Essentialism is Lambda Legal's ticket to the Supreme Court decree they want outlawing religious censure (if orientation is "essential" then homosexuality = melanin), but they haven't yet got all the Queer Theory enthusiasts on board, who are laying down a 180-degree opposite line on sexuality.
The players need to get on the same page, or someone's liable to point out the cognitive dissonance at an awkward juncture -- say, during oral argument before the Supreme Court.
"They haven't yet got all the Queer Theory enthusiasts on board, who are laying down a 180-degree opposite line on sexuality."
I was just pondering that the other day.
On the one hand, you've got Team A saying that gender is a social construct, a fabrication; an artificial pattern of outward behavior and inner aptitudes, appetites and responses which forms a false consciousness from which we must free ourselves...to invent our lives... to create ourselves anew...free to be... (breathlessly) ... you and me!
But on the other hand, Team B says that if (regardless of his XY genotype and his testes-and-penis phenotype and his hundred million live sperm) some boy is absolutely convinced he's meant to have sex with other boys, then he's really deep-down gay and cannot be changed!
And if he's long felt that he's "really a girl inside," then he's got to be flouncy, bouncy, frilly and feminine, from his false eyelashes to his pink-painted toenails, because that, my friends, is his (excuse me, her) real inner gender and THAT cannot be changed!
So this confused young male gets a diagnosis of gender dysphoria, which means unhappiness about the sex he was born, and goes under the knife to cut his external genitalia down to size, plus drugs to make him a moody jeune fille in a fetching bustier, and by jiminy, he still has gender dysphoria (he's still unhappy about the sex he was born), plus in due time he can be even more miserable about the anti-phenotypical mess he's made of his poor maimed self.
Where do you think this bizzarro train will take us, culturally speaking?
Honestly, I'm sorry for kids these days.