Theories on gender fender benders

I have attempted over the years to buy into the "gay gene" theory which says all gays are "born that way," and "once gay, always gay."

Try as I might, however, I keep coming to another conclusion that's not politically correct by today's post-modern standards.

The question of the origin of gay orientation can be summed up as follows: Is it an issue of hardware (a gay gene), software (early childhood development) or of a trendy updated download? And does it really matter what it is anyway?

First, I do believe there are a very few children born with truly confused sexual identities, manifested by obvious physical traits. These are easy to spot to even the casual observer. This is clearly a hardware issue and often resolved by medical and surgical means.

But much more frequently, same sex attractions can and do occur in early childhood, long before a child has the ability to make conscious decisions.
According to some experts--often discredited and outed by many of the radical gay righters and politically correct liberals--there is a normal phase all children pass through--and most come out of-- that involves same-sex attraction and bonding.

During this time, children who grow up to be normal heterosexuals go on to find their opposite sex parent more exotic and mysterious, and hence more attractive as they grow into adolescence and adulthood.

However, the children who go on to have same sex attractions experience the same sex parent or caretaker to be more exotic and thus more attractive as they grow into maturity. This is an issue of early software programming in the basic operating system. And because it often develops at a young age, it usually feels like a hardware issue.

The reasons a child unconsiously finds his same sex parent or primary caregiver more attractive are legion, and can include aloofness, absence or abuse from the same sex parent, or over-bearingness or abuse from the opposite one. But clearly in an early developmental childhood phase, a "software" problem develops at the most fundamental level of operation.

These gays are usually the ones who think and feel, and are told, that there's is a "gene" problem and therefore their condition is fixed in concrete and can never be changed. Today if such a person wanted to even explore the possibilities of change of orientation, they are warned they couldn't and shouldn't want to change. Instead, such a person should have "pride" in the intractible nature of their situation.

The experts who insist change is much more possible than any of the militant gay righters are willing to concede are frequently outed and accused of being hate-filled homophobes of the worse kind.

This is also where the most militant gay rights activists are focusing their attention and efforts politically: theirs is a natural condition of birth and therefore it should be afforded the same rights and privileges in all aspects of life as heteros.

Forming another group of gays that develop later in life are heteros who live part of their lives in opposite sex relationships and later, after raising a family, or marrying and divorcing, make a more conscious decision to cross over.

I have known several of these people (usually women sick of doing the dishes for some couch potato or disillusioned with the Pope who never had to clean up after all those children) who have declared theirs a political/lifestyle choice. These women usually become the militant feminists historically with a more extreme, vocal political agenda than hetero women.

This is clearly a software issue, not of the basic operating system, but an addition to, say, the control panel later in the life of the "computer."

Finally, there are college students who experiment with their sexual identities in the new found freedom of a college setting. In that case, many return to their hetero roots, though some do not. I have friends who had a daughter who did this in college. Because the father was a high school principal and knew this was experimentation, they played it very cool. After the "gay" daughter got beat up by her girlfriend, she decided to come back over and today is married to a man with whom she has several children.

This is indeed a trendy softward download which is easily deleted or over-ridden with an update.

So while I think a very few people do have it hard-wired into their genetic codes, most gays have it programmed into their software somewhere between their basic operating system, the control panel and their documents folder.

I believe that for those who are interested, leaving same-sex attractions is certainly possible though the degree of difficulty in leaving depends on where and when the gay enabling software was installed. And I also realize that many of those people don't want to leave and never will.

But the militant gay righters would have everyone believe that their condition--whether they like it or not--is cast in concrete and can never be changed.

I don't buy that for a minute. Not all gays are created in the same way. I dare not say "equally."

More on this in later posts.