Okay, I just want to argue against this whole ‘decision to be gay’ that people are putting out there.
I know for a fact that I did not choose my sexuality, it came naturally. The environment that I was raised in was one that was very open to the concept of multiple gender identity possibilities, but never once did it even dawn upon me that my own gender identity was anything but completely natural. So if being gay is a choice, then I ask you, why isn’t being strait a choice? Lets be fair now. I never asked to be strait.
I have sometimes wondered if that is nothing but a result of my environment, but after talking to many people: gay, strait, lesbian and bisexual, I have found that very few people have tried to argue that their own gender identity was a real choice.
I am no expert on the issue though, and I won’t claim to be, but I will ask my speech instructor after class today, and see if he has any input (My speech instructor is a gay man, and has been a very big proponent of G/L/B/T rights for years; I’m sure he has something valid on the topic).
Back to the subject of marriage. The gay and lesbian couples that I have talked to argue that despite the current state of marriage, a legal wedding in a church is about more than just spousal rights; Its about the assertion that there are no second class citizens in the United States. For gay men and women, getting married is more often about standing up and claiming their rights as legitimate people than it is about actually having to deal with all the legal bullshit of being wed.
People don’t choose to be straight, mostly because people are “normally” straight. Over the course of human existence, males have coupled with females to produce offspring. This has ingrained a natural order of heterosexuality into the human race, partly because of repititiveness, part survival of the fittest. So over the course of human existence, straight is the “normal” thing to be.
And if you’re straight, then you choose not to be homosexual.
<font size=“10”>EVOLUTION IS NOT SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST!! EVOLUTION IS DIFFERENTIAL REPRODUCTION! SURVIVAL IS NOT REPRODUCTION BECAUSE EVOLUTION HAPPENS BECAUSE GOOD TRAITS ARE PASSED ON FROM 1 GENERATION TO THE NEXT AND BAD ONES AREN’T! HENCE REPRODUCTION!</font>
Ahem.
So Cala is right in saying that heterosexuality is most likely produced through evolutionary pressures. The point is that homosexuals would have less fitness than a heterosexual (fitness is an organism’s potential to survive to REPRODUCE) because they won’t be reproducing as much as heterosexuals.
Nevertheless, this doesn’t explain why we see homosexuals. It explains why heterosexuality is good in evolutionary terms. So its a possibility that there is no particular allele that makes you a homosexual unless its a rare recessive trait.
Since homosexual males like other males and females like females, I think it is easy to see that what makes you think you’re a male or a female is set up at a different time than your genitalia so that you can have the system develop into having you think you’re a female even if you’re a male. What causes the switch, I don’t know. But to put it in simple terms, you have the wrong Operating System installed on the wrong hardware because the installation went haywire when the computer was being put together. And with the way things work in biology, it is highly likely to be a developmental switch that determines if you’re "female’ or "not female’ that’s flipped or not flipped.
The thing everyone needs to understand is that there is a system for men to like women and women to like men. All that happens with homosexuality is that the system for women to like men gets installed in a man and vice versa. All people have the same genes. The only place people differ in GENDER is the presence of the Y chromosome and the Sry that comes with it. This means that guys might come with the system to tell them how they can be females and girls might come with a system that tells them how to be males. All that needs to happen is the appropriate gene to be turned on so the right “operating system” is installed. If the wrong one is activated, it would be possible to get a homosexual.
You know what the cool thing is? Me and a friend in school were just arguing about whether or not it’s a choice, so I got to quote all this.
And yeah, I never really liked the whole “Survival of the fittest.” It never made much sense to me, that line…
Okay, I’ll give up on this idea that homosexuality is one of the ‘normal options’ for our species, based on the idea that it goes against our very basic drive as a species to further the population of the species, but only if we can start calling vegans deviants also. They seem to be denying their canine teeth, and the human need to consume protien. And while I’m at it, I’ll say that philanthropists are deviants also. Lets not forget that it is part of the drive of being a creature to ensure the well-being of ourselves and our offspring, and that says nothing about helping maintain the existance of other, lesser aspects of the genetic pool, if anything, that goes against the basic survival of the philanthropist.
It is a false morality that has been placed upon us, based off an older more applicable drive to expand a species. This idea of deviation from the norm is only a means of continuing a long-standing stigma against the GLBT community. Yes homosexuality is a deviation from the evolutionary paradigm, but so is any sex that is not intended to procreate.
And Cala, I still don’t recall ever deciding to like chicks. Please tell me when I was given the option to decide what phermones my body responds to with sexual arousal. I’ve never smelled a guy and thought “sexy”. I can’t say the same about my phermonal response to females.
Humans actually don’t use or respond to any pheromones, although pheromones are used by other organisms. I think bees, for example, are triggered to kill all the eggs by a pheromone, for example.
And proteins can be acquired from other sources than meat, although meat is a good source of proteins. Wanting to have sex for pleasure is a byproduct of evolution. What better way to have a species propagate by making it almost addicted to reproduction?
If homosexuality and heterosexuality are a “choice” as you put it earlier, then very few people would have ever choosen homosexuality. If it were so simple as you put, then everyone would choose to be a heterosexual simply because of the social stigma homosexuality carries with it to the less tolerant members of our society. Remember that not too long ago homosexuality was considered a mental illness, and nobody in their right mind would have WANTED to be homosexual in that time period. It must have been a genetic or environmental factor.
Yes, I suppose you could choose that if you wanted to, but why would you want to? The only real benefit I can see is that you will not get impregnated from sex (and that’s something that can be avoided by heterosexual couples, too- I won’t go into details :-P). Why would you choose to do something like being homosexual if it’s much easier to be a heterosexual? Jane doesn’t have to hide it if she likes Johnny, but if she likes Joan… too many fucking J names. But you get my point.
But if you’re going to choose to be homosexual, it’s because of the way you feel. This is influenced by a number of factors previously stated, and if it’s the way you feel, then why should you deny it?
If it’s the way you feel, then that isn’t really a choice, now is it? I do not choose to enjoy the female body any more than I choose what colour skin I have or how long my limbs are.
In that case, Cala, you’re not really choosing to be homosexual. You have sexual feelings for persons of the same sex. Rather, what you’re wondering about, it seems, is why would people ACT on their feelings, which is an entirely different question. See, if we accept this biological model, then you do not choose to be homosexual; you choose to act on homosexual feelings. A minor, but important, distinction.
But isn’t what you feel emotionally dictated by your mind? If so, then it’s you who’s making a conscious - well, possibly unconscious - decision on whether you like the opposite sex or not.
Well, isn’t dying just a <i>unconscious</i> deicison made by your body to no longer function? Jeez, Cala, just clearly define what “decision” means to you.
Anyone who’s ever been in love can tell you that you don’t think you’re in love, you know you’re in love. The feelings you feel aren’t dictated to your mind but are pretty much forced onto it.
