Hmm, no I actually disagree. That assumes that “trying” ought to change it. On the contrary, I don’t see that a situational + cognitive origin implies a conscious toggle switch.
Consider food again. I watched my brother learn to hate honey—he liked it initially, until one day he was disgusted to find bee parts in it. Then we as kids teased him with it, building associations of disgust. As an adult he finds it nauseating. I have no expectation that he could will himself to like it.
I think that people have been pushing the “can’t change” aspect as a way to defend gay people from bigots, specifically to fight the religious charge of sin (because it undermines the idea of guilt), and to fight the quack science of willed change (“ex gays”). Culturally, when we hear “can’t change”, we go looking for it in the genes. Personally I haven’t heard strong evidence for genetic predetermination (versus a genetic preference rather like having a sweet tooth). I have heard evidence it can’t be willed to change. But why expect that it could? And I have also heard (anecdotal) evidence that it can change on its own or situationally, such as when trans people transition.
There probably aren’t genetic correlates per se (they’d get bred out of the population pretty quickly if so); but as I understand, there are fairly solid links between incidence of homosexuality and the hormonal environment in the womb during certain critical periods of pregnancy. That being said, sexuality is fluid to some extent, but not by a lot, and it doesn’t seem to be under conscious control.
The situation makes a lot more sense when you realize that “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual”, etc., aren’t atomic properties of a human being, but rather statistical tendencies in the response of certain (largely unconscious) cognitive and biological functions to environmental stimuli. Even the straightest dude can get a bit of a man-crush once in awhile if the object of his attraction happens to trigger the right affective states, whether by having unusual pheremones, pleasing physical features, an especially compelling personality, or anything else which might activate some quirk of said straight dude’s brain.
To describe the process of sexually maturing as a process of discovering one’s innate desires, then, is perhaps somewhat misleading, as you pointed out, insomuch as we are at risk of reifying those desires; but the effect of (mostly) unchangeable physiology is still significant in this case. We can view the process of sexual self-discovery, then, as that of an inexperienced neocortex learning to maximize the reward signals it gets from the black box of its limbic system.
As for food, those preferences are actually easily changeable. There are a number of foods (falafel, grapefruit, mustard, pickles) that I couldn’t stand in the past, but kept occasionally trying anyway; as my body learned that these were sources of valuable nutrients, I eventually grew to like them. Similarly, a bout of food poisoning turned me off avocados for about a year and a half, but through repeated exposure I came to enjoy them once more. Extremely spicy foods are another good example. The stomach needs to learn what it can eat, in order to adapt to changing nutritional needs and environmental conditions. In contrast, there’s no particular selective pressure for a person to experiment with screwing different kinds of people, animals, objects, etc., so we should expect our attractions to remain largely autonomous of our efforts to change them.
Hmm, no I actually disagree. That assumes that “trying” ought to change it. On the contrary, I don’t see that a situational + cognitive origin implies a conscious toggle switch.
Consider food again. I watched my brother learn to hate honey—he liked it initially, until one day he was disgusted to find bee parts in it. Then we as kids teased him with it, building associations of disgust. As an adult he finds it nauseating. I have no expectation that he could will himself to like it.
I think that people have been pushing the “can’t change” aspect as a way to defend gay people from bigots, specifically to fight the religious charge of sin (because it undermines the idea of guilt), and to fight the quack science of willed change (“ex gays”). Culturally, when we hear “can’t change”, we go looking for it in the genes. Personally I haven’t heard strong evidence for genetic predetermination (versus a genetic preference rather like having a sweet tooth). I have heard evidence it can’t be willed to change. But why expect that it could? And I have also heard (anecdotal) evidence that it can change on its own or situationally, such as when trans people transition.
There probably aren’t genetic correlates per se (they’d get bred out of the population pretty quickly if so); but as I understand, there are fairly solid links between incidence of homosexuality and the hormonal environment in the womb during certain critical periods of pregnancy. That being said, sexuality is fluid to some extent, but not by a lot, and it doesn’t seem to be under conscious control.
The situation makes a lot more sense when you realize that “heterosexual”, “homosexual”, “bisexual”, etc., aren’t atomic properties of a human being, but rather statistical tendencies in the response of certain (largely unconscious) cognitive and biological functions to environmental stimuli. Even the straightest dude can get a bit of a man-crush once in awhile if the object of his attraction happens to trigger the right affective states, whether by having unusual pheremones, pleasing physical features, an especially compelling personality, or anything else which might activate some quirk of said straight dude’s brain.
To describe the process of sexually maturing as a process of discovering one’s innate desires, then, is perhaps somewhat misleading, as you pointed out, insomuch as we are at risk of reifying those desires; but the effect of (mostly) unchangeable physiology is still significant in this case. We can view the process of sexual self-discovery, then, as that of an inexperienced neocortex learning to maximize the reward signals it gets from the black box of its limbic system.
As for food, those preferences are actually easily changeable. There are a number of foods (falafel, grapefruit, mustard, pickles) that I couldn’t stand in the past, but kept occasionally trying anyway; as my body learned that these were sources of valuable nutrients, I eventually grew to like them. Similarly, a bout of food poisoning turned me off avocados for about a year and a half, but through repeated exposure I came to enjoy them once more. Extremely spicy foods are another good example. The stomach needs to learn what it can eat, in order to adapt to changing nutritional needs and environmental conditions. In contrast, there’s no particular selective pressure for a person to experiment with screwing different kinds of people, animals, objects, etc., so we should expect our attractions to remain largely autonomous of our efforts to change them.