I would be interested to read more about how this article reads to you. I didn’t pick up on the point you are making here, but obviously that is to be expected being that I am hetro, and not particularly interested in any other orientations dilemmas.
I was interested recently to watch a few videos from a popular lesbian YouTube personality about how “trans” women (biological men who identify as women, with various degrees of transition) have “invaded” women’s spaces (change rooms, toilets etc) and have hijacked the feminist agenda for their own purposes.
Indeed, a very prominent WA builder, who was infamously unpleasant as a man, “transitioned” to being a female and has upped the ante on just how unpleasant a person can be!
The current online conversations about the now so called “Alphabet” people (which I can’t imagine to be a very pleasant designation for those who are “old school” gay or lesbian) has been rather ridiculous. The shift from sexual orientation, to sexual identity is very pronounced.
I recently watched a video of a biological male who now lives as a ‘female’ describe how the current hysterical culture of many political voices has ignored the respect for the basic reaction that everyone has; I am looking at a man who is dressed and acting like a woman!
He, whom I gladly call a she out of respect for her respect, put it very plainly; she was a man, and will still for her whole life be initially perceived as a man. It’s up to her to deal with this and respect it.
LGBTQ has definitely snowballed. It’s very difficult to put one’s finger on it. Politically, I support a wait and see approach. There may be a lot of casualties or very few. We don’t know. Personally, it’s not my business how others live as long as they aren’t promoting violence. Who is and who isn’t promoting violence does seem up for debate. Are hormones a violence towards children? Maybe/maybe not. The data seems to be leaning towards not, at the moment. But like I said, I support a wait and see approach.
My current opinion is that it’s a social contagion. I just don’t see why it’s necessary to change your body. Why not just be a girl who likes girls and acts manly, fucks with a strap on and wears her hair short. Why the need to cut off your breast and give yourself a penis? Shouldn’t that effort be put into accepting the body you have? But all in all it’s not too different from nationalism, QAnon, materialistic people, etc. People do as bad and worse things to themselves when infected with those social contagions.
It’s going to take a fair few more readings of the article to understand.
@jamesjjoo If I were so bold as to summarise what I see in the article; social identity is not a part of the basic instinctual identity.
The upside of this is that psychic self-immolation doesn’t depend on deconstructing this socially formed ‘self’. A full freedom and experience of infinitude does depend on it though.
It’s extremely wonderful to have Richard comment on the modern developments of social identity. As he points out, society seems to have been operating better before the sexualisation of social identity.
That to me is quite a startling piece of information.
I had otherwise been very much putting everything in the “same bucket”.
Humm I thought the article made it clear that it was about sexual orientation identity, not sexual orientation itself.
In the tooltip around the second mention of the term sexual orientation identity, the quoted article (from the American Psychological Association) states:
In terms of formulating the goals of treatment, we propose that, on the basis of research on sexual orientation and sexual orientation identity, what appears to *shift and evolve * in some individuals’ lives is *sexual orientation identity *, not sexual orientation.
So from what I gather the article is talking about this identity – which is what can “shift and evolve” and didn’t exist in the late 1940s and early 1950[1] – and not sexual orientation in and of itself per se.
As the article draws this distinction between sexual orientation and sexual orientation identity – and especially as it says the latter didn’t exist ~70-80 years ago, while of course the former did – then it seems clear that the article is not saying that sexual orentation itself is identity based.
So it doesn’t seem to be at odds with what Richard previously wrote (“Neither heterosexuality or homosexuality (or bisexuality/ transsexuality for that matter) are a product of identity as other animals display variations in sexual orientation as well …”).
I didn’t see anything in the article that spoke to the topic of sexual orientation in and of itself, but rather that it was addressing sexual orientation identity, and solely this (and evidently drawing a distinction between the two). As the topic is about identity in general that’s why the focus was on sexual orientation identity and not sexual orientation.
As an aside I remember reading the book “Why Men Don’t Listen & Women Can’t Read Maps” which touched on the topic of sexual orientation. I’m just speaking loosely from memory here so this isn’t so solid, but they basically indicated they spoke to some people in a position to know in Soviet Russia, that some experiments were performed relating to withholding testosterone from male babies while in the womb. Roughly from what I remember is that for a male fetus, they receive 3 large doses of testosterone while developing in the womb. The experiments found that if all 3 arrived as it does the majority of the time the baby would develop into a straight male; if they had 1 or 2 fewer doses they would develop into a homosexual male; and if they missed all 3 doses they would develop into a transsexual female (ie female born male). The authors likened it to literally that the brain would develop differently in certain ways in the presence of these doses or not, so in the case of not receiving any doses, the result would be basically a feminine brain (i.e. a brain developed the same way female brains do in “regular” female babies) but in a masculine body.
This all would indicate sexual orientation is indeed set at birth – i.e. that it doesn’t “shift and evolve” – just as the APA publication from 2009 says.
Contrasting to this, Richard & Vineeto’s article was speaking to sexual orientation identity, not sexual orientation. So I believe they were making the case that, for example, a sexually-oriented straight male, might form an identity as being a female attracted to females, and thereby be compelled by said identity to undergo gender-transforming surgery – without that being their actual sexual orientation. This would be disastrous of course for someone whose sexual orientation identity then later shifts and evolves again…
Another anecdote, I heard from my partner that contrary to the culture of transsexual females in the USA, where it’s common to believe that they are born in the wrong body and need surgery to alter themselves according to how they ‘should’ be — in Brazil (I think it was), the transsexual females do not seek to alter their bodies, but rather are satisfied with them. From what I understood, it was that they fully and happily acknowledge themselves as women with male genitalia, and even proudly so (such as for example to have the ‘power to penetrate’ while other women don’t).
My take-away from this was that the notions around how transsexuality “should” play out are highly cultural in nature, i.e. not set at birth…
I should add a note that this is all rather anecdotal from my part and I haven’t delved into the topic very deeply!
I’m not sure where all this comes from? Where did anything in the article indicate a male performing sexual acts with another male would be ‘bad’ in any way? Plus all the rest that follows?
Perhaps you are reading something into it that isn’t there?
Cheers,
Claudiu
By virtue of being raised in the late 1940s and early 1950s the writer typing these words has firsthand experience of how the citizenry-at-large (i.e., society-in-general) is quite capable of operating and functioning sans these sexualised identities. [source]
This is a similar conclusion I arrived at couple of weeks ago when I was pondering this topic. Although it seems to me that mostly it might not be a rational/conscious decision to ‘take on’ a new identity to gain power etc but rather likely to be some form of a coping mechanism/trauma response to jump somewhere where ‘I’ can generate some kind of coherence/security for ‘myself’ when for whatever reason the traditional way of developing the identity does not work.
I was thinking, and I looked up the stats, that it seems more males transition over to being a female vs the other way around and I was thinking it somewhat makes sense. For an ailing/dysfunctional male identity can escape the rather callous vibes of having to ‘be a man’ and join the ‘sisterhood’, a group more typified by nurture, self acceptance and covert power in the form of fundamental moral superiority - here ‘I’ can hide.
It was cool to see Richard write the article shortly after with similar conclusions although I am not certain of the above, just some thoughts.
Hey @claudiu, I’m gay (imagine if I wrote: I identify as gay:rofl:) and as I said in the post I’ve chatted to R&V in person about this stuff - hence why for me it isn’t clear that Richard isn’t referring to homosexual behaviour when he talks about homosexual identity. You really like to speak for them hey . You said were going to start going against the grain - or did you mean against my grain?
In the article Richard literally speaks to a time, possibly a better time (he further clarifies), before people started ‘coming out of the closet’.
Richard:Furthermore, it is still within the living memory of a significant proportion of the culture generally – in peoples raised in the late 1920s and thereafter – as to how society operated and functioned just as well(if not, and arguably so, even better) in those decades before these purposely self-sexualised identities first began to deliberately court public attention, dubbed “coming out of the closet”, amongst peoples who were not of the majoritarian other-sex sexual predisposition in the mid-1970s and early 1980s for group-solidarity socio-politico reasons (such as public awareness and public acceptance human-rights campaigning).
He’s literally saying society was functioning as well or better before homosexual people dared to be visible within society (with their petty claim at human rights ). To Richard, those people simply saying “I’m gay” (the way that Richard simply says he is white and 6ft tall) constituted a deliberate courting of public attention etc. Of course I’m well aware there were protests and riots - but people were being beaten and lynched - so not sure that a quiet “hey guys I’m gay” would’ve really done the trick. Let alone same sex people just starting to make out on the street without any prior warning.
Of course I’m not saying that there isn’t gay identity - of course there is. I’m just asking (asking Richard, that is) where he exactly sees that line between the simple fact of orientation and an orientation ‘identity’.
@Kub933 Yeah I think that’s an insightful description! I know a few non binary peeps who, from what I gather talking to them, basically didn’t feel they aligned or fit in well with their gender of birth. The impression I got though is that it’s the stereotypes and tropes of their gender of origin that they were rebelling against.
That being said I can feel with myself that I’ve moved in my later 20s much closer to being bisexual. This is partly because homosexuality has lost some of the allure as I’ve got older - and possibly cause I see myself as being more masculine . So I can relate to how it would be possible to ‘shift’. It seems the identity moves to where it thinks it will survive better.
There is a whole ideology that comes along with it that Richard seems to be referring to. He specifically says it right in the quote you used “for socio-politico reasons”
People are not merely being asked to accept the existence of gay people. No, you also have to recognize every gay person as stunning and brave or you are a bigot. Celebrate it, be reminded of it. Let the teacher confuse your 5 year old about their “gender identity” when they just want to play with legos. You may be asked to wear the rainbow at your job or be fired. If you see video footage of a grown man in hyper sexualized female clothing spreading their legs in front of toddlers don’t dare call it abuse or grooming because that’s transphobic. And yes I get that gay and trans are different but the acceptance of this stuff piggybacks on the gay rights movement and support of the alphabet ideology.
I mean he didn’t do a pole dance butt naked did he? I don’t see the problem…Yuck! (even i don’t like pedophilia jokes…but jokes, ya know, they for the most part write themselves…whatta ya gonna do - i apologize. - but hey i could have been even more disgusting)
Tell me about it! We live in such a clown world that churches who rape children still have 100’s of millions of people giving them money and no one protesting their actual ongoing indoctrination of children. All the while drag queens have armed militias following them around.
)
. You said were going to start going against the grain - or did you mean against my grain? 
). To Richard, those people simply saying “I’m gay” (the way that Richard simply says he is white and 6ft tall) constituted a deliberate courting of public attention etc. Of course I’m well aware there were protests and riots - but people were being beaten and lynched - so not sure that a quiet “hey guys I’m gay” would’ve really done the trick. Let alone same sex people just starting to make out on the street without any prior warning.
