Gay\transgender -- not by genetics, not by upbringing, not by choice

Can you remember a time you chose to like Marmite (or not like Marmite)? A time you chose to like wearing those jeans? A time you decided to like this music but not that? A time you chose to want to do your job? Did you choose to like you girlfriend/boyfriend/whoever? Did you really choose to get that cat, or did you just want one and then get one? Did you choose that want?Choice is kinda of a difficult concept.

The best counter to the "it's a lifestyle choice" claim from the bigoted is to show them a gay porn site and ask if they can 'choose' to get off on it.

There would also be very little homophobic bullying in schools if gay people could choose to be straight.
You would have to be some kind of masochist to actually choose to put yourself through that kind of abuse.

On the other hand, consider the actress Cynthia Nixon who recently said that for her the decision to be homosexual was a choice.Now, I can think of several reasons why she would say such a thing and it not be true. But my point is that she is at least making the claim. Thus, we must consider the possibility that, for some people, it may be a choice. The spectrum of human sexuality is wide.For many, it's impossible to imagine how or why anyone would be attracted to someone of the same sex because they themselves are not. Perhaps it's equally difficult for any of us to imagine that sexuality could be a choice because it's not a choice for us.

That's a possibility.Another hypothesis is that Ms. Nixon is actually bisexual, sexually attracted to both genders, and her choice was simply to restrict herself to females for whatever reason. Perhaps she finds men just as physically attractive as women, but really hates football, or the toilet seat being left up, or finding beard trimmings in the sink.We all make certain choices about restricting our dating pools; I prefer to date atheist women, and will not date fundamentalist religious women. That has nothing to do with my un-chosen feeling of attraction, it's a choice I make to prevent future drama in a relationship. Some people choose not to date outside of specific economic classes, or outside of a specific culture, even if they could feel attracted to people outside of such subsets of the population.That hypothesis better fits my prior expectation, and so has an advantage over the hypothesis that Ms. Nixon really did "choose" to be homosexual in the absence of distinguishing evidence, and Ms. Nixon would be saying the same thing either way. From her article on Wiki:

quote:

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Regarding her sexual orientation, Nixon remarked in 2007: "I don't really feel I've changed. I'd been with men all my life, and I'd never fallen in love with a woman. But when I did, it didn't seem so strange. I'm just a woman in love with another woman."[7] She identified herself as bisexual in 2012.

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Just as a relevant aside, I'd also like to note that, outside of general curiosity, the actual causes of homosexuality and transgenderism are irrelevant. They don't matter.Whether a person is gay or transgender through genetics, choice, environment, or any other reason does not matter. They are the way they are, and they have just as much a right to be who and what they are as the rest of us. Attraction to a specific gender, regardless of your own gender, is not immoral or harmful in any way. Self-identifying as a gender that is different from your physical sex is tragic for the individual because of the mental and emotional distress they experience, but is not immoral or wrong, and the correct course of action is to help such a person transition to the gender they identify as.It's perfectly okay to be gay or transgender, no more wrong than being straight or liking the color blue or having naturally black hair.The discussion over the role of choice in sexual orientation and gender identity is typically used by bigots in their arguments that such things are evil and wicked. Those arguments are still wrong, even if it were revealed tomorrow that sexual orientation and gender identity really are choices.

It seems that a small difference in nature coupled with a small difference in nurture produced a noticeable difference in personality but lets not exaggerate the magnitude of that difference. If one liked blue and the other liked green you wouldn't bat an eye but if one likes pink it's, "OMG! He acts like a girl!"It isn't unusual for twins to have different personalities. In this case, the difference happens to cross the line of gender stereotypes but is there really a definable difference between "male" personalities and "female" personalities?Why does a person have to be a "girl in a boy's body"? Why can't he just be a boy who likes pink?

...there are boys who like pink. Lots of them.A transgender person, a person trapped in the wrong body, is not simply someone who has a stereotypically cross-gender color preference.Transgenderism is a real and serious problem for those afflicted, and it's not just because little Jimmy prefers Barbies to GI Joes. A person who actually has a gender identity problem will feel real distress at the fact that their outward physical sex does not match the gender by which they identify themselves.

But how much of that distress is caused by expectations of what gender "should be"? In the OP, the child was told, "You don't want to wear that." His preferences were unacceptable right from the beginning.

Their color and clothing and doll preferences are not what causes the distress, Ringo.What causes distress in a person who actually has the wrong sex is having the wrong body. A transwoman can wear a dress, or wear pink, or collect Barbie dolls. None of that causes distress. The lack of acceptance from others of those preferences causes social distress, sure - but that's still not what I'm talking about. Hell, all of that can be experienced by a transvestite, a cross-dresser, which is not even remotely the same as transgender.When you look in the mirror, what you see generally lines up with your internal identity. I'm a man, ergo I'm not distressed by the fact that I have male genitalia or grow facial hair, or that I have a (somewhat) deep voice.A transwoman would see her penis or her facial hair or hear her voice and feel wrong. She would feel literally trapped in a body that did not reflect her inner identity as a woman. It would be something akin to the outright panic I would experience if I woke up tomorrow with breasts and a vagina. The only thing that would eliminate that sense of wrongness is a gender reassignment, correcting the outside, physical sex to match the inner gender identity.Perhaps you should seek out an actual transgendered individual or two and speak to them.

So where does that idea of a "wrong body" come from? What creates the "internal identity"? How is that different from somebody who wants to have a healthy leg amputated because it "feels wrong"? Is there such a thing as a white man trapped in a black man's body? Would race reassignment surgery be the solution? I have all kinds of sympathy for people who aren't comfortable with themselves or their place in society. I just think that in some/many cases there are other solutions than cut and paste.

I agree with everything you said, and add the following:It seems to me that a universe of one comparison of two individuals is a bit small for sweeping conclusions about everyone on the planet.

I'm not sure we can trust the family's viewpoint on this though. It could just be a case of the natural human tendency to reinterpret and reinvent memories to make a coherent storyline that made sense all along. They might simply be overexagerrating and inventing incidences of girlish behaviour from when he was very young, because that's what they'd expect in retrospect.

Aren't you a lesbian woman?

I'm an honorary lesbian.Edited by ringo, : Added a space. @#$%ing spacebar isn't anticipating my needs.