A couple of weeks ago my mum, 98, asked me what made some men gay. To which I answered nothing makes them gay.
Consider this. About half the people in the world prefer women, and about half prefer men. And most of the people who prefer women are men and most of the people who prefer men are women. If those two statements are true then it is inevitable that some people who prefer women are women and some people who prefer men are men. These are not even different sexual preferences. If I am attracted to the same person as a female friend, we are having the same sexual preference.
The problem we have as a society with sexual preference and almost any other LGBTQ2 issue is that we have created artificial communities through historic persecution and cultural prescriptivism. My grandparents would have told you that all men should, must, prefer women and, I suppose, that no decent woman could want anything other than to submit to her husband. Both of those arbitrary ideas are false; both products of narrow minds and ignorance.
When we talk about gender, it’s binaryness or spectruminess we are missing the point. These terministic screens we are constructing depend on the divisions we have inherited in our societies that are based in a worship of conformity. Primarily they are based in the repulsive human proclivity of defining criteria for licensing cruelty.
All that is really true is that there is variability. If humans are not statistically uniform as my Salvationist ancestors desperately wanted to make them, then gender identity variation is just as inevitable and unremarkable as the imperfect correlation between sex and sexual preference.
If intolerance, persecution and religious prescriptivism were to ebb away, the only time you would ever need concern yourself with another person’s gender identity or sexual preference would be if you were trying to get together with them.
