Diversity is a Family Value
There's been a lot of critique of the Born This Way narrative that I won't retread, but something I'm thinking about now is how its logical implications really never got belaboured to the people who needed to hear it. The right-centrist Family Values cultural sphere settled into a kind of "well they can't help being like that but do they have to shove it in my face" reluctant tolerance. But surely if you were taking family values seriously, the next step is... someone could be Born This Way in my family. In fact, the more kids I have the more likely it is that at least one of them will be some flavour of LGBTQ. What's best for my family if it turns out the diversity is coming from inside the house? Is it having all the diversity corralled in the designated diversity area where I don't have to look at it? Or is it a community that diversity is peacefully integrated into so my kids have role models for whatever kind of adult they're growing into?
What Born This Way ultimately demanded was to fundamentally give up the delusion of cast-iron control of your own children, the kind of delusion that can only be maintained by disowning or destroying any children that refuse to be controlled. And from here it looks like that just didn't take. But with or without that particular narrative, we need to keep trying to break the delusion, because that's what stands in the way of cis, straight, etc people's love for their family turning them into allies.
This applies to disability too, btw - imagine the power of the Autism Mom lobby if they learned to listen to autistic adults instead of pseudoscience peddlers. If you fully internalise the idea that you could have queer or disabled kids or grandkids, completely jettison the idea that there's always something you can and should do to avoid it, then you personally benefit from living in a community where queer and disabled people visibly thrive. At that point, it doesn't actually matter whether your gay uncle, or the trans lady who works at the library, or the teacher in the wheelchair was "born that way"/has tried hard enough not to be/etc. What matters is accepting that your child or grandchild could be fundamentally different from you in some way, simply on account of that's how humans work, and if that happens you will want someone to ask for advice, someone who's started the work of making your community accessible to your child, someone who just by being around proves to your child that it's worth trying to live through their teens. And if it doesn't happen to you it'll happen to your neighbour or your colleague or someone from your church. So why wait?
