When you say you "chose" it, do you just mean
it's a product of your social environment?

No. The word "choice" indicates an element of free will, and those of us who use the word "choice" to describe our experiences typically realize this and use the word deliberately.

A more interesting question, however, would be whether people who say "social environment" really mean "choice" as well. By what mechanism, exactly, does environment affect people? Don't people make choices in response to their environment? The choice is not necessarily a direct choice as in "I'm deciding to be queer now" (although there are some of us who did make direct choices like that), but environment doesn't generally seem to impose itself on some helpless victim's psyche without some sort of choices being involved. Of course you could argue that in a case of severe trauma, environment can produce post-traumatic stress syndrome without a person choosing to experience it. But if we're talking about a healthy person responding in a healthy manner to a healthy social environment, then we're usually talking about someone who's making choices in response to that environment.

For further discussion of direct and free choices versus indirect and un-free choices, try "What is a 'direct choice'?" and "What is an 'indirect choice'?"

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