Some Musings on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity

Below are some musings regarding sexual and gender identity and how we tend to think about these issues these days.    I'm not really interested here in trying to provide a complete philosophical or scientific case for my ideas, though I think what I'm saying is philosophically sound and consistent with what we really know from science.  I just want to plant some thoughts and suggestions that might provide an impetus for thinking through some of these things more deeply.

Until recently, the mainstream "liberal" or "progressive" party line on homosexuality was to portray it as a kind of inevitable genetic/biological binary.  There are two sorts of people one can be born as - "gay" or "straight."  One is pretty much either one or the other, for the most part.  And if you are born one of these, that's what you are.  It's determined by your biology and not at all a product of cultural influence, and it is unchangeable and clear.  Once one figures out which one is, one will be determined by this identity and unable to escape from it.  I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but not much.  This is, by and large, pretty much how most liberal or progressive people tended to think about it.  Many promoters of the ethicality of homosexual acts have tried to bolster their case by arguing that people don't choose to be "gay" or "straight."  They are just "born that way," and what can anybody do about it?  It's just who they are.

My own take on this view is that it is unrealistic and too simplistic.  I'm sure that there are biological and genetic factors that influence sexual orientation, but I think that a much larger role is probably played by cultural factors than people have wanted to admit.  To think about this, it helps if one has a good degree of self-awareness about one's own sexual psychology and potentialities and is aware of how human psychology in general works in this area.  Sexuality in human psychology is very flexible and can naturally be drawn in lots of different directions.  I think that a large number of people are quite capable of being drawn to lots of different kinds of sexual practices and expressions--including sexual experiences with both males and females.  A lot of this, I think, depends on the cultural and moral expectations and values one has imbibed, as well as one's personality and how inclined it is to stick within cultural norms.  Within Western history, until recently, anything other than monogamous heterosexual sex has been considered morally abhorrent and even repulsive, and this has no doubt influenced a lot of people over the centuries.  Most people would have felt a strong sense of inappropriateness, guilt, and even revulsion if they found themselves contemplating sexual acts with a member of their own sex.  They would have tended to close off such pathways in their minds and viewed themselves as in accord with the heterosexual norm.  In recent times, this has changed, as homosexuality has been mainstreamed to a great degree, as well as other sexual practices frowned upon in previous generations.  Young people today do not carry the same cultural antipathy to such things, and they are even encouraged by the culture to explore these areas of their psychology, to look inside themselves and ask questions like, "Am I attracted to men, or to women, or to both?", etc.  They are encouraged also more and more to experiment in various ways with these kinds of things.  They are therefore finding that they are capable of finding pleasure and attraction within same-sex sexual relationships or experiences or in other forms of what historically would have been considered "sexually deviant behavior."  But I don't think that these modern people are, for the most part, all that different in their psychological sexual potentialities than people in the past.  I think that a great many people through history have had similar sexual potentialities.  The difference is that, because of changing cultural views and norms, modern people feel more comfortable allowing themselves to explore these potentialities, and so they have been able to find and admit these things in themselves in a way most people in the past would have found unthinkable.  Again, I don't deny that there are probably significant biological/genetic factors involved in same-sex attraction.  I'm sure that some people are more naturally drawn to and satisfied with same-sex sexual acts and relationships than others.  But I think that this potentiality is more widespread than those who explicitly identify as gay or lesbian or who practice homosexual acts.  It is probably a matter of degree rather than "you have it or you don't."

In recent times, up until just the past few years, the "liberal" party line was to look at sexual orientation as a deterministic biological binary for the most part, and this, I think, influenced how people identified themselves.  Most people felt that they must be either "gay" or "straight," and they eventually locked themselves into one identity or the other.  I'm sure some of the reasons for why some identified one way and some another had to do with biological/genetic tendencies, but I'm pretty sure a lot of it had to do with quirks of individual personality and cultural development as well.  That is, I think it highly likely that a lot of people have had the capability of finidng pleasure and attraction in same-sex acts and relationships, to varying degrees, but different people have developed these potentialities differently based on a whole host of personal and cultural influences, with some of them ending up identifying as "gay" while others identified as "straight."  Over the past few years, however, the lines of the gay-straight binary have been blurred, and people have more and more started to think of sexual orientation as manifesting itself in a wider variety of ways, often along a kind of spectrum.  I think this is why we've seen a growth in people identifying as "bisexual," "pansexual," etc.  I think that a lot of these people would have identified simply as "gay" or "straight" if they had come of age a few years earlier when the "progressive" viewpoint was different.  But now they are encouraged to explore their sexual potentialities more widely, and so they are discovering that they are capable of sexual excitement and attraction in a whole lot more ways than they probably previously would have realized.  The cultural norms have changed so as to allow and encourage them to explore their psychology and to experiment in more directions.  (I'm not saying that there weren't recognized "bisexuals," etc., in the past, but it was less frequent.  There was more of a binary and less of a spectrum kind of view, and sexual orientation was viewed more rigidly and less fluidly.)  People are typically highly influenced by prevailing cultural trends and ideas, and this cultural "zeitgeist" can influence and even determine to a great degree what people are able and willing to find in themselves and how they interpret their characteristics and experiences.

I think a lot of these same kinds of observations are also relevant with regard to the modern "trans" movement.  Males and females (using these terms in the classic way as referring to biological and anatomical characteristics oriented towards playing certain roles in reproduction) have a lot of diversity within their ranks.  The spectrum of attitudes, interests, behaviors, ways of thinking, etc., within the broad categories of "male" and "female" is a vast one.  In the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the feminist movement worked hard to break down stereotypes regarding alleged general differences between males and females.  They attacked ideas such as that women are fit only for certain social roles, or that they are more emotional than men, or that their minds work in fundamentally different ways, or that they must have certain interests (like women being attracted to makeup, dresses, dolls, etc., while men are supposed to be attracted to cars and trucks, beer, sports, etc.).  In this regard, I often think of a line from the 1989 made-for-TV movie, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, in which Keisha Knight-Pulliam played the main character, Sir Boss, who had come to medieval Camelot from the future (1980s) United States.  At one point, when Queen Guenivere is trying to give King Arthur governing advice, Arthur says to her, "These are things for a man's mind."  Guenevere replies, "But Sir Boss says there is no difference between a man's and a woman's mind."  From the perspective of 1980s liberalism, this was a very progressive thing to say.  Guenevere was challenging Arthur's quaint, sexist medieval view (as the show-writers obviously saw it) by means of wisdom coming from the more-enlightened future.  Today, however, with the rise of the trans movement, Guenevere's statement seems almost as antiquated and offensive as the medieval view she was challenging.  The party line has changed, becoming, in some ways, almost the reverse of what it was before.  Trans ideology has to insist that there are meaningful differences between men and women other than the traditional biological, anatomical, and reproductive differences, for otherwise trans ideology is dead.  A lot of trans ideologists frequently appeal to differences in the mind to justify the currently-popular attempt to divorce "gender" from "biological sex."  They also, ironically, often try to bring back stereotypes that earlier feminists worked hard to root out.  If a young boy is found wanting to play with dolls, or to do other "girly" sorts of things, or to associate with girls, or if a young girl is found wanting to play with cars or trucks, be "tom-boyish," etc., the progressives today often want to use these as grounds for suspecting that the young boy might actually, in reality, be a young girl (in identity and in the mind, even if not in biology or anatomy).

There has been a significant increase in young people identifying as "trans" or as "gender-fluid" or "non-binary" when it comes to gender identification.  As with homosexuality, the current party line is that these people have found in themselves--or have had found in them by others--a kind of clear, absolute, unchangeable trans identity which they have to acknowledge as objective reality and which will determine their destiny.  Modern progressives take this so seriously that they are often pushing for dramatic and permanent surgical and hormonal treatments even for young children in order to try to allow them as much as possible, and as soon as possible, to "turn into" the gender they have decided to identify with.  What is the cause of this trend towards more and more young people identifying as trans?  Is it because being trans is a clear, objective state of being and there are more objectively trans people these days?  Is it that there have always been this large a number of trans people but in the past (due to the unenlightened state of the culture) they have not been able as easily to identify themselves?  I suspect, rather, that what we have here is similar to what I described above with regard to homosexuality.  While I'm sure there are, at least sometimes, biological/genetic factors that cause people to find themselves prone to identifying with the opposite gender, I think it highly likely that cultural influences are playing a large role as well.  In the 80s, or 90s, or 2000s, a young person who found themselves drawn to actions or interests associated with the opposite gender would simply have been viewed, and would have viewed themselves, as an example of the large amount of diversity that exists within the boundaries of being male or female.  Feminist ideologists would have made (and in fact did make) use of such persons and such experiences as arguments against stereotypical gender norms.  That's how the cultural ideology of the day would have led them to perceive and interpret these kinds of characteristics and experiences.  Today, however, the cultural "zeitgeist" has changed.  Now, among the most "progressive" segment of society, these same sorts of experiences tend to be taken as indicating that the young people who have them actually belong to the gender opposite the one historically associated with their biological sex.  If Johnny likes to play with dolls, or acts in more "girlish" kinds of ways, etc., instead of seeing this as an evidence of the diversity inherent in "maleness," the tendency now is to see it as evidence that Johnny, in the deepest sense, is not really male at all.  Objectively speaking, "Johnny" is the same now as he would have been if he had been born in the 1980s.  What has changed is the prevailing cultural ideology, which has caused Johnny's chraracteristics and experiences to be seen and interpreted in light of a different set of expectations and norms.

One really interesting dynamic all of this has caused is the conflict we are seeing now between trans ideologists and people still holding to the older gay or feminist ideologies.  We are seeing splits within the "liberal" or "progressive" ranks.  Some gay activists are opposing trans ideology partly on the grounds that it is seen as threatening gay identity.  This article by gay activist Andrew Sullivan, for example, argues that trans ideology is dangerous to gay kids because it encourages them and their caregivers, with regard to signs that previously might have been taken as indicating that a child is gay or lesbian, to instead read those same signs as indicating that the child might be trans.  If my analysis above is correct, this of course makes perfect sense.  Is a young person attracted to members of the same biological sex?  In the past, that probably meant they were gay or lesbian.  It showed the breadth of sexual orentation possible within the categories of "male" and "female."  Now, however, such attraction is increasingly taken to indicate that the young person actually belongs to the opposite gender, regardless of their biological sex.  After all, girls like boys and boys like girls, right?  So if I like girls, I'm probably a boy, and vice versa.  Instead of seeing homosexual attractions as indicators of just how broad and unstereotypical males and females can be, now the trend is to assume those previous stereotypes and use them to argue that the young person may be or even is likely to be the opposite gender.  (Of course, if one wanted to irritate pretty much everyone, one might suggest, as I have done above, that both the homosexual and the trans intepretation of same-sex attraction is an attempt to force something more fluid into artifically rigid categories.  Perhaps what we really have are simply a bunch of human beings with the potential to experience a great deal of sexual diversity depending on beliefs, values, cultural influences, personal background and experiences, genetic/biological traits, etc.  A spectrum, rather than a strict "gay-straight" binary.  And a greater diversity within the categories of "male" and "female" rather than rigid, more simplistic definitions of "male" and "female" requiring us to assign a person to the other gender if they don't fit into such stereotypes.)

We are also seeing more traditional feminist ideologists reacting against the trans movement for similar reasons.  (Think of J. K. Rowling's recent run-ins with the guardians of ultra-progressive orthodoxy.)  Trans activists are trying to restore gender stereotypes that feminists worked for decades to break down.  Those stereotypes were an obstacle to feminist ideology, which wanted to recognize variety inherent in males and females in order to break down differences between the sexes, but those same stereotypes are beneficial to trans idelogy, which wants to find ways to define "male" and "female" that are not dependent on biological sex.

One important implication of these musings is that thinking along these lines can challenge both homosexual and trans ideologists in terms of their tendency to see homosexual or trans identities as clear, objective, absolute, and unquestionable or unchangeable.  If sexual potentialities and proclivities are not necessarily the result of rigid, clear, objective forms within particular people but can be manifestations of the elasticity of human sexual psychology and potentiality, influenced by both biological and various cultural factors, then people who find in themselves these sorts of attractions, tendencies, characteristics, etc., need not be forced by these observations to choose some clear and rigid identity--like "gay" or "trans"--and to feel a need to commit themselves irrevocably and firmly to it.  They might find that they have the sexual elasticity to allow a greater role for their own choice in terms of what sort of sexual or gender orientation they will conform to, practice, experience, and enjoy in their lives.  They might not need to cut themselves off from the possibility of enjoying more ordinary, classical, heterosexual relationships, or of identifying with the gender historically associated with their biological sex.  They need not regard their sexual proclivities as necessarily inevitable or unchangeable or uninfluenceable.  Of course, this will be different from person to person.  I'm not saying everyone will or must take the same route.  There will probably be some people who, because of biological/genetic traits, cultural influences, or a combination of factors, may never be able to be attracted to or succeed in a classical heterosexual relationship, or be entirely comfortable with their own native gender.  What I'm doing is simply challenging the rigid, fatalistic categorizations that pretty much all modern "progressives" seem determined to apply to sexual orientation and gender-identity and to suggest that human psychology and potentialities may be more fluid and flexible than most people these days feel they can allow themselves to believe.  (And perhaps, ironically, the recent push to widen the spectrum in these areas--as manifested by increasing emphasis on categories like "pan-sexual" and "gender-fluid"--might end up having the effect of helping to make this same point in the end.  If there is more variety, fludity, and flexibility in human sexual psychology than our culture has previously tended to believe, then perhaps people who experience "sexually-deviant" desires or who find themselves at odds with gender stereotypes or expectations may not have to conclude from these things that they cannot live according to the gender associated with their biological sex or allow their beliefs and values to influence the direction in which their sexual orientations and proclivities develop.  They need not necessarily be slaves to the rigid identities the culture has tried to force them into.)

For more, see here, here, and here.

ADDENDUM 11/21/22:  I recently came across an article from the University of Sydney which indicates that research is starting to come out on sexual orientation as something more fluid and versatile, and sexual flexibility more common, than people have recently been inclined to think.  This is exactly what I'm talking about in this article.  I predict we will see more and more of this sort of research being released.  I think we could have seen such research earlier, but it's only more recently that people in mainstream culture have been willing to consider that the old, strict, gay-straight binary is not as strict and rigid as has been assumed in recent decades.  We often cause ourselves to only be able to see what we think we should see, especially when it comes to highly-charged social issues like homosexuality.  But now the culture's growing interest in "pansexuality" and seeing more fluidity and diversity in sexual expression, and the growing sense among people that it is good and healthy (and perhaps a source of social acceptance and popularity?) to find evidence of "sexual deviance" within oneself, is creating a platform where the culture is more and more allowing itself to see human sexual proclivities more realistically.  I think we are going to come more and more to realize and admit that what has locked people into rigid "straight" or "gay" categories has not been so much biological necessity but rather social structures that lock people into certain modes in terms of what they feel themselves allowed to find in themselves.