No hierarchy of humanity

This was an interesting excerpt from Charles Blow's memoir featured in the NY Times about coming to terms with his identity, specifically his bisexuality. It also has an interesting story about how to deal with victimhood (he was sexually abused by a cousin, upon which he wisely remarked, "I had to stop hating Chester to start loving myself. Forgiveness was freedom. I simply had to let go of my past so that I could step into my future." He also makes an interesting argument:

Yes, the mark that Chester’s betrayal had left on my life was likely to be permanent, but blaming him for the whole of the difference in my emerging sense of sexual identity, while convenient, was most likely not completely accurate. Abusers don’t necessarily make children different, but rather, they are diabolically gifted at detecting difference, often before the child can see it in him or herself. It is possible that Chester glimpsed a light in me, and that moved the darkness in him.

The explanation for the strong correlation between childhood abuse and non-heterosexual orientations is that child abuses go after kids who they sense are sexually open? I would like to see some stats on that, because that's the first I have heard of this specific argument. But I feel like this general type of argument is common for victims of child abuse to make. It seems almost too depressing to admit that your sense of "difference" from others all stems from you being a child victim. We would like the world to make a little more sense and be a little less haphazard than that. I certainly have made similar arguments about my own childhood -- that I wasn't made to be this way by what I happened to have experienced in formative years, or at least that I already was predisposed this way. But of course I freely admit that if I hadn't had those formative experiences, I wouldn't be who I am today (whatever else I might look like).

But I also thought his discussion of self-discovery and trying to find an identity in a world that wants to shoehorn and pidgeonhole us into their expectations of what we are or who we should be was interesting.

My world had told me that there was nothing worse than not being all of one way, that any other way was the same as being dead, but my world had lied. I was very much alive. There was no hierarchy of humanity. There was no one way to be, or even two, but many. 
***
I had done what the world had signaled I must: hidden the thorn in my flesh, held “the demon” at bay, kept the covenant, borne the weight of my crooked cross. But concealment makes the soul a swamp. Confession is how you drain it.

DARING to step into oneself is the bravest, strangest, most natural, most terrifying thing a person can do, because when you cease to wrap yourself in artifice you are naked, and when you are naked you are vulnerable.

But vulnerability is the leading edge of truth. Being willing to sacrifice a false life is the only way to live a true one.

I love that first part "There was no hierarchy of humanity." Except as true as it is, almost no one actually believes that, unfortunately.