In Missé's words, the essentialist approach argues that there is an essence in people, prior to the influence of culture and society. From this point of view, being LGTB, the acronyms used by him, has nothing to do with the society in which he lives; it is a congenital, biological characteristic of people. That would be the main approach to understanding the LGTB issue today “there are people who are LGTB, others are not, and period”, also by members of the LGTB movement and when it comes to developing public policies. But Missé doesn't agree.

The entrepreneur explained that questioning this understanding is risky because this argument has served many people to understand themselves. That it has been useful to answer the question “why is this happening to me?” with motives such as “I am, I was born this way” and that has served to say that the existence of the LGTB community is legitimate. Miss clarified that he does not want to question the stories that LGTB people constructed about their lives, but claimed the possibility of discussing this perspective on a theoretical level.

There is also no common opinion within the LGTB community about the origin of the case, according to Miss. Despite the fact that in recent decades the different movements have fought for depathologization, many LGTB people had taken the same pathology with good eyes. At a time when they were being persecuted in many ways, seeing LGTB as a disease was a way to expose them: “They are sick, they have not chosen, it is not their fault.” Then, thanks to the struggle of the decades, it has ceased to be understood as a disease, but it has remained, “unfortunately”, that is understood as something that is in the essence of people, which is congenital. That is the historic moment we are in, according to Missé, but he would like to change paradigm again.

“I don’t think that being gay or trans is congenital or an essence, because I don’t think it’s heterosexual or that it’s Cis [non-trans people, who identify with the gender they assigned as a child].” To explain that the LGTB issue is related to culture, he departed from the role division between men and women. Confident that all listeners would agree, he said that boys and girls are educated on the basis of stereotyped gender roles, and that these cultural learning conditions people's vital trajectory a lot, although we can then question them. The policies of equality of years would lead to the recognition as a society of the influence of culture in the construction of masculinity and femininity.

“That there are so few women enrolled in scientific careers does not mean that women have no interest in technology. It means that science has gone a long way because of the way it's been socialized. And the same with men, if they don’t put so much interest in care, it’s not because their nature is to fight lions, education is a matter.”

“Sexual orientation is as cultural as gender roles”

Missé wanted to bring to the issue of sexuality that feminist framework she established to understand gender roles. He warned that it is difficult to think that sexual orientation is cultural, arguing that it is biological because a theoretical work has been done for decades. He proposed different elements to break it. To start with, the very idea of sexual orientation is something new, which was first theorized 150 years ago. “In many other cultures, like in ancient Greece, having sex with other men as a man did not make you homosexual, it did not differentiate you from men who had sex with women, nor did it exist as a category.”

On the other hand, it is rare, according to Missé, how we understand our sexual orientation and what characteristics we attach importance to when we think about people who attract us. “We understand our desire, mainly by the sex of others, which is very rare. Most people of this sex don't like it, but that's why we understand our desire. People I like may have many characteristics in the bathroom, but what we highlight is sex. According to many studies, most people look for couples in the same social class, but nobody says it’s ‘sexual middle class’.

Missé also criticized the understanding of sexual orientation as something fixed and static. We say that a person is heterosexual, gay, lesbian or bisexual, and we represent it all our lives. “Entering a category limits our freedom to know us. We should build a society where, without fear of people exploring their sexuality, in high school they put a lifelong label on Rodrigo for eating a penis.” People, rather than a desire orientation, have a desire experience.

Miss said we could think gender identity the same way. “Are people transit from birth because they are a man? Was I born a man in a female body? No, surely I am transshipment because my way of being a woman could not be understood in this world, and because in my head it has been much more productive to think that I was a man. Does that mean that I am actually a man? Or, on the contrary, the world I live in has forced me to choose between several categories, and can I only live in freedom as a man? If I lived somewhere else where gender norms are more flexible, would you think my way of being a woman is not acceptable and maybe I'm a man? Surely not, we don’t know.” For Missé, we could only know what our “own identity” is in a society that does not have such rigid rules.

When thinking about public policies, the way to define the problem determines where the solution is sought, according to Missé. “If I think being LGTB is the essence of people, what I will do is fight discrimination against this collective, protect those minorities. On the contrary, if we think that the source of the problem is that society has too narrow categories to think about gender identity and sexual orientation, we will look for the solution from another place.” And here the sociologist wanted to focus: public policies that can question the mentality of the whole society, not just those that are made to support the LGBT community. “The best LGTB policy is the one that improves the lives of heterogeneous people.”

“Compulsory Secondary Education is late”

Missé said Vox is right in a provocative tone. He set out as an example the workshops he gave to the kids about 14 years old. Ask the heterosexual girls of the class “Do you think that from here to death, in the next 80 years, you can feel the desire of another woman? Even if it is only in a specific moment, although it is an idea that passes through their heads, do you think it can happen?” Most girls raise their hands for doubt. As for boys, silence first and laughter later. They say that the 14-year-old boys are sure that this is never going to happen to them, even in the most diffuse way.

This recurrent fact was what Miquel Missé took to claim the need to educate in sexual and gender diversity. Homophobia is one of the fundamental characteristics of male masculinity, and sadly explained to what extent boys have already built their heterosexuality in Compulsory Secondary Education, cutting their freedom to research or rehearse. Miss recalled how Vox promoted ‘Parental Pin’ in Murcia, so parents can decide whether to send their children to class when talking about sexual diversity in school. “I don’t want my kids to be wrong with this gay and lesbian thing. Why does Vox say? Because she knows that sexual diversity has to do with culture. And I agree with his hypothesis. The difference is that I feel good and they feel bad.”

The answer to Vox from the LGTB movement is many times: “But how will they mix? Nothing to see. A conference must be given so that there is no homophobia against gays, but that will not change heterogeneous people.” Miss said yes, people will change. And it's good to change. “Not for them to become gays and lesbians, but for young people to know that it is OK to explore their sexuality, that they don’t have to know at age 14 whether they are heterosexual or homosexual, that they can ‘transition’ the genders, demonstrate, go, go back, do whatever they want. There is no definitive truth.” Vox knows that if we tell kids to go to schools and explore, they're going to experiment, "and that's why they don't want."

He concluded his speech by saying that he would like to step out of essentialism, open dialogue to all citizens and think that sexual and gender diversity is a collective value, a collective wealth, that benefits the whole society.

“More strategic than denying TERF’s arguments is to get it flattened”

Afterwards, a space was opened for contributions or questions, and a person who appeared as a non-binary trans woman spoke. He stated that he complied with what Missé had exposed, but that he had concerns. I often thought that if I was born in a society where other masculinities were accepted, I might not have chosen to identify myself as a trans woman. But this did not open the way to the arguments of the TERF movement, for example, because the TERF considers the transas ‘men dressed in women’.

Missé had to explain the origin of the TERF concept (acronym for Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist, radical feminists who reject transactions): This is an acronym spread by the U.S. trans movement to call feminists who opposed trans rights. Missé said the concern is understandable, but the solution is not to deny the impact of culture and say that it is in the essence of people. Strategically, it seems more effective to make them overflowing with the same arguments.

“The reasons on the other side are similar to mine, but taken to the extreme. They say that being trans is culturally related and that if it's based on cultural stereotypes, culture is the problem and we have to ban gender transitions. You live as a male woman and you as a female man, and period.” For Missé, these arguments are based on a poor understanding of culture, which does not affect us as if it were cultural. “That transsexuality has to do with gender stereotypes? Yes, of course. Like not being trans. Why do we have to be the boldest and break gender roles, without anyone judging them while others live from them? Cis people also show gender stereotypes, but we do not ban hair removal clinics or makeup companies. Do I repeat gender stereotypes? Yes, of course, like you. Maybe I wouldn’t be Miquel in another world, but to live here I want to be Miquel, because I can be freer, because that is how I am recognized some types of expressions that if I were a woman would be stigmatized”.

People ask the entrepreneur why there are so many identities that are not necessary. And he himself answers. “They are necessary as long as there are rules. As long as there are rules governing normality, there will be people who say ‘I am not like that’. It doesn't matter if a fiction is lesbian and heterosexual, that Cis is as fictional as being trans, they're part of the same movie. We should relax a bit. That categories lose weight, but not only LGTB, regulations should lose weight.”