Post #1670795

2026-04-24 22:02 UTC

RE: https://mastodon.social/@fesshole/116460827818430557 Every time I see something like this, I think about how the "born this way" narrative may have been an expedient strategy in the early fight for gay/lesbian rights, given that our society loves positivist and bioessentialist explanations, but that it also contributed to transmedicalist attitudes and certain forms of more explicit transphobia. More to the point of this post, it also helped obscure the contructedness, instability, and fluidity of sex/gender and sexuality. 🧵1/6

Replies (2)

@lina@neuromatch.social 2026-04-24 22:02

One of my haunts when I lived in San Francisco was The Gangway - a small dive bar in the Tenderloin where a boat's hull hung over the bar, and also one of the oldest queer bars in the city. There were some ancient regulars there, each with a million tales that could capture your attention all day long. One day, one of them was telling me (paraphasing here), "back before 'born this way' caught on, we were fucking everybody... tons of guys who never would've identified as gay, and who were mostly into women, were still down to fool around. Once 'born this way' spread, the scene dried up. Guys suddenly stopped having sex with us because doing so would mean that they were immutably gay, and they just weren't." What was once a world of fluidity hiding within a culture of intolerance had been binarized. Queerness was simultaneously naturalized and, through its positionality, maintained as subordinate, less natural. 2/6

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@NilaJones@zeroes.ca 2026-04-25 04:50

@lina Back in the 80s, when the first gene associated with homosexuality was discovered, I was afraid. I thought it would lead to putting people in concentration camps I was surprised that it had the opposite effect. Suddenly it was okay to be gay, marriage was legalized, etc Of course this took some clever politicking I agree with you, about the loss of the sense of fluidity and variability People talk too, about the pressure to make gay marriages look like straight marriages, with the monogamy and all that We invented the idea of being gay, just like we invented the idea of being trans or white or disabled or a millennial. These are all attempts to describe an experience -- either for the purposes of othering, or for finding commonalities with people who are otherwise very different from us

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