Regarding LGBTQ+ rights. Do what you want, be interested in whom you are are interested, and engage in consensual relationships; just don't harm others. Be who you want, and present yourself as you wish to be presented. Being brought up a fundamentalist evangelical Christian, my first thought on being gay or lesbian was that it was wrong. What was peculiar, however, was that at my church, two individuals kept harping on the fact that you should not have sex with other men, and you should not seek gay relationships. That always confused me, as I never had any interest in any other men. As I got older, I started to realize that if I have so little interest in not seeking a relationship with another man, that those who do may genuinely desire such relationships. After all, I was not interested in every woman. Given the incredible disadvantages of being gay or lesbian in the 1980s, I realized that no one would deliberately chose such a relationship just to "rebel against god." After all, if you wanted to rebel, you could just have a sexual relation with a woman, and that was in theory just as bad, at least, according to the doctrine of fundamental Baptists. Now, in my twenties, I thought I was okay with people being gay, but then one rather fundamentalist person challenged me if I would be okay if my children were gay. At the time, I didn't give an answer because I knew what my gut reaction was, so that led me to deeper soul searching. By the time I was thirty, I was okay with people being homosexual, even if they were my children.
Now, there are so many other branches and names come up as "two spirited", "queer", "bisexual", "transgender", "questioning", "intersex", "pansexual", "androgynous", "asexual", etc. I just gave up on trying to understand what each of these specifically means, because in reality there is a continuum of attractions and feelings of self. Instead, at this point, I don't care how an individual presents themselves nor who they are interested in romantically, as long as they do not engage in nonconsensual actions with others. Such identifiers are useful for allowing individuals to quickly identify themselves to others, but two people identifying themselves as queer really doesn't say anything at all about whether or not they will be attracted to the same person.
I have more-or-less successfully stopped using pronouns 'he' and 'she' at least for humans. As I don't know otherwise, I see no issues with calling a male dog "he" and a female dog "she." For humans, however, its just easier to use demonstrative pronouns: "this student" or "that person" or "this individual's", etc. I don't have a good memory for names, so I'm probably going to have less success remembering someone's preferred pronouns.
I do not suffix my name with "(he/him)" because my entire life, I've avoided identifying as "male." Sure, I was in the army, yes, I dress up in suits, but that is secondary. Its not that I'm not male, its just that I have very little interest or use in identifying as a male. I am not a fan of sports and I did not participate in gender-related groups. I considered joining a fraternity in undergrad, but quickly dropped the idea. Sorry Delta Upsilon. Trying to avoid stereotyping and focusing on gender most of my life, I rather resent being asked to explicitly identify myself as "he/him" or whatever.
One funny story: in Farsi, there are no gender-specific pronouns, so far too many Iranian teaching assistants have accidentally referred to me as "she"and I just got used to it. It would be easier to simply not have gendered pronouns in English. Unfortunately, the word for first-person singular is او which is pronounced "ow" as in "ouch," so I doubt it will be adopted into English.
As for names, call people what they want to be called. I don't care if I'm called "Douglas" or "Doug," but I prefer to be introduced as "Douglas," and some people call me "Willi" (pronounced "vill-ee"). But I really don't care otherwise.
One point I resent are titles. A title that is earned is something worth having, but I don't understand why we must still give ourselves titles such as "Mr.", "Miss", "Mrs.", "Ms." or "Mx". I prefer the last, but in reality, I'd really prefer there to be a box that says "No title." If the University of Waterloo ever allows lecturers to use the title "professor", I will use it, but like "Master Corporal", it would be a title that is earned and not one that is imposed at birth based on perceived gender.
Sex
A book says a thing on this, specifically that there are two sexes: "so God created humans in his image, ... male and female he created them" and "two and two, male and female, went into the ark." This, however, is hardly reflected in reality: while the majority of humans have either two X chromosomes (XX) or one X and one Y chromosome (XY), this is not universal: it is possible to have only one X chromosomes or three X chromosomes. It is also possible to be XXY or XYY or XXYY. In some cases, the individual may present as what is considered male or female, but in others, the individuals share characteristics of both sexes. In most cases, there are additional (and sometimes detrimental) effects not common amongst the majority of the population. Another syndrome (Swyer) is when an individual has XY chromosomes but the Y chromosome is not active, producing a human who appears to be female but cannot, for example, produce hormones necessary for puberty. Yet another syndrome (complete androgen insensitivity) has the individual produce testosterone and other male-specific steroids (androgens), but the body does not respond to these steroids, resulting in the individual being phenotypically female.
If there were "supposed" to be only two sexes, then someone somewhere already failed.
We should, however, understand the genetic benefit of sex in the first place: it is a mechanism to allow the combining the genetic material of two individuals. There are other means of transferring genetic material, but none is as efficient as the wholesale combination of all chromosomes, and so species with sexes are able to mutate and adapt much more quickly than others. One could envision combining the genetic material of three individuals, but the additional overhead seems to have not chosen such a branch. Once sex began, there were now two possibilities: to produce many small reproductive cells, each requiring little energy, or to produce few reproductive cells but investing significant energy into those that are produced. Such differences accelerated and with positive feedback produced what in general today are what we consider "males" and "females." But nature isn't binary, and as we described above, there are differences from the characters of the majority of the population.
Homosexuality
Almost every species appears to have a subset of its population that demonstrates homosexual activity, and such activity has been observed in over 1500 species, and no species has been determined (to the best of my current knowledge) to have no component of its population demonstrating such behavior. Thus, to claim that homosexuality is not "natural" is absurd, to the extreme; almost more absurd than claiming the Earth is flat. To give examples,
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For giraffes, male-on-male mountings account for generally more than half of all such encounters, although less than one percent of mountings are female-on-female.
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For black swans, one quarter of all pairs are male-male, and they either steal eggs or entice a female to lay an egg and then chase the female way.
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It appears all bonobos, one of our two closest extant relatives, are bisexual and sexual relationships are as common as companionship in humans.
From an evolutionary point of view, there are benefits to same-sex matings, not all of which apply to all species:
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If the male of the species is stronger than the female, then two male guardians are more likely to successfully raise an offspring.
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If males compete for females, then same-sex matings may reduce the intensity of such combat, leading to fewer injuries or deaths in the species.
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Having genes that make all offspring more attracted to males means that the female offspring may have offspring themselves, but resulting in more male offspring having more interest in same-sex matings.
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Alternatively, having genes that make all offspring more attracted to females will see the males offspring having more offspring with more females, but resulting in more females having more interest in same-sex matings.
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Finally, it is not necessarily detrimental to a community to have a subset of its population not spending a significant amount of their time raising offspring.
But there are likely many more evolutionary benefits to not having the entire population only interested in mating with the "other" sex (which, as we saw above, isn't true, either, as there are more than just two sexes).
Conservative reactionism
Conservatives tend to promote and preserve traditional societal and cultural institutions, practices, and values. This has evolutionary advantages that tend to allow at least a certain proportion of the population to adopt such an approach to life. It can be beneficial, but it is not adaptive. I will give a few examples:
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In the military, using traditional methods of warfare is generally beneficial, as adopting new techniques may lead to higher rates of failure or greater death, while a drilled traditional technique may not be optimal, it may be more successful. For centuries, the British forces wore red coats, the benefits of which outweighed the obvious disadvantage of being an obvious target, at least, until they didn't, when the British army switched to khaki uniforms. The French infantry entered World War I wearing red pants and blue coats: easy targets for a machine gunner.
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In cultures without knowledge of science-based medicine or the germ theory of disease or condoms may observe that individuals with multiple sexual partners may develop sexually transmitted diseases, diseases that in some cases have serious and life-threatening consequences. Such diseases may be misattributed to being a curse from some divine being, and thus resulting in customs and mores that shun or prohibit multiple sexual partners. Such mores may become so engrained in a society over thousands of years that they are simply assumed to be beneficial or to represent an ideal of some kind or other. The development of the germ theory of disease and of medical treatments as well as the wide-spread availability and of normalization of the use of profilactics helps makes such cultural mores no longer necessary and indeed harmful.
When inter-cultural marriages were first allowed, no doubt you could find women who were beaten by their husbands, and this would result in cries from conservative reactionaries against such aberrations: they had an obligation to prevent individuals from their culture from marrying partners from other cultures. For a long time, such marriages were simply illegal and criminalized. Such bigotry no doubt was a consequence of in-group--out-group differentiation: something that no doubt was evolutionary beneficial tens of and hundreds of thousands of years ago. Today, most marriages are intercultural, and yet even today conservative reactionaries rail against them.
When gay relationships were first no longer made criminal, no doubt you could find individuals who had horrible experiences in that individual's same-sex relationships, and of course, this resulted in the conservative reactionaries using such individuals as poster children, examples that show that such behaviors should not be condoned but condemned and re-criminalized. Perhaps having such strong taboos against same-sex relationships in the Judean highlands resulted in more children, something certainly necessary in the more sparsely populated Judean mountains and Samarian highlands, yet same-sex relationships were quite common in other cultures. Unfortunately, the dominant religion in the highlands of Canaan also became the core of another religion that appropriated this first culture's scriptures, mores and taboos and then went on to dominant in Europe, the Americas and Australia as well as other regions within Asia and Africa.
Today, gender-affirming health care is experiencing a similar repetition: it is easy enough to find one individual that had gone through gender-affirming procedures who subsequently regretted that choice.
For black swans, one quarter of all pairs are male-male, and they either steal eggs or entice a female to lay an egg and then chase the female way.