The T is not the LGB
This is how the trick is done. And done and done and done, a billion times every day.
Eeeeeeeek attacks on LGBTQ rights everywhere eeeeeeeek – when what they mean is bills to keep men from taking everything women have or bills to protect children from adults who urge them to ruin their lives. Supergluing the T to the LGB is all for the T, and disastrous for the LGB.
The ACLU has become an absolute wreck ever since Strangio seized the reins.
Of course homosexuality is declining if you’re transing the gay kids. Then you redefine them as heterosexual. Iran would be proud of you.
Bisexuality becoming the new normal? What the everliving fuck? It might be instrumentally useful, but it’s just not how sexually reproducing species work (not the sort of trait that would be selected for).
BKiSA, actually bisexuality, broadly speaking, isn’t as uncommon as one might think… as long as there’s some opposite-sex sexual activity, reproduction (as a population) can still proceed just fine. I mean, any activity more of once per breeding cycle (depending on species that could be a season, gestation period, generation, whatever…) is basically a bonus in a social species (pair bonding, in-group bonding, etc.), and of no-to-minimal energetic cost to females (barring physical trauma… admittedly some species are, er, rather dramatic; I’d argue male cost varies more widely though). It can be complicated (and fascinating!) to try to analyze, but the presumption that it would absolutely be selected *against* isn’t really justifiable in many cases I can think of… and traits don’t need to be beneficial to show up or persist in a population, just not particularly deleterious ;-)
Strict homosexuality is quite another situation, because sure a sexually reproducing species could be wiped out with one full generation of exclusively homosexual individuals (ok, unless they also develop parthenogenesis ;-) ).
Tatchell’s wrong, of course, about bisexuality.
Sexual orientation is not culture-bound, and it doesn’t change with the political tides. There doesn’t appear to be all that much variation in the amount of same-sex sexual behaviour across times and cultures (despite what the artsy elites of ancient Greece and Rome wanted us to believe). There are two instinctual factors in sexual behavour: sexual attraction and sexual aversion, and both are almost universally polarized along the sex axis.
The vast majority of people exhibit a very strong preference for the opposite sex, and a moderate-to-significant aversion to the same sex. A tiny minority exhibit the same pattern but with the sexes switched: they have a very strong preference for the same sex and a moderate-to-significant aversion to the opposite sex.
Thus, the reason straight people aren’t having all that much gay sex isn’t because of social taboos, it’s because they’re born with an inclination to dislike it, either a little or a lot. Conversely, the reason so many closeted gay people do have straight sex is because they’ve historically faced significant social pressure to overcome their inborn inclination to dislike it.
This strong bias most of us have in favour of one sex over is not a product of social conditioning. Preferring one sex over the other is not like other physical characteristic sexual preferences — it’s not like preferring brunettes over blondes or Asians over African Americans or short people or tall people or younger people or older people. Those other things have much more to do with personal taste, which is almost completely culture-bound.
Bisexuality as a sexual orientation in its own right is a subjective term that generally describes the small number of people whose instinctual aversion to their non-preferred sex is weak enough that it’s overridden by cultural/social factors — taste, in other words. In females, aversion to their non-preferred sex is generally weaker than in males, thus females are more likely to have sexual encounters with both sexes.
Cultural factors can move the needle a little bit: if your aversion level towards your non-preferred sex is low to moderate to begin with, you’re more likely to overcome it through social pressure or in some cases lack of availability of your preferred sex. (Which is why some straight men in prison have same-sex encounters while others don’t. Same goes for teens in boarding schools, etc. Strong hormone levels and a lack of preferred-sex partners can push the moderate- to low- averse males to dabble in same-sex hanky panky.)
Young people are actually facing a lot of social pressure to identify as anything-but-straight and to even experiment with same-sex encounters to prove their liberal credentials. Social/cultural pressure to override their own aversion is playing a factor in the increased numbers of people identifying as “LGBTQ+”.
This may be music to Peter Tatchell’s ears, but I find it to be very upsetting news. No one should feel ashamed or coerced about their sexual preferences, straight or gay.
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Going out on a limb here . . .
All I have is my own 40 years of experience as an out gay man. True bisexuals are as rare as hens’ teeth. Not saying they don’t exist–I had an affair with one, after all–but everywhere you look, you see mostly hetero and a little homo and next-to-no bi. I know exactly one man I would call bisexual (see above). I have another friend, a female, who is mostly lesbian but is most certainly bisexually oriented. I KNOW NO ONE ELSE who is either actively bisexual or an avowed bisexual. I don’t know what to make of this: Is my experience that biased?
If you want to find “bisexuals,” look at places like Grindr. Uniformly, universally, they are married or “straight” men who are fucking around behind their wives’/girlfriends’ backs.
Please show me a bisexual who is married to a man, who fucks around with women behind his husband’s back.
The B in LGB is superfluous.