Asklemmy

Judging from the voting, I think it might have confused a lot of people.

What I was saying was this:

Literally everything about your life was determined at your birth. If your mother drank, was living in poverty, was being abused in a relationship, and had adequate nutrition and medical care has a huge effect on your earliest formative development. There’s epigeneticic effects of malnutrition of the pregnant mother that last for two generations. You will have a vastly higher probability of drug and alcohol abuse, you are less likely to have an advanced career, you are more likely to be arrested, and the list goes on. All of those things are also influenced by the genes you inherited, some of which influenced your mom’s behaviors that affected you as you were developing. Genes of course influence an incredible amount of what makes you you. They affect your propensity for violence or for pro-social behaviors. They affect how you respond to people, romantically and physically.

And then there’s the environment you grew up in, which again is a direct consequence of where you were born. Was it in a community of poverty and crime? Were there other kids your own age and safe environments for play? Did they have good schools, or schools at all? Are predatory animals that attack and kill children a large concern? Did you grow up in Texas honor culture where you can’t be gay and if someone calls you gay, you have to fight them to prove you’re not? Did you grow up a woman in a radically religious society?

It has nothing to do with loving ourselves, for Christ’s sake. It was an attempt at wry humor that was effectively saying that it would have been nicer to be born to Bill Gates than to a single mother in a trailer park. I worked for LGBT rights since ACT UP, and still stayed in the closet for more than a decade afterwards. I’ve been bashed to the point of hospitalization. I constantly advise LGBT kids who come looking for advice to accept themselves and to take their current living situation into account when coming out.

I don’t mean this in the way it’s normally used, but I’m sorry if you or anyone were offended by what I said. I think that even if you’re not a believer in biological determinism, we can agree that, given the circumstances of our genetic and social histories, there are things outside of our control that could have gone better.