On the Sexuality of Your Offspring

A guy on the dads' Facebook group I belong to recently posted asking for guidance because his nine year old daughter had confided in him that she thought she might be bisexual. Apparently there's a girl in her class she really likes and she's watched some YouTube videos and some things have started to click for her. Her father, who I'm sure means well, wanted to ask his fellow dads if nine was too young to know whether or not you were queer.

To which the obvious response, voiced by several dads, is: at what age would you prefer she wasn't too young? It's not like there's a switch that trips in your brain or your groin the moment you hit your x-teenth birthday, and all of a sudden you know who you're going to be attracted to for the rest of your life. Biological organisms - including me, presumably you, this guy and his daughter - notoriously refuse to be placed into neat little boxes or packages. Just when you've got cows nicely pegged as strict herbivores, for instance, along comes a viral video of one eating chickens. I mean heck, we still haven't settled how many kingdoms of life there are (there used to be just two, animals and plants, and now there are anywhere between five and eight depending on who you talk to). So the short - and one would think by now obvious - answer is: it depends.

My wife, for example, has told me that she knew she really, really liked boys by the time she was in kindergarten (and would chase them around the schoolyard trying to kiss them). At the other extreme, there are plenty of adults, of all ages, who have yet to figure it out. For most of us, I suppose our sexual orientation takes shape round about the time the distinction between the two biological sexes becomes significant. I remember at around seven or eight having crushes, sometimes on other kids at school, teachers or other real people, sometimes on fictional or mythological characters. What I don't recall, at that age, is gender factoring into it in any significant way; it was simply that the figure had some set of attributes that I found especially admirable or attractive. Fast forward another year or two, and that's when the objects of my crushes became exclusively female. And anyone you ask is going to have a different story and a different timeline. Or they're going to kick you in the shin for being nosy. You just never know. There goes that biology again.

Much has been written and theorized, most of it bollocks, on what causes a person to be gay. Ideas run the gamut from genetics, to upbringing, to family dynamics (it used to be thought that growing up in a household with a strong mother and a weak father made you more likely to have same-sex attraction), to time of conception, to venality, to demonic possession and a hundred other ideas with varying degrees of attachment to reality and logic. After all that, we still don't have much of an idea about what determines sexuality. Every time biologists or behaviorists think they might be onto something, along comes a cohort of exceptions stubbornly refusing to fit, like a pair of identical twins one of whom is straight and the other of whom flames brighter than a California wildfire season after a five year drought.

So, scientific curiosity aside, why does it matter anyway? No-one worries about their kids being too young to know they're straight. No guy looks back over his childhood wondering what it was about the way he was raised that makes him feel all funny in the nethers when a pretty girl smiles at him. It just comes down to wanting to put everything into a box again. We regard straightness as the default because it's how we get the next generation of behaviorists. But that agenda isn't in any jeopardy. We don't, empirically speaking, need to expend any more energy on worrying how we acquired our sexual orientation than we do on worrying why we like spicy food, or why we're so good at playing the xylophone, or why we support such a godawful football team.

Which wraps back to the dad on Facebook. And the answer he needs to hear in regard to his daughter is of course: there isn't one. Probably the mere fact that she's thinking about her sexuality indicates that she's old enough to at least start to grasp what it means. His job is simple: be a dad. She wants to talk, so talk to her. It is at the very least an opportunity to learn, whether she's definitively figured out where her preferences lie or not. And she'll need his love and support, in particular because there are an awful lot of people out there who can be real bungholes about things not fitting into neat little boxes. If he can't do that, then he'll have failed as a father. But the good news, for him and his kid: he reached out for advice, and that suggests he hasn't, and won't. I send both of them my warmest wishes of good luck. They've got this.