Well, it’s simple experiment.
If you are a man and like woman and think sex with men is icky, then *choose *to be attracted to men.
Go ahead. I’ll wait.
So you’re born straight or gay, but being a man or a woman is a choice? (Chaz Bono, Caitlyn Jenner, etc…)
Because life, people, the world isn’t as simplistic as that. There is no known single “gay gene” for men (even less is known about the role of genetics in sexuality for women). Genetics has been shown to play a role, but is not the only factor. Here is an article I found discussing a recent study on the issue.
I don’t know. I consider myself straight. But I have felt strong attraction to men before. I don’t know if it’s a sexual attraction because as hard as I might try to envision it (yeah yeah, make your jokes), I can’t imagine myself having sex with a man. I wouldn’t even consider myself bi-curious because that would imply that I would be interested in having sex with another man, and I just don’t think I AM interested. It’s more like I will encounter guys who have a combination of 1. skills that I admire (music, art, high intelligence) and 2. a certain physical appearance: youthful (but still unambiguously adult), slightly built, and having “pretty” features. And I’ll just think, “God, he’s beautiful”. I get kind of the same feeling that I had having crushes on girls in my youth. It is a definite feeling of attraction. But it’s…just not sexual, if that makes any sense. The number of times I have ever had a sexual experience with a man - or even fantasized about it while engaged in other sexual activities - is zero.
And that’s fine with me. But what if some day I decided to experiment? What if, for whatever reason, I felt like making a move on a guy or going along with one made on me - just to TRY it, and see if I liked it?
And what IF - after trying it - I made the choice to continue it, and decided to identify as, maybe not gay, but bisexual?
This identity would never come about if I didn’t make the choice to TRY - and even then, I might NOT like it and might decide I’m just straight, full stop.
I think for the majority, maybe like 90%, of gay people, they really do not choose it. They have a strong sexual attraction to the same sex, the way I have always had a strong sexual attraction to the opposite sex. And even if they choose never to act on it - the feeling is still there.
But I can’t imagine I’m the only person in the situation I’ve described. So I think maybe for some people it is kind of a choice. But the choice isn’t really “I’m going to BE gay/bi”, it’s more of a series of choices that might lead up to that point. IF they choose to try.
I’ve heard it expressed more as it’s a choice to BE gay, i.e., to embrace it as a lifestyle or mode of living, instead of coping with unnatural desires by suppressing them, the traditional way.
For example, pedophiles feel an urge or attraction to children, yet few if any are supporting this as a “they were born this way, so let them be free to be themselves” scenario. They are expected to repress that side of themselves.
Note that I personally do NOT equate the two, and fully appreciate the difference between the abuse of children and two consenting adults Doing Their Thing and it being Nobody Else’s Business. But for the most stringent “God Has Said This Is Wrong In So Many Words” people, it’s the same principle: just because you have an inner urge to do something wrong that you can’t help, doesn’t mean it’s acceptable.
I don’t think it really matters whether orientation/attraction is a choice or if it’s ingrained.
What matters is actions.
People have a spectrum of sexual desires. Those desires can and should be controlled by the will and only acted on in a rightly-ordered context.
I actually think this is true. I think that there are people who wake up every day and “choose” to be straight, they spend their every waking moment resisting their homosexual,urges and they think the rest of us are doing the same. They were raised in a culture that demonizes gayness (literally, it is the work of the devil) and they struggle against it every day.
I’d argue that they don’t choose “to be” straightr, they choose to ACT straight.
I mean, if things flipped overnight and I was in some sort of mirror universe, I might choose to ACT as if I was gay, but no amount of choice is going to change that I like women.
Thank you. This is the point.
I think a bunch of people “experimented” in college and think they chose to be straight. They’re probably not particularly straight, but they think so, and they probably feel that other people have chosen to be gay.
Needless to say, I don’t believe any of this garbage anymore, but this is what I was taught growing up. I also use terms such as “homosexual sex” because that was what I was taught.
The Mormon teaching I grew up with was simply that homosexuality was a sin. Pure and simple.
So just like you can choose to tell lies or choose other horrible sins such as drinking coffee, then you can choose to engage in homosexual sex. People are faced daily with deciding to follow God’s path and do righteous actions or Satan’s and do evil. Your choice.
There is no actual attraction between gays, it’s all just following Satan.
Spencer Kimball, the Mormon prophet of my generation, wrote a book about sex and sin, and the progression was that men will masturbate, first by themselves, then with other men. Then they start to engage in homosexual sex. You have to wonder how they come up with this. What are they obsessed about?
So, it’s not that difficult to avoid homosexuality. You just don’t masturbate to begin with, and you’ll never run into that problem.
The teaching has changed now, and they accept that some people have “same sex attractions,” but they are supposed to be celibate and resist acting on that because that’s still a sin.
It absolutely kills my mother that I have a sibling who is trans and bisexual.
I don’t remember when I stopped believing the shit which the LDS church dishes out.
And that “rightly-ordered context” is…?
That’s interesting.
Good luck with that. And anyway, if masturbation causes homosexuality, shouldn’t 99% of the male population be homosexual?
This is the Catholic view also.
They actually convinced me to not masturbate for the 18 months of my mission! It’s also a reason why so many guys get married when they are 22 and just back from their mission.
Oddly enough, in the zillion times I’ve masturbated ever since I stopped being an active Mormon, the fantasy of having another guy help me never occurred once. Satan is such a slacker!
It’s a slippery slope thing. It just depends on where you stop yourself. They send guys into 12 Step programs for deviant sexual behavior if they occasionally masturbate and “can’t stop” or watch occasional porn. Watching a bit of porn makes a guy into a sex offender.
Crazy, isn’t it? At least with the Catholic church you have celibate leaders telling people to be celibate.
Do you realize that homosexuality was illegal in England at the time? Look what happened to Turing. And Arthur C. Clarke went to Sri Lanka not just for the scuba diving, but because he was afraid he’d get arrested at home.
I bet the majority of wealthy gay English men were married back then, probably many happily. Marriage is not all sex, after all.
In the good old days of bigotry, gay people choosing to be straight was kind of like choosing to give your wallet to the guy with the knife at your throat.
You can’t choose what sexuality to be, but you can choose which to participate in. Seems best practice to follow what your instincts tell you which you are, but obviously many do not, and manage okay. Many do not manage very well.
Seems to me that this is so obvious it doesn’t need to be explained.
When I was at university in the 70’s, “Gay by choice” was the political position of the political gay movement at my university. Not just crazy outliers.
It was, amongst other things, a reaction to the idea that being gay could be cured, but perhaps it was also a reaction to feeling like a victim.
It included political and lifestyle movements like the “Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence”: at the time, being gay meant more than a sexual orientation, it was also a lifestyle choice and a political choice.
No. If you think that transgender people are simply “choosing to be” a different gender, then you probably need some of the basics explained to you, so here goes:
-
Obviously nobody chooses what genital anatomy or chromosomes they are born with, duh.
-
Nor do people choose what brain structures they’re born with. Current research suggests that certain differences in brain structure affect people’s innate sense of gender identity, and don’t always correlate with biological sex as determined by chromosomes and/or genitals, which is why some people identify as transgender.
-
The vast majority of people, whether transgender or cisgender, don’t view their innate sense of gender identity as a “choice”: they simply feel that they are a man, or a woman, and they can’t change that, whether or not it matches up with their anatomical/chromosomal sex.
-
A minority of transgender, nonbinary, genderqueer etc. people do describe their gender identity as a “choice”, just as a minority of homosexual people describe their sexual orientation as a “choice”.
-
Presenting and living as a person of a particular gender, or as a gender-ambiguous person, or whatever, is always a choice (at least for autonomous adult persons in a free society), whether the person is transgender, cisgender, nonbinary, whatever. No matter what your biological sex or personal gender identity is, it is up to you to decide how you want to dress, act, and otherwise present your appearance with respect to cultural gender norms.
Consequently, it’s not correct to say that a transgender woman like Caitlyn Jenner “chose” to “be a woman”, if she doesn’t feel that her personal gender identity is a matter of choice. She didn’t choose to identify as female in her own mind: that was simply the way of perceiving herself that seemed natural to her. The part of her transgender experience that was her choice was to transition to presenting and living as a woman.
Well… most of them, anyway. With the occasional baldfaced, lying hypocrite thrown in to balance things out. And I’m **not **talking about pedophiles, because gay =/= pedophile. I’m talking about priests who have adult male or female lovers and/or who have fathered children and remained in the priesthood.