Why do the majority of gays and lesbians argue that you are born with your sexuality?

Question

I don't think that everyone is born with their sexuality. Some are, but not all...

Some people are born gay, some straight, some bisexual. Some people figure it out along the way. Some people fall in love with the person (not just as in bisexuality, but as in a person who has identified as one side of the pole, and fallen in love with someone on the other side of the pole.)

So why do we keep insisting that you have to be born one way? Isn't that just shallow and ignorant?

Sorry, I forgot to put etc. etc. in the second paragraph...don't want to leave anyone out!

First of all, yes I do "live with it" everyday. I'm proudly gay...you obviously didn't read the entire question.

Secondly, READ THE ENTIRE QUESTION PEOPLE...Some people ARE born gay...some people fall in love with the opposite sex even though they consider themselves to be heterosexual...it's not because they are confused...I know a gay couple who have been together for about ten years. They are both "heterosexual", have lived their entire lives that way, however after losing their wives (one divorce, on widowed), they ended up together. Yet they are only attracted to each other, not other men.

Oh, and also, by saying it is because "who would choose to go through...blah, blah, blah...", you don't choose who you fall in love with.

Answer 1

I totally agree... I myself was married for 6yrs... then after marriage was over I decided to check out some gay bars....after experiencing for a while ,I decided this was for me ...and have been living a gay lifestyle ever since....I never had the inner struggle about me being gay....I had girl friends and a teenager and had experiences with boys as well...I just felt sexual and didnt feel the need to label....
Ive always felt everyones sexuality comes in percentages....100%...80-20%...and so on...
Would I ever go back to living a straight lifestyle?...absolutely not...

You have gay and striaghts....Then theres a whole in between world
.

Answer 2

Some people in this section are so sensitive. Usually questions like these end up getting reported. Well, obviously there is no such thing as feminized brain. What researchers said was, gay men a have similar brain structure as straight women. Does that mean that all gay men are supposed to be feminine? Of course not, not every straight women is feminine. Also, the way a person act can be influenced by the people around the person. However, that does not mean that it will be the same for everyone, everyone is different.

Answer 3

Well it isn't like there is a mark on the bottom of our foot at birth to let us know who we will be attracted to sexually, boy that would sure make everything easy wouldn't it. The argument is nature versus nurture and some will believe as you that it is more about external influences during our formative years while others believe that our sexuality is ingrained within our genetic makeup and influenced by factors that nobody has any control over. The important thing isn't the factors leading up to our sexuality but instead it is how we are treated because of our sexuality. If everyone would treat everyone with dignity and respect then the nature versus nurture argument would become nothing more than an academic discussion.

Answer 4

They cannot fatham that a combination of social forces in their lives might have had some interactive effect (with biology) on their sexual orientation. It's far easier to just say it's all based on genetics or a flush of sex hormones on the fetal brain. They don't even want to consider that parental upbringing, isolation, or any other social force might have had, in a very quiet almost unnoticeable way, determined who they are attracted to sexually.

In essence, it's part of a denial process.

Answer 5

First off, learn to state your question without trying to come back and either defend it or argue your point. That's NOT the point of this format. It's strictly supposed to be Q&A. Deal with it.

Secondly, whether a person "discovers" their sexuality, simply falls in love with a person regardless of gender or has previous identified as something else, doesn't necessarily prove that sexuality isn't inborn. All that proves is that a person's personal perception of themself changes, not their sexuality.
I could say I'm right handed all I want, but it won't change the fact that I'm actually a southpaw.
I could say I'm above jealousy and revenge, but that doesn't prove that I'm anything more than simply human and those emotions are inately human.

There's this thing called "Denial" and humans use it all the time as a coping mechanism. If they're raised to believe that being gay is somehow wrong/bad/sinful, but they find that they've had homosexual tendencies, denial will kick in to protect them. It doesn't change the fact that they actually ARE gay, it just allows them to go through life pretending they're something their not.
The problem with denial is that it's terribly destructive to the psyche. Denial is a form of lying to yourself. Lies only beget more lies and so on. We know how this goes, you tell one lie and then you find yourself having to tell more and more just to cover up the first lie.
Well denial works the same way.
Eventually, we will hit a limit as to how many lies we can keep track of before our self-built house of cards comes crashing down.
Eventually the truth will come out and denial's spell will be broken.
Thats when nervous breakdowns can set in, or the work of accepting our selftruths.

Yes, I do believe our sexuality is indeed inborn. I just think society forces us to use denial as a means of self perservation...at least a temporary one.

Answer 6

"Some people fall in love with the person " Actually pretty much everyone falls in love with the person - it's just that, for the majority of folks, they have an innate capacity to only fall in love with persons of one gender.

Realisation/recognition and acceptance of one's sexuality does not mean that one's sexual orientation is determined at the point of being reconciled to it. There s no conscious choice to become gay and there is research (either relating to prenatal hormone levels in the mother or to genes which may engender homosexuality) to suggest that it IS hardwired in the individual.

Answer 7

I think you might of answered your own question like you said you believe some are born with it and some figure it out along the way. Well not everybody says that they are born with it for me i figured it out along the way and have never claimed that it was something i was born with who really knows if that is possible or not its just the way i feel

Answer 8

I don't think its shallow and ignorant -- however, I do think its possible that some males (myself included) tend to try very hard to be politically correct, which can lead to making blanket statements that include women, when in reality studies show that women are more fluid than men in their sexuality.

The proper statement might possibly be that all men and some (most?) women are born with their sexuality.

Now, that does NOT mean that all men and some (most?) women come out immediately. I know men who didn't come out until their 20s, their 30s and in some cases never. They however, if you are close friends with them, always KNEW what they wanted -- they simply attempted to obey cultural normatives and pretended for a variable length of time to belong to the majority (often in my experience actually getting married, having children, and then never having sex with their wives again). That does not mean they weren't gay from the start, only that they couldn't deal with it and preferred, or prefer, to hide - so that family and others whose opinions they value the most, will not reject them. The recent study by Pathela et al, published in the "Annals of Internal Medicine" showed that self-identification as gay or straight had little to do with sexual behavior or reality among males. 4% of males were willing to say they were gay, but 12% plus a fraction had sex exclusively with men. The additional 8% or so self-identified as heterosexual but had no interest in women. That is not something to be figured out -- that is simple self denial. This of course is the link between studies that show around 10% of males as being homosexual, and the studies that show 3 to 4% as being homosexual. The former tend to focus exclusively on behavior. The latter exclusively on self-identification. The two are very different.

As for me, I knew I was gay by 8 although I didn't know the name for it until 11, had my first boyfriend at a late 13/early 14 and started telling people about the same time. Friends of mine are, as I indicated however, still in the closet. Even two who have had an intimate relationship with each other for well over 10 years, though both are in loveless marriages with kids. Both were having sex with males as teenagers, by preference. Both married to fulfill familial and religious obligations. Both are actually gay.

Regards,

Reyn
[e-mail]

Answer 9

Apparently you don't read the actual research.
"Figuring it out" would fall directly in the category of being born that way. Simply sleeping with the opposite sex is not what makes a person heterosexual, or vice versa. The Sexual Attraction is what defines the orientation, not the physical actions.

Answer 10

When we say we are 'born that way', we don't mean that we necessarily knew all along. I was still dating only one gender (which doesn't fall under my present sexuality,) only a few years ago, but I have, as you stated, discovered who I am along the way. But I do believe I was born this way, as in this is how my brain and body works, I just think that because society does not see it as being quote-unquote "normal", we don't really think about it until our own thoughts and bodies react in a way that steps outside of those boundaries.