Do We Choose to Be Who We Are?

And what, by the way, is choice?

Tucker Lieberman
3 min readMay 21, 2022

Monarch caterpillar clings to a leaf
Monarch caterpillar. Photo by the author, Tucker Lieberman. You may use it, too. It’s on Pixabay.

While reading Iain McGilchrist’s philosophy book The Master and His Emissary, I was indirectly reminded of an old debate about whether people choose to be gay.

When the debate is framed in an adversarial way (as it usually is), gay people typically find it necessary to give a resounding “no.” As long as you describe your gayness as…