‘Born this way’? Sexuality not that simple
Some people resist notion of being gay from the first day
For decades, “born this way” has been the rallying cry of the mainstream gay rights movement, a simple slogan cited as the basis for political change and cultural acceptance.
Getting America to believe that people are born gay — that it’s not something that can be chosen or changed — has been central to the fight for gay rights. The “born this way” mantra, a ubiquitous part of the Pride celebrations taking place this month, doesn’t reflect the feelings of all members of the LGBTQ movement. Some argue it excludes those who feel their sexuality is fluid, while others question why the dignity of gay people should rest on the notion that they were gay from their very first breath.
“There are a lot of lesbians who subscribe to the ‘born this way’ narrative, in part because it’s become almost an obligatory story,” said Jane Ward, a professor of gender studies at the University of California-Riverside. “If you support gay rights, then you have to believe that. But there’s now almost 50 years of scholarship on how people come to understand their queerness,” and for some people, it’s something they claim ownership of more deliberately, over time.
The opposite of “I was born this way” is not “I chose this way.” In a 2016 article published in Psychological Science
in the Public Interest, researchers wrote that “whether sexual orientation is a choice” is a poor phrase for understanding sexuality. We choose our actions,
they wrote, not our feelings.
The story we’ve been told is that a combination of genes and early exposure to hormones make us who we are. They influence the formation of “male brains” and “female brains,” or “gay brains” and “straight brains.” Biological factors drive sexual desires, personalities, toys we play with as children, jobs we choose as adults. Gay and straight. Male and female. We’re wired differently.
As the patchwork of studies that make up this story receives more scrutiny, holes appear.
In her book Brain Storm: The Flaws in the Science of Sex Differences, sociomedical scientist Rebecca Jordan-Young broke down 13 years of analysis on hundreds of studies on sex and the brain. Her conclusion? Biology matters, but we don’t understand how.
“The science of whether sexual orientation is biological is pretty sparse and full of disparate, mixed and unreplicated findings,” said Sari van Anders, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan. “So that is one reason why there is a lot of confusion about it. Because a study will come out that says, ‘This gene!’ And then another study will say, ‘Oh, we didn’t find that same gene, but we found this gene.’ ”
The science on sexual orientation is limited, van Anders said, because the ways scientists define sexual orientation — who counts as gay, who counts as lesbian, who counts as bisexual — assumes we can draw bright lines, when we can’t. Are you gay if you have same-sex desire but never act on it? What if you’re a man who has had sex with men, but you don’t identify as gay?
It’s impossible to know if we’ll ever be able to map the complexities of human sexuality, but it’s more and more clear that the bodies we’re born with don’t determine everything about who we are.
“What we need now is a way to cultivate and reinvigorate curiosity about how the body really matters in the development of human personality and behavior, because curiosity and skepticism are the real engines of scientific discovery,” Jordan-Young wrote at the conclusion of Brain Storm. “What good is a science that doesn’t tell us anything new?”
“The science of whether sexual orientation is biological is pretty sparse and full of disparate, mixed and unreplicated findings.” Sari van Anders, University of Michigan