“Why be straight and cis when you can be-
THE LGBT MOVEMENT HAS SPENT YEARS TRYING TO CONVINCE PEOPLE IT ISNT A CHOICE
SHUT UPidk how I feel about this, especially if OP is white. a lot of poc who otherwise never questioned their gender previously who discover that the gender binary is what it is (a European construct that was forced onto their ancestors via violent imperialism and colonization) don’t want any part in conforming to it. Willingly identifying as nonbinary is a step many poc take to decolonize.
There is not one singular way to experience being nonbinary or trans. We don’t need to justify ourselves to cis straight people or seek their acceptance through the “born this way” narrative.
Also: “born this way” rhetoric was a useful stopgap to shift us to objects of pity because “we can’t help it”, instead of people deliberately choosing to sin, which is effective in making some cishets hate us a little less… but it shouldn’t be the end goal.
Because
1) not everyone is born this way
2) framing us as objects of pity, people who “just can’t help it” won’t end our marginalisation
3) that rhetoric still casts transness and queerness as undesirable, just unavoidable; the implication being that if we could avoid it (via gene therapy, conversion therapy, selective abortions, etc.) the problem of our existence would be solved.
4) we deserve equal rights whether our genders and/or orientations are unchangeable or fluid
5) If genders and attractions can be chosen, cis and het are not the only valid choices and that’s important to reinforce.
People expressing pleasure in their own genders and orientations with this word choice is not setting the movement back, okay? And policing people re: their expression of how they experience gender or attraction in fear of what the cishets will think of us is bullshit respectability politics.