Engineering Sexual Orientation

Perhaps Lady Gaga was right - sexual orientation is not our choice: baby, we were born this way. This conception has, after all, done much for the mainstream acceptance of certain queer identities. But if we really were simply born this way, then ought we only to accept non-cis-heterosexual identities simply because those who identify as such, so to speak, just cannot help it? This seems undesirable, as it leaves open the possibility that there might be something inherently blameworthy about them; such a static conception of sexual orientation moreover does not seem to reflect the lived experiences of many individuals (Diamond 2022, 83, 93).

In addition to that, and perhaps even more pressingly, just what is sexual orientation about to begin with? It is not obvious whether we are referring to sex, gender, or some combination of the two; it is also contentious what these terms really mean, and whether “sex” wasn’t already “gender” all along (Butler 2006, 9–10), in the sense that sex categories, which may be thought to be based on cold, hard biological facts, already bear, to a certain extent, the imprint of culturally contingent gender norms.

The “born this way” narrative is at the core of the so-called “folk” conception of sexual orientation, according to which sexual orientation is to be understood as an exclusive preference for a certain sex (but again, what is sex?), and takes priority over sexual preferences - colloquially, “types” - in the sense that types operate within someone’s sexual orientation. For instance, someone who is attracted to women and prefers as a general rule tall people will likely not be attracted to a tall man (Halwani 2023, 4–5). This results in three sexual orientations: heterosexuality, homosexuality, and bisexuality.

In my article, I want to provide one main reason why the so-called “folk” conception of sexual orientation is defective and might need to be re-engineered. Before we move on, however, I want to take as axiomatic the following facts: (i) that nobody is entitled to a right to sex, or even a right to be attractive, and (ii) that an individual’s (reasonable) sexual preferences are entirely legitimate and to be taken at face value, and the same goes for their self-identification. Any attempt to re-engineer the concept of sexual orientation will need to jostle between on the one hand spiralling into the incel rhetoric of entitlement to sex, because there is no conceivable way to endorse a right to sex and therefore redistribute desire compatibly with a more primitive commitment to basic human rights, and moral authoritarianism on the other, that seeks to dictate what people ought to like and identify as – I view this as incompatible with a commitment to basic autonomy (for a discussion on this topic, see Srinivasan 2021). In other words, any potential blame will not be located at the individual level, barring obviously problematic cases in which preferences are based on explicit objectionable beliefs - for instance, the case of someone justifying their racial sexual preference on explicit racist beliefs. As Andrea Long Chu put it, “nothing good comes of forcing desire to conform to political principle” (Chu 2018)¹.

I focus on what I think is the main defect of the folk conception of sexual orientation: it is not at all clear what it is about. Consider a variation of the famous Ship of Theseus problem: if $\clubsuit$ self-identifies as lesbian and her partner $\spadesuit$ starts identifying as a transgender man, and undergoes medical transition, at what point does $\clubsuit$ stop being a lesbian, if ever? So is sexual orientation to be understood as a preference for sex, gender, or perhaps a combination of both, and what are sex and gender to begin with in this context?

Consider sex first: Halwani attempts to define it as the marks of one’s reproductive strategy (Halwani 2023, 3). Under this view, a man’s sexual preference for transgender (as in, assigned male at birth) women who retain their penises can be understood as “gynandromorphophilia” (Halwani 2023, 9), because these women² have mixed sex markers, i.e. both breasts and penises. Halwani is here making an implicit assumption: that breasts are invariably a marker of the “female” sex, and penises invariably of the “male” sex. I believe this assumption is unjustified, because of mainly two reasons. In the first place, Halwani’s assumption threatens to override the lived experiences of the many individuals onto whom the sex binary that he proposes does not neatly apply: what he is saying seems to imply that if a cisgender lesbian is in a relationship with a transgender woman, then she is not really a lesbian after all, and this is incompatible with our commitments. Moreover, Halwani seems to completely overlook the ways in which gender affirming hormonal therapies drastically changes the functioning of sexual organs even in absence of any surgical intervention. But what notion of sex can underlie the concept of sexual orientation, then? At most, and consistently with our commitments, I concede that we may be attracted to traits that are likely by-products of some combination of someone’s reproductive strategy, and anatomy, karyotype, and sustained hormonal profile, but this a far cry from Halwani’s proposal.

As for gender, consider a self-identified gay man who grounds his, so to speak, gayness, onto his sexual attraction to penises. Would he then be attracted to certain transgender women, and not to many transgender men? Bearing in mind that we do not want to tell people what they ought to be attracted to, nor to override their personal labels, I think this shows that gender cannot ground sexual orientation either, consistently with our commitments.

These brief remarks, I hoped, showed that the folk conception of sexual orientation is defective in, mainly, not being able to accurately reflect the experiences of many queer individuals, and that it is therefore a rather inadequate grounding for, at the very least, the expansion of civil rights. Should we then re-engineer our concept of sexual orientation?³ I believe that these defects point to this.

Lastly, the discussion above may also make one wonder whether we need a concept of sexual orientation at all. As a concluding remark, I want to suggest that such an objection would be somewhat misguided, as I hold that some construct is valuable as an analytical tool that enables us to identify patterns in preference that may be socially and politically shaped (see Barn 2022).

Bibliography

Barn, Gulzaar. 2022. “The Ethics and Politics of Sexual Preference.” In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality, 421–36. Routledge.

Butler, Judith. 2006. Gender Trouble. Routledge Classics.

Chu, Andrea Long. 2018. “On Liking Women.” N+1 30.

Cull, Matthew John. 2024. What Gender Should Be. Bloomsbury Academic.

Diamond, Lisa. 2022. “What Is a Sexual Orientation?” In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Sex and Sexuality, 81–101. Routledge.

Halwani, Raja. 2023. “Sex and Sexual Orientation, Gender and Sexual Preference.” Journal of Controversial Ideas 3 (2): 1–23.

Haslanger, Sally. 2000. “Gender and Race: (What) Are They? (What) Do We Want Them to Be?” Noûs 200 (1): 31–55.

Srinivasan, Amia. 2021. The Right to Sex. Bloomsbury Publishing.