Hopefully I don’t need to give you folks (another) lecture on why the gender binary is silly. Sadly, however, human beings appear to be addicted to binary thinking, and it causes them to get into all sorts of panics. One such has been playing out this past week because of this article by Lisa Diamond in New Scientist which argues against the “born this way” narrative of same-sex attraction. There’s not one, but two binaries involved here. The first is that people are either homosexual or heterosexual; the second is that sexuality is either biologically determined or not. Both of these binaries are, in my view, false.

The first one ought to be obvious, because people do identify as bisexual. Sadly this just gets people think that there are three types of sexuality — L, G and B — all of which are quantitatively different. As a trans person, I find the whole question rather silly. Many of us have sexual relations both before and after transition. Sometimes these are “heterosexual” in both genders; sometimes “homosexual” in both genders, and sometimes with the same gender either side of transition. Some of us are bisexual both before and after transition. What does this mean for our sexuality? Who knows, but I have this horrible feeling that it means we are the “wrong sort” of bisexuals, because queer politics is all about policing how people get to be queer.

The second binary is hugely political. The “born this way” narrative was adopted by L&G campaigners as a defense against the claim that being homosexual is socially deviant and needs to be “cured”. If sexuality is somehow innate then “cures” are impossible and L, G & B people are deserving of the same rights in society as straight people. Articles such as the one by Diamond inevitably attract criticism as legitimizing “cures”. But Diamond is openly lesbian. What exactly is going on here?

Color me suspicious, but part of me is not surprised to see articles dumping the “born this way” narrative now that LGB appear to be socially acceptable. I keep expecting to see something at the end of these articles that says, “so being queer is totally socially constructed, but biological sex isn’t, which that proves that the tr*nn*es are fucking perverts who ought to be forced to undergo cures.” Thankfully I haven’t actually seen one of those yet, but I’m sure I will.

Another, less paranoid, reason why we could be seeing these articles now is that magazines are looking for the next controversy in sexuality, and because the fight for same-sex marriage has been won (in the places where those magazines are published) people feel more comfortable challenging the political orthodoxy of the queer community.

Because I look at the history of queer people, I see this whole thing very differently. Whether sexuality and gender identity are ingrained or not, one thing is obvious and that is that how we understand sexuality and gender is socially constructed. Different societies understand and accept sexuality in different ways, and the same is true for gender. What it means to be a homosexual person, or a trans person, varies with social context.

In practice, more people are bisexual than are strictly homosexual (Lisa Diamond has data), and in times/places when same-sex attraction is more acceptable the number of people prepared to admit that, or to act on such desires, will go up. My guess is that more people will identify as genderqueer than will need full gender transition, and again the ability of people to engage in ambiguous gender performance is socially dependent. I also suspect that some people can and will change both sexuality and gender identity as they grow older.

So where does this leave the whole “cures” argument. Well, if we view sexuality and gender identity as each being on a spectrum rather than having gay/straight and cis/trans binaries it all makes sense. Lots of people are fluid in one or both of those areas. Put those people in a situation where their gay or trans feelings are deemed socially unacceptable and they will shrug and say, “OK, I can live with that”. However, the people on the far ends of those spectra can’t live with it (for whatever reason). If they could change, they would, because the social disadvantages of not changing are horrendous. But for them the cost of changing is worse. Those are exactly the people who are likely to end up being sent for “cures”, and that’s why the cures don’t work.

Whether this means that there is some biological component to sexuality or gender identity is irrelevant. All that matters is that people have different degrees of flexibility in these areas. Forcing the people who are least flexible to undergo conversion therapies is pointless and cruel.

Can we please stop obsessing over their artificially constructed binaries and just accept that people are diverse, and that’s OK?