Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement

by Joanna Wuest

The story of how a biologically driven understanding of gender and sexuality became central to US LGBTQ+ political and legal advocacy. Across protests and courtrooms, LGBTQ+ advocates argue that sexual and gender identities are innate. Oppositely, conservatives incite panic over “groomers” and a contagious “gender ideology” that corrupts susceptible children. Yet, as this debate rages on, the history of what first compelled the hunt for homosexuality’s biological origin story may hold answers for the queer rights movement’s future. Born This Way tells the story of how a biologically based understanding of gender and sexuality became central to LGBTQ+ advocacy. Starting in the 1950s, activists sought out mental health experts to combat the pathologizing of homosexuality. As Joanna Wuest shows, these relationships were forged in subsequent decades alongside two broader, concurrent the rise of an interest-group model of rights advocacy and an explosion of biogenetic and bio-based psychological research. The result is essential reading to fully understand LGBTQ+ activism today and how clashes over science remain crucial to equal rights struggles.

Genres: LGBT, Politics, Gender, American History, Nonfiction

293 pages, Paperback

Published September 15, 2023

Reviews

[Yoav Sivan · Rating 2 out of 5]

I reviewed this book for The Gay and Lesbian Review, July-August 2024:

LGBT activism has a longstanding relationship with the illiberal notion of being “Born This Way” (as gay, lesbian, etc.)—illiberal, because it argues that the sexualities behind the queer alphabet soup are not a choice but a predetermined reality (biological or otherwise) to which one is awakened at some point and with which one must come to terms, hopefully to embrace and even celebrate.

Joanna Wuest argues that beyond the catchy slogans one can trace an ideology that has subsumed LGBT activism, politics, law, science, and healthcare since the 1950s. Genetic or prenatal determinism has been the major arrow in the activist’s quiver, readily adjusted to counter the arguments of anti-gay conservatives. In Wuest’s critique, sexual determinism became a tenet of faith in the LGBT corridors of power early on, leading to gay normalization that neutralized activists’ erstwhile radical queer agenda. She convincingly shows that every stakeholder in the LGBT movement has channeled some version of “Born This Way.” Even the anti-establishment purists seeking to topple essentialist categories in favor of flexible identities are shown to be entangled with remnants of determinism.

Despite its intriguing premise, the book is consistently undermined by the narrow lens through which the history of the LGBT movement is being viewed, namely the persistence of determinism in LGBT politics, which she suggests is ideologically or ethically compromised. Her history of the science of sexuality fares no better, marred as it is by her lack of sophistication on the workings of science; and one is struck by her denial of the potential of science to tell us anything at all about the biology of sexual orientation and gender identity. And she fails to recognize that the “Born This Way” hypothesis has often been a political expedient rather than a core dogma.

[Kathleen O'Neal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was assigned this book for my Social Institutions class with Dr. Roger Lancaster in the fall of 2023. Early on in the semester, I signed up to give a presentation on this book because I knew that this book was the sort of thing I would really love and indeed I did. In addition to my presentation, I also wrote a short review on the book for this class. I have since cited the book in other papers and assignments. This work is an amazing analysis of the ways in which scientistic discourses about sexuality and gender identity have been subsumed by an increasingly corporatist LGBTQ+ nonprofit sector in ways that have defanged the promise of earlier gay liberation movements. Beginning with the history of homophile movements in the 1950s, proceeding through the gay liberation era of the late 1960s and the 1970s, the genome mania of the 1990s, and the progress and reaction seen in reference to struggles for LGBTQ+ rights today, the book examines the complicated history between the movement for LGBTQ+ rights and the scientific, psychiatric, psychological, and medical establishments. I was personally very moved by the ways in which gay liberationists of the 1970s era placed youth liberation at the center of their struggle and sought to take radical stances in favor of the sexual and other rights of young Americans. As the gay movement has become more professionalized and respectable, so much of that radical energy has dissipated and it has been supplanted by nonthreatening discourses about how we're "born this way" and essentially "can't help" our homosexuality. Dr. Lancaster was on the advisory committee for the thesis that later became this book and I thought that was a really cool factoid about a book that I know I'll be thinking about and referencing for a long time to come. I can't say enough good things about this book.