The boundaries are already blurring
So now it’s your sexual preferences.
Yers it’s “rigid” to be either heterosexual or homosexual. Truly decent people are omnisexual, not that we’re judging you or anything, we’re just judging you.
Nobody should ever be pressured, but everybody should definitely be judged. Nancy Kelley is judging you.
What the actual fuck??
I’m male, been with the same man for 35 years, married for the last seven–
If my husband were suddenly to declare himself a “woman,” would I then be heterosexual?
I’m afraid you’ll have to petition Peter Tatchell or Nancy Kelley for further explanation. It’s all in their hands.
“…as homophobia declines, most people will no longer define their sexuality so rigidly and exclusively.”
Let me see if I have understood this correctly. Peter Tatchell claims that as society becomes less biased against homosexuality, fewer people will be homosexual. Which implies that homosexuals are homosexual because society is currently heavily biased against being homosexual. Pressure against being homosexual causes it, acceptance of it causes its decline.
Peter Tatchell is sniffing glue.
Mike B, in certain circles, yes your relationship would immediately be declared heterosexual on that basis, and you would probably be called bisexual if you were not already calling yourself that. They really are that confused on the subject.
Mike @1 This is what they want you to think. Transcending sex categories is not heterosexuality, but if it’s something else, then they want to claim it for something beyond same sex attracted. It may be an oversimplification, but how complicated is it to see sexual attraction as same sex, opposite sex or both? There really aren’t any other biological choices. So there is LGB, and really nothing to add beyond that, sexually speaking. Trans is simply presentation, or in Judith speak, “performative.”
Agreed.
I’m not sure I agree with the phrasing. “Writing off”? How about “not attracted to”? Or “not interested in”?
Sure, it’s worth considering. And it’s worth considering how culture and environment and norms have affected your attractions. All very interesting, especially to sociologists. Great material for introspection, too. But I get the strong impression this statement isn’t really about introspection, but about other people criticizing the preferences of others. How dare these people not include Group B in their dating pool! How dare they not be attracted to Group B! Otherwise, why make the statement?
Didn’t mention white people, for some reason. Or blondes. Or men. But really, it’s not my business if people don’t find members of these groups sexually attractive. But mostly this list of groups provides cover for:
Define “trans people”.
Rejecting men who present in a feminine manner and call themselves women, that might be because:
– They are men;
– They are men who present in a feminine manner;
– They are men who call themselves women;
– They are narcissistic jerks who think the world revolves around their gender identity.
I might be surprised if they were rejected solely because of what they call themselves (rather than the conflict between what they are and what they call themselves), but again, not my business. The trans lobby seems to think this is the usual case, but citation needed.
What Tatchell was getting at, I think, is the idea that homophobia does two things: it inhibits people from considering same-sex attractions, and it insists that people who experience same-sex attractions only experience same-sex attractions. (Boys who do something that hints in the least at same-sex attraction are teased by bullies for “being gay”, not for having a same-sex fling or for being bi.) As homophobia diminishes, maybe people will not feel so strongly socially constrained, both to deny any same-sex attractions, and to be stuck in one box regarding sexual attractions. So, if that’s what he’s getting at, I think he has a point.
It is possible, however, that he has some way of extrapolating this point to make judgments on those who are in fact same-sex attracted, or heck even opposite-sex attracted, rather than bi, and especially on those people who do not wish to “date” people who are pretending to be the sex they are not. But such an extrapolation is not in the statement quoted in the post.
Homosexuality used to be deeply taboo. Not that long ago either. In some circles in our societies it still is, and in many other societies it is so taboo that people found to be homosexual are at risk of being killed. It’s hardly surprising then that people being openly identifiable as homosexual was rare until quite recently, and that numbers have increased particularly in areas where there is greater acceptance. Closet doors swinging everywhere. It’s also deeply unsurprising that more people are being open about being bi. After all, the law didn’t draw a fine distinction as to whether you were same sex attracted or shagged anything that moved. It was the act that was punished. Acceptance of homosexuality has this created free space for bi people as well, not that there is much gratitude for it as far as I can see.
It’s possible that Tatchell is running a ‘homosexuals should all become bi’ routine, but I suspect he’s simply missing the point that sexual attraction is a multi-modal distribution with bi attraction representing cross over.
Tatchell is probably also quite aware of the “gay/straight–but with an exception” that a lot of younger folks seem to fall in–where they have their firmly set notion of who they are attracted to, and then suddenly find one particular person for whom the plumbing aspect doesn’t matter so much. Often, such individuals are quite unwilling to declare themselves ‘bi’, regardless of which side they’re coming at it from; straight-identified folks are naturally going to have to deal with whatever latent homophobia they might have hanging around, while a lot of gay folks do, indeed, tend to get a bit tribal about the whole topic, and regard bisexuals as ‘tourists’.
The problem with this whole “in the future everyone will be bisexual” nonsense is of course that’s not how sexuality fucking works in reality. We know a shit-ton about sexuality, in humans as well as other animals. Queer theory types like to think their eccentric, nightclubbing social circles are the world’s leading experts in everything to do with sexuality, because surely they gotta be the best at something, and since the the only something they organize their entire social lives around is celebrating all the edgy different ways their friends like to fuck each other, they’ve decided that must be their academic expertise.
But sexuality is in actual fact something that can be studied in measurable scientific terms. Psychology, sociology, anthropology… but mostly hard, cold biology. It’s true that as society’s boundaries & taboos around sexuality loosen up, factors from simple curiosity to excessive porn consumption and even social pressure can lead people to dabble in homosexual or heterosexual encounters (believe me, as a gay bartender it was an almost daily occurrence, hearing stories of a straight person experimenting with a gay encounter, or a gay person experimenting with a straight encounter), but the distinction between a gay man or woman, a straight man or woman, and a bisexual man or woman is deeply rooted in our biological makeup. That can even be measured physically. My acquaintance Ray Blanchard used phallometers (devices that measure penile tumescence) to suss out the distinction between men who have on occasion had sexual encounters with other men, and men who are genuinely sexually aroused by male human bodies.
And don’t get me started with this idea that as more women dress and present more masculinely, and more men dress and present more femininely, that we’ll start to ignore each other’s true biological sex and instead become aroused at each other based on our “gender presentations” (which is the real idea behind all this nonsense, and which is motivated by crossdressing/trans-identifying straight men who want to convince themselves lesbians “should” be attracted to them). This is what gay culture has looked like since at least the Seventies: a bunch of really femmy guys and really butch gals in close proximity all night, in steamy, boozy nightclubs. Do you think the gay men were all becoming sexually aroused by the “masculine presenting” butch lesbians? Do you think the lesbians were all taking femme gay men home? Trust me, it never happened like that, and it never will. No matter the clothes or the “gender presentation,” for the majority of people*, it was and continues to be the biological sex that determine who is a potential partner and who isn’t.
*there are certainly exceptions; one of the most common being men who are sexually aroused by males but only if they crossdress and present as much as possible as female. This is called gynandromorphophilia, or sexual attraction to male genitals on a “female” body, and it’s a common enough paraphilia that it fuels transgender prostitution throughout the world, leading to countless gay men living as transgender prostitutes and enduring poverty and violence.
I don’t know why anyone takes Peter Tatchell seriously.
Thirty plus years ago, during the campaign against what became Section 28, Tatchell appropiated the famous ‘confession’ attributed to Martin Niemoller: ‘First they came for the communists’, etc. He used it as the peroration of at least one public speech, suggesting that Section 28 (or Clause 27 as it was at stage) signalled a move that would end in the mass extermination of homosexual people. As I recall, he and his group also had a flyer printed that used the ‘Niemoller confession’ to similar effect. (I expect I still have a copy in the loft.) Those of us who were campaigning against the actual legislation, concerned in particular about its impact on sex education in schools and on local authority funding of counselling and support services for young people, did not find Tatchell’s wildly alarmist rhetoric helpful.
Tatchell, notoriously, has also supported the right of adult men to have sex with underage boys. In June 1997 he wrote a letter to the Guardian in which he commended ‘the positive nature of some child-adult sexual relationships’. His position was not well received by readers and he has continued to receive criticism for it. In an interview in 2020 he asserted, “I have never supported adults having sex with children”, but a glance at the Guardian letter shows that this is plainly untrue.
Tatchell is not a reliable source and he will tell a different story when it suits him.