We spend a lot of time fighting the "choice" meme.

Which is understandable, given the fact that who we’re attracted to and who we identify as are not things that we can switch on or off like a light. The idea that everything we are boils down to a whimsical choice gets bandied around flippantly and turned into the club used to try to bash us back into hiding.

But I’m owning my choice – even though giving any quarter at all to those who hate us always gets exploited and twisted. Any admission of possibly choosing to be LGBT gets distorted beyond recognition. This is one area where society’s failure to discern between sexual orientation and gender identity and expression inevitably affects us all.

And in fact, part of the panic raised about us — the possibility that we might (*gasp*) influence kids when in roles as teachers or parents, or the possibility that our ability to communicate with media or openly in public might encourage others to turn gay or trans — only works if people swallow the idea that our identities and orientations are choices informed by flighty, misguided (or evil) notions.

Homosexuality is no longer considered a mental disorder (delisted from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual governing mental health in North America in 1973 and finally delisted in Alberta in December 2010), but the concept of choice provides an opportunity for those who conflate orientation and identity to try to "cure" people of being gay - although the major medical bodies have condemned reparative and aversion therapies for homosexuality, such treatments for transsexual and transgender people are still largely excused. Many of the clinicians working to revise sexual-related issues in the DSM-5 still practice choice-based aversion therapies to cure kids who display signs of gender transgression, while stating a conviction that if they don’t, the kids may one day choose to be gay. [1] And society is still so repulsed by the idea that someone can "choose" their gender to be different from that decided at birth, that many governments require forced sterilization [2] in the form of surgical modification before considering to recognize them legally — if even then. (I strongly believe in the necessity of GRS for those who are in severe distress about their body, but also believe that the choice to have GRS should only have to be made based on that distress, and not from expectations from outside or even within our community.)

Our understanding of human rights is still based on the concept that some people are deserving of rights and some aren’t, with choice being the latest magical divisor (which is ironic, of course, considering that most of the people repeating this meme expect to be assured rights based on their choice of religion). If the current structure of human rights were to be scrapped, like some of our opponents opine, then it could only be done under one of two pretexts: that either everyone alive deserves equal rights, or that no one does and the majority should have the right to tyrannize if it wants to. The former would seem the sensible alternative, but would mean accepting people regardless of their choices, LGBT people included. It probably won’t happen, though, so for now, we need a piece of legislative paper to remind people that it is not acceptable to treat anyone as lesser people for any reason. Including what is perceived to be their life choices.

And we do make choices. Human behaviour stems from a combination of biological / instinctive drive, influential socialization and conditioning, and choice. Any time we dismiss or denigrate any of the three, we’re missing part of the picture. Currently, our society still overemphasizes and distorts the effect of socialization [3] and we are just starting to revisit the instinctive. But our collective attitudes about choice are all over the map.

So today, I’m owning my choices.

While growing up, I chose to try to be the person everyone expected me to be. I knew I was different, but perceived that it had to be that either I was wrong, or everyone else was. I chose to believe the latter, although I blame society a little for stifling all discussion of anything else, and making it seem like there was little choice available. I also consider it a shared responsibility that difference seemed like a character flaw, which became an attack on self-esteem that I still struggle with.

After spending the first 16+ years trying to exorcise myself and living in the eternal ex-gay Jesus-fix-it perpetual emotion machine, I realized god wasn’t going to "fix" it, that I couldn’t live that cycle any longer. I chose to walk away... and because at that time there was no such thing as an "affirming" church, and homophobia and faith were synonymous, I chose to abandon Christianity along with it. Finding no information other than partial answers that led me to believe I’d never be able to afford to transition, I chose to continue trying to play the hand dealt to me and live as a testosterone-fuelled organism for another 20 years, identifying only as bisexual. When I kept hitting the wall of suicide ideation, I finally chose to stop hiding, fighting, and living the lie that was causing me to suffocate.

Yes, that much was a choice.

We quite commonly hear from people who cry "reverse discrimination" over protections given based on minority traits — forgetting, of course, that protections based on general terms like "race" actually do include the majority along with the minority, and that the imbalance they perceive happens largely because one of the two really does have a relentless tendency to be bigoted. But many minorities often have a less obvious commonality that the "choice invalidation" argument seeks to undermine. Are people really discriminating against someone purely because of the colour of their skin, for example, or is colour an indicator that triggers presumptions about one’s culture, lifestyle, behaviours and tendencies? Biased people always excuse their bigotry in this way: "I have nothing against ____ people," you might commonly hear," but you know what they’re like...." Prejudiced people are blind to their prejudice because they’ve seduced themselves into believing that what they’re reacting to is not really the trait itself, when they’re acting on the unspoken and often inaccurate smorgasbord of inventions that go with it.

And those are inventions that generalize, assume and cast judgment on behaviours, abilities, perceived beliefs, and choices — some of which may appear at times to hold true because they’re driven by common recurring factors like poverty, minority stress and socialization.

Regardless of how we want to couch things, society needs to recognize and respect any life that is lived with care to the safety of others, with responsibility in our interactions, with mutual respect, and with mature / informed consent from those we invite into critical intimate areas of our lives, such as (but not limited to) our sexual behaviours. When people are living within those parameters, it is not acceptable that they should ever be excluded, invalidated or hated — regardless of how different their choices and lives may be from what we live, ourselves.

As much as homophobia and transphobia are driven by a societal stigmatization of sex and denigration of the shades of gender expression, it is also informed by a shunning of difference itself, and the persistent use of social engineering to eliminate it. What happens when we magnify the use of choice (as is being done by the far right regarding LGBT people), as the wedge differentiating the acceptable from the unacceptable, and as a tool to be dismissive of entire populations? For that matter, what happens when the elimination of difference by social engineering becomes bolstered with genetic engineering? The scientific journals are already musing over the moral implications introduced by the possibility that the use of dexamethasone in pregnant women might reduce or eliminate behaviours indicative of lesbianism or transness. [4] To what length is society prepared to go, in order to eliminate difference, and does denigrating choice provide the means to do so?

Part of change rests in owning, respecting and defending choice, and our right to choose.

1) www.gaycalgary.com/u163

2) www.gaycalgary.com/u170

3) www.gaycalgary.com/u177

4) The Anti-Lesbian Drug, Newsweek, July 2, 2010,
www.gaycalgary.com/u184