Comment by aphyr | Hacker News Reader

Comment by aphyr | Hacker News Reader

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As a gay person who periodically wades past the dialectical peat bog that is Hacker News, I am begging you to stop digging. I cannot tell you how disheartening it is to find comments like this at the top of a thread, let alone anywhere. Perceived mutability is one aspect that affects perceptions of marginalized groups. Neither perceived nor actual mutability justifies discrimination.

A world in which gender transition were a trivial weekend occurrence would not excuse the gender wage gap. If conversion therapy were effective, it would still not be moral to imprison people for being gay. Being able to lighten one's skin does not, and should not, excuse the shooting of Black people at traffic stops.

For some of this, this isn't an armchair "design space". Some of us still have people shouting "faggot" at us from passing cars. Some of us have strangers threatening to kill us in the supermarket. Some of us have been fired when our old names were found out. Some of us are trying to figure out how to tell our children how not to be murdered. These kinds of discrimination are not "perfectly legitimate" social choices. They have impact on actual human beings.

Nobody here is saying that discrimination isn't wrong. But why that discrimination is wrong matters. In the west, you can appeal to notions of individual self-determination: "We shouldn't care about peoples' consenting sexual conduct." Those rationales have little meaning in Asian or African societies. That's why the fact that sexual orientation is not a choice people make one day, but is instead something they are born with, is critical to point out.

I’m not “armchair designing” anything. I’m from a Muslim country that does not accept western notions of individualism or sexual permissiveness. So it’s important that, even then, LGBT rights have a solid justification in the fact that it’s biology, not choice. That’s something you can educate people about and improve things. Invoking fallacious hypotheticals like “what if sexual orientation was a choice”—which is the exact opposite of what LGBT advocates believe to be true—undermines that. Instead, it seems like a pretext for universalizing western sexual morality more broadly. That’s imperious—there is no reason why protecting LGBT rights should require embracing western ideas about sexual morality directed to voluntary choices. And ultimately, it’s actively harmful for the hundreds of millions of LGBT people who live outside the west.

Liberal gender and sexual norms are very clearly better for humanity and it is a moral imperative that the rest of the world adopt them. Social conservatism of the sort practiced in most of the world, including but not remotely limited to the Muslim world, is incompatible with basic human rights and freedoms. To be very clear: social conservatism is bad and social liberalism is good.

As someone not from the west, I hold these beliefs very firmly. The abuse and oppression I saw growing up was the inevitable result of patriarchal culture. Traditional gender and sexual norms are not worth saving. I hope some day they're seen in the same light we see feudalism or chattel slavery today.

So, yes, in that sense "born that way" is a compromise with bigots.

There is no reason to treat "social liberalism" as practiced in western countries in 2020 as some inextricable bundle, where each change must be considered "progress" independently. For example, while the sexual revolution tries to ride the coat tails of equal legal rights for women, there is no reason a society can't have equal rights for women without embracing the premises of the sexual revolution. (Don’t forget that the sexual revolution has freed men to do a lot of socially harmful things that burden and hurt women.) Even in the west, it is far from the consensus view that the sexual revolution was a good thing: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/sex-re.... Can a society have equal rights without, for example, the epidemic of fatherlessness that plagues the United States?

It’s impossible to deny that socially liberal societies today aren’t doing a great job at one of the fundamental functions of a society: raising children. North America and Western Europe suffer from birth rates so low they’d soon cease to exist if it wasn’t for immigrants from socially conservative countries (Latinos in America, Muslims in Europe).

I'll also add a striking data point--even in the United States, conservatives are happier than liberals: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/conservati...

> Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.

In Bangladesh, where I'm from, it's taken for granted that getting married, going to mosque, and having kids is the way to a good and happy life. Yes, Bangladeshis are backwards people in many ways. But maybe they’re not wrong about everything. Maybe in this area, Bangladeshis know something about being human that social liberals have talked Americans into forgetting?

I wonder how happy the queer kids of those parents, both Americans and Bangladeshis, are.

Oh wow, the people that are are happy with things as they are and want to "conserve" those things are happier than the people that are downtrodden under the current system and thus want to change it.

Who could've guessed.

The low rates of physical teenage sex in the west today are a result of a generation of social liberalism along with technological progress (enabling virtual means to explore one's sexuality). Social liberalism means having a healthy attitude towards sex and gender and being able to talk about them freely, not treating them as taboo subjects.

Low birth rates in the US and EU are a direct result of socially conservative public policy, where having kids generally means one's standard of living goes down. France has the best child support and consequently the highest birth rates in the EU.

> I’m from a Muslim country that does not accept western notions of individualism or sexual permissiveness.

There is no such Western notion of individualism or sexual permissiveness. The sexual mores of Roman Catholics in South America are very different than the sexual mores of Roman Catholics in Italy and very different from some polygamous Mormon enclaves in the US. The "West" once uniformly banned homosexuality and has been very inconsistent in slowly coming to tolerate it, and such tolerance has certainly also grown in the "East" in a similar slow and inconsistent fashion.

What there is, in many countries, is a notion of the necessity of secularism in law and government. Brought about precisely because religions cannot agree about basic fundamental points of morality and they have been all too willing to fight each other over it throughout history. In order for the various religious sects to stop fighting one another, it was agreed in many nations that the law shouldn't play favorites with a given religions view of morality.

This separation of church and state is indeed found far and wide and certainly goes beyond the "West". The underlying principle, that you cannot get people even in a single nation to agree upon what otherwise harmless things are taboo, ultimately leads to other protections for self expression and in this case homosexuality.

If I follow you, you're suggesting that these Asian and African societies you have in mind would be more accepting of LGBT rights if they were convinced that it was something biological and immutable.

I present the counter example of birth sex, which is quite genetic and practically immutable for most people. Do those same countries afford women and men equal freedoms and opportunities, considering the biological nature of the trait?

A model individualist society would. A model collectivist society might not. With my collectivist hat on: Whether or not something is "a choice" doesn't have any bearing on whether it is good for society. Even a biologically, incorrigibly gay person should reproduce sexually, for the good of the collective.

I can speak to this pretty confidently as somebody living in Utah and raised Mormon: The biology argument does not matter. Religious people acknowledge that some are born with predispositions, even strong ones, to commit certain sins. They consider them challenges to be overcome. They absolutely do not exempt you from the responsibilities of a member of that society.

Like it or not, sexual actions and lifestyles are a choice. Muslims and Christians know this. Fighting the biology battle might lose us ground (to the extent that any evidence at all comes up against it), and it will never gain us any.

> So it’s important that, even then, LGBT rights have a solid justification in the fact that it’s biology, not choice.

... and if the science turns out otherwise? We just ignore reality so people are not harmed? it would be preferable if individual rights are protected regardless. Sorry, just my "western" view.

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