Identity and attraction as dreams
What we are and what we want seem to be neither fixed nor voluntarily chosen
In general, people describe themselves and others in terms of a wide variety of identities and attractions relating to sex and gender. For lack of a better term, I’ll call the total description for any given person their sex/gender persona. In the most systematic approach (not necessarily recommended) each person has an associated choice for each available category. For example, gender could be identified as “male,” “female,” “nonbinary,” “agender,” or possibly other terms that I’m overlooking.
Much of the discourse about sex/gender personas deals with this categorization: how many categories are there, how do they interact, what are legitimate choices in each category, and so on. One example is whether you can have something other than “M” or “F” on your driver’s license (possible in 22 states). This is also the domain in which we wind up with unwieldy alphabet-soup terms like “LGBTQI+” (and I can’t resist noting here that at Harvard some stickler alphabetized this acronym into into the “Office of BGLTQ Student Life”). I am not seeking to weigh in on the category schemes, but instead considering how one’s categorization might vary over time.
Two common perspectives on identity and attraction
There are at least two incompatible views of how a person experiences their particular sex/gender persona.
In the first view, a particular sex/gender persona is voluntary and chosen. This is the view that justifies conversion therapy. It’s also what underpins the multiple religious traditions that treat being queer as some kind of sin, as well as the multiple legal systems that treat being queer as some kind of crime.
In the second (countervailing) view, a sex/gender persona is genetic, set at birth, immutable. Within that framing, it’s clearly cruel and pointless to sanction people for their queer characteristics. After all, it’s not voluntary and not within their power: it’s all fixed, although sometimes societal pressure means that queerness is hidden and only slowly revealed or understood.
It’s easy to see why these two perspectives exist, and why they are appealing to different people. Dividing the world cleanly in terms of voluntary vs. involuntary can be a comfort. On one side, there are the things that we can control; on the other side, the things that we can't control. Such a clearly-divided world is not necessarily easy, but it does not require subtlety or nuance. We might still need to work on accurate assessment of each item’s category, and we might find it challenging to worry only about the things we can control. But in such a world, the conditions for doing that work would be manageable.
A third way
My goal is not to argue for or against these well-established positions, but rather to complicate the issue in ways that can potentially annoy both sides. Where both of these positions see things as sharply defined, I’m inclined to see fuzziness and shades of gray. My experience of changing attraction or changing sexual identity seems to be “not OK” for some people. It’s not only (some) straight people who find this shift worrisome; (some) queer people do too.
I’m not saying there are no sharp boundaries anywhere, although some might argue along those lines. There are clearly things that we can choose to do or not to do, and in some ways there are things that we can choose to feel or not to feel. For example, there's the saying that “pain is inevitable, but suffering is not.” A lot of practical philosophy and religion are about finding and exercising “better” ways of dealing with difficult situations and circumstances. But after we acknowledge that some things are within our power, there are also things that are not in our control.
Although it’s a little more contentious to make this claim, there are also items that are in a kind of a grey zone: neither clearly within our control nor clearly outside our control. In particular, it seems that queerness (or more generally one’s sex/gender persona) is not a purely voluntary choice – at least, not as most people experience it. There are few, if any, people who choose or change an identity or attraction in the way they might choose or change an article of clothing. On the other hand, it also seems difficult to be sure that these identities and/or attractions are permanent and fixed experiences. These things are not necessarily the same over a lifetime, and any change is not necessarily explainable entirely as a function of societal repression or education.
I want to underscore that I’m not denying the relatively common narrative of “I was queer from my earliest memory, but I hid it for many years.” We can certainly find cases in which such a change is due to overcoming repression or learning more about possibilities; but as a pure matter of logic, the mere existence of such cases doesn’t prove anything about universality. Such an experience can be important to a particular person; it can even be a common experience for many persons. But even if we have a stack of these experience reports, we have simply aggregated anecdotes – we haven’t formulated some kind of universal law. That is, we haven’t proven that fluidity is impossible.
At least some of the time, for at least some people, it’s possible that there is some genuine fluidity, so that people may find themselves surprised over the course of a lifetime by developing or changing attractions. That’s certainly my personal experience. I’m also acquainted with a person who’s had a similar shift over time, with the shift happening in the opposite direction of my experience. I also know another person who had a shift in an aspect of their sex/gender persona that’s absolutely unchanged (and seemingly unlikely to change) for me. My experience and their reports confirm my sense that this kind of “drift” isn’t very common… but that’s different from saying it never happens.
If we step back from this topic, we can see that it’s odd that we need to say this explicitly. In general, we don't have any problem with the idea that people develop or change – but we seem to have found ourselves in a strange place on sexual identity, sexual attraction, gender identity, and queerness. It’s understandable that we don't want to think of these areas as “voluntary,” and therefore subject to coerced choice or reprogramming; but having said all that, it seems bogus to think of these areas as fixed at birth and unvarying.
Changes like aging?
Instead, it seems wiser to think of these issues analogously to aging. In aging, there are processes that are poorly understood but discernible in their effects, causing certain changes over the course of a lifetime. There are choices we can make that may affect the speed of aging or the impact of aging, but that’s not the same as saying that we have control over aging, or that we can choose not to age.
Of course, the analogy with aging is imperfect: with some degree of confidence, we can say that everyone who lives to a certain age will experience at least certain aging effects having to do with loss of skin tone, lower energy, reduced need for sleep, and so on. In contrast, we don't really understand anything about what seems to prompt or trigger fluidity of identity or attraction. In an actuarial sense, we have excellent models for aging. When it comes to fluidity of identity or attraction, we can’t predict its onset or progress, nor can we be sure that changes won’t reverse at some later point.
Further complicating the analysis, for many people it may not even strike them that there has been any unusual change. For example, it may feel as though the change of identity or attraction is associated with meeting or spending time with a particular person. However, for others the change may be very conspicuous: although they still want to stay with a single person, their interests have shifted – and for reasons not connected to boredom or distaste for their original partner.
Changes like dreams?
The other phenomenon that this fluidity seems to resemble is a dream: not in the sense of a dream while sleeping, nor in the sense of a daydream – but in the sense of a larger motivation, a big-picture desire, a wellspring of intent. If you ask someone what their dreams are – and if they're willing to tell you – you often find that their dreams are not easily connected to identifiable origins. There is some possibility that these dreams can be traced to particular events or circumstances in the person's early life, but that seems unlikely to be universal. Only a fool or a knave would claim that they can dissect and analyze every form of desire or dream to the point where it is fully understood.
Many people would say that they don't know where those dreams come from – but that lack of understanding doesn't affect how strongly they feel them. I think they would also say that the dream, and the motivation that they derive from the existence of the dream, are not “voluntary.” Even if the dream is in some sense hugely threatening to them and their current life; even if they would like to walk away from the dream; even if they wish they didn't have the dream; none of that serves to actually eliminate the dream. Instead, it seems as though the choices are either to accept and acknowledge the dream – possibly taking actions to realize it – or to attempt to repress or ignore it. The route of repression and ignoring doesn't typically work very well. People can certainly ignore their dreams, but that doesn't make them go away – and there isn't a sense in which one can simply quit a dream, in the way that one can for example quit a job.
We know that dreams are involuntary, and we also know that dreams are fluid. Someone may have a dream at one age that they don't have at a different age. Although sometimes that’s because the dream has been realized or attempted, that’s not always the case. People simply shift, not on a day-to-day basis – the dream that I have today is most likely the same dream I had yesterday and will be the same dream I have tomorrow. But if we're considering a period of years, it's entirely possible that the dream will change.
In fact, we could think of sexual attraction as being a particular kind of dream. When we think of it as a dream, then it seems to me that we develop a healthier attitude about identity and attraction are. One dreams of being a person who has particular sexual characteristics and/or particular gender characteristics. Likewise, one dreams of having a partner with particular sexual or gender characteristics.
As with other dreams, the origins of these dreams are poorly understood. Their suppression or repression is unlikely to be healthy for the person, and yet it can change over time. This perspective seems wiser and more realistic than the excessively rigid position that some people have that says sexual attraction and sexual identity are not changeable, are not fluid.