Yes! My family moved every year or two. For me it was devastating. I would start the mental countdown months before every move and cry myself to sleep. Once we got to the new place, wherever it was, it took me months to adapt. I would spend all my free time writing letters to friends in the last place. Often by the time I adjusted, the next countdown had started.

The last move, in the middle of high school, affected me so badly that I went from valedictorian candidate to almost failing out.

To this day I have to remind myself not to obsess over the passage of time. I dread making new friends and getting close to them. I try not to like anything that can't last "forever."

My biological brother, two years younger than me, was always unfazed by this. Two days in a new place, and he was friends with the whole neighborhood, having a ball.

(Now our parents' bitter DIVORCE effed up both of us.)

I also think that age, even if close together, can be a big factor. We moved furiously when I was in elementary school - I think 8 times total 5 of which were between my grades 4-6. My sister was a year younger than I am.

Our moving slowed down. I was able to enter junior high with everyone else moving up from 6th grade. I actually made friends eventually and for the first time in my life, had some popularity. I moved again in the middle of my sophomore year. It was horrible. I was depressed beforehand and didn't adjust well afterwards.

On the other hand, it was a dream for my sister. In the new part of the country, freshmen were still in junior high, so she got to enter school with a couple of friends and enter high school with her class. She was popular and successful in high school. She no longer had the misery of being compared to me (it was usually unfavorably by teachers who had had me) and could forge her own path. The move was great for her. She was religious and when she moved to the Bible Belt, she really found her home.

So for us, both age and personality played a part.

If you'd like to see a pretty thorough treatment of the impact genetic engineering can have on humanity, scifi author CJ Cherryh's Cyteen series may interest you.
We're at the point computers scanning brain activity can produce images of what you are seeing - and what you remember seeing in some cases - and the more we know about the human genome, the closer we get to reprogramming it.

Aaaahhh.
So people are NOT "born that way"... unless it's politically expedient to say otherwise...

BD, I think the point is that people /are/ born with certain dispositions.

Radwaste, I can't wait to see what it all means for the legal system. Of course, what we remember seeing is usually not what we actually saw.

"So people are NOT "born that way"... unless it's politically expedient to say otherwise..."

Hey, look! It's Ben David!

A little under four years ago, you had the opportunity to display something other than a profound lack of understanding, and you had a question asked of you, whereupon you fled the scene, punted or whatever.

So here it is from that other Advice Goddess thread: What do you want to happen to them?

By the way, BD - your statement's fallacious. Guess which one.

> A little under four
> years ago...

I love a man with a long, bitter memory. It just smells like... Dialectic.

♡

And no one (here) has even tried to explain why we care whether or not someone is born gay.

I put a bookmark on it, sweetheart. I do not have your Google-fu.
This memory isn't bitter. The unanswered question is more like a fingernail that has not been trimmed…