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[–] bayesianqueer 1 point 4 points (+5|-1) ago  (edited ago)

Personally I'm all for gay sex, but I don't think attaching it to an identity is healthy...

The only reason that it's an identity is because of societies homophobia and heteronormativity. When I talk about the movie my husband and I went to last night and that he spilled a coke on me, I have two choices: either refer to him as my spouse and play the weird don't use pronouns game, refer to him as a friend, just not tell the story, or make the person I'm speaking to aware of an identity with which they pigeonhole me - their gay coworker. It only becomes an identity when others see you as abnormal.

While it may not be a "choice", you aren't really "born that way" either. Were you born to prefer your favorite color, food, song? Was that preference a "choice" or a by-product of experience?

A better comparison is actually our model of genetic disease. This is not to say that homosexuality is a disease, but genetics is still genetics. Say we are talking about the Breast Cancer (BrCa) gene. While women without the gene have a 12% chance of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes, women who have that a harmful BrCa 1 mutation have about a 50:50 shot of getting breast cancer in their lifetimes. Now of women with that mutation, about half never will. There are other influences too, diet and exercise, hormone use, and today whether one gets a prophylactic mastectomy. So whether or not a woman will get cancer can't be predicted with certainty. However, we know that some women (with certain BrCa mutations) were born much more likely to get it. Moreover, while there are a myriad of things an individual woman can do to increase or decrease her risk over a lifetime, they can't choose to not get cancer.

With homosexuality, there are some genes that strongly predispose to homosexual orientation. (If you are interested google: gay uncle gene, or CAH in Ashkenazim women.) There is certainly some influence that happens before and after birth, but pretty much by gradeschool, the die has already been cast. Moreover the things that we know that predispose to homosexual orientation aren't exposure to LGBT people.

especially when you're pushing it on kids who don't know themselves yet

It doesn't matter if you "know yourself" at age 10. Exposure to gay adults doesn't influence kids to become gay any more than exposure to straight adults makes them straight. Hell, most gay adults are the products of very straight parents and were raised in environments where almost everyone appears straight. When I was growing up (70's and 80's in the south) the first time I remember meeting someone who was gay was when I was 17. I didn't know that faggot was derogatory toward gay men until I was a teenager.

However we do know that kids who have been exposed to LGBT people do end up a little different as adults. They tend to be much less homophobic in the same way that kids who grow up with positive experiences of people of different races are less prejudiced against POC.

that doesn't mean that you're in the wrong body, or that you're supposed to act a specific way, or that you must like certain other unconnected things that just happen to be part of the "lifestyle" characterizations being applied to you

I have never felt that way. In fact, if anything I have experienced pressure to be less stereotypically gay. Being 'straight acting' is considered a benefit by a lot of men in the gay dating scene. Sure, lots of us like to dress in rainbows and glitter for pride once a year, but I see that as no different from Mardi Gras in NOLA. (Having experienced both, I would say gay pride events are a bit more sophisticated and demure.)

edit: wurds