I could have said "your rhetoric". You pointed out that you were called sick and diseased. That's a discourse and it has _real_ effects on people.
Similarly, insisting that desiring a man/woman is genetic and that's the only way to talk about it, you deploy a discourse that has _real_ effects on people.
e,g., an ex-partner was confused for years about who he was. He enjoyed sex with men. He enjoyed sex with women. There was nothing, for him, that made him feel better or worse, more 'at home' or not, more 'right' than not, finally who he 'really was' or not because he had sex with a man or a woman. Those phrases are what some glbts use to describe their sexuality. A lesbian may have been straight for years, have sex with a woman and then say, "I felt more "right" having sex with a woman. Sex with a man was never "right" for me."
This is probably true for her. Alas, because people in the gay community have raised this discourse to a norm--with shunning and accusations "you're not reallY gay" meted out to anyone who deviates from the normative discourse.
This has real, harmful effects on people. Not life and death, but stuff people simply shouldn't have to deal with. In my ex's case, he couldn't figure out what was going on b/c he didn't "fit" with the gay community's insistence that he "wastn' bi, he was gay and just wouldn't admit it."
This is confusing if you have erotic dreams, feelings, activities for and with both sexes. It's confusing if you can't say, I was born this way. That just doesn't make sense to me and I had sex play with girls when I was 12, way before I had sex with a man. It didn't make sense to him, either, and he'd been having sex with men since he was 14.
Every gay person in the world would tell him he must be gay, that this thing he had for women was due to heterosexism and his fear of coming out. blah fuckedty blah.
Well, then he met me and learned that there was a growing movement within the gay community that didn't label him a deviant.
That's how a discourse works. There are real actions that occur around the words. There are real judgements. Real feelings that are encouraged by those words and judgements. It's just another way of saying "norm" and "practices".
Can you see, touch, taste, fuck, whip a norm? No. You can't see touch, taste, fuck, or whip a norm --or a discourse. But you can sure as heck tell they exist when you break a norm or deviate from a dominant discourse. But, unlike others, I don't think you can ever get at some arhcimedean point outside of discourse. We live in and through language.
Norms, discourse, practices, institutions, whatever you want to call it. They are very real and they govern our behavior every minute we breath. Even as we reject those norms, they shape our behavior.
E.g., you appeal to norms and the problem with norms every time you charge the left with being victorian prudes. NOt everyone is, but most of them are--on your view.
And, as you judge them for their prudishness and educate them toward a more enlightened position, you are, as you admit, enforcing a new norm, just one you think is enlightened.
"We're in a fucking stagmire."
--Little Carmine, 'The Sopranos'