I recently got caught up in a discussion on twitter with the charming Louise Sorensen over this article: “What Science Knows About Homosexuality.”
As much as I applaud any survey of scientific research on a subject, I have to say that there is an undercurrent of assumption in a lot of the scientific literature that gender and sexual orientation are fundamentally interlaced. This, to me, is a cultural assumption that taints a lot of the scientific work. Pervasive cultural models DO affect how scientists go about asking their research questions and must by necessity affect their results.
I have always felt that the whole GBLT grouping is odd for a number of reasons. Firstly because it implies an absolute polarity that I find forces people into camps they don’t necessarily always feel comfortable in. There is a continuum along the attraction to same gender – different gender line and I suspect that, free of cultural value judgements or social or environmental pressures, many people don’t reside at either pole. My second problem with the GBLT lumping is that I believe it reflects our intense discomfort talking about sexuality and associating it with gender.
All the experience I have had of transgendered people is that their individual sexual orientations are never a given. There are gay transmen and lesbian transwomen. The assumption that a transgendered person will automatically be heterosexual (to their trans self) is just as bigoted as assuming all cis-gendered people are hetero. Far more helpful to me is to accept people as the gender they wish to be identified with, and then look at their sexual orientation as another issue altogether. Transgenderedness is an issue of gender. Not sexual orientation. And our overwhelming need to break things down into binaries is also a problem. I have met transgendered people who do not identify as strictly male or female but a nameless ‘other’. And these people seem to freak out practically everyone. But why? Just because we don’t have a word for it doesn’t make it, by necessity, bad or frightening or wrong or odd. It just shows up the poverty of our language to offer other possibilities.
That we feel the need to lump it together with GB & L speaks to our desire to marginalize people, and even to self-marginalize. It also speaks to our need to classify and manage. And this bothers me more.
To me, labels are about ‘managing’ things. And this, by necessity has an erosive effect on seeing and appreciating the individual as individual, first and foremost. Beyond their gender or their sexuality.
I hate identifying as ‘bi’. It’s a culturally loaded term which It implies that I’ll fuck anything. The truth is, I’m obsessively picky about who I’ll fuck. It’s simply that the gender the object of my desire identifies with has never been one of the criteria. I’m much more likely to make a decision based on political orientation, frankly.
I think the nature vs nurture debate is a dangerous one. It feeds in to a discourse that, to my mind, is fundamentally unethical because it is always predicated on exterior categorization. i.e. this person is male because they have a penis – says society, says science, says God. And there is an inherent power dynamic here when anyone is labeled or categorized from outside.
A far more ethical basis for the discourse is to ask: how would you like me to address you? What feels most appropriate to you in your flesh, in your bones, in your deeply held sense of self?
Moreover, we need to be prepared for the answer to be ‘I don’t know yet / now’ and to put aside our discomfort with not getting a answer or having it deferred. That discomfort with the undefined is a symptom of our need to control the other by slamming a label on them. And the quicker we can dispense with it, the better. Because when it becomes impossible to identify anyone as ‘other’, the better we start treating them as human beings, and the way we would want to be treated.
Absolutely. I, for one, would love to live in a world without labels of any kind.
Overall, I agree and see your point. However, on nature vs. nurture, there’s a great deal of political expediency going on that I have to support. While I personally believe that “what one or more consenting adults do in their bedroom is no one else’s goddamn business” and therefore it doesn’t matter whether those adults were ‘born that way’ or just ‘chose that way’, it’s difficult to get past the very large number of people who do believe it matters.
The argument that it is wrong to discriminate against people because of how they were born is a political winner in the West. As much as it’s an oversimplification of human sexuality, it’s been immensely valuable. Unfortunately, like most political arguments, introducing nuance and reality just muddies the water and makes it harder to win the point.
So I think the authoritarianism desire to label actually helps in this case. I don’t like it, but I’ll bite my lip as long as it helps the overall culture move beyond the oversimplified male/female heterosexual views of ‘how things are.’
Ed, women have been treated as half-human for centuries by christianity and still have little rights or power in most of the world, as a consequence of how other religions value them. So, clearly in the past, the fact that someone is BORN a certain way has not made a difference to bigots.
Black people are born black – it’s genetic – but that doesn’t stop bigots from considering them inferior.
If you really believe that proving that homosexuality is BORN, then you are deluding yourself that you are able to reason with irrational people who feel the need to believe that someone is lower than them.
Beyond this, having the debate on this level is like saying: well, gay people can’t be sinners, because god made them that way. It implies that someone who WOULD CHOOSE to be homosexual IS a sinner. There are people in this world who make a conscious choice. I know, because I have made it.
I personally don’t believe that homosexuality is born. It, and sexuality in general, are far too complicated. There are certainly elements of nurture and choice involved as well, and I do know plenty of people who’ve made conscious choices about their sexuality.
And yes, for most of human history, bigotry based on how someone was born is the norm (and still is in much of the world). However, for the past fifty years, the West has had this idea that it’s wrong to do so. It’s been imperfectly and inconsistently implemented, but it has helped push us towards less discrimination and bigotry.
There’s no winning arguments with those who need to believe someone is lower than them. There is, however, the ability to persuade people that their son/daughter/uncle/friend isn’t a sinner because they’re gay. This moves the people whose bigotry is more culturally originated rather than emotionally/psychologically originated in a useful direction.
Do I hate the fact that it implicitly implies that those who choose an alternate sexuality are sinners? Yep. Am I willing to bite my lip for political expediency? Yep.
We’re fighting a huge cultural war. My approach (which I will concede may not be the best, but that’s a separate argument), is that we need to win the “it’s okay to not be heterosexual” argument first, and by any means necessary.
Well what do you think the need to label someone as evil and unnatural is about, Ed? What purpose do you think it serves.
We’re in agreement about the purpose it serves. I’m arguing pragmatic tactics. Persuading enough of the world that “gay” isn’t an evil term is a sufficient first step, for me, down a path to getting to a point where we don’t label any* sexuality issues/orientations/desires as evil.
For others, the compromise to get “gay” accepted by arguing it’s nature is unacceptable. I can live with the disagreement.
*Exceptions for real life rape and its variants. But we slide off topic with that.
Good stuff (must be, because I agree with it).
Labels and generalisations are actually useful, especially when one has to decide something very quickly. However, I think that knowing the origin of an assumption is the key. If it is “authoritarian”, treat it with suspicion, I daresay, with prejudice.
Sadly, it is rare to find someone who questions their own beliefs and even rarer to fine one without assumptions. I do some of the former and many of the latter.
So: thanks for your ever-good opinion, RG.
Alec
Totally with you on labeling and grouping. Although I do appreciate the need to band together for strength. The thing that puzzles me is how we decide the order of the letters in the whole quiltbag alphabet soup. What are there? Ten possibilities?
GBLT? LBGT? BLTG? Two of those sound like sandwiches.
Did somebody hold a meeting? Was there a vote? What happens when we add another letter?
Mostly I refuse to identify at all.
The addition of ‘T’ to LGB/GLB has always baffled me somewhat; gender and sexual orientation are NOT the same thing, and I think having the T in that acronym has quietly disrupted discourse on both gender and orientation; it is really hard to find information on either without the other.
As for labels overall… I have an ongoing debate with myself on this topic; because I do use labels in order to ease conversation and simply make it easier to speak fluidly. However, I dislike how the use of labels distances us from individual experience. I would, at the very least, like to see a society where the questioning of labels is encouraged. I would like “I am heterosexual” to be a starting point for conversation, not the final assumption.