The Drives You Didn’t Choose
A thread on Reddit—over three thousand comments, which means it touched something real—opened with a simple premise: if gay people didn’t choose their attractions, what does that logic extend to? The question was about pedophiles and zoophiles. Not a comfortable question. Not one that resolves cleanly in any direction. I’ve been sitting with it since.
The case for why homosexuality is legally and morally distinct from the other two is actually straightforward. Gay sex happens between consenting adults who are capable of agreeing to it. Sex with children is abuse—a brutal exercise of power over someone who cannot meaningfully consent and who carries the damage for the rest of their life. Sex with animals is the same problem by definition. The harm is real, the victim has no voice in it, and the comparison ends there. No amount of philosophical framing about the unchosen nature of desire changes any of that.
But set aside the question of acting on it—which isn’t in dispute—and the philosophical symmetry is harder to dismiss. None of these people chose their attractions. Sexual orientation, whatever form it takes, forms in early life and calcifies by the end of puberty. Doctors are fairly consistent on this: there is no reliable intervention that fundamentally rewires what a person finds arousing. The mind is not a preference menu. You get what you get.
What that means for gay men and lesbians, in most Western countries now, is the freedom to actually live. The decades of legal change and social movement that got us here were earned, and the work isn’t finished—there are still plenty of countries where homosexuality is criminalized or treated as illness to be corrected. But the direction is right. Gay people can love who they love without the state coming for them. That matters enormously.
What it means for pedophiles and zoophiles who have the attraction but have never acted on it is something harder to think about without the categories collapsing around you. They’re carrying a drive that will never be acceptable, never be legalized, never be treated as anything other than a categorical error in a human being. And they’re right that it won’t. Unlike homosexuality, which harmed no one and was only ever illegal because of moral panic, these attractions are structurally incompatible with any legal framework that protects the vulnerable. That is not going to change. The pope will convert to Islam first.
And yet I keep coming back to what that actually looks like from the inside. A person who has this draw, who has understood it since adolescence, who watches the rest of the world navigate its desires with relative freedom while living with something that must be buried completely—what is that psychological pressure like? The pre-emptive self-exile from anything that might trigger it. The dread of your own mind. Cursing yourself for not being normal, as if normality were a switch someone forgot to flip. The argument isn’t that they deserve sympathy at the expense of potential victims—it isn’t even close to that. The argument is only whether they are still human.
The comparison to how homosexuality was framed decades ago is uncomfortable and probably unavoidable. Not because the situations are equivalent—they aren’t, not in the ways that matter most—but because the rhetorical move of labeling any sexuality as monstrous, as inhuman, as something to be corrected or punished out of existence, has a specific history. It produced specific damage. The fact that in those earlier cases the target was people whose sexuality harmed no one, while here we’re discussing attractions that are harmful by definition, doesn’t make the move less recognizable.
There isn’t a resolution here. The thread had three thousand comments and didn’t find one. What I have is the question: is it possible to hold two things at once—that acting on these attractions is among the most serious harms a person can cause, and that the person who carries them and does not act is still a person, is not the monster the media needs them to be? That second thing feels important to me. Not as an argument for anything. Just as a fact about what a human being is.