I Wasn’t Born This Way

Or maybe I was. Or maybe I changed along the way, or maybe I decided to live like this. It doesn’t actually matter, though.

Spectacular rainbow outside the settlement of Humbolt-Dewey, near Prescott in Central Arizona. Original image from Carol M. Highsmith’s America, Library of Congress collection.

I know I’m supposed to say I was born this way. That is the party line for LGBTQ people, and I understand why, but I can’t in good faith stick to that line. For more, I don’t actually know if I was born this way. More importantly, however, it doesn’t matter whether I — or anyone — was born this way or not. The real issue is about who is good, who is valid, who may or may not live freely in society — and that is a moral argument, not a scientific one.

My moral claim is that all orientations and genders and (generally speaking) personal identities are valid and acceptable. This is true regardless of whether someone was born that way or not. I make no claim about to what degree anyone is or isn’t born this way — no such claims are necessary, after all. You might have been born this way — I’m not saying you weren’t! — but I can’t say that I was, and I won’t pretend so just for the sake of maintaining a rhetorical position I don’t believe in.

For the sake of completeness I want to try to address some of the reasons why born this way is the party line. I don’t want to toss it out without some consideration. It is too deeply rooted in the way society tends to think about this to silently disregard. There are, however, some very good…