I think you are creating the slippage. You are the one eliding homosexual behavior and a homosexual identity, not me. I don't believe if a homosexual identity as such which is why, on a previous thread, I argued against the chimerical multi-gender position. Tens of millions of years of vertebrate evolution have produced a Homo sapiens with two and only two stable genders. And some recent phenomenon, probably in one of the latest common ancestors we have with our closest genetic relatives, has produced a consistent tendency of exhibiting homosexual behavior.
You keep making the argument that human sexual behavior is predominantly a creation of socialization, but arguments like yours below:
"Thought experiment: take away all the cultural distinctions, socialization, and endless talk and behavior that bifurcate people into men and women. What is left? In a social and practical sense, there are no longer "men" and "women". People in that nongendered society would consider dividing people up based on sex chromosomes to be arbitrary and silly, like people in our society would react to claims about the innate superiority or inferiority of men with male pattern baldness or blue eyes. --Any biological differences you can observe between people or groups of people only have social meaning and importance because of social relations (e.g., the differing importance of the same skin color depending on the historical and cultural moment)."
...try and remove Homo sapiens from an evolutionary context. Skin color and karyotypic gender are not comparable as biological differences. One is trivial and probably no more than fifty thousand years old. The other is profound and stable across tens of millions of years of evolution at the very least. Moreover, there are consistent patterns of behavior between males and females - you know, the whole heterosexual sex thing - while skin color has been treated differently across societies.
There are many markers of social caste that are completely invisible and meaningless to an outsider and ephemeral. Let's say you adopted a baby who had been orphaned in one of the Hindu areas that were destroyed by the recent earthquake. If the baby's local community had disappeared, his caste would also have disappeared. However, the child's gender would still be clear.
boddi
On 12/1/05, Miles Jackson <cqmv at pdx.edu> wrote:
>
>
> On Thu, 1 Dec 2005, boddi satva wrote:
>
> > What's more interesting is that homosexuality is consistently
> > expressed in both humans and our close relatives much more often than
> > in most higher vertebrates. This suggests that homosexuality has
> > probably been with us and our recent ancestors for hundreds of
> > thousands of years. That does suggest that homosexuality may well be
> > associated with something that is positively adaptive or positively
> > adaptive in itself. It's clear that homosexuality COULD have a
> > negative effect on reproductive success. It hasn't. In fact, at the
> > time when we and our close ancestors were having phenomenal
> > reproductive and survival success, we were probably expressing, as a
> > population, this homosexual behavior.
>
> This highlights the slippage that bugs me in this thread: there is
> a crucial difference between "homosexual behavior"--e.g.,
> Bonobos females going at it--and our modern concept of a stable
> "sexual type". If by "homosexuality" or "heterosexuality" you
> mean that people engage in same-gender or opposite gender sexual
> escapades, I agree wholeheartedly, we have good evidence of
> homosexuality and heterosexuality in humans and related primates.
> However, if you mean by "homosexuality" that people everywhere
> at all times classify themselves into a discrete, stable sexual
> category, and then act exclusively on the basis of that category,
> then you're making a claim that is contradicted by a
> huge pile of historical and anthropological data.
>
> Crucial lesson from Foucault: there is a huge conceptual
> gap between engaging in a sexual act and being a sexual "type".
> We assume that sexual acts reflect some underlying sexual
> "essence" or identity in a person, but that assumption is
> a social fact, not a biological mandate.
>
> Miles
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