Alternate title: Ross Douthat "both sides" the trans/gay panic bullshit to make his liberal readers feel better about being bigoted.
Alternate title: Ross Douthat "both sides" the trans/gay panic bullshit to make his liberal readers feel better about being bigoted.
Is this higher than estimates of closeted non-heterosexuality in the past?
Controversial topic but I would really like to examine this and whether it has always been that way, or whether there are environmental factors increasing it, whether sexuality is actually more fluid than we thought, etc etc. From a purely good faith and healthy point of view I mean. It just seems much much higher than I expected. Only a topic I would consider exploring among other non-hetero people I think... For obvious reasons.
Idk but European culture over the last like 3-400 years is the most strictly and violent heternormative, hetersexual, and gender rigid culture I'm familiar with. Various kinds of homosexual and gender variant roles were much more common and unmarked in various cultures all over the world before the Europeans got super fucking extra about one man, one woman, and no gay stuff.
This seems to be true in the UK too , kinda based. I'm still super curious about it though, in particular because going through a very real sexual preference change myself while transitioning led me to questioning how hardcoded it really is.
I have a hard time with the idea of any level of biological determinism because my "training" as an anthropologist emphasized again and again how wildly flexible culture can be, and how expressions of masculine and feminine rolls can be very different in differing cultures. So I kind of just trust people when they tell me that they always knew they were X or Y or Q or whatever. I think we're still a long way from understanding fully how chromosomes, genetics, culture, and individual experience combine to manifest as gender. Because it does seem to be a mash up of different things, with most people being somewhere on the two humps of the bell curve for man and woman, but then there's all kinds of outliers and unexpected things popping up that don't necessarily fit the model.
Infinite diversity in infinite combinations.
On a related note, I went to college back in '03ish, and I observed at the time that a lot of people were much more flexible in their sexuality and gender presentation than I'd ever seen in highschool. I long held a theory that there were a lot more not-straight people than commonly believed, and it came out in college because people were in a safer place, away from their parents and communities, where they could experiment and express themselve for the first time. And then when the left college and went back in to the real, more socially violent and repressive world, they'd clamp down on those differences and perform the expected cisheteronormative roles. And I think that 21% number supports what I was seeing. I'm so glad younger people feel that they can be open about it and don't have to hide just to survive as much.
One factor that's worth noting is that the definition of LGBT+ has expanded to be more inclusive. 20 years ago, an asexual person for instance might not even know that asexuality is a thing, and might have felt that they don't fit in or qualify as an LGBT person. Likewise, for me, I didn't identify as LGBT bc I didn't want to be with a man as a man, and it was only later that I realized being trans was an option, and of course my exposure early on was transphobic stuff like South Park. There's also, like, sissies were/are a thing in BDSM with AMAB people who might be into feminization/crossdressing, but might also be more into women and therefore might not have identified as LGBT before, but now I'm sure some identify as NB/trans.
Having said that, I don't think that sexuality is as set in stone as people think it is. To some extent, saying that people are naturally LGBT or not-LGBT kind of assumes that categories of gender are innate, as well as attraction. But if that were true, then standards of beauty wouldn't change over time.
If we want to dissect this, like, some people are turned on by high heels, and I think it should be obvious that there's no "high heel gene" that determines that. Rather, heels have a certain meaning based on socially constructed associations. Originally, heels were worn by men looking to appear taller and therefore more masculine, but over time they shifted to be associated with women. A person might enjoy wearing heels themselves, or they might enjoy getting stepped on, or any number of other interactions with them, and these interactions have a psychological meaning to the people involved, and may fulfill psychological needs and desires that are more complex than simple attraction. If a person feels pressured in their day to day life, they may seek to hand over control in a sexual context, for example. A person's psychological needs are dependent on their material conditions, meanwhile, the meaning that they assign to particular stimuli are very much influenced by culture. And if we can say that being attracted to heels is determined by social conditioning and the cultural meaning assigned to them, then it doesn't seem like a stretch to say the same about, say, breasts.
So hypothetically, would it be possible to like, raise a kid in a lab and control whether they're attracted to men or women? I think it'd be possible to tip the scales, but the human mind is very complex and I doubt that it's possible to predict things to that extent. If you try to make them be attracted to one thing, they might discover another thing and find it new and exciting instead. Like, conversion therapy and stuff can just make it so that being straight is associated with doing what your parents and society want you to do, while being gay is associated with defying that and doing what you want. So it's not something that can be changed so bluntly. But I think it stands to reason that generally speaking, social stigma is going to lead to fewer people identifying a certain way, and that's even if it's an anonymous survey, because people are going to be less likely to investigate feelings or be open to new experiences, and to admit things to themselves.
I think sexuality is rather fluid based on what I've seen and experienced in my life. I don't think there's anything wrong with "born this way" rhetoric, and there's certainly people it applies to, but a huge percent of bi people I know (including myself) say that doesn't really match how they came into their sexuality, so there's definitely a broad spectrum.