This is interesting.

[Dark Jaguar]

I think the argument in this case is more "It's not okay to discriminate against gay people because it is a genetic inclination."

I see what you are saying but it still hurts the cause of equality more than anything because it's not very well thought out reasoning. Whether they can help it or not isn't the point, though it is certainly relevant for the sake of scientific study. (In fact, current research supports both that some people can control it and that there is a genetic bias.)

What matters is very simple. How does it harm anyone? Some may say "it threatens marriage" but it doesn't really. Being gay doesn't hurt anyone, so therefor, there is no reason to discriminate, therefor such discrimination is wrong. That's all there is to it. In some, indeed many cases, it's a genetic influence that sets it up from the start. There's not enough evidence to support that being all cases, but some is enough. In some, it just can't be helped. However, saying that's a perfect excuse suggests that it would be just DANDY to discriminate if they COULD help it, and honestly, is that really the message you want to send?

On a related subject, along the lines of saying this person is a DEFINITE man and that's the ONLY word we should call him, well that's kinda like Bill O'Reily saying with absolute certainty there's only ONE valid definition of marriage, as if language doesn't change and shift over time and as if the definitions of words are somehow legally enforcable. (As an aside, I have to wonder, if they are claiming that calling gay marriage a "civil union" still gives them all the same rights, just under a different name, then why is it so important to waste the legal time to call it something else? What does it matter what it's called, and why does it need to be codified into law?)

Oh, and above all language as a tool must be useful. It's all well and good to say that if someone wants to be called a man instead of a woman, they have the right to request that, but we still need a word to describe their physiology accurately, so if, as you suggest ABF, we are morally obligated to always refer to him as a man, what word DO we use to identify what their internal physiology most resembles in a nutshell? Or, are we just supposed to gloss over that? Certainly, a doctor doesn't have that freedom, they have to know for certain if they are going to help them in any real way and what the person thinks of themselves mentally really doesn't change the method of treatment needed.

It's fine if you want that the defintion of male and female becomes a definition in terms of how someone sees themselves, but aside from the difficulty of "seeing one's self" as a gender necessitating an idea of what gender is to begin with, there's the difficulty of needing new words to replace the function the old ones had. In the end though, we already had a working solution all along. Words can have multiple definitions. Boy/girl can refer to all the possible definitions of gender, and really in context there's nothing wrong with that. It's only discrimination in the case where one refuses outright to accept one definition or another as valid. Saying this person is a girl (in terms of functioning uterus) is as accurate as saying this person is a boy (in terms of cosmetic alteration of the genitals) and that is as accurate as noting the person is a girl in terms of genetics. All are valid, and I suppose the best compromise is to simply add in notes as to what you are referring to. However, in the end such corrections were never really needed. No one here ever actually was screaming "freak" about this person or saying they shouldn't work at this or that place. This argument was pretty much meaningless.

Anyway, on the topic of the above, I thought the whole discussion those two biologists had was pretty involved. What I noted was pointing out that at best one's brain would just be programmed with a basic rule of, say, altruism with absolutely no sub programming as to WHY being altruistic helps the genes to survive. The behavior DOES, or did at one time, but evolution does "just good enough" adapting, so the brain never needs to understand WHY it wants to help people. Thus, the idea that we help people "for our genes" in terms of a subconcious "true motive" is not accurate at all. That "genetic motive" may be there, but genes are unthinking. Our brains get constructed with the rule but not the original "need" for said rule, so help people guilt-free. You're doing it because you want to help people, and the help to the genes is simply a consequence of that. Heck, misfirings happen all the time as a result. Because there's ONLY the rule "help people" you may help people in cases where it wouldn't help you reproduce at all. As they put it "your genes can jump in a lake" in that sense.