Sexual orientation can change. Sexual orientation can be a choice. Gender identity can change. Gender expression can be a choice. Many people don't experience these as choices, but some people do.

Any robust argument for queer and trans liberation has to be independent of the truth value of these propositions. Bodily autonomy has intrinsic worth and value and requires no biological or quasi-biological justification. This is a moral question, not a scientific one.

It's simultaneously true that "sexual preference" is a conservative dogwhistle, and that not every queer or trans person was "born this way". We have agency.

"Preference" trivializes the centrality of gender and sexuality, or the absence of gender and/or sexuality, to human lives. But as long as you're breathing, almost anything about you can change.

Queer and trans activists are often tempted to salve cis het people's fears with: "Of course you can't change. You could never become one of us. There's no need to be scared of becoming such an unfortunate creature as we are. We were born this way." Resist the temptation.

Yes, you could might become one of us, not through a choice like ordering Pepsi or Coke, but through a long process of growth and discernment. Change is scary, but confronting that fear is the only path that liberates all of us, not just some of us.

If you hand over the power to scientists to grant permission to be gay or to be lesbian or to be pansexual or to be trans, you also give them the power to revoke that permission.

Also, it might be comforting to let scientists testify that queerness is immutable -- but if you delegate that decision to scientists, paradoxically, you also delegate to them the power to engineer ways to mutate it.

If sexual orientation or gender identity is encoded in the brain or in DNA, then it's unlikely that gene therapy, or interventions that leverage neuroplasticity, *won't* be researched. Conversion therapy will shift its foundations from psychoanalysis to bioengineering.

The way to stop that is to reject the unidirectional relationship between the brain, or DNA, or hormone exposure in utero, or whatever it is this week, and gender identity or sexual orientation.

Any biological theory that grants permission for queerness or transness will eventually be used against queer and trans people. If such a theory is true, it will be applied to select us out between conception and birth, to convert us at any stage of the lifespan, or both.

A false theory shouldn't be embraced because it's politically useful, and any true theory about biological roots of queerness or transness will be politically used by the majority against the minority.

Scientific research has to be based on a moral precept of universal acceptance of human diversity. It can never be the other way around.

The "born this way" hypothesis about sexual orientation also cedes ground to terves. If sexual orientation is hardwired, it's difficult (though not impossible) to conceive it as about the cultural meanings of gender. Culture isn't hardwired. So it must be about genitals.

Genitals also have meaning that is culturally constructed. However, it's easier for most people to see attraction to a type of genitals as hardwired than it is to see attraction to a cultural category as hardwired.

Ergo: "I'm attracted to cis women, but not trans women, and that's my sexual orientation and you can't expect me to change that."

Endorsing sexual orientation as genetic hands over ground to trans exclusionists and trans exterminationists.

For people working within the American legal system, it's tempting to frame gender and sexuality as immutable personal characteristics, because the template for discrimination law is race, which is encoded in the law as an immutable personal characteristic.

But we know that race isn't immutable. No one has a race independently of the cultural context they're in. The same person can be perceived as belonging to a different race depending on where they are and who they're with.

And historical change shifts entire groups of people from one racial category to another (for example, see _How the Irish Became White_ by Noel Ignatiev.)

When the law is wrong, change the law, not your beliefs.

We can recognize that some people can change what race they're perceived as (and that there is no innate felt sense of race; it's purely relational), that some people experience shifts in their gender or sexuality, and still others consciously choose their gender or sexuality...

...and still argue that discrimination on the basis of race, gender or sexuality is wrong, because no one should be expected to change these aspects of themselves in order to earn a living, much less to belong to a community.

Some trans activists counter trans-exterminationist commands to "change your mind, not your body" with "I can change my body, but not my brain." And right now, that's true...

...But the impossibility of changing your brain gender or your subconscious sex can't be the basis for trans liberation, because what can't be changed today might be changeable tomorrow.

If it's biological, human ingenuity will find a way to change it. Protecting gender identity and sexual orientation from bioengineering (and its successors, eugenics and genocide) requires something stronger than science.

A stronger position than "I can't change my brain" would be "I don't want to change my brain, and you have no moral authority to coerce me into changing."

And there's a legal framework that fits this: no one (I don't think?) argues that religion is immutable or biologically determined -- if they did, evangelical Christians would be screwed. We still protect freedom of religion because we (correctly) value religious autonomy.

As with gender, some people feel their religion (or their atheism) isn't a choice. Others actively choose to start practicing a particular religion, to stop practicing one, or to change religions. Religious freedom accommodates both.

(and I mean real religious freedom, not the right-wing kind that only protects evangelical Christians' right to evangelize.)