It is quite common to hear the phrase “I was born this way” from gay people. The reason we say this is because being gay is something you are born with and is not a choice, just like your sex or skin color, and as such, it cannot be a sin, nor can it be something used as a reason for discrimination.
Or perhaps it would be accurate to say that we have in our DNA and brain chemistry something that makes us attracted to people of the same sex rather than a different sex. Most of us don’t notice this at birth but instead at puberty when people first have the physical capability for sexual activity and most likely are hearing about it in sex education at school.
But some children start noticing people of the same sex at the same time as most people start noticing the opposite sex. It is hard for me to describe, especially since I did not go through this type of experience during puberty. However, I know from the stories of other people that people don’t choose who they are attracted to.
Given a choice people would always choose to be heterosexual because that is what society demands of them; heterosexual people have always been able to get married. No one has been murdered or bullied specifically for being straight because the majority are never criticized.
I think that the only reason that gay people are so misunderstood is because we are a minority. The people who make laws about whether gay people are allowed to marry each other or whether they are even allowed to adopt children are decided by straight people who don’t know the experience of gay people.
But I completely agree that people are born in a way that wires them to be gay. It also comes as a spectrum. Some people are interested in both men and women simultaneously. In that case, they would be called bisexual. I would even go so far as to say that most people are neither completely gay nor straight but that there are a lot more people who are bisexual or pansexual.
But let me be very clear about something: being gay does not actually mean you are having sex with anyone. In fact, many people are married and have sex with their spouse, who is the opposite sex. Others are celibate because there are people of various religions who believe that same-sex activity is a sin. Therefore, these people attempt to conform to the way their religion and the broader society expect them to be.
But just because a gay man marries a woman and has sex with her doesn’t mean he isn’t thinking about men while he is doing it. A gay woman can still marry and have sex with a man, but it is questionable whether she is enjoying it.
However, I have personally been studying celibate gay Christians because the idea is fascinating. If someone believes they will go to hell for having gay sex, then they may avoid it their whole life. However, the process is never reversed. No heterosexual person believes that it is a sin for them to have sex. Therefore, they might wait till marriage, but they never avoid it the same way gay people are expected to.
Even when heterosexual people have sex with multiple people who are not their spouses, the Christians don’t seem to judge them at all. Somehow, every sexual sin can be forgiven if you are at least doing it with the opposite sex, but if you are doing it with a member of the same sex, then all of a sudden, you are told that you must go to hell because you cannot inherit the kingdom of God (based on 1 Corinthians 6:9 in the Christian Bible).
I am not here to tell you what you should do if you are a gay person. I just wanted to highlight some of the ways that we are not treated the same as straight people. It seems that most of it stems from religious teaching. There are people more qualified to speak from that perspective than I am.
But as soon as society understands that people are not choosing to be gay, then it no longer makes sense to treat them like criminals, especially when they have not done anything about their feelings.
Although being gay is not the same as being transgender, both things are similar in that the person did not wake up and decide to one day turn themselves into the opposite sex. In the case of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, Intersex, and Asexual, all of them were literally born this way.
That we are born this way is a fact that must be understood; otherwise, none of us would exist. We would choose to feel and be what the majority wants us to be so that they stop persecuting us about it.
I was born this way, but really, I think we are this way before birth. I think we are conceived this way with the code that eventually gets run later in our lives.
Chastity White Rose 