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I agree here, and most of the other comments make similar points on this front. I've got to rethink my formulation of shame and how it has changed over time.
This also plays into how what is a 'choice' has changed over time. This framing actually sheds a lot of light on why gay and LGBT activists were so insistent that being homosexual is not a 'choice,' it's determined at birth. That way you couldn't shame gay people under this framework.
Seems like the whole transgender 'identity' thing is similar. Before if someone wanted to crossdress, you just told them that's a bad or wrong choice. But now it's somehow indefinably a quality they can't control.
I have a hypothesis that it's to do with trait agreeableness + openness, which are common traits on the left. Agreeable people are more forgiving and accepting of others. Lovely, except that they are also more likely to do so in a way that infantilises the people they sympathise with. Disageeable and low openness people, on the other hand, are very willing to respect other's agency but also more likely to want a society that is "pure", "clean", "respectable" etc. and hence tend to become social conservatives.
A free society depends on social attitudes finding mediums between these social attitudes, where people are seen as having the right to make bad choices (within limits e.g. shooting or robbing people) and the responsibility to suffer consequences of these (e.g. don't expect society to fund your drug habit with a basic income).
That's partly why, though I haven't thought that homosexuality or transphobia were morally wrong since Limp Bizkit was an important force in popular music, I have always been annoyed at the attitude that these behaviours should be tolerated because they can't help doing it (often conflated with the relevant preference being innate) or because they not really bad anyway (fine, but that's accepting them, not tolerating them).
This infantilisation becomes really dangerous when it's applied to e.g. black criminals ("They can't help it - a racist society made them this way!") both for their victims who are denied justice, and through creating a society where young black men experience the tyranny of low expectations.
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Same as what happened for homosexuality. They just made it up1. No one bothers arguing for it anymore, now that the political victories have been won solidly enough that there appears to be no chance of it ever going back. In fact, various trans/queer movements are going back to chip away at this claim, so when it "somehow" becomes a choice again, don't be too confused.
1 - For potentially the clearest example of this, go to their own words. Check out the APA's brief in Obergefell, where they had the opportunity, on the nation's highest stage (for the political result they desperately wanted), to lay out the absolute best scientific case with the absolute best evidence available on the matter. They cited an opinion poll.
The recent huge increase in the percentage of people who are LGBT suggests that at least bisexuality is a choice for 1 in 5 women. The number of gays is up 4x, and lesbians 11x since the silent generation.
The new narrative is that orientation is a spectrum. Perhaps this is true. Male homosexual acts were commonplace in Ancient Greece and Rome and I think this suggests that at least 50% of men would engage in homosexual acts if it were fully normalized. This seems very high bit I can't explain the ancient world without people being quite flexible.
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