Hello, I’m Pang Ying. Welcome to our final post-debate review, Episode 35.

The motion asked whether gay-rights advocacy should abandon the born-this-way argument. Why abandon a true, useful claim?

A younger teammate found this motion in an overseas English-debate list years ago; it stayed with us both.

I wondered how the affirmative could argue it. Even if premature in practice, might it clarify our thinking?

Chinese debates once often discussed gay rights, but rarely do now. I am grateful to debate it with Zhan.

Comments on Vistopia and Weibo revealed both valuable insights and precisely the problems my position addresses.

First, saying homosexuality is innate may be imprecise. What problems follow?

A commenter asked whether orientation can be deliberately changed. Research consensus says no.

Another asked about sexual fluidity. Fluid does not mean controllable: water flows, but not wherever you command.

Height changes through life and environment.

Yet change does not mean we can choose our height. Controllability matters more than innateness.

Another commenter felt deceived upon learning orientation may not be entirely innate, exposing the weakness of that argument.

Most people care whether it is chosen. Mixed genetic and environmental causes do not make orientation self-changeable or externally correctable.

So feeling deceived mistakes mixed origins for personal choice; neither makes orientation controllable.

So say it is not subject to will: it cannot be chosen, corrected, bent straight, or bent gay.

Cancer also reflects interacting genes and environment without being fully understood.

Height, skin color, and intelligence mix inherited and acquired factors without becoming freely changeable.

I could have used a semantic trick: abandon “innate” only to replace it with “beyond volition.”

But I cared about the idea, not merely winning.Even the more precise uncontrollability argument produces undesirable effects.

Why? Comments reveal common intuitions.

Parents may stop blaming a gay child after hearing orientation is innate.

Yet they may blame themselves for the child’s suffering, while many LGBT people hate their own unchosen identity.