Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement: An interview with Summer Stipends recipient Joanna Wuest
In Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2023), sociolegal scholar Joanna Wuest analyzes decades of scientific studies, legal documents, media coverage, and advocacy pamphlets to detail the inception and ongoing life of the “born this way” defense of LGBTQ+ rights.
As Wuest tells it, “born this way” has exhibited a surprising plasticity, but at its heart lies the assertion that LGBTQ+ identities are in some sense biologically rooted. Wuest writes about the reasons for this ideology’s allure, potency, and adaptability, and also, as she puts it, “the promises and problems of scientific authority.” Along the way, she shows us how the “born this way” argument’s path to near ubiquity was shaped by economic, social, and political forces. In other words, she demonstrates how the ideology as it stands today was not simply born this way. I had the opportunity to ask Wuest about her work.
Slight edits have been made by staff for length and clarity.
Where did the project start for you?
The seed of this book was planted in a graduate seminar I took with Professor Adolph Reed Jr. at the University of Pennsylvania. That class focused on the history of “race science,” meaning that we read all sorts of horrible scientific studies from the late nineteenth century when scientific researchers were studying individuals’ skulls, facial features, and other biological properties, aiming to discover their “true” nature. I was stunned that the same set of premises that had justified brutal Jim Crow segregationist laws and restrictive immigration policies —that is, biology can neatly sort us into a taxonomy that speaks to our deepest essential truths—were being promoted by Lady Gaga and the Human Rights Campaign to defend LGBTQ+ rights.
That sent me on a nearly decade-long effort to understand how the “born this way” narrative was created and how all the stories that we tell about human difference and biology are inherently political stories. This means that “bioessentialist” theories—those that place the determinative role concerning what it means to be a man or a woman, gay or straight, cisgender or trans on factors like genetics and brain structures—are always weaving together biological findings and premises with inherently political questions about minority groups and the polity writ large.
Of the “the promises and problems of scientific authority” covered in the book, which have had the greatest impact on LGBTQ+ lives?
The scientific study of sexuality and gender has had an enormous impact on LGBTQ+ people’s lives—and not always a salutary one. In fact, the modern U.S. gay and lesbian rights movement that formed in the 1950s and 1960s spent much of its time opposing the leading psychiatric research of the day, which held that queer people were mentally ill, perhaps even dangerous sexual psychopaths. Because that scientific opinion influenced lawmakers, those early activists thought it was necessary to develop an alternative story.
Luckily, reformers in sexology like Alfred Kinsey and the psychologist Evelyn Hooker were producing new research that held homosexuality to be “normal” or nonpathological. By 1973, like-minded leaders of the American Psychiatric Association worked with gay rights advocates to remove homosexuality from their influential list of mental disorders. During that same moment, behavioral researchers like Charles Silverstein and Gerald Davison began to (slowly) turn the mental health professions away from so-called “conversion therapy” practices (which today are called “sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts” to signal that such practices are not legitimate therapies). The defeat of the pathological model of homosexuality was an enormous triumph, one which has been very effective in campaigns for equal rights ever since. It was also the ground upon which the “born this way” argument was eventually built, which has remained a more difficult thing to prove than “not sick.”
Throughout the book, you work to reintroduce economic, social, political, and other factors that have been left aside in both the use of “born this way” as an ideology and the recounting of its development. First, why is it important to situate scientific knowledge in its broader context and, second, what approach(es) did you take in building this nuance?
As I remind my students each semester, science is a “human practice,” meaning that biological studies, genomic data, brain scans, measures of hormonal balances, and medical knowledge as a whole can never be totally disentangled from our societal commitments and political conflicts. Science is also never divorced from political economy; capital investments in biotechnologies and databases are also decisions made by human beings, sometimes for profit-motivated reasons. For example, I write about the DNA home testing firm 23andMe’s role in “born this way” politics today. A simpler way of putting this is that scientists and medical experts are human beings who bring their beliefs, biases, hopes, dreams, career aspirations, and fears into the lab with them.
Circling back to your second question, this is all essential for understanding how “change efforts” came to be seen as a dangerous pseudoscience. It is true that, after decades of researching and practicing attempts at “conversion,” mental health experts have come to see such practices as coercive and extremely harmful to those who are subjected to them. That is partially because change efforts have proven so dangerous and largely ineffective, but it’s also because our notion of “harm” has changed. An older generation of psychiatrists was also concerned with harm, but they were more worried about their gay clients’ life prospects given that being branded a homosexual could cost a person their job, family, children, and even their welfare or veteran benefits. Today, mental health professionals are duly concerned about the harms of coercive change efforts and societal discrimination. So, the scientific record has surely transformed—and in radical ways—but so have our values.
Did anything surprise you as the project developed?
I was most surprised by the fact that the “born this way” idea has been so adaptable. I say that because, not that long ago, there were activists and scholars who feared that the narrative would only work for gays and lesbians, leaving bisexual and trans people in the dust. However, that has not been the case at all, especially for trans people. For the past decade or so, civil rights attorneys have repeatedly brought gender identity clinicians, endocrinologists, neuroscientists, and other medical experts to testify in favor of trans civil rights. And many of those testimonies have featured quite strong claims about the biological roots of gender identity.
This has had some pretty powerful effects on trans civil rights law. In the book, I show how last decade’s legal war over “bathroom bills” were heavily textured by biology. Making the case that trans people should be allowed to use sex-segregated facilities that match their gender identities, some civil rights lawyers argued that brain scans and other studies illustrate that gender identity is not just one component of biological sex (as are chromosomes and genitals, for example), but is instead “sex itself.” This is where the law comes in. While U.S. federal statutory law lacks strong protections for trans people and LGBTQ+ people more generally, there are many laws and judicial decisions that prohibit “sex” discrimination. If you can slot your identity claims into that existing legal category using biology, then you have access to all kinds of protections against discrimination.
Some trans advocates disagree with this approach, citing the importance of antidiscrimination laws that explicitly protect trans people. Others lament the fact that biological arguments erase the autonomy to self-define. That is, if only biology, clinical papers, and gender dysphoria diagnoses can prove one’s “trans-ness,” then we’ve strayed quite far from visions of a less stringently gendered world. And if trans identity can be subjected to objective measures of biology, then we’re still stuck in a paradigm where folks often question whether a person is “truly” trans or perhaps a misdiagnosed “trans trender” or given some other false yet clinical-sounding alternative diagnosis. Such suspicion has become a common trope that has been wielded against gender-affirming health care and trans rights.
Early on, you write, “That we now conceive of LGBTQ+ identities as discrete, stable, and relatively innate extends from how tightly entwined the fight for equal rights and the science of sexuality and gender have become.” Why this tendency towards discreteness and stability? What are its ramifications?
Although we think about each part of that acronym as signifying a very specific kind of person who is easily distinguished from those people signified by an adjacent letter, that is a very historically contingent phenomenon. Back in the 1860s, the German sexologist Karl Ulrichs wrote about “urnings” who constituted a third sex; an urning was described as possessing the body of a man and the psyche or soul of a woman. Whereas Ulrichs was mostly talking about people today who we would think about as gay men, this sounds a lot more like some prominent contemporary notions of what it means to be a trans woman.
The modern LGBTQ+ movement owes its shape and logic to a few different factors. When it first formed in the 1950s, the modern gay and lesbian rights movement was often keen to present its identities as “respectable” and assimilable, meaning that the men wore suits, the women wore dresses, and their demands for equal rights would not disrupt the existing gendered state of affairs. For decades, gay and lesbian political organizing was quite distinct from those agitating for what we might call trans civil rights today.
As for the notion of “stability,” the law also played a role here. In 1973, the Supreme Court ruled in Frontiero v. Richardson that (cis) women deserved equal protection under the law because biological sex was “an immutable characteristic determined solely by the accident of birth.” Gay rights groups began to argue similarly that sexual orientation was immutable and, therefore, merited additional legal protections.
The last point I want to stress has to do with liberal pluralism. Taking inspiration from the mid-twentieth-century African American and women’s civil rights movements, the gay and lesbian movement organized itself into identity-based organizations that fought mainly for what we call formal antidiscrimination rights. That is, while some leaders in each one of these civil rights movements fought for more substantive agendas—ones which included a federal jobs guarantee, a universal health care system, and other economic programs that could create a more egalitarian society for all—they all became somewhat narrowly focused on the right from discrimination rather than the rights for some kind of broader equality. That narrower focus is a hallmark of liberal pluralism, which focuses much more on assimilating marginalized and oppressed groups without changing the rest of society, not least its class hierarchies. Ideologically, that project is cohered by the message that the most important feature of a person’s identity has to do with one’s racial, gender, or sexual status; that argument adroitly erases the immense class differences within a group like “the LGBTQ+ community,” and instead portrays antidiscrimination laws in employment and housing, for instance, as benefiting the entire community (even if many queer people cannot afford an apartment, which means that antidiscrimination protections won’t do very much for them).
One of the things that makes scientific evidence so potent is the sense that if done right, science can deliver simple, unquestionable truths. You call for heightened attention to this impulse, writing, “We ought then to be cognizant about how the desire ‘to know’ is textured by our circumstances.” What are some of the ways our circumstances can texture our desire for knowledge?
This is a good moment to say that there is not much evidence for the strongest “born this way” narrative. That is, our genetics, hormonal balances, and brain structures are likely not the reason that we identify or are identified as gay or straight, cis or trans, man or woman. Those are mainly social categories. That’s not a new perspective either; just look to famous assertions by mid twentieth century women’s liberationists like Kate Millett and the philosopher Simone de Beauvoir as well as the statements made by gay liberationist organizations like the Gay Liberation Front in the 1970s.
We should be careful to note that taking an anti-bioessentialist position does not require one to accept a radical version of “choice.” As a society, we do not conceive of religious affiliation as a biological category, but we generally accept that it is inhumane to force someone to betray their beliefs, especially if they do not cause harm to others. Just the same, one need not take an essentialist view of queer identity to see that attempts to forcibly “convert” or to otherwise disaffirm one’s sexuality or gender can be monstrous.
So then to the second part of your question, context is everything. When municipal reformers and eugenicists alike sought to quash so-called “deviant” sexual and gender practices in American cities and to “protect” the Anglo-Saxon white nuclear family from “barbarians,” they promoted pathological ideas about what it meant to be a non-cisgender, non-heterosexual individual (in fact, heterosexuality as a concept owes its character to these scientific and political efforts to distinguish queer people from the rest of society). And so, it is no surprise that politically mobilized queer people eventually assembled a bench of reformist scientists and mental health professionals who could contest the pathological thesis, both in medical practice and in the law. As one early lesbian leader expressed in the 1965, “ours is a science-oriented society, and scientists are God to most people.” Ergo, it can be politically expedient—and even existential—to “know” that queer people are not deranged or violent; even stronger, perhaps they are simply born that way.
Joanna Wuest is an incoming assistant professor of women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at Stony Brook University. Wuest was awarded an NEH Summer Stipends grant (FT-278744-21) in 2021 to support her work on Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, & Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (University of Chicago Press, 2023). Born This Way has been featured on WNYC’s Radiolab and received honorable mention for the 2024 Rachel Carson Prize, awarded by the Society for Social Studies of Science.
The NEH Summer Stipends program promotes the creation and dissemination of advanced research in the humanities that is of value to scholars, the public, or both. The award funds two consecutive months of full-time work and is open to a wide range of individuals with projects at any stage of development. For more information on the Summer Stipends program, or to apply, see the program’s resource page. Contact @email with questions.