I’m sure for many of us, our first introduction to the “born this way” narrative was from Lady Gaga’s hit song “Born This Way.” As she belted out the lyrics, “I’m on the right track, baby / I was born this way,” on the radio, we sang along to the iconic song. While the sentiment has been a rallying cry in the fight for LGBTQIA+ rights for decades, the narrative falls short of capturing the queer experience.

While I do believe that I was, in fact, born this way and that being queer is innate to who I am as a person, the “born this way” narrative created false expectations in my life. When asked, “When did you know you were queer?” I often don’t know how to answer, because the answer people are expecting is, “Oh, I’ve known since I was five.”

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I didn’t know that I was queer until I was about 16 years old — which is still very young in the grand scheme of things, but it makes me feel like I should have known sooner. This feeling of not being as valid in your queer identity compared to others who knew sooner can be very difficult to deal with.

It can feel isolating and make it hard for family members to take your identity seriously if it doesn’t fall into their narrow idea of what being LGBTQIA+ is. Trying to explain to uncle Joe that you are queer or transgender becomes increasingly difficult when your coming out doesn’t feel like an open secret. 

The “born this way” narrative enforces the idea that since you were born LGBTQIA+, you were very clearly and obviously not straight or cisgender from a young age. And since Uncle Joe never thought you acted gay — whatever that means — when you were younger, you must not actually be gay. It was actually all of that “liberal propaganda that they feed kids in schools these days.” 

Beyond making it more difficult to explain your queerness to older, less understanding family members, the narrative can also make late-blooming LGBTQIA+ people feel like impostors. 

For people born into religious or conservative families, it may take them years or decades into their adulthoods to realize they are queer. This later realization that they are LGBTQIA+ may come only after learning new terminology or after meeting fellow LGBTQIA+ people — both of which may take someone raised in a religious or conservative household years to come in contact with.

Being exposed to the LGBTQIA+ community late and subsequently coming out later in life does not make anyone’s queer identity less valid. It does not make them an impostor who is lying about their newfound identity. Embracing and discovering your LGBTQIA+ identity can happen at any time, and the born this way narrative does not allow for that nuance. 

Upholding the narrative that LGBTQIA+ people are born this way also doesn’t allow space for the evolution of identity over time. This narrative asserts that we, as queer people, are born being queer and, by extension, knowing that we are queer, it does not allow for any fluidity or self-discovery. For many LGBTQIA+ people, their identities have evolved over the course of their life.

This is especially true for transgender people, as they often identify as multiple different labels within the LGBTQIA+ community throughout their life. For example, it is common for transgender men to start out as identifying as a lesbian or bisexual woman in their early coming-out, then come out as transgender and change their sexual orientation from lesbian to bisexual or from bisexual to gay. 

People’s identities aren’t unchanging, especially in the LGBTQIA+ community, and the “born this way” archetype simply does not give people the space to explore their identities. While the narrative has been instrumental in initially explaining the LGBTQIA+ struggle to cisgender heterosexual people, it is now outdated and should be left in the past. 

While we can all agree that Lady Gaga is certainly iconic, we can also be “on the right track” without being “born this way.” 

Peyton Dacy is a sophomore writing about the struggles queer people face on college campuses and beyond. His column, “Lavender Letters,” runs every other Tuesday.