Attraction isn't a choice
In case you missed it there's been some "is it a choice to be gay" discourse on Twitter over the past few days. I've been thinking about it and the criticisms of bioessentialism against the no crowd and trivialization against the yes crowd. Attraction is obviously something that happens to you and not a matter of willing yourself to be attracted to a certain kind of person, so how do we dispel this bioessentialism accusation?
First, for clarity, having a choice doesn't mean we can will whatever we desire into existence. Choice means making a decision between possibilities, and what's possible is shaped by contexts that are largely outside of our control. Some of these could be described as biological, developmental, or environmental.
Brief aside, but this is why you can't terminate feminist arguments at "she had a choice and chose this" under any circumstance - everyone always has a choice, the question is "why are we faced with the choices we have?"
Anyway, there isn't "just" a gay gene, and it's not "just" your environment. There's evidence for countless factors, some involving your personal biology and some not, and from these emerges a unique human experience that can't be wholly explained by any one of them. You might notice that this isn't just a theory of constructing queerness as some "other" thing, but that it describes human subjectivity as a whole!
No matter who you are, you have the will to identify and behave how you choose but the way you desire to identify and behave (in this case, as a result of attraction, or the lack thereof) is not a matter of will, yet can also potentially be developed over time. It's neither bioessentialism nor compulsory fluidity. To me, the tension between "I am the product of my parts" and "I am the product of my environment" is never resolved not only in that it's actually both, but that there is a loop between the two that we are always actively trying to resolve, with no true end point.
As for the case for bioessentialist arguments purely on account of them being rhetorically sturdy - they're not, but I understand it being a useful tool to quickly explain the concept. The right wing's "social contagion" theory's weapon is not the word "social" but the word "contagion"; that is to say, fundamentally, anti-queer arguments are made not on the basis of queerness having a certain mode, but on queerness being an affliction: an affliction on the self and/or an affliction on society. If it weren't, it would be rhetorically useless for them to suggest that queerness can spread or be "fixed", and so this is true regardless of whether it's perceived as wholly biological or wholly social in origin. But it is a real case that someone's space could be made safer by a disarming bioessentialist argument.