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Are sexual orientations freely chosen? The idea that someone’s sexual orientation is not a choice is very influential in the mainstream LGBT political movement. But do we have good reasons to believe it is not a choice? Going against the orthodoxy, William Wilkerson has recently argued that sexual orientation is partly constituted by our interpretations of our own sexual desires, and we choose these interpretations, so sexual orientation is partly constituted by choice. In this paper I aim to examine the question of whether our interpretations of our own sexual desires are constitutive of our sexual orientations. I will argue that whereas Wilkerson’s argument for the claim that sexual orientations are in part constituted by our chosen interpretations of our sexual desires is not sound, there are good reasons for endorsing a weaker claim, namely, that there are different but equally apt descriptions of the same sexual desires, depending on which concepts we have.

In this paper, I aim to discuss several proposals about the meta-metaphysics of gender and race, that is, proposals about what debates in the metaphysics of gender and race are really about. 7 It could be argued, though, that if we allow this kind of normative considerations to play a role in theory-choice in metaphysics, then we are no longer doing metaphysics, since we are appealing to political considerations, not only normative considerations within metaphysics. Her aim in that paper is also to argue that certain views about what metaphysics are really about rule out important debates in the metaphysics of gender as being genuine metaphysical debates. (Sider, [29], 1) Barnes ([4]) has argued that Sider's account of what genuine metaphysical questions are about rules out feminist metaphysics from being serious metaphysics. [Extracted from the article]

What does it mean to say that some features, such as gender, race and sexual orientation, are socially constructed? Many scholars claim that social constructionism about a kind is a version of realism about that kind, according to which the corresponding kind is a social construction, that it, it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructionism, then, is a version of realism about a kind that asserts that the kind is real, and puts forward a particular view about the nature of the kind, namely, that it is constituted by social factors and practices. Social constructivists about human kinds such as gender, race and sexual orientation often make an additional claim, namely, that these kinds are social constructions but they are typically believed to be biological kinds (that is, people are typically wrong about the nature of these kinds). Ron Mallon (2017) calls social constructions that are (falsely) taken to be biological kinds covert social constructions. This paper is about how we could have terms in our natural language that come to refer to covert social constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]