#and dont even get me started on giving credit to the false dichotomy between agency/choice and desire/accident. give me a break 🙄🚬

[garbagequeer]

it always rubs me the wrong way when people try to counter the supposed underlying logic to homophobic and transphobic thinking with ideas about the innateness of lgbt desire and identity. like things like ensuring people that there being more openly lgbt people wont “make kids gay” or whatever it might only make the already gay ones more comfortable which imo goes in the direction of 2 basic lines of argument: 1 that being lgbt is not a choice and 2 that being lgbt is not contagious. but tbh a lot of human identity and desire is based on the desire to be “like” somebody else or on the knowledge of a preexisting model to structure the capacity for desire by seeing the way other people structure desire and not this theoretical innate pool of fully formed truly individual desires that just so happen to coincide with those of groups of people living in a certain place at a certain time. like i want to call back to some lesbian pamphlet from like the 80s that was like a lesbian q&a where the hypothetical question was “is being gay a choice?” and the answer was something like “who cares if it is”. 

like to me theres also something of an apology in saying dont worry we cant make more lgbt people all lgbt people are lgbt no matter what from birth and that is why you have to tolerate them (and therefore if someone isnt understood as innately lgbt this opens a way for violence bc the premise is that you have to forgive us for what we cant help basically). i mean in a path to end cisheteropatriarchy there will be more lgbt people as it advances because the hegemonic models of desire will be questioned and changed and that is part of liberation. you can say they were simply always there but all closeted but the thing is thats not something you can back up + who cares if it is a choice (it’d be a good and legitimate choice!). also the fact that it is not a legitimate or even real worry of homophobes and transphobes that there will be “more” lgbt people cause they’re concerned there are ANY lgbt people. so why engage in something so rigged to move the goal post from “queer is good + queer is something we want” to “queer is + queer is something we accept” which is closer to “queer is, unfortunately + queer is something we’re trying to help”