New Desktop Dash, No Bueno

If you truly believe women can be anything, then you are going to need to accept that some women are men.

If you truly believe women can look like anything, then you are going to need to accept that some women look like men.

If you truly believe women can do anything, then you are going to need to accept that some women transition to be men.

If you truly believe that women have the right to decide what to do with their lives and bodies, then you are going to need to accept that some women decide to be men.

Decide to be…?

What’s not tracking?

Isn’t it kind of harmful to say that a queer person decided to be that way? Or is that idea outdated now and I’m being dumb?

the only reason we have to rely on the idea that sexuality and gender is innate and unchanging is because the legal system in the US ties rights to things that are innate and unchanging

while for the vast majority of people, their gender or sexuality is unchanging, as most identities stabilize between age 3-5, the idea that identity (whether gender or sexuality) cannot change at all over the course of someone’s life is just simply not reality. Unfortunately, the right wing takes this fact to mean that you can successfully engage in conversion therapy - this is not true. Sexuality/gender can just change for some people over their life time. For some people it IS very much a conscious decision. 

It’s a difficult conversation to have esp in the US when all human rights rely on the foundation of an innate/unchanging status. 

Love learning this kind of dynamic assessment from new Tumblr friends. Thank you.

To further build on this, the Born This Way narrative was constructed specifically to counteract the (particularly Catholic) Church’s “Choosing the Gay LifestyleTM” narrative. When (Christian) bigots said we could just choose not to be queer we responded with “but I cannot choose not to be queer. I have always been this way. Are you saying God made a mistake when He made me this way?” And it was a convincing argument for a lot of liberal religious folk and got them to be allies and that was all well and good.

But the problem with that line of argument was that it conceded to the Church the right to define the question. The response instead should have been “so what if it is a choice? So what if I choose to be this way? How does that give you the right to discriminate against me?” By arguing that being queer is not a choice, we are implicitly saying that no one would choose to be queer if they could instead choose to be cishet. We are implicitly asking for their pity as humans who have been condemned by God to live a life that no human would willingly choose and to be allowed to live a life as close to cishet normality as possible as an act of mercy.

Which… Is not a narrative I will willingly accept. Whether I chose my queerness or not is immaterial to my right to experience the full gamut to human sexuality without fear of persecution based on irrational hatred or religious bigotry. So what if I chose this? I have the right to choose.

The Born This Way model also tends to leave bi, pan, and sometimes ace queers in the lurch because… well, by definition, you could choose differently, right? For example, if you’re a woman and you’re attracted to both men and women, you could choose to act only on your attractions to men if you wanted and not lose out, right? Right?

Wrong. Of course you would lose out: you would lose your connection to a real part of yourself and condemn yourself to a life of hiding a piece of yourself. This is already a big problem for bi/pan/ace queers, who tend to be externally defined in terms of the gender of their partners rather than in terms of the identities and histories that follow an individual. Even a monogamously married person has a sexuality, a history, and a life that extends beyond their current partner. When you erase that part of a person, you cut them off from community and from their whole selves. The isolation of the closet is strangling even if your relationships are wholly fulfilling, because queerness is not a function of a single relationship.

It is not acceptable to forcibly closet our sisters, brothers, and siblings based on their current partners. The grudging acceptances won by the the Born This Way narrative are inherently hostile to all non-monosexual queers: by insisting that you would only choose this if you had no other choices, you deny acceptance to people who could choose to cut off a limb of their selfhood to vanish into unmarked heteronormativity. This narrative erases the violence and the isolation perpetuated by the non-consensual closet by pretending that passing–cutting off pieces of oneself to mimic a coercive heteronormative ideal–is essentially a privilege instead of a an expensive tool that can be used in order to survive.

Isn’t that what coming out is for all of us? A choice to share and own our queerness as part of our truest selves rather than hiding it away in shame? A choice to seek authentic connection instead of compartmentalizing ourselves into a series of boxes? Everyone has choices about their queerness, whether or not they are choosing to be queer: you can choose to hide, or you can choose pride. Why should we concede to the church that our truest selves are inherently a cause for discomfort and shame?