"“There ain’t no other way, baby, I was born this way” rings through our skulls, arming our neurons with muskets of confidence. But I worry that that slogan is dangerous. It sounds fatalistic to me. It suggests that our biology sentences us to a certain kind of life...
“Immutable nature”! By that logic, as long as we LGBTQ persons can’t help ourselves, we can keep our weddings. But give us agency, and we best cancel the catering and send back the flowers, because no one in their right mind would ever choose to be one of us. This deterministic mentality thrives at the expense of what seems to me the much more appealing idea — that we should treat people fairly because it is a basic tenet of human dignity.
“Born this way” marks us as not just gay or straight, or male or female, but also introverted or extroverted, good or bad at math. It goes against a huge body of research on the importance of environment in shaping who we are and whom we become. To dig into just the gender and sexuality angles, what frustrates me is that “born this way” protects straight and cisgender persons from ever being one of us. They cannot be infected with our queer desires or queer gender presentations. In this worldview, we all enter this world with a stable gender identity and unwavering sexual desire. Identity is simple."
https://medium.com/matter/we-ve-got-gender-all-wrong-dc7a7a6a2809
And the fun and fascinating part of biology is how many things impact it. How fluid biologicl trits ARE given environment and random things.
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