And perhaps more importantly, how you would answer it now if you were 20, surrounded by twenty year olds who might encourage someone who isn’t feminine to go for they/them pronouns and who are interested in rejecting the patriarchy through rejection of their assigned role…? I’m an old school feminist/women’s studies minor with a non-binary afab kid (who identified as asexual last I checked, but three months ago got their first boyfriend - shocking their parents), so my lens that I see this through is … unusual.
One of the issues is that calling it even partially a “choice” comes with baggage: a lot of homophobia and transphobia includes making the claim that children are being “converted” or coerced.
Regardless of the baggage though, I haven’t seen anything to counter the position that @Napier alluded upthread. That, basically, you can be attracted to more than one gender, and you can choose which attraction(s) to act on. And in that sense only “choose” your sexual orientation.
But if people can consciously choose to (not) be attracted to a given gender, it seems to be a very rare superpower.
AFAIK, Kinsey’s sample selection was extremely faulty (nonrepresentative), which explains much of the striking statistics, if not the more general observations where Kinsey got much right.
Though when it comes to kids going through medical transitioning…the Economist had a really good article two weeks ago, we don’t have enough studies and the impact of getting a medical transition wrong for a twelve year old not great (a huge understatement). (This may be behind a paywall What America has got wrong about gender medicine | The Economist)
That “gender-non conforming” bit always confuses me. According to some definitions I’ve seen, I would qualify as gender non-conforming because I absolutely do not conform to most of the expectations for women ( I do conform with some, at least sometimes) but the part I don’t understand is when it’s listed as a choice for an identity. It seems to me that people of any identity or orientation can be gender non-conforming.
underlying sexual desire is something you are born with and don’t choose. what you do with that desire is influenced by choices and environment/interactions with others.
the expression of sexuality is an inherently political action. (as are reactions to the expression of sexuality). see: Kate Millet, Theory of Sexual Politics https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/millett.htm
my sexuality was greatly repressed for the first 20some years of my life by my school, peers, and family. now I am very happy to be outwardly queer and bi.
I agree in believing the number of people who are not strictly heterosexual is higher than what many would think. sexuality is a spectrum / has fluidity.
And that creates a feedback loop. Back when Elliot Page first came out as transgender, I realized this was the second such person that I’d been attracted to, who turned out to be transgender. It made me wonder for a bit if I wasn’t quite as straight as I’d always assumed. That’s a conversation I simply never would have had 20-30 years ago, because people coming out as transgender simply did not occur nearly as often, and almost never someone famous like that.
Now, we have kids growing up with this conversation being normal, and I don’t doubt that means some of them are realizing things about themselves as a consequence, that they simply would not have learned if they’d grown up at the same time I did.
There are a lot of people who perform homosexual acts in prison, but claim to be exclusively heterosexual outside of prison. On college campuses, there is the L.U.G., the “Lesbian Until Graduation”.
I think that, for a large percentage of the population, sexual orientation consists of “whatever the people around me encourage, and whatever else I can get away with when they’re not looking.”
this story is not factual, it is intentionally trying to muddy waters and deny healthcare to children. it does not cite any medical papers. it does not even link to the studies it mentions.
the overwhelmingly most common initial treatment for young people with gender dysphoria is puberty blockers and social transitioning. puberty blockers are safe.
instances of detransitioning are very rare and the negatives of them are greatly dwarfed by the negatives of trans people not receiving necessary healthcare.
Lesbian until graduation is oh so late 20th century. Now you are just bisexual.
Did you read it? It doesn’t cite medical papers because there are very few - the ones that are there (which it does cite) are not very good. Which is the problem. Without medical papers with decades of followup, we don’t know if its good or bad. We don’t have decades of followup because we haven’t transitioned children for decades. We do know that in some cases its good…and in some cases its bad. We also know that dysmorphia is common in young girls as they hit puberty, but a minority of those young girls of the past grow into transmen, most mature out of the dysmorphia as they adapt to their changing bodies. We also know that dysmorphia in young women is linked to sexual abuse - and transitioning only because you’ve been abused is NOT GOOD - for one thing it isn’t like transpeople are sexually abused at lower rates.
Neither I nor the Economist is saying kids should NEVER transition, just that we need a lot more study and a lot more control than exists now, because in some cases we do real damage with transitioning kids, and in other cases we do real damage by not transitioning kids and we don’t have a good way backed by studies to tell which is which yet.
Our kids both took Our Whole Lives in middle school. A lot of the kids, including one of ours, fall on the LGBTQ spectrum. Being in an accepting environment definitely makes a difference. The “bisexual in spirit” probably fits my wife. We’ve been in a monogamous relationship for almost 30 years now. I’m only attracted to women, but I probably have characteristics generally regarded as"feminine" (although it’s probably not that simple).
I’d still be, in that aspect, who I am; and I was and am definitely female. I knew by the age I was 20 that I didn’t fit well into boxes – my old high school binder has BUT written on it in large letters. Whether I might have answered non-binary would have depended on my understanding of the meaning of the word. If there had been a choice for “other”, I might well have taken that.
If @doreen’s right, the options actually were:
Choice of answers: Gay or lesbian; Straight, that is not gay or lesbian; Bisexual; Something else; I don’t know.
and I suspect that at 20 I would have picked “something else” by which I would have meant “probably straight, but maybe a little bit of bi”.
Is anybody actually doing medical transitions with twelve year olds? AIUI, the most that’s going to happen with a twelve year old (besides names, pronouns, and clothing) is puberty blockers, which are reversible.
Yeah, it does seem it would be more of an add-on, not the basic identity. And orientation is a different thing entirely.
Sexual orientation is not a fixed characteristic of people that they have to maintain throughout their lives.
One category that would probably have been overlooked before is being femme or masc, where one doesn’t strongly identify as a woman or man (respectively) but leans one way or the other. These people tend to identify as either she/they or he/they.
I suspect that, in the past, most would just round to the closest binary, and so a femme person would, for instance, say they were female.
We already know that some people who aren’t a perfect 0 on the Kinsey scale might also round, identifying as “straight.” But now there’s the question of “are you straight if you’re attracted to nonbinary femme people?” I consider myself straight even though I find some degree of androgyny to be quite attractive.
Interesting to me would be a follow-up survey of teens and young adults, who we generally accept to be in the throes of hyper-aware peer scrutiny, with the question: “Do you feel that, among your cohort, identifying as heterosexual or cis is stigmatized in any way?”
ISTM that the last thing a teen or young adult want to be accused of is being “uncool”.
Well, damnit, now you made me remember Annie Lennox in the 80s.
Yes I’d agree with that. I consider myself very pro-trans but I still think that there are complex situations like women’s sports and pre-pubescent gender transitions.
AIUI it’s common for girls in particular to be uncomfortable with some of the changes happening to their body during puberty, and I think we need to be careful about not misinterpreting that.
And I don’t think gender transitioning is perfect yet. That’s my main beef with trans competitors in women’s sports…I don’t think we can transition sexual dimorphic characteristics so well that there is no advantage.
Said another way, the same f***ed up post-Victorian ruling culture that gave us Reefer Madness and therefor the Drug Wars also gave us the Straight State and the hetero-/homo- false dichotomy fueling much of the current Culture Wars.