The Moonspeaker:
Where Some Ideas Are Stranger Than Others...
THE TROUBLE WITH "BORN THIS WAY" ARGUMENTS
A BLUNT INTRODUCTION
One of the saddest, and frankly irresponsible pretend arguments for not subjecting homosexuals to social ostracism, castration, or outright execution is the bleat, "we can't help it, we were born this way." It's sad because how pathetic can a person be, to claim they are utterly unable to control how they act, as opposed to making claims about their feelings, which yes, cannot be controlled unless we resort to psychoactive drugs. This is an extremely important distinction, because as it happens I do think it likely that people are born with a predisposition towards homosexuality or heterosexuality, but whether they act on it and how depends significantly on their social circumstances. This is what can be ascertained from the historical record. Now, what makes resorting to "born this way" arguments irresponsible is the way they are manipulated by people with sociopathic and psychopathic leanings. These are the same people who want to manipulate society into pitying them because they are rapists who will do absolutely anything, from trafficking to rape in front of a camera to make pornography. These are also the people who are absolutely desperate to conflate homosexuals in the public mind with rapists and pimps, because they thrive on taking advantage of the socially isolated, and enforcing such a conflation will socially isolate anyone merely perceived as homosexual. There is no point trying to soft peddle this. The reason such people are so interested in computer generated pornography is because they see it as the best gateway drug to pornography made by abusing real people, and as a means to push up the price of abusing real people because of the legal risks involved. To see whether this is true for yourself, just spend a little time tracing the cross links and writings of the current woke darlings of the alphabet soup brigade that has hijacked and is striving to completely destroy the successful work of the women's, lesbian, and gay rights movements.
There is another group of people who are quite happy to hear the "born this way" argument, who are far less dangerous on a societal level, but are difficult to deal with on family and individual levels. They are not sociopathic or anything like that, nothing of the sort. They are however, absolutely certain that any person who is not like them, must be miserable. On good days these people will express pity for the presumed afflicted homosexual who cannot help themselves and will never have a normal and fulfilling life. They are quite certain those "born that way" are all either holding on in quiet desperation or under psychiatric care for their presumed inevitable depression because they are so lonely and have such empty lives. The evidence before their own eyes of the opposite makes no difference. On bad days, these people will demand those "born that way" to stop making a spectacle of themselves, and why are they taking up the resources normal, responsible people need? It is more than likely many of the people in this group have been feeling specially vindicated by transactivist talking points which fundamentally reflect the stereotypes they are so committed to.
But it is when lesbians make this ridiculously weak "born this way" argument that I feel most deeply frustrated. In my experience lesbians who make this argument are rarely able to accept other lesbians may disagree with them for good reasons, and those reasons need not and do not deny their experience. Instead, more often than not, lesbians committed to the "born this way" argument set about furiously accusing lesbians who don't agree with them of not being lesbians at all, of being homophobic, of insulting them, even of lying. The position these lesbians take seems to be that if another lesbian does not agree and hold the absolute belief lesbians can only be born that way, then that lesbian is a "political lesbian" by which they mean not a lesbian at all, usually followed up by insistence she is really a bisexual or probably straight. In other words, one of the things the "born this way" argument encourages is a type of horizontal violence, especially against radical feminists at any time and lesbians who came of age during the fabled second wave of feminist activism in north america and europe. Horizontal violence between the oppressed serves the oppressor. If an argument turns out to be especially useful for divide and rule by the oppressor, we ought to be all the more leery of it.
THIS ARGUMENT REFUSES TO GO AWAY
A short while ago I had the excellent fortune to watch Sheila Jeffreys and Elizabeth Miller discuss Lillian Faderman's 1982 book Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women From the Renaissance to the Present. Their discussion is part of the long-running women-only Radical Feminist Perspectives series of webinars run by Women's Declaration International (WDI). They did an excellent presentation of a classic work of lesbian history, and demonstrated at the end how to disagree passionately and respectfully on the question of whether sexuality is inborn. I did come away with two puzzled questions. One was why Faderman, and in turn Miller, was so concerned about whether the women-loving-women were sexual together or not. It seems to me that this comes effectively to a claim that women may love each other all they like, and however they like, but if they don't "have sex" they aren't really lesbians. On one hand, I can't believe either Faderman or Miller intend this at all. Yet on the other hand, Miller herself claims to have had sexual feelings for women by the age of four. But wait, when a person claiming to be trans-identified makes such a claim, lesbians and women in general promptly disagree. Then again, that's different, trans-identification is about commitment to sex role stereotypes for whatever reason. Sexuality is supposed to be innate, and it is undeniable that many lesbians have had to stand up to incredible social pressure up to and including physical violence and institutionalization to be with the women they love. So then is the proper explanation for their determination and strength that it is inborn? Jeffreys pointed out that "born this way" is a belief, it is religious. It is undeniable that people of deep religious faith have also resisted incredible physical and psychological violence too. At this point my second puzzled question came up. Why do we keep getting stuck arguing about this? Neither question is intended to be disingenuous or disrespectful. Jeffreys suggested it is incredibly important for us to examine why it is possible to think and speak of lesbianism as a choice at one time, and not at another. In a small way, that task is what I am going to try to contribute to here.
A practical starting point is to go back to key sources from the 1980s, when an extraordinary efflorescence of lesbian feminist writing in politics, philosophy, history, and literary analysis made it into print. The writers are far from homogenous, including lesbians in and out of academia, racialized lesbians, and various positions and perspectives on the question of what makes a woman a lesbian. During the 1980s, lesbians discussed this especially through recounting and examining the experience of "coming out." It seems to me the origins and meaning of "coming out" has been very much lost from the present conversation, and that is a serious problem. Originally the phrase had nothing to do with homosexuality at all, and arguably was appropriated by gay men from middle and upper class heterosexual women's culture. "Coming out" was originally what young women of at least modestly wealthy background did when deemed of marriageable age, usually by attending some sort of large party while dressed up in the most hyper-feminine clothing possible. The whole point was to advertise her as now on the heterosexual marriage market, a change from one state of life, childhood, to presumed heterosexual adulthood. So when lesbians began "coming out" during the second wave, they were creating an alternative development path for women who were adults and not entering or continuing to participate in presumed heterosexual adulthood. They had to create paths and rites of passage for this, not least because it was life-changing. This is what lesbians were doing, while also trying to sort out why it was so important to do it, and what made it possible.
About the same time, feminist literary scholars were considering what could constitute a female bildungsroman or novel of development, which admittedly sounds a bit rarefied. Yet, it is not necessarily so. Bonnie Zimmerman, who would publish The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction, 1969 – 1989 a few years later, wrote in 1983 when discussing the lesbian novel of development,
Coming out is also a developmental issue, for, to paraphrase Simone de Beauvoir, one is not born but becomes a lesbian (despite popular ideology), and even if a woman recognizes her attraction for other women at the age of two, she must still name that feeling, act upon it, and choose to affirm her identity to the outside world. Coming out is a process...
There is a lot to unpack here, quite apart from the sting in the tail of De Beauvoir's original statement that is so often lost in translation, because in french the same word is used for both "woman" and "wife." Note for instance, her parenthetical reference, which indicates at least in the united states, a significant number of lesbians were already committed to the "born this way" argument. More importantly, Zimmerman makes clear "coming out" requires action on a lesbian's part. If she does nothing but go along with the paths already set out for her by a patriarchal world intending to compel heterosexuality, then in effect she will end up living as a heterosexual. Her lesbian potential cannot be realized without taking the all-important steps to resist compulsion to stifle it. Lesbians cannot wait around like Snow White or Sleeping Beauty for Prince Charming. Nobody will move their development along for them, they are responsible for taking those key steps, and must expect to keep on walking. It's scary, but empowering.
For a different perspective more directly based on experience, we can be well-served by turning to the anthology The Coming Out Stories in its original or expanded editions, edited by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope Stanley. In her sensitive review of the first edition, philosopher Marilyn Frye delves further into the meanings and feelings associated with "coming out,"
One thing the stories reveal is that, among other things, coming out feels good; we are obviously, and righteously, quite pleased with ourselves. We experience our insistence on our lesbianism as integrity. We also tend to interpret the inability at a certain point to name oneself as a lesbian as dishonesty. I think there is a mistake here; a conflation of a conception of metaphysical integrity with a conception of moral integrity, a confusion of a metaphysical split with (cowardly) self-deception or self-denial. We need some concepts which will enable us to see that the struggle for integrity of being is in some sense and in part a moral struggle, and yet that lack of metaphysical integrity is not to be understood simply (and written off) as a personal moral flaw. Many things besides moral weakness contribute to our not having come out yet when we haven't come out yet. To see coming out in a simple way as a matter of personal moral courage nourishes contempt not only for certain other women but for our own earlier selves.
Frye helps us better understand the level of vitriol some lesbians hurl when they hear the argument that any woman may choose to become a lesbian. It may be they are interpreting this argument as somehow an impugning of their moral or metaphysical integrity, and this would certainly make anyone instantly very defensive. I suspect the old canard of lesbianism being "just a phase" is also in the background here, the damnable phrase heterosexual parents who seek to pressure daughters into heterosexuality use to suggest they are merely being childish. It is all the more bitter that inevitably some women will fall back on this explanation should they find themselves unable or unwilling to avoid a heterosexual relationship. "Unwilling" can mean many things, from a woman finding she is what we are now taught to refer to as bisexual, or she is making the sort of grim trade off right-wing women do, as Andrea Dworkin explained so well in her 1982 book on the phenomenon. The second possibility really stings, because it is real, and as long as it is real, women are not free.
There is more helpful material in the same issue of Sinister Wisdom this review comes from. Sarah Lucia Hoagland's reflective essay, "Remembering Lesbian Lives" unflinchingly looks back on her life and the questions, "Have I been a lesbian all my life?" and "Have I been a lesbian all along?" Hoagland's account of her life would suggest a firm answer to most lesbians, provided they have not already decided she is a "political lesbian." After briefly explaining her utter alienation from other women by the age of twenty-five after witnessing so many throwing away friendships with women in favour of men, Hoagland writes
Having lost solitude and descending into loneliness, I came close once to seriously considering "giving up and getting married" though I had no one particular in mind. Instead, I sniffed at a book someone shoved under my nose, The Feminine Mystique, and voraciously devoured it. (I especially liked the way she exposed the Freudian traps.) By twenty-eight I was solid in feminism, having detected, in my new-found concept, sisterhood, a source for loyalty among wimmin who choose to become friends and a recognition of my long-held belief that no man was worth the dissolution of a friendship. Soon I was discovered by lesbians and I came out at twenty-nine. Now I am thirty-five.
Hoagland is describing a process much like what Zimmerman described, recognizing her feelings, working out their names, and acting on them.
Certainly I never fought the battles prefeminist dykes have. Mine are a different set of scars. Until I was twenty-eight, I did not have the concept, lesbian, with which to evaluate myself. I only knew I wasn't a lady. And for most of my life that meant I wasn't a woman – not one of them. I was unique.
I should note that at the very beginning of this essay, Hoagland is unequivocal about her femaleness. "I was never confused about whether I was male or female. I always knew I was female. But for most of my life I did not believe I was a woman." It is notable Hoagland found it necessary to actively take up and insist upon the fact she was a woman, and today we understand all too well how vulnerable lesbians are if they find themselves in this position. Thinking over the impact of masculinist scholarship on women's history in general and lesbian history in particular, Hoagland warns us to take care lest we "preserve a masculinist context."
For example, lesbian historians have found themselves expected to facilitate male voyeurism by responding to demands for exacting proof of "genital contact" so men can consider that contact might possibly be evidence that some womon was more than likely, though not for certain, but quite possibly, not heterosexual. And so the strength and vitality of a woman's life again crumbles in the face of male questions and feeds male fantasy.
The male obsession of whether women had genital contact comes down to their demand to dominate the lesbian historian and the women in question, thereby satisfying their voyeurism. As far as men are concerned, as long as they can pretend there was no "genital connection," they can also pretend the women were not really lesbians. It seems many lesbians have come to accept the male, fundamentally pornography-driven definition of lesbianism as being primarily about and defined by "genital contact," hence focussed on their sexuality over lesbian or women's liberation more generally. Add to this the misrepresentation of the concept of "political lesbianism" and the result is a profoundly toxic brew.
Many of the leading activists in the women's liberation movement in north america and europe have been lesbians, stretching back to at least the nineteenth century. This was once so well-known that as soon as women began breaking away from the patriarchal left in the 1970s, the accusations of lesbianism came thick and fast. For a woman merely to break ranks with the men and take steps to liberate herself and her sisters was enough. (Probably refusing to make the coffee and hand around sandwiches was enough.) She didn't have to do anything even remotely resembling an expression of curiosity about, let alone interest in woman to woman genital contact or even a non-sexual primary relationship with another woman. Rather than stand up to this nonsense, at first heterosexual feminists tried to stick to the game of respectability politics, which is a patriarchal game in which for women heads the men win, tails we lose. This led in turn to lesbians forming their own caucuses to fight for respect for their ongoing contributions to the women's movement and due consideration of their issues. They began speaking more openly about their experience of choosing to prioritize women, and choosing to be lesbians. Some women took serious umbrage to this notion of choice: feminists who felt threatened by the suggestion they chose to be heterosexual, and a surprising number of lesbians, many of whom seemed more or less committed to certain sex role stereotypes. Perhaps being more or less conscious of the dynamic Dworkin documented in Right-Wing Women made them all the more uncomfortable, because they felt their moral and/or metaphysical integrity were being questioned.
Today's accusations of "political lesbianism" however tend to come from, as I mentioned, lesbians who grew up during the 1980s and 1990s. In my experience, especially online, they go very quickly from the accusation to insisting "political lesbians" want heterosexual women to toy with them and touch other women's genitals. As in, have them touch other women's genitals while they watched, as if political lesbians were men. A few heterosexual women participating in the discussion then chime in about how they would find this disgusting just as lesbians would be disgusted by men. A typical flourish is to denounce the accused "political lesbians" as bisexuals. In my own brief encounters with this rhetorical sequence, the women who make these accusations or agree with them tend to head off into a longer conversation about sexual disgust. In other words, a lot of invocation of feelings and pretending to know the feelings of others.
Unfortunately, what this comes down to is yet another attempt to play at respectability politics. We are, like it or not, living in a heterosexist patriarchy in which men's definitions tend to be valued over women's. Men say a lesbian is a woman who has genital contact with another woman, and they slyly hold out the suggestion that if only lesbians agree to abide by this definition, men will leave them alone. Furthermore, women are still sex role stereotyped as passive, as being passengers in their own lives rather than drivers. How else to meet that respectability criterion without allowing men to be in charge than to insist being a lesbian is not a choice at all, but a compulsion because a lesbian is born that way? With those two steps taken, much of the energy and political power inherent in realizing and accepting women can and do choose to refuse to go along with patriarchal versions of womanhood is neutralized. Most especially, any hint of a possibility heterosexual women may finally realize the only way to break patriarchy for good is to end their emotional and economic dependence on men is buried. Heterosexual women achieving this break is not equivalent to deciding to only have genital connection with women, that's ridiculous. We have too much bitter evidence courtesy of the BD/SM proponents and today's pornography on blast for the fell influence of the "dick in the head." Compulsions are not politics, and as I already noted, respectability politics is a game women can never win because the game is rigged. "Born this way" may be a strong belief for some, but is in no way a strong argument for anything.
Strong arguments are based on being able to say and show that you are able to act as a responsible human being in the world, and that you are able to accurately assess whether you are about to behave in a way that would hurt someone by acting in a way that the majority do not. I think that the various people who try out the "born this way" weak argument are hyper-aware of this, because they are often the same people who demand particular performances of "normality" or "conformity." In the case of lesbians and gays, they want to see mimicry of heterosexuality, preferably by remaking themselves into ersatz "straights" by taking drugs and having surgery to create an appearance of opposite sex secondary characteristics. A lower key demand has been for "gay marriage" and making sure to conform to sex role stereotyped dress, behaviour, and jobs while in a permanent monogamous relationship. The easiest proof of this is to check the depiction of lesbians in mass media and note who is missing, unless as a joke or a way to suggest that in real life such a woman had better get on with testosterone dosing and surgery. These are the sorts of demand that a weak and irresponsible argument leaves a person open to, because by hanging everything on "born this way" they have already declared themselves unable to function as active adults in the world without special indulgences. Indulgences only come with a price. A corroding and coercive price. The "born this way" argument for acting in a particular way is a trap. Don't fall in it.
CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
There is at least one more "what about" a person could call on here: what about the lesbians who insist they knew they were lesbians from when they were tiny children? I can't help but wonder what they could mean by this. Just in terms of how human cognition and emotional range develop alone, it really makes no sense, if the insistence is based purely on sexuality. It can also be very hard not to impose our adult interpretations onto our child selves, and we are good at creating plausible-sounding stories to carry our adult ideas into the past. Our ability to create sense-making stories of this kind is one of the two true human superpowers, and it is both bracingly powerful and infamously dangerous. Hence the dangerous allure of the various studies repeatedly finding a correlation between childhood resistance to sex role stereotypes and adult homosexuality, including well-designed, responsible studies. As I said at the very beginning of this essay, it does seem likely to me that people may be born with a predisposition towards homosexuality or heterosexuality, just as we are born with a tendency to right handedness more often than left handedness. But what makes the difference between being a lesbian or not is the combination of opportunity plus awareness of the very possibility of having a lifetime intimate relationship with another woman, with or without "genital contact," plus the choice to take advantage of the opportunity and act on that inclination. I don't think those studies are demonstrating the reality of any such predisposition. Those studies demonstrate which children are most likely to have and act on the capacity to resist parental and peer pressure to go along with what everybody else is doing. I suspect a deeper read of the study data and results would reveal the cohorts of people who demonstrated this capacity as children are also more likely than average to pursue unusual or "risky" careers, partner or parent later in life, and so on. It makes sense children who have this capacity would demonstrate it early, and have a strong memory of going their own way even from the late edges of toddlerhood, especially in the case of girls. The questions raised by the clear certainty of most partisans of patriarchy that women must be constantly pressured to be straight even though supposedly we are all born innately with a straight, lesbian, or bisexual orientation remain unanswered.
We all have the potential to resist, but we don't all end up in circumstances where we get to choose to resist or not. For women in general we must get used to being disobedient and bracing ourselves to meet the consequences of choosing to challenge the patriarchal structures trammelling us. This is hard and exhausting work, and it is so bitterly unfair we can't seriously fall back on a weak argument like "born this way" to carry some of the burden in the way men can wave at their penises and claim to be both incapable of self-control and in control of everything at the same time. But we can't. We can't lean on an argument that guides us into attacking one another, thereby enabling men to divide and rule us.
- WDI runs another women-only webinar series, "Feminist Question Time." Both series are part of their many excellent resources, which now include a book as well as newsletters, consultation documents, and more.
- Boston: Beacon Press, 1990.
- Zimmerman, Bonnie. "Exiting From Patriarchy: The Lesbian Novel of Development," 244-257 in The Voyage In: Fictions of Female Development, edited by Elizabeth Abel, Marianne Hirsch, and Elizabeth Langland. Dartmouth: University Press of New England, 1983. Page 244.
- Besides the conflated french meanings of "femme," as Bronwyn Winter notes, the article in the original is often mistranslated too.
- The editions are: The Coming Out Stories, Persephone Press (Watertown), 1980 and The Original Coming Out Stories (Expanded Edition), Crossing Press (Freedom), 1989.
- Frye, Marilyn. "Review of The Coming Out Stories, edited by Susan J. Wolfe and Julia Penelope Stanley (Persephone Press, 1980)," Sinister Wisdom 14 (1980): 97-98.
- Dworkin, Andrea. Right-Wing Women. New York: Coward, McCann, 1983.
- Hoagland, Sarah Lucia. "Remembering Lesbian Lives," Sinister Wisdom 14 (1980): 52-56.
- Hoagland, 53.
- Ibid.
- Hoagland, 54.
- It is well worth reading what the lesbian participants had to say about the meaning and deployment of the term "political lesbianism" in this period, as they rarely get a fair hearing. For instance, see Charlotte Bunch's collection Passionate Politics Feminist Theory in Action: Essays 1968-1986 (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1987), or Ti-Grace Atkinson, Amazon Odyssey: The First Collection of Writings By the Political Pioneer of the Women's Movement (New York: Links Books, 1974). Women constantly give men a fair hearing, and we ought to do the same for each other too.
- For an eloquent explanation of this very point based in longer and deeper political and activist experience than my own, please listen to or watch WDI member and Lesbian Caucus coordinator Lauren Levey's talk, Choose Lesbian. A transcript is also available.
- Hence the heterosexual variants on the annoyed meme, "If being a woman is so natural, stop telling me how to do it!"
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