Real Life Ain't a Game

Ever play the "Game of Life" when you were growing up? It's a bit
of a favorite past-time for my aunt and I. We'd play if we had the chance when my mother brought the family to her home state of Florida on vacation over the summer. While not exactly my favorite game of all time [though it still greatly amuses me that the only time I remember winning was when I played my little peg as a lesbian], it never occurred to me to question why the pegs were only colored in pink and blue. Oh sure, I remember wanting to play with the blue peg because I didn't like pink-I would have really preferred red-but I never thought about how much the game plays into the binary of heteronormativity.
Let's think about how the "Game of Life" can parallel Feinberg's Transliberation: Beyond Pink or Blue. Sie tells us,

"...if you do not identify as transgender or transsexual or intersexual, your life is diminished by our oppression as well. Your own choices as a man or a woman are sharply curtailed. Your individual journey to express yourself is shunted into one of two deeply carved ruts, and the social baggage you are handed is already packed." (pg. 6)

If you look at the game board, you'll notice that there is no deviation in the life course you are expected to follow. You go to school, get married, have a few ankle-biters, eventually retire, so forth so on. There are no single parents in the game, no alternative sexualities, no allowance for class or race even. Sure, just like in real life, you can encounter hardships such as tax fines or losing your job, etc, but pretty much everyone is on a level-heterosexualized, mind you-playing field. As most of us know, real life just isn't this way. For individuals like Feinberg, those whose gender cannot be easily defined by a simple glance, who prefer to be referred to with gender-neutral pronouns, being different means more than just liking a different color. It means that you can be punished for a simple choice of dress, turned away from a perspective job, and even denied basic health care all because you don't fit into that neat heteronormative binary that the general masses are very set and comfortable in. But it isn't just the "queer" that face the bigotry in this world for not fitting into the stereotypes. It's anyone who does not fit into the norm.
And in this mess of trying to "pass", of trying to just be normal, why is the debate between choice vs. nature matter so much for homosexuality? The simplicity of this concept is exactly what gives the mess its complexity: if it can be proven that being gay or being "other" is a simple factor of genetics, then there is possibility that it can be changed. "History indicates that current genetic research is likely to have negative effects on lesbians and gay men, particularly those living in homophobic societies." (Schuklenk, Stein, Kerinm, and Byne, pg 50) If geneticists are eventually able to alter a person's DNA for the parent who wants their child to have blue eyes instead of brown, to be tall and thin instead of petite and rubinesque, what's to stop them for also wanting that bit of genetic soup eradicated that determines one's sexual orientation so that their child doesn't deviate from what is considered to be "normal".
Consider this: if we were all alike, the world could (possibly) be a peaceful one-there would be no reason to persecute others because of their differences-, but it'd be pretty damned dull. We can add so much to the richness of each other's lives if we could only learn to celebrate one another's uniqueness.