One really common argument about gayness is that we should accept gay people because it isn’t a choice. “Who would choose to be gay?” the argument runs. “If you’re gay, you’d experience homophobia, which can lead to rejection from your family and friends, discrimination in housing and on the job, and sometimes even violence. Therefore, it could not possibly be a choice. No one would choose gayness.”
My mother responded to me coming out with “oh, well, you’re bi, you should just choose to be straight, then. It would be a lot easier and you wouldn’t have to face any homophobia.” I think that my mother probably intended to be compassionate: after all, she’s a nice liberal who doesn’t consider herself to be homophobic in any way. But this still was, mm, not exactly a great way to respond to me coming out. And I’ve met quite a few other bisexuals whose parents responded similarly.
I put the blame for that response squarely on “no one would choose to be gay” discourse. If you believe sincerely that gay people should be accepted because they didn’t choose it, because no one would live a gay life if they had another option, what happens to those of us who could be straight, if only we lied and repressed part of ourselves? Why would the compassionate response to us coming out be anything other than shoving us back in the closet as quickly as we can, for fear we might experience the tremendous suffering that is being queer? If no one would choose to be gay, then when we choose to be gay, we must be misinformed or simply making a mistake.
Make no mistake, “I’m just concerned about the bigotry you’ll experience!” is, well, bigotry. Well-intentioned, kind bigotry, to be sure. But if you say to a bisexual person “I’m just concerned about the rejection you’ll face as an openly queer person!”, you’re, well, rejecting them. You are saying that someone should hide a core aspect of themselves, should lie about a fundamental aspect of their experience. That is the thing you are doing.
(This is by no means a phenomenon that only bisexuals experience. People who disapprove of interracial relationships quite often justify their disapproval by citing all the other people who disapprove and might cause trouble. In fact, some people in interracial relationships have the experience that the only people who are remotely jerks to them at all are the ones who are trying to protect them from jerks by getting them to break up.)
But I think if we are going to get people’s nice straight liberal parents to stop responding to their coming out in that fashion, we’re going to have to shift the way we talk to nice straight liberals about LGBT issues. We’ve got to switch it to “sometimes, being gay is fucking miserable; sometimes, being gay is really awesome. Over time, the misery-awesomeness ratio has been moving more in favor of awesomeness. It doesn’t matter whether or not someone chose to be gay. The reason we should accept them is that being gay is not actually inherently any worse than being straight. The only reason they’re any different is because some people decided to be douchebags, and we’re not going to let the douchebags get their way and chase everyone into the closet. And because we didn’t do that, the douchebags are losing, and soon it won’t be worse at all.”
Thing of Things 
Since Bi people are ‘born this way’ as well I cannot but disagree with that, though the discrimination; as with Trans people, comes more from the ‘Gay’ community than not.
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Where does this put me as a bisexual who firmly believes that the vast majority of humanity is bisexual and should coordinate to be straight in practice?
I’m aware of the typical mind fallacy, but I don’t think that’s what I’m doing. It completely makes sense that, if most people were actually bisexual, most of them would pretend to be straight and maybe even believe it. We do live in a pretty homophobic society. And on the other hand, LGBTQ+ community norms tend to prefer “full gays” to bisexuals, whether explicitly or implicitly; I know more bisexuals who identify as gay for political purposes than actual gays.
The best explanation for my observations is that a tiny fraction of humans are actually gay, but then a huge supermajority – maybe 60%, but more likely something like 99% – are bisexual and closeted. The gays angled for acceptance and that started a ripple effect wherein the more gays became accepted, the more bisexuals quit identifying as straight.
Gay acceptance is bad because, though it may make life better for people who were “born this way” (although maybe not! celibacy is pretty underrated, tbh, and sexual attraction is hardly the most important aspect of a marriage), it also removes the incentive for the much more prevalent population of bisexuals to choose the pro-social option of heterosexuality.
As long as we’re talking about ways the “born this way” narrative hurts people, it also presumably hurts the fairly large population of women who become lesbians following rape.
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What makes you think that a large majority of the population is bisexual? The people who engage in ‘bi-hacking’ seem to report fairly low success rates, and those are people who are actively trying to get in touch with their same-sex attraction.
Also, my personal experience doesn’t bear this out. I just don’t really experience attraction to men. I can enjoy looking at an attractive man on an aesthetic level, but it’s a much closer feeling to what I get when looking at a nice painting than what I get when I look at an attractive woman. I’m sure that I could convince myself to be somewhat attracted to a man if it were socially mandated to do so, but I think it would require a decent amount of repressing my natural instincts. Maybe that’s all social conditioning, but I don’t remember ever really feeling any other way. When I was 13 and watching the early Harry Potter movies, there’s a reason I wanted to watch Emma Watson’s scenes over and over and not Daniel Radcliffe’s. Am I the 1%, or am I a repressed bisexual?
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Perhaps this might have something to do with the fact that Daniel Radcliffe looks like a Lego model of a potato.
More seriously, movie stars don’t have a wide range of appearances or aesthetics. I’ve heard from a lot of people that anime made them realize they were bi, but I’ve never heard anything like that about movie stars. This could be a selection effect, but it seems more likely that it’s because of the difference in the range of types.
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“I’m aware of the typical mind fallacy”
Awareness of fallacies is not immunity. You are almost certainly wrong, unless you round up a Kinsey 0.5 or 1 to “bi.”
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It’s not possible for 99% of people to be “bisexual but repressed” for another reason–1% of us are asexual. That leaves no room mathematically for any straight or gay people at all…and don’t forget about those who are pan (like bisexual but with no preference about gender). I think the Kinsey scale is a better measure of how bi the population is, keeping in mind that many straight people will insist on having some same-sex attraction (and vice versa for gays) yet still won’t identify as bi because the attraction is so rare.
If I had to estimate based on my own experience, I’d say about 60% of people are totally straight (at least 85% of attraction experienced is to other gender, experiencing attraction at least 4-5 X/year), 8% are pan (no preference for gender, experiences attraction at least 4-5x/year), 12% are bi, 18% are gay, and 2% are asexual/demisexual/gray (experience limited or no sexual attraction to any gender).
Of course, based on the people I know personally, only 20% of people are straight. But my friend circle isn’t the most comprehensive or representative sample.
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I think that part of the blame should also fall on people’s unfortunate tendency to treat romantic partners as interchangeable. It seems like some people don’t understand that it is possible to fall in love with a specific person, and to want that specific person even if there are other people around with similar objective qualities.
Sometimes a bisexual person will fall in love with someone of the same gender. And telling them to pursue people of the opposite gender won’t work because their goal isn’t Find A Romantic Partner, it’s Date A Specific Person. (Of course, t0\he same can be true of heterosexual and gay people who want to date a specific person even if there are other people who might be easier to date. Scott Alexander’s posts about True Love are rather enlightening on this topic)
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(Nazis cw)
Germany, 1939:
Your friend: I’m Jewish, but the government doesn’t know. But I’m tired of hiding it and I’m going to start wearing a yarmulke.
You: If you do that, the Nazis might do something bad for you. I recommend keeping your Jiewishness hidden.
Your friend: You’re a bigot, you and the Nazis both want me to keep hidden a fundamental part of who I am.
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Nazi Germany is a bad comparison because homophobic violence is not state-sponsored or pervasive to anywhere near the level that anti-Semitic violence was.
Like this argument would be totally different if we were talking about a place like Uganda or Saudi Arabia where same-sex relationships are a capital offense. I think we’re taking it as a given that homophobia is bad (and sometimes does result in hate murders) but like, being out isn’t a death sentence for most people.
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Then presumably there’s still a reason to be closeted in current society, it’s just not as strong of a reason as it would be in Uganda. Unless the person saying “Stay in the closet” overestimates how dangerous expressing same-sex attraction is (or underestimates how costly it is to pretend to be straight), in which case they’re making an honest empirical mistake, not rejecting who someone fundamentally is.
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Maryland, 1849:
Harriet Tubman: I’m a slave, but I want to be free, and I want all other slaves to be free as well. So I’m going to escape, and then help others.
Her friend: If you do that, slave owners might capture you, and do something bad for you. Sure, being a slave might feel a little bit inconvenient sometimes, but the alternative is much more dangerous.
Harriet Tubman: You’re not helping. *proceeds to be Harriet Tubman*
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If I care about a friend or relative’s well-being more than I care about a Cause, this makes perfect sense. If I were Harriet Tubman’s friend (and didn’t need to escape slavery myself), I’d hope that someone out there would be doing that work, but that it wouldn’t be her.
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I feel like this might be one of those times where attempting to develop a general meta-level principle about coming out isn’t going to work. It might be necessary to (groan) engage in object-level reasoning about specific circumstances. Which is annoying, since that’s hard.
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@blacktrance, yes, but if the said friend has already made it cleat that the Cause is more important for them than (arguable) increase in personal safety (and I remind that in case of bi people the Cause is the ability to date the loved ones – and making sacrifices for love isn’t exactly unheard of), you can continue trying to sabotage their efforts to fight for the Cause iff you selfishly value their life and perhaps their social availability to you more than their being happy and satisfied. And it’s certainly possible and fine to have strong preferences about someone’s being alive, safe, and with you, which are conflicting with this person’s preferences. But the ability to respect their autonomy and ultimately support their choice is what separates someone who, say, feels deeply heartbroken from unreciprocated affection from someone who rapes whomever they want.
The respect of one’s choices doesn’t entail abstaining from giving (solicited, or at least not explicitly rejected) safety advice. Like if someone wants to be openly LGBT in Uganda, a caring person might offer helping them and their loved one(s) in escaping to a more tolerant country, and suggest waiting with coming out until then. They might suggest safer neighbourhoods and venues to be open. Offer help with physical protection. There are a lot of things one might help with, aside from insisting on abandoning the Cause.
Another thing this reminds me of is abstinence-only sex ed. Yes, it is in fact the case that one can eliminate all the risks associated with having sex by not having it. But quite likely people *are* gonna have it nonetheless. Any reasonable amount of convincing isn’t gonna stop people from having sex (maybe they will have less of it, or later in life, but they still likely will), and the amount sufficient to actually stop would be so abusive and controlling that the harm it causes would far outweigh the risks of sex. Thus, this abstinence only stuff is actively harmful, since it boils down to withholding essential information about risk mitigation.
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It’s entirely possible that my friend’s well-being is more important to me than it is to them – it’s quite possible that they’re better off being okay but unable to pursue all of their romantic choices than trying to do whatever they want in a risky environment. Of course, I might be wrong about the tradeoffs, but the principle that guides my actions wouldn’t be wrong. (For example, compare to someone who wants to continue abusing an addictive drug – it would be considered unproblematic if I tried to persuade them to stop, and it’d also be a case where I care about their well-being more than they do.)
Nor am I suggesting any violations of autonomy. Recommending that someone stay safe doesn’t force them to do anything – I doubt you’d say that I’m violating your autonomy by telling you to lock your door at night. I could go above and beyond as you suggest, and it might be wise to do so if I both strongly care about my friend and they’re likely to put themselves in danger in spite of my normal warning, but if it’s not to that point, then recommending that they abandon the Cause is the best of my available options.
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Hmm so this is one of the only Thing of Things essays where I strongly disagree with the main thesis (or at least with large part of the argument behind it; I’m not going to dispute that saying things like “you should choose to be straight to avoid homophobia” is hurtful to bi people).
I mean, sure, to say “you should choose to be straight, because it would make your life much easier” and just leaving it at that is really shortsighted. Never mind the fact that using the phrasing “choose to be straight” is blatantly hypocritical if it comes from a well-meaning liberal who firmly believes that nobody can choose their orientation. Surely most of the people saying these things really mean “choose to act straight” or in particular, “choose to engage only in heterosexual behavior”. But anyway…
The “`I’m just concerned about the bigotry you’ll experience!’ is, well, bigotry” mentality is what I consider to be an exquisite example of confusing “is” and “ought”, or, as I have struggled to put it elsewhere (warning: lots of dry explanations using math), the confusion between “Which decision is best given what others will decide to do?” and “Who has moral responsibility for what might follow from your decision?” In my view, it’s the same muddled thinking as the logic behind “Advising your daughter not to wear clothing that’s too revealing [on the grounds that it might attract unwanted attention] is sexist!” — it’s often misguided, but certainly not inherently sexist. Sometimes in the face of a unfair world, which we are against and want to protect those we care about from, we feel compelled (rightly or wrongly) to give what seems like the only sensible advice under the circumstances.
Let me ask this: if I’m living in Nazi Germany where Jews are being terrorized and advise my Jewish friend to hide their menorah for the time being, because I want them to live and I don’t see any way of defeating Naziism in the immediate short term, does that make me an anti-Semite? I would say that whether my well-meaning advice is actually good or harmful depends a lot on individual circumstances, but it certainly doesn’t make me one of the anti-Semites, who in fact I am actively against. (Yes, I realize that’s not a perfect analogy, because the most effective strategy for defeating homophobia has indeed been coming out and encouraging others to come out. That part of the essay I do agree with. But I don’t see that it invalidates my main point of disagreement.)
I don’t see the “people choose to be gay” mentality as being a primary cause of the prevalence of this kind of advice. That’s over-thinking it, in my opinion. I see the common knowledge and fear of a homophobic society as leading to it. If being gay weren’t widely considered to lead to more difficulties than advantages, then straight privilege wouldn’t be an almost universally-understood concept. Yes, in another sense, it is awesome, but I’m afraid that we’re conflating senses of misery/awesomeness here.
And how is it rejecting someone to say “I’m just concerned about the rejection you’ll face as an openly queer person!”? I just don’t hold to a definition of rejection that is at all equivalent to advising some to “hide a core aspect of themselves” or “lie about a fundamental aspect of their experience”. I guess you could say that it’s a rejection of someone’s behavior (in the sense of “it’s unwise under these circumstances” rather than “it’s wrong and I deny your inherent right to do it”), but certainly not a rejection of who they are.
Anyway, it’s a type of argumentation I find very frustrating; I’m sorry that my tone has been a little strident here.
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I am surprised by how fast this thread hit nazis. I mean damn.
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There’s something off about this whole post.
I get the argument that “born this way” should not be a prerequisite for respect. This is fully in accord with my own beliefs. A valid, REAL ethic on sexual consent has to treat uncoerced, competent adults as capable of making their own personal choices, and has to include respect for those choices.
But the only actual moving part in the argument you’re making is at the very end, where you argue, indirectly and with a lot of edging around the issue, that gay rights advocacy in our culture systematically exaggerates the degree to which gay people are oppressed.
That’s the most (only?) direct and on point aspect of your argument (in essence you appear to be saying: don’t tell bisexuals to take advantage of their comparative ease at closeting themselves, it’s not that bad out of the closet), it’s also probably the most controversial, and you really undersell it.
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And the comments are filling up with people pointing out that minimally advertising your status as a disfavored minority really is the smart move when facing serious oppression, further cementing my suspicion that the actual moving part in this argument is the half stated assumption that bisexuals aren’t oppressed enough to justify that.
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people have already taken it to nazis, but maybe a more current analogy (that i have personal experience with) would be easier to deal with.
I’m an ex-muslim. The ex-muslim community i’m a part of has borrowed a few concepts from the LGBT community, particularly being in the closet. I’m in the cloest to my family but not to my friends. I’ve seen a LOT of people ask about advice about coming out as ex-muslim to their families and friends. Almost always (and i’ve given this advice myself), the advice is something along the lines of:
if you’re in a conservatively muslim majority country that is harsh to ex-muslims, stay in the closet and try to get out of the country
If you’re in a western country but your family is conservative, stay in the closet to your family, be very careful about telling people who might get info back to your family, wait until you are financially independant and then decide whether to come out to family or not
if you’re in a western country and your family is liberal, then MAYBE come out to family while still not being financially independant/ being a minor.
would you say this advice is ‘rejecting’ the people the advice is being given to? Most of the advice is given from people who are in or used to be in a similar situation, but it’s still ALL about hiding part of yourself to limit damage from other people around you.
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Well, one difference is that those people actually came to you for the advice.
Presumably, Ozy was hoping for something along the lines of, “You are still my dear child and I love you”, instead of, “At least you’re not totally gay, so if you make the right choices, I won’t have to deal with anything inconvenient!”
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>Make no mistake, “I’m just concerned about the bigotry you’ll experience!” is, well, bigotry. Well-intentioned, kind bigotry, to be sure. But if you say to a bisexual person “I’m just concerned about the rejection you’ll face as an openly queer person!”, you’re, well, rejecting them. You are saying that someone should hide a core aspect of themselves, should lie about a fundamental aspect of their experience.
I don’t see the connection between “you should lie about this thing” and “I am a bigot who rejects you as a person”. It seems like either you’re using a very different definition of “bigot” and “rejection” than I am, or there are additional assumptions here you haven’t explained.
Mind you, I can definitely buy that non-bi people tend to underestimate how hard this would be, but that doesn’t imply that they hate bi people – just that they’re idiots.
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What? No.
Telling someone to stay in the closet for their own safety isn’t ‘rejecting’ them. Not everyone lives in a place where it’s okay to be gay, some of us can’t afford Bay Area rents.
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What about Salt Lake City rents? (Really.)
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“Make no mistake, “I’m just concerned about the bigotry you’ll experience!” is, well, bigotry. ”
Ok, then I don’t understand at all what bigotry means.
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“Make no mistake, “I’m just concerned about the bigotry you’ll experience!” is, well, bigotry.”
This rang very true to me, and it’s interesting to me that so many people here disagree. I wonder if I can explain my feelings about this. I don’t have an actual explanation, so I’ll just bullet-point my various thoughts.
– what Patrick says – the people saying “you should closet yourself” are often overestimating how bad the bigotry actually is (I don’t think this is really the fault of gay rights activitism though)
– Also though, maybe more importantly, “you should closet yourself” often underestimates how important my identity is to me.
– a good way to support someone who is mostly closeted is to provide a safe space for them to be out. It may be a lifeline for them. If you’re telling them to hide a part of themselves, you’re not doing that.
– this response often comes from people who themselves seem to not be that comfortable with the situation. It often feels like they’re offering up “I’m just concerned about the bigotry you’ll experience” as a justification for why you should just be normal, even though really they just want you to be normal because they’re not comfortable with the way you’re not normal. This is especially the case with parents, who are often a source of this kind of response – parents often have strong preferences about their child’s life which include their child having a normal life and not putting themselves in any risk, especially for a reward which the parents can’t understand
– similarly – and coming back to the first point – it can feel like the reason parents are overestimating the bigotry is that they’re typical-minding – they’re like “well you’re our child so we’ll accept you no matter what, but we are perplexed by gay people in general so we expect other people will react badly to you because you’re not their child”
– it would be really different if the person was like “ok, thank you for telling me, I love you and you’re awesome and I will support you no matter what you choose. I can’t help being worried about you because I know there’s a lot of bigotry out there. Are you sure you want to be out? I’ll support you no matter what but you know it’s dangerous out there. my home will always be a safe space for you to be out” – and then if I tell them that I acknowledge the risk but it’s just really important for me to be out, they would say okay and let me make my own choices – that would be okay. The problem isn’t so much running a cost-benefit analysis and deciding that the best course of action is to be closeted, the problem is running the cost-benefit analysis badly for various reasons and then trying to impose it on someone else’s life
– being LGBT can cause various problems in one’s life, one of which is that coming out can strain relationships with people in one’s life – one has to strategize how to come out and then deal with the fall-out and worry about managing people’s reactions and stuff – and one of those unhelpful reactions is people who probably have your best interests at heart but don’t understand what your best interests are trying to get you not to live your life the way you want. Like, they are making your life hard for being LGBT in a way they wouldn’t be if you were straight.
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Also though, while I am basically in agreement with this post, I am a bisexual who has found the “Born This Way” narrative helpful before.
I found out I was bi by having a super huge crush on a friend of mine in high school. That super huge crush did not feel under my control in any way. There was no choice involved in any way really – I couldn’t date her anyway, she was straight. It was just a thing happening to me that was scary and confusing.
I didn’t experience the kind of homophobia or biphobia which is like “well you shouldn’t choose to date that person, it’s wrong” because I wasn’t dating at all or really making any choices; instead, I had fear of being rejected and judged by those around me for being non-straight and having non-straight feelings (side note: this is why I am super in favor of parents and other authority figures signaling acceptance to their kids even if their kids aren’t known to be LGBT, because if a closeted kid doesn’t know how their parent will react, that is a really scary experience). Even if nobody was judging me in particular, I reacted badly to people saying negative things about any part of the idea of same-gender attraction/relationships/sex/whatever, because it felt like it reflected on me.
So it helped me for a while to respond with “hey you know being gay (or bi) is not a choice, neither is who we fall in love with, you are judging people for something that is an inherent and unchangeable part of them, stop”. For myself personally, “hey I’m bi, and this is not a thing that I chose or that I can change, it’s just a part of me that you’ll have to accept”, because what was important to me at the time was my internal emotional experience and identity rather than my choices.
To an extent even talking about hypothetical future romantic choices worked well with the “born this way” narrative if I combined it with “I don’t choose who I fall in love with”. Partly this was a product of an incomplete understanding of relationships in which I underestimated the element of choice involved. But it’s also to an extent actually true.
Still, now I’m lucky enough to be able to just say “I am lucky enough that in my milieu, dating women will not substantially impact me negatively, so following my heart is worth it. Let’s make all places like that, so that everyone is free to follow their heart.”
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in other cultures, coming out to parents or friends are just a dream. the conflicts are not within them self but also to the families, friends and societies. I actually think it doesn’t matter whether you’re straight, gay, bi or trans, as long as you’re happy.
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Wow. I really agree with this, but I haven’t really thought of it before. Great eye-opener!
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Never really thought about it that way. Very interesting 🙂 x
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