense, “Do people choose their same-sex relationships?” then the answer is OF COURSE YES! In this sense, homosexuality involves choices just as heterosexuality does. They’re not choices about what kind of feelings to have, but about whether, when, and how to act on those feelings. There are many other such life choices involved in the lives of homosexual people just as it is for any human being.
I have already elaborated on this distinction between “orientation” and “activity/expression” and the issues with such a distinction in this article of mine under the sub-section “What is homosexuality”.
Remember, an “out” “gay” man chooses to be “out”, not to be “gay”. A “straight” man also does not choose to be “straight”, but also does not need to be “out”.
Mend the society so that an “out gay man” doesn’t need to be “out” too and suddenly you won’t feel the rainbow people “rubbing their sexuality in your faces 👐 through their Pride marches 🌈”. More on this in a future article.
Until then, ❤ 🤞
The writer is an engineering & design graduate from Stanford University. His X (formerly Twitter) handle is @IamSid_Chandra
