Choosing Sexuality: Is Everything We Know About Being Gay Wrong?

Just because an argument is convenient for political purposes doesn’t necessarily mean it’s accurate. When we embrace a few facts we will stop making arguments that aren’t true, only for political expediency.

The facts are:

• Most humans are born bisexual but tend to make the choice of being heterosexual as that norm satisfies the innate need for having a family and continuation of the human species without reducing the female population of the species to their reproductive functions.
• Heteronormativity is part of the human condition and needs no challenge as that satisfies a core need that makes humans, humans.
• Being homosexual is maybe a choice for some and not all homosexuals are just born that way.
• Not all heterosexual people who have sex with the same sex are bisexual or closeted, and we do a disservice if we force those words on them. 
  

I know the above facts are hard to digest for people on both ends of the discussion and I will receive flak from both sides. But as a Vedic Psychologist and not just a psychologist that has to go with the flow for fear of losing their livelihood, I have never shied away from the pursuit of truth, which used to hold true for the scientific world earlier.

Out of the above facts, today I want to lay my perspective about the truth that ‘being homosexual is a choice and homosexuals aren’t just born that way.’

Both viewpoints of homosexuality as only natural and that being not natural at all seem to be extremist positions. I do not subscribe to either.

As a Psychologist, my concern is only for the self misunderstanding born hesitancy for help among non natural homosexual event participants.

Naturalization of non natural cases of homosexuality, in many cases leads to a self-misunderstanding.

It is of 2 kinds:

1. Homosexual part of the bisexual behavior is being misunderstood to be natural, hence non treatable homosexuality.

2. Imitation and influence created homosexuality is self misunderstood to be natural homosexuality and hence any attempt of treatment is resisted out of hesitancy and resignation born out of such misunderstanding.

I understand it is out of fear that homosexuals will be subjected to horrible practices like conversion therapy, an essentially Christian practices that has its roots roots in unscientific, irrational and socially exclusionist, prescriptive Abrahamic dogma, that people try to adamantly prove it is natural to be gay and it isn’t a choice. 

Homosexuals shouldn’t be forced to go to conversion therapy or other such things that don’t work. But then, the people who adamantly try to prove that they are ‘born this way’ are opening themselves up to trying to find a ‘gay gene’ that will inspire homophobes to ‘find a cure’ for homosexuality.

My main point of concern as a psychologist is that we shouldn’t force homosexuals who know from their personal experience that it is a choice for them, and they want to make a different choice and are unable to, by denying them methods of treatment if such are available, (as discussed by Maharshi Sushruta in his Sharira Sthanas chapter, in his treatise on Ayurveda, Sushruta Samhita where he discusses the mindboggling possibility of 48 genders) or become available in the future.

Does the para I wrote above sound like a more liberal and humanitarian approach or the argument that someone is born a certain way and there is no way to change it?

Whenever I tell people that “If the exact causative mechanisms are not fully understood” about why someone becomes homosexual, then we cannot call it a natural phenomenon, they often cite the example of consciousness.

True, we do not know the exact causative processes of consciousness, but we know and have a collective consensus on what it is to be conscious. That is what makes it natural. The same doesn’t hold true for homosexuality being natural as we can’t even agree exactly what it is to be homosexual.

Our desires are oriented and re-oriented based on our experiences throughout our lives. All of our desires are continually being shaped throughout our lives, in the very specific contexts in which we discover and rehearse them. That sounds more like the ‘rise’ in homosexuality that we are seeing today. Isn’t it?

Could you imagine if the dominant narrative of black or brown people was, “Well, of course I’d want to be white if I could. Wouldn’t everyone want to be white?” That is racist and we’d never accept such a narrative. So, why are we accepting and reinforcing people with the narrative “that of course they would want to be straight, but just cannot?”

I can give another example where legal protections are afforded to someone who wants to make an informed choice: Religion. See, people aren’t born with their religions. People are raised in religious traditions, but they have the choice to convert if they wish. But there are still legal protections for them. Whether using the Synchronistic model, the Digestion model, the Miracle model or the Need fulfillment model is an ethical way to almost force someone to convert is a different question. But nonetheless one can convert.

So, we must recognize as a society that the human experience is complex and there are anomalies and if these anomalies aren’t hurting the other, then it is okay to let the fellow human go through these human experiences. On the other hand, we should recognize that while being homosexual is okay, it is dangerous to challenge heteronormativity risks reducing women to mere reproductive roles or undermining the concept of family, which is central to human society. Either of those are bound to happen when we keep challenging the dominant narrative that is heteronormativity by encouraging people to embrace their fluid selves.

Sexual orientation is about arousal and satisfaction. Both of these factors are choice based factors, else men who were previously gay couldn’t go onto relationships where they married a woman and gave birth to children.

If we call something natural it must have one or more of the following to be true:

1. We must know the exact causative mechanisms of the particular phenomenon and through that fully understood why something is happening. In the case of being homosexuality we do not have the above.
2. We must have a collective consensus on what that experience entails. In the case of homosexuality this does not hold true.
3. We must see it happening in nature, and it must be a phenomenon that holds true for other species of placental animals other than humans. This does not hold true in the case of homosexuality because when confined together for years without the opposite gender, animals remain sexual beings and may take whatever outlet is available to them. We do not find any evidence of homosexuality in animals to be conclusive. In fact, remaining sexual beings and taking whatever outlet is available to them holds true in the case of same sex only dormitories, hostels, jails and other such places.
4. It must be true for the most part of the history of humanity. Again this isn’t true for being gay. People weren’t gay and didn’t ‘come out as gay’ for the most part of human history. They accepted their sexual orientation, as part of their gender identity and if it was something other than the heteronormative structure, they remained who they are without causing problems for the dominant society. They accepted it being not natural and because the participants themselves recognized this fact, society at large was okay with it. It was Abrahamic thought that challenged this structure of mutual respect through its dogma of exclusion, tolerance and prescriptive ideology.

Conclusion

What both sides need to accept is that whether homosexuality is natural or not, is a question without a definitive answer and pushing it to either side, polarizing it is out of political agendas and nothing more. It is a new trend and a rising one at that. It is here to stay and that is okay. We should embrace, the fact that it is okay for someone to be homosexual despite it being somewhere in between a choice and being natural, as long as they accept the same facts and are not causing problems to the heteronormative societal structure, that is innate to us being human.

We should also recognize that if this choice, if it is one for people claiming it to be, if made by too many people will reduce women to wombs if a non hetero normative family structure were to continue somehow and if not will crumble the idea of family altogether leading to the denial of a truly natural phenomenon that makes us human, which is family while sacrificing it for the choice of an extremely small minority of humans.

So, we should actively help people who want to not make this choice but are unable to. We must also do everything in our power to actively discourage people from making the choice informing them the importance of family and not reducing women to their reproductive functions which is what happens when a homosexual couple wants to have children but cannot and opts for surrogacy. Again, we must do this without actively harboring hate towards anyone who has made the choice.

Keywords:

• Sexuality choice
• Homosexuality debate
• Sexual orientation myths
• Gay rights controversy
• Heteronormativity challenges