Indeed. Thirty or forty years ago, the Gay Lobby was all about "tolerance," about acceptance into civil society. I believe some gays still believe that is the "mission." (Like my sister and her partner, who are rock-ribbed conservatives on any and every issue — except for the issue of "gayness.")
All that has changed of course. Since the 1970s, the demand for tolerance has mutated into an absolute demand that non-gays actively love them, and consider them heroes, given all the putative existential suffering and struggle they were involved in "finally coming to terms" with their "unfair" biological misidentification/social mischaracterization in terms of the categories of male and female.
And if we don't love them as they insist on being loved, then we shall be made to suffer.... Hold-outs can be sued at law; can be financially destroyed. Etc. This is not "tolerance." This is tyranny.
Even though natural reality produces only two sexes, it seems Gays need further "wiggle room" to account for themselves.... So new sexual classifications have to be added — e.g., transgender, bisexual (hermaphroditic), God knows what else is yet to come — to account for their own perceived, not to mention strongly preferred, self-experience.
Once-upon-a-time, the official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual ("DSM") of the American Psychiatric Association — we're referring to the early 1970s here — categorized homosexuality as a full-blown psychiatric disorder. This diagnosis was made on the basis of the profound observed disparity, and total lack of convergence, between a person's wholly subjective self-ideations, and the simple facts of his (or her) own ineluctable personal biology.
Following from this recognition, the therapeutic approach up until that time WRT such persons was to try to meliorate this stark disparity between a person's self-concept and his actual biological nature. That is to say, to make the self-concept more "realistic" in reflecting the actual facts on the ground WRT the person's born sexuality.
Of course, the Gay Lobby found such ideas totally intolerable, utterly offensive, and pressed the American Psychiatric Association to stop talking about them. Which it did, rather quietly, in fairly short order. The current edition of the DSM no longer lists homosexuality as a "psychiatric disorder."
Gays insist that they are "born that way." Which means there must be other "sexes" or "genders" to account for them, which have not yet been sufficiently well-acknowledged....
For many Gays, there is no question of "nature" versus "nurture": The "fact" that they are "born that way" obviates "nurture" altogether.
So it's pointless for psychotherapists to try to "normalize" them to the facts of their own biology. They are trying — it seems to me — to escape altogether from the facts of their own biology.... To them, it is some kind of ultimate liberation from human and social nature that enables them to be "free" to "be themselves."
As far as the probability of "nurture" having any relevance to the "gender self-identity" problem, Gays typically insist it has exactly no relevance whatsoever. For gays are born, not made. This seemingly is their sacred doctrine.
And yet I have to note that, having known very many gay people in my life, in many instances in the closest imaginable relations (e.g., family members and their friends), I have sensed a certain commonality in their respective personal "stories." Whether they were born male or female, there seems to be a common denominator in their psychodevelopmental backgrounds. And that is: difficult, even tortured relations, with their Mother, that persist over time; that never go away.
FWIW. I'll leave it there for now.
I often wonder whether the "born with it" insistence is rooted in the desire to be on equal footing with people of color in civil rights, affirmative actions, etc.