[vitd]

Why should that matter? You could say the same thing to a transgendered person. He or she can wear the clothes for the gender people assume they are. They have a choice. That doesn't make it any more right for people to be prejudice against them.

[panic]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't being transgender like being gay in that you're born that way and don't have a choice?

[zeta0134]

I wouldn't even say that being gay necessarily works this way. I am a gay man, and I can look back over the timeline of my life and identify several key turning points that could have caused me to take a different path. I may have decided that being gay was a "phase" and decided to be straight. To date, despite identifying as and clearly being gay, my longest relationship was with my highschool sweetheart, a woman whom I am still friends with to this day.

Gender identity is fluid, and not nearly as clear cut as something like race. I'm sure there is some genetic influence that affects ones biological tendencies (For example, I am biologically attracted to men, and I can't really change that no matter how hard I wish to "will" it away) but ultimately how one expresses gender, and whom one decides to be interested in, is influenced by so many learned behaviors, social pressures, and factors that go beyond the biological component. Relationships are much more complicated than "Gee, I would like to have sex with that person." One's preferences in this regard are far more than a simple boolean variable, and the choice of expression is ultimately up to the individual.

Every person will have a unique story and their own outlook on this, so I don't think it's fair to place people into boxes and say, "This is the way things work, so this is the label I will assign you." That's not fair on any basis. Not race, not gender, not sexual orientation or any attributes that are out of the control of the individual. You must instead judge the individual based on their unique characteristics, their behaviors, and their own merits, separate from the group to which they supposedly belong.

[dragonwriter]

> Gender identity is fluid, and not nearly as clear cut as something like race.

Racial and ethnic identity is a product of social context and probably somewhat fluid fundamentally, but the social context most people are exposed to probably results in it not tending to express all that fluidly in most cases, especially given that there is less social acceptance of divergence between socially-ascribed race and racial identity than is even the case with gender identity (even in the case of people of mixed ancestry, there is often strong social judgement if they don't identify primarily with the race that is perceived by others to be dominant in external expression.)

[Retra]

That's irrelevant. Maybe one gay person did choose to be gay and maybe another didn't. Maybe people's gender preferences are on a spectrum of varying intensity. None of this has any bearing on how we should treat them, because these issues are completely irrelevant to one's ability to be valuable to society.