It's known that birth order matters. "The more older brothers a male has from the same mother, the greater the probability he will have a homosexual orientation."[1] Interestingly, this occurs only in right-handed males.
See [2]: "Mothers of gay sons, particularly those with older brothers, had significantly higher anti-NLGN4Y levels than did the control samples of women, including mothers of heterosexual sons." There's something going on during pregnancy, and it's starting to be identifiable, but it's not understood yet.
Sexual orientation has a known association with handedness (same-sex-attracted people of either gender have higher odds of being left-handed/ambidextrous than do straight people) so it’s reasonable a priori for a correlation to exist in one sub-population and not the other. Splitting by handedness reduces variance for many sexuality questions — it’s not a sign of p-hacking.
> Sexual orientation has a known association with handedness
That sounds so strange I had to fact-check, and it appears you're right, there does seem to be a measurable association [0].
Perhaps even more interesting, that same article reports: '...the strongest handedness nding for both sexes was a marked tendency for participants who described themselves as ambidextrous also to describe themselves as bisexual'. How weird.
The mechanism is thought to be a maternal immune response to male fetuses, whereby antibodies neutralize male Y-proteins thought to play a role in sexual differentiation during development. This would leave some regions of the brain associated with sexual orientation in the 'female typical' arrangement – or attracted to men. Biochemical evidence for this hypothesis was identified in 2017, finding mothers with a gay son, particularly those with older brothers, had heightened levels of antibodies to the NLGN4Y Y-protein than mothers with heterosexual sons
Are there any studies looking for genetic differences in mothers of gay men? Is it possible for the mothers to have a genetic trait that increases the chance of a gay son, but doesn’t get passed down to that gay son?
I'd definitely be surprised if a significant portion of homosexuality wasn't environmental, but to my knowledge there is a degree of heritability shown in twin studies. Actually reading the article shows that they found several genes that each contribute, but no single gene. That shouldn't be surprising to anyone, considering that almost every complex trait is somewhat affected by a huge number of genes each tweaking the result by a small amount. Remember that DNA controls the development of the body through an insanely complicated Rube Goldberg machine, no one should expect a 1:1 correspondence between any complicated trait and a gene.
Identical twin studies point away from genetics very hard. Pretty much all genetic anomalies will affect both identical twins 100% of the time. The fact that it's less than 40% points much more to environmental effects rather than genes.
From the link:
"Research from the 1990s2 showed that identical twins are more likely to share a sexual orientation than are fraternal twins or adopted siblings."
"We present an overview of behavioral genetics research on homosexual and heterosexual orientation. Family, twin, and adoptee studies indicate that homosexuality and thus heterosexuality run in families. "
This thread seems very insistent on pushing the environmental case when presented with evidence to the contrary. It’s like I stumbled into a Republican convention in the 90s.
Baseless theories: people do this to feel better about LGBT discrimination or the idea of sexuality being out of our control is too scary for dudes who haven’t come to terms with their own masculinity. The latter isn’t necessarily shade, I’m not sure I figured it out until my mid-20s.
You can believe that homosexuality is at least partly environmental while also believing that people should have the freedom to be as gay as they want to be.
I don't really like these appeals to motive; this is quite an interesting empirical question that's disconnected from discrimination. Even if it would turn out that homosexuality is a choice (I don't think it is, but let's assume it would be) then this wouldn't change my position one iota. People choose whether to smoke weed or not, and I also think people should have the freedom to choose to do so.
I'm not so sure what the evidence says on this, but it appears it's less of clear-cut "it's 100% genetic" than it seems to be. These things are notoriously hard to study.
The real problem seems to be that people are afraid that the "God hates fags" people will run with these kind of things, but these people will do their thing anyway no matter what the science says on account of being homophobic twats.
I'm a little confused, you seem to be using choice and environment like they are synonymous here. It's a small nitpick but, even if this is environmental or epigenetic it doesn't necessarily mean that people get to choose the environment they exist in, at least in their formative years.
Reading my post again, I probably could have chosen some better wording here and there. However, the point is that it doesn't matter if homosexuality is either environmental or a choice: the effects people having gay sex remains the same: people have gay sex with no negative consequences to anyone at all. Nothing more. And therefore they should have the freedom to have as much gay sex as they damn well please. Everything else is, quite frankly, just bullshit.
As I pointed out in my other comment[1], I definitely chose to have gay sex at some point and certainly could have chosen not to. I don't think it's so black/white.
Of course! I should have mentioned that I absolutely agree with the thrust of your original comment :) I should have been less confrontational with my opening statement.
That's not at all what was being said. The question of what causes homosexuality or heterosexuality is an interesting scientific question. Even if it were purely by choice, that doesn't reflect on any other characteristic of a person, and any fear that homophobes might try to use some hypothesis or another for their propaganda doesn't matter because they don't care about science anyway.
To be honest, as a gay man, I find the opposite is often true: that somehow insisting on homosexuality being genetically preordained is needed in order to argue against sexual-orientation-based discrimination. That is, if it is an inborn trait then gay people shouldn't be discriminated against because they "can't help it".
I've always found that somewhat offensive, because it somehow takes the sub/unconscious opinion that being gay is defective: "You wouldn't discriminate against someone with a severe birth defect, well gay people can't control it either." Fuck that. Whether it comes about from the genes, or through the environment, or most likely through some combination of the two, it is completely illogical for anyone who has ever felt sexual attraction of any kind to argue that it can "controlled", so I don't need some appeal to "it must be in my genes" to make me feel better.
Also, there are already protected classes that are partly or wholly matters of choice. Religion, pregnancy, familial status, veteran status.
On a related note, I don't see that the is it a choice? question is even meaningful in the first place. Preferences aren't generally something we get to choose. I could probably learn to like some unfamiliar genre of music simply by listening to a lot of it, but you could offer me a heap of money to like the PHP programming language and I'd still be unable to do so. My opinion of it isn't something I can so easily will to change.
It goes beyond that. The fear is that genetics will show that people are in fact not blank slates, and even further that there advantageous and disadvantageous traits common to groups of people.
I'm sure you can surmise the implications of this. Evolutionary biology has been making steady gains in the "nature not nurture" department and it has become an absolute lighting rod to discuss.
"environmental" doesn't mean it's a choice or that it can be effectively changed. For example environmental factors during pregnancy could have influence, but once someone is born it could be mostly determined. That would be entirely consistent with sexuality being somewhat genetic, mostly environmental, but unable to be changed after birth.
When the population base rate is low, and being genetically identical increases the rate to 40%, that is a strong argument that it's highly genetic. The effect only gets stronger to the extent the 40% is from environments where people would be reluctant to admit to homosexual experiences.
I'd say that that's probably more than a little bit of a simplification. Sexuality is almost certainly extremely polygenetic, interacting with the environment in all sorts of miserably complicated ways. Plus, the standard twin study design winds up counting pretty much all error as environmental.
By "mirror image", do you mean very identical looking, or do they also have different handedness or something? I could go 50/50 on this being some term for twins I haven't heard before.
I mean mirror image twins. Approximately 25% of all identical twins are mirror image twins. Or mirror twins, or opposite twins. There are a few different terms for the same phenomenon. The exact cause is unknown but it's theorized that mirror image twins happen when the zygote splits a few days later than 'normal'.
Remember that heritability is a measure of a population, not an individual. So you're measuring the amount that genes vs environment contributes to a trait within that population. It's not an absolute number.
I mean, yeah? It's still fairly strong evidence against there being literally no genetic component to homosexuality, which I definitely saw a lot of in this thread. Unless I misunderstand your comment?
Not disagreeing with your original point, just adding that if you were controlling for environmental factors (everyone has equivalent environment), then you'd see more contribution to variance in phenotypes from genetics than environment. So for homosexuality, I'd bet the reason genetics don't contribute as much is because of the heterogeneous environmental conditions (just think about where you grow up and what religion you are for example).
Edit: a good example of this in action is handedness, because different societies historically have different advantages to using different hands
> Second, the samples used to estimate the handedness heritability were from different places, different years or different centuries and were not always representative of the general population. Heritability is not an intrinsic property of a trait: it varies with phenotypic and additive genetic variances and thus can vary across populations and across generations
Ahh got it, thanks for clarifying. That definitely makes sense, and clicks with my intuition that genetics and the environment are sort of both 100% responsible.
The same goes for a cause we'd consider purely environmental, such as an illness caused by an infection. There will still be lots of associated genes with small effect determining how resilient a person is to the infection. Twins share environmental causes from early stages of development (like an infection during pregnancy) so that angle gets potentially confounded too.
Twin studies typically compare identical and fraternal twins to eliminate such environmental factors (Obviously there are still errors, but they generally wind up as counting towards environmental). And of course polygenetic factors probably have a sort of necessary-but-not-sufficient type of relationship with the traits they contribute too, but that doesn't mean that anything that isn't pegged to a single gene can be thought of as environmental.
Tangential to your point, but I enjoy the comparison you draw between DNA mechanisms and Rube Goldberg machines. It’s an apt metaphor because DNA, and the body as a whole, is constructed quite randomly according to the demands of the environment.
Oh absolutely! I can remember being so confused for so long about how DNA could possibly code for everything in an animal until I learned how convoluted and indirect the effect is. So much of what genes do is totally mediated by the process of development, emergent interactions between cells. No wonder we so rarely find clean correspondences between genes and traits, its honestly a miracle even polygenetic statistics find anything.
I'm curious if they instead focused on a simple neural net that is fed genes + gay/straight flag if the NN would actually successfully predict it.... in other words, NN's don't care about "finding" that specific gene, they kinda include everything and it "finds" the gene without actually pointing it out.
That's very different from the human approach which is to try to find something specific.
I mean compare it to blood diseases based on genetics. There are many genes that lead to health problems that comes down the shape. But it's not just one thing, it's a spread of things. We're thinking Gay is a specific gene we're just as unlikely to find it.
Not arguing any specific direction, but I just suspect the findings if they don't include variances in their methods.
Neural nets for genetics are probably a good fit, and perhaps arguably, a better biological analogy than actual neurons. But they're likely already getting the gist here. They actually say that with genetic analysis (implying more than one gene at a time), they could explain 25% of sexual behavior. To be honest, that's a lot more than I would have expected. In biology, that's a pretty high predictive power, and I think is a way more interesting headline than "no single gene controls sexual orientation".
At the end of the day though, many other factors will contribute, so genetics can only explain so much. With aggressive data collection during development, I would wager we could get sexual orientation prediction much higher. Probably not high on the proverbial bio-ethicist's wishlist of things to make broadly available.
For complex traits, I believe people think that linear effects dominate. Which is another way of saying that they see no advantage to adding a hidden layer, which encodes interactions, compared to adding up individual effects.
The caveat here "for complex traits" means things like height, for which we know there are hundreds to thousands of common variants which matter. Some things aren't like that, e.g. simple recessive gene effects are interactions! And, with more data, this may change.
Yeah, you see a lot of penalized regression techniques applied in that field. With that said, identifying useful non-linearity might just require moar samples.
I don't think it is entirely genetic. There are other factors like development within the mother's body, levels of hormones / chemicals, and so on which could contribute to a different sexuality later on.
This doesn't mean you can change it, and messing with chemical levels in the hope of finding a configuration which leads to "normality" would be very unethical in my eyes.
This is the ingredient most of this discussion is missing. People here seem to mostly believe "If it's not genetic then it's nurture", but that's not the case. It can be all sorts of other things.
My (rusty) recollection of the literature is that our best guess for what most causes homosexuality in human males is the hormone profile given in utero. This is not caused by the fetus's genes, but it will interact with the fetus's genes. Hormone levels could be influenced by the mother's genes[0]
I think what HN-ers are really interested in is, "How much control can we humans practically exercise over this?", the answer being "very little" in both the case of "genes control sexual preference 100%" and "in utero hormone levels control sexuality 100%".
Given the pretty strong birth order effects in play when it comes to gay men[0], you could probably stop about a quarter of the gay male population from being born just by banning consecutive male births, assuming you were willing to enforce a comically evil level of control over the population.
> Given the pretty strong birth order effects in play when it comes to gay men[0], you could probably stop about a quarter of the gay male population from being born just by banning consecutive male births, assuming you were willing to enforce a comically evil level of control over the population.
A one-child policy with exceptions available if the first-born is a girl is a “comically evil level of control” that is hard to imagine being applied in the real world?
A one-child policy is ethically achievable by making the parents rich or otherwise making retirement care a non-concern. If you look at studies, rich people or people who have retirement taken care of are more likely to produce less children. A socialised retirement plan along with a good safety net for those unemployed would likely drive down population massively within a few generations.
> There are other factors like development within the mother's body, levels of hormones / chemicals, and so on which could contribute to a different sexuality later on.
Those could still be influences if it was purely genetic. Biological sex is approximately fully genetic (not quite, but very close to it), but womb environment (I remember pH differences specifically being identified as an influence) play a role in which sperm, with which sex chromosomes, are most likely to survive and reach the ova.
Interesting. The direct correlations seem to be weak, though.
I wonder if biology will turn out to have something comparable to the "hidden units" of machine learning, where less specific inputs from DNA combine in some way to produce intermediate - somethings? - that key specific functions. Probably something that will be explored over the next few decades.
This is an interesting idea. I wonder if we could then use something like [0] to trace back "gay-ness" as well as other "personality features" (I'm not sure what the correct term is here) to the exact genes.
One potential issue I see is that the DNA of any person has an arbitrary length, which poses some challenges in the design of a neural network. Traditionally, this has been solved with LSTMs or RNNs, but as far I know these are designed for data with a temporal dimension (such as text or speech, which progress with time). I'm not sure if that's true for DNA.
Or.. there is no such thing as a gayness gene. Genetics are generally not a strong predictor for human behavior. Gestational environment, what sort of environment you grew up in, whether or not you've suffered any head injuries or have another developmental disorder, internal hormonal environment, the culture you live in... these are all much better predictors.
You could of course argue that environment in the womb is largely genetic (and has a 50% correlation with the kid's genes, which is damn influential).
But once we open that door we're going down an extended phenotype rabbithole where you can start to talk about social interactions amongst non-immigrants being partially genetic because of correlations within regions, etc, and hilarity (with a healthy dash of idiocy) ensues.
The greater point being that saying something is either genetic or due to environment is always a pointless exercise because there is no separation, there are merely genes that spread without ever deciding how to allocate blame or credit for their successes and failures.
Here is the speculation part: the more older brothers one has the older they will be from you and entering into sexual experimentation with younger brothers. A quick google shows that this is normal behaviour but the sings are normally similar ages.
I tend to think its probably a mix between nature and nurture.
I suppose it depends on causality - do otherwise "str8" men who experiment with other men "turn" gay, or do "queer" men self select themselves for such experimentation?
Regarding your hypothesis, I'd suggest that perhaps queer kids are more likely to be targeted by older male relatives for sexual abuse.
It's unlikely there's a gene that codes for being gay. Homosexuality instead is better thought of as more like why men have nipples. Obviously the nipples are not useful to the reproductive success of men, but genetics and natural selection are messy and there's likely no easy path to not having them in men while maintaining their function in women.
For homosexuality, the systems of sexual attraction in the brain need to tune to the gender somehow, and this is a system which, apparently, isn't 100% successful at aligning gender and sexual attraction. So the answer to "why are some men attracted to men" is the same as "why do men have nipples:" it's because women need to be attracted to men and because women need nipples.
And of course it needs to be said that just because someone's sexual attraction isn't aligned to their gender it doesn't mean that they're inferior. We don't measure the worth of a person by their reproductive success.
On the other hand, the extiction of our species for not-reproducing would be quite a failure even on our own metrics.
So it's not like we're some higher-dimensional ethereal beings, not tied to evolution and our natural fitness, with relation to our successes and failures as a species (and even as individuals).
To reverse the "psychological projection" trope, it's just that we learned throu psychological denial to ignore those aspects most of the time...
Right. Selfish genes don't necessarily need to be beneficial for every individual that carries them. Queen bees have evolved -- through regular Darwinian evolution -- the trait of having a majority sterile offspring. Those genes don't help the worker bees, but they help the queen and so get passed down.
If you have a genetic mutation that means 1/4 of your offspring won't bear their own children, but will increase the likelihood of your grandchildren living to adulthood, that may well be something that gets selected for.
Not saying that this is necessarily the case with "gay genes," simply that it is perfectly consistent with standard evolution.
I've seen this hypothesized and studied before as how homosexuality exists in the face of evolution. That is, some combination of (a) without children of their own homosexuals are better able to help raise their other family members, (b) homosexuality is strongly correlated to higher fecundity of female family members, and (c) homosexuality is just a fluke in sexuality in general, similar to how other complex biological processes often have birth reflects related to some failure in each step of those processes.
While the "fertile siblings" theory and evidence make a lot of sense to me, I also find it somewhat depressing, as if being gay is just kind of a fluke byproduct to help your other family members.
Yeah, evolution is a bitch. Never ascribe moral worth based on what evolution favours.
I think the theory makes more sense in communities in conflict. Missing fathers make the presence of an uncle much more important and high mortality rates make fertility rates more important.
Interestingly that somewhat overlaps (to my untrained eye) with cultures more accepting of homosexuality: early Japan, ancient Greece, modern tribal societies.
Not sure if nipples are the best analogy here. Formation of nipples is largely down to how fetuses develop; i.e. nipples form before sexual differentiation. And I believe in some mammals, males in fact do not have visible nipples.
Here's the way you answer your question. Ask yourself, is this the answer I would have said in middle school? Or maybe, maybe high school. If you think the answer is worth more than that. Well... May god save your soul.
The recapitulation theory (Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny) is based on observation. The tendency of creatures to develop in stages that roughly correlate as to how their ancestors evolved, is not related to sexual preference. There's no evidence that homosexuality shares the same root cause(s) as to why men have nipples, theoretical or otherwise.
I found the conclusion to be misleading, based on this “ The researchers split their study participants into two groups — those who reported having had sex with someone of the same sex, and those who didn’t. ”
So apparently you are gay if you have had sex one time with someone of same sex sometime, anytime in your life. Bisexual, bicurious, some one straight who experimented, etc would all then be “gay”, which are all more prevalent than being strictly gay.
That’s like looking for genes that predict left handedness by selecting people who at some point in their lives have written with their left hand. No wonder they got confusing / weak signals. They should have limited to including only people who actually identified as being gay.
My understanding is that people who self identify as gay are a much smaller subset within the group of people who engage in homosexual activities. For example, in my Asian country a large segment of the guys you meet cruising are married men (to women) who identify as completely straight. Perhaps the wife is unwilling to engage in acts you enjoy, and sex with men is low effort high reward. I also knew many guys who preferred sex with men but couldn't fathom a romantic relationship with one, and identified as mostly straight. It's highly likely that most (though not all) of these men were truly gay/bi/pan, but unable to accept it due to social conditioning.
I agree that a single encounter probably shouldn't count for the terms of the study.
Harsh bucket boundaries are always the catch with studies like this. If you grew up in a smoky house or have had at least one cigarette in your life, you fall into a gray area of studies where you don't qualify as a smoker or a non-smoker.
I recently read about the spectrum of homosexuality. Its not a black and white issue. I don't recall the Kinsey scale being the article I read, but it seems relevant. If this is the case, it seems less likely its a single gene. Perhaps its multiple gene expressions accompanied with environmental factors?
Not neccessarily. Humans are social creatures, our genes' survival is not solely dependent on our individual ability to pass them on, since we share genes with our siblings and parents as well as offspring. For example, families with some non-reproducing offspring may fair better due to having a higher adults/children ratio.
If such a gene existed (which perhaps it doesn't), it might benefit families who had members carrying it.
This is the same reason some species have evolved alarm-calling when a predator is nearby. It benefits the collective (who share the gene), but at an obvious detriment to the individual's ability to pass on their genes in this case.
In addition, one suggestion is that a possible “gay gene” would be something that causes extremely strong attraction to men in both men and women with that gene. Women with this gene would then be more likely to father children, which could counter the evolutionary pressure resulting from the male offspring with that gene not having any offspring.
(I’m massively oversimplfing of course, my bio knowledge is fairly limited).
In my EvoBio class a decade ago, my professor told us the theory that homosexuality could be adaptive based on birth order because it would reduce fraternal rivalry: the family would have an additional adult to care for the young without being a reproductive competitor.
This doesn't make much sense, though. Every additional human is a very expensive investment of time, resources, and effort on the family, and offers no material return on investment for at least a decade in terms of productivity. True, while the gay son might not produce offspring to compete with his brother's kids, it also means he brings no additional mate and offspring to help out the family.
A common analogy here is that in lots of insects, you see whole groups of non-reproductive members, and yet the idea of a "non-reproductive worker insect" hasn't "evolved into extinction."
(I'm not commenting on whether being gay has a genetic basis or whether it's an example of kin selection, because honestly, I have no idea.)
The point is that non-reproductive insects don't have specific set of genes that make them non-reproductive - it is not an inheritable trait. If it was, then it would have evolved into extinction.
Of course they do (have genes that make them non-reproductive) and of course it hasn't (evolved out of extinction).
There is nothing about a possible genetic basis (whether complex and indirect or simple and direct) for an individuals non-reproductiveness that implies it has to result in extiguishing itself.
Humans are social enough that genetics which benefit the group at the expense of the individual are perfectly selectable.
Heck it even works for utterly antisocial species.
All that's required for a trait to persist is for it to be good for any members by any means. It doesn't have to be good for the individual carrier, and it doesn't have to be good in a way that we happen to understand.
> If a gene copy confers a benefit B on another vehicle at cost C to its own vehicle, its costly action is strategically beneficial if p_B > C, where p is the probability that a copy of the gene is present in the vehicle that benefits. Actions with substantial costs therefore require significant values of p. Two kinds of factors ensure high values of p: relatedness (kinship) and recognition (green beards).
non-reproductive workers benefit the reproductive insects. For instance, worker bees benefit the queen. The queens that lay the eggs in the most beneficial ratios are most likely to survive and pass on.
For this analogy to be equivalent, it should lead to having gay children benefit the adults enough to allow for more successful breeding.
I do am not commenting on one's gayness has a genetic basis, because I also have not idea.
Not really. Say I'm shortsighted, and still a potential mating partner due to a variety of other traits (being a billionaire, or looking suspiciously similar to Ryan Gosling). In that case, I would be able to transmit my genes to my eventual offspring.
The case with gay genes is different. Regardless of any other trait, I'm genetically prone to not have any offspring. Thus, eventually my genes would be less and less common.
>All that's required for a trait to persist is that it benefits the pool.
Or that it's less bad than whatever beneficial trait it's coupled to.
Humans consume a lot of water in order to shed heat. Our backs are pretty f-d up. Our brains waste a lot of energy and require a very long childhood. But on the flip side we're basically terminator compared to the African fauna our primitive ancestors hunted.
I'm assuming you're right since I don't know much about this subject, but how does that mechanically work? How does a trait, even if it is beneficial to the community, get passed down if the members that have that trait don't have offspring?
"If there was a genetic cause for shortsightedness, why is it still around?" - because myopia doesn't significantly affect your chances to produce offsprings.
It seems reasonable that being gay does significantly reduce your ability to have children; therefore it is reasonable to expect that if it was an inheritable trait it would have been selected against.
Everyone keeps saying that, but it's simply not true.
We have understood how this is not true for decades or even hundreds of years, and it's not even some impossible concept to grasp.
All that's required for a trait to persist, is for it to benefit the pool, not the individual.
The only way the seemingly obvious but incorrect idea you descibed applies is, a trait which is good for the group at the expense of the individual, if it's 100% effective like sterility unlike say alarm-calling which merely carries a risk for the individual, is that such a trait can never grow to where all members exhibit it.
But it can absolutely be strongly selected for maintaining whatever the optimal percentage is. IE, if it benefits the pool for 10% of members to be sterile, then the percentage of sterile members will not decrease through the mechanism you and so many imagine, but will stay at 10% for as long as the benefit exists.
And everybody keeps saying THAT. The problem is, that's a secondary effect. A secondary effect is going to have to be pretty strong to counter an obviously anti-competitive primary effect. You can construct scenarios, but I haven't seen any that seem particularly compelling. It seems to me that the default position of "it's not genetic" is much better supported by the data.
> All that's required for a trait to persist, is for it to benefit the pool, not the individual.
This is a well debunked belief. Genes are selfish, and they only reproduce to the benefit of the gene.
Group selection does not occur.
An example is evolutionary stable strategies, where cheaters persist in the population, even though the pool would be better off if all individuals in a pool were selfishly altruistic towards pool members.
A much better example of counter-intuitive evolution, one that's literally textbook, is sickle-cell anaemia. It's a genetic disease (bad) that offers protection against malaria (good), so it's more common in areas where malaria is a fatal problem for significant numbers of people. This illustrates the principle that genes do more than one thing, and can be simultaneously adaptive and maladaptive at the same time. As a hypothetical example, maybe the same genes that make a man fractionally more likely to be gay could protect his sister from ovarian cancer or stop him going bald.
A lot of the musings I've seen in this direction have been along the lines of
(1) some people are bisexual and thus would occasionally reproduce and
(2) if sexuality promotes "togetherness" and "group cohesion", then having "our gay uncle who 'has connections' and is always willing to help out the family group" is still beneficial for the family unit and thus a gay gene would not be selected against within that family lineage.
Probably not a majority of the population, but there's no reason for such a "gay gene" (if it were to exist) to be driven to zero.
Not if it is recessive. Example with a recessive "gay gene":
Both parent have one normal allele and one "gay" allele. The repartition of the offspring will be:
- 25% both normal alleles (normal phenotype)
- 50% one normal allele (normal phenotype)
- 25% both gay alleles (gay phenotype)
1. If having gay relatives improved the chances that you will have children and they would survive to themselves reproduce, then evolution could favor maintaining a gay gene.
Remember that for nearly all of our species' existence, and that of the pre-humans we evolved from, we've lived most of our lives in arrangements where our close relatives lived near us and most people in the region were also related to us.
Your children have half your genes. Your siblings' children have a quarter of your genes. So in effect two of your siblings children are equivalent to one of your own as far as getting your genetic material into the next generation goes.
If being gay meant that your sibling does not have their own kids to take care of and so they devote effort that would have gone to raising their own kids to helping their straight siblings' with their kids or to doing things that help the village that those with kids don't have the time for, that might greatly increase the survival rate of those kids enough to make up for not having kids of their own.
2. Being gay doesn't mean you can't have kids. Throughout most of our history, many many people have had kids with people they have not been attracted to. That goes for both gay people and straight people.
3. What if it were a bisexual gene rather than a gay gene? Having people in your tribe that can form with both men and women the kind of close bonds the people form for the sexual partners has some obvious advantages.
There is also the 'beneficial sibling' theory where a homosexual sibling improves the reproductive success of their siblings/close family via being able to devote more energy to their siblings offspring instead of their own or are able to gather/utilize more resources that leads to a familial advantage.
* the same gene can have different phenotypes in different individuals. One phenotype may be net negative but the benefit from the other makes it net positive.
* in social animal gene can be carried by relatives. Extreme example is ants and bees, most of them are not fertile but they help to spread their genes by helping those who are.
More than just that, as far as I can see, there is no reason this only applies to social species.
If it benefits the pool that x% of members have a trait, even full sterility, then the genetics will result in x% having that trait, as long as the benefit continues to exist.
I'm not sure what an example mechanism might be for some mountain cats or spiders or whatever that the species benefits from 4% of their members being sterile, but I see no reason that there couldn't be one, and it doesn't require the unfortunate exhibitors of the trait to preserve and occasionally produce the next exhibitor of the trait.
Let's assume the benefit is improved female fertility. If it's an autosomal trait, half of the carriers will be male, and lead to the vast majority of them refusing to have offspring. That would require the sisters to have a pretty spectacular bump in the number of offspring to offset their gay brothers. Indeed, since the trait is clearly polygenic, all the sisters do not inherit the trait equally, if at all. The sisters who do inherit it would have to be spectacularly fecund to compensate.
It might persevere through kin selection. For siblings who share the gene, such an individual would have all the benefits of a male/female (security, hunting, care-giving), but none of the mating competition. One could argue if such a gene existed, it would be quite an altruistic one.
Not necessarily. If the gene is recessive, it will be passed on. The question then is: what happens when that gene expresses itself?
The naive reaction is: individuals with the "gay gene" won't reproduce and it will eventually die out. A more nuanced perspective is that while that individual won't reproduce, their presence in the community helps the clan's survival, so a community with the gene is overall stronger, so the gene will stay around.
Depending on other conditions (environmental and genetic), a particular gene may not be expressed in the same manner (or at all). You can find simple examples in recessive alleles. The phenotype of such genes will only be expressed when both alleles are of a compatible type.
Another striking example: Sickle cell disease will only be deadly if both alleles carry the unfortunate mutation. But the unhealthy allele is unlikely to be eliminated by evolutionary pressure because carrying one allele provides significant protection against malaria.
The interactions between genes and their environment is usually more complicated that these simple examples, but I hope it illustrates that evolutionary pressure may not suffice to erase some apparently unsustainable alleles from the population.
The striking example that you gave is more striking than that. Having one allele actually brings protection from malaria. So the recessive is selected for..as long as not too many people have it.
That is why sickle-cell anemia mostly shows up in people whose ancestors came from places with a long history of malaria.
The other posts cover possible reasons why being gay may be actually good for the utility function of a gene.
There is another hypothesis for why this hypothetical gene might not evolve into extinction. Being gay may just be a side effect of it, with some other benefits being the reason this gene stays in our gene pool.
The argument around this is that it's of social benefit rather than individual. Particularly when child/infant mortality is high and women have lots of children, it could be helpful to have a pool of adults supporting the child-rearing of others, especially their immediate siblings.
Well yes and no. It might actually give a benefit to other siblings. It could manifest itself only in certain circumstances in the womb or in the environment if something helps the phenotype manifest itself...
For example there is a correlation with sibling order and homosexuality. The more boys your mother had before you the more chance you have of being homosexual. We're talking about a non-negligible increase of over 30%: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male...
Interestingly, I've heard about many people who went from "straight", married with children to leaving their families because they've found out they're gay. I even knew one whose first sexual experiences were with women, and he decided he was gay later. In his "straight phase" he could have had fathered children if he weren't careful. Curiously, I've never heard about opposite cases (spontaneous [1] gay -> straight transition). Make of it what you want.
[1] Spontaneous = ignoring attempts to "cure" gay orientation.
Yes, it would; being recessive just makes the process take longer.
I've pointed out on other HN threads that homosexuality has much lower concordance in identical twins (around 40%) than almost any other trait, making it an especially unlikely candidate for direct genetic causes.
If you take a simplistic view of genetics where you draw Punnet squares and check if the offspring has GG alleles, maybe. Even if there are social benefits to there being some gay people around, that would still make those alleles pretty unlikely to be passed on. That doesn't imply there isn't a genetic component. Real genetics is a lot more complicated than that.
The fact that something is genetic doesn't imply there is no social component. Genetic factors could lead to a predisposition for a certain behavior that would still be altered by environment. There could be many genes that each has some small effect but none of which is an on/off switch. Those would lead to more complicated selection pressures.
We are pretty sure there is a genetic component. We are pretty sure that it isn't just "if you got the gay allele then you's gay".
Also, some gay (or mostly gay) people have children. This is because a) most people are at least a little bit bisexual, b) people may want to have children even if the sex act isn't appealing, and c) there are social pressures to conform.
People latched onto the idea that sexuality is genetically determined because it seemed like the only viable way to defend themselves against rampant religious bigotry and oppression. It was a rope dangling into the well you were trapped in, and the well was filling with acid, but if you could just manage to climb that rope then you'd make it out. The reasoning went something like "if I can prove that sexuality is genetically predetermined then it means that I didn't choose to be this way". As if genetic predestination were the only possible reason to grant protection to a class. Some people fairly quickly saw the problem with this defense and expanded it to include other uncontrollable elements of childhood development, again leaning on the "if I didn't have a choice _then_ it has to be ok". As if choices were still somehow the problem.
But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control. If it's constructed then it's constructed. If it's not then it's not. People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason.
I think the idea of genetic predestination might have been a short-term useful crutch in the past but I hope that we've begun to progress beyond needing people to explain themselves.
You're collapsing a huge societal design space into a narrow, ultra-individualistic western viewpoint. Your point only makes sense in societies that take it as a given that individual autonomy trumps the right of society to enforce behavioral, moral, and social norms. That approach is not morally required and almost no non-western society embraces that viewpoint. Almost all of Asia and Africa accepts that requiring conformity in voluntary lifestyle and personal expression is legitimate. There is nothing special about sexuality in that respect--nearly everyone in the world thinks its perfectly legitimate for societies to, for example, impose taboos on sexual activity outside the bounds of some marriage-like relationship. By your reasoning, modern western sexual permissiveness is morally required--even when it comes to voluntary choices. That's a radical (and quite ethnocentric) claim.
In that context, whether something is a choice, versus a characteristic that cannot easily be changed, is tremendously important. It elevates the issue from ordinary policing of norms into the realm of human rights.
And of course, it's ridiculous to say that people "latched on" to sexual orientation being immutable to appease "bigots." Sexuality being immutable (or at least not easily changed) is an observation that rests on the experience of countless individuals who suffered tremendous pain and suffering trying to deny their sexual orientation. And the article, of course, nowhere suggests that sexual orientation is a choice. Many things are immutable characteristics, or at least not easily changeable--without being traceable to a specific gene.
As a gay person who periodically wades past the dialectical peat bog that is Hacker News, I am begging you to stop digging. I cannot tell you how disheartening it is to find comments like this at the top of a thread, let alone anywhere. Perceived mutability is one aspect that affects perceptions of marginalized groups. Neither perceived nor actual mutability justifies discrimination.
A world in which gender transition were a trivial weekend occurrence would not excuse the gender wage gap. If conversion therapy were effective, it would still not be moral to imprison people for being gay. Being able to lighten one's skin does not, and should not, excuse the shooting of Black people at traffic stops.
For some of this, this isn't an armchair "design space". Some of us still have people shouting "faggot" at us from passing cars. Some of us have strangers threatening to kill us in the supermarket. Some of us have been fired when our old names were found out. Some of us are trying to figure out how to tell our children how not to be murdered. These kinds of discrimination are not "perfectly legitimate" social choices. They have impact on actual human beings.
Nobody here is saying that discrimination isn't wrong. But why that discrimination is wrong matters. In the west, you can appeal to notions of individual self-determination: "We shouldn't care about peoples' consenting sexual conduct." Those rationales have little meaning in Asian or African societies. That's why the fact that sexual orientation is not a choice people make one day, but is instead something they are born with, is critical to point out.
I’m not “armchair designing” anything. I’m from a Muslim country that does not accept western notions of individualism or sexual permissiveness. So it’s important that, even then, LGBT rights have a solid justification in the fact that it’s biology, not choice. That’s something you can educate people about and improve things. Invoking fallacious hypotheticals like “what if sexual orientation was a choice”—which is the exact opposite of what LGBT advocates believe to be true—undermines that. Instead, it seems like a pretext for universalizing western sexual morality more broadly. That’s imperious—there is no reason why protecting LGBT rights should require embracing western ideas about sexual morality directed to voluntary choices. And ultimately, it’s actively harmful for the hundreds of millions of LGBT people who live outside the west.
> I’m from a Muslim country that does not accept western notions of individualism or sexual permissiveness.
There is no such Western notion of individualism or sexual permissiveness. The sexual mores of Roman Catholics in South America are very different than the sexual mores of Roman Catholics in Italy and very different from some polygamous Mormon enclaves in the US. The "West" once uniformly banned homosexuality and has been very inconsistent in slowly coming to tolerate it, and such tolerance has certainly also grown in the "East" in a similar slow and inconsistent fashion.
What there is, in many countries, is a notion of the necessity of secularism in law and government. Brought about precisely because religions cannot agree about basic fundamental points of morality and they have been all too willing to fight each other over it throughout history. In order for the various religious sects to stop fighting one another, it was agreed in many nations that the law shouldn't play favorites with a given religions view of morality.
This separation of church and state is indeed found far and wide and certainly goes beyond the "West". The underlying principle, that you cannot get people even in a single nation to agree upon what otherwise harmless things are taboo, ultimately leads to other protections for self expression and in this case homosexuality.
If I follow you, you're suggesting that these Asian and African societies you have in mind would be more accepting of LGBT rights if they were convinced that it was something biological and immutable.
I present the counter example of birth sex, which is quite genetic and practically immutable for most people. Do those same countries afford women and men equal freedoms and opportunities, considering the biological nature of the trait?
A model individualist society would. A model collectivist society might not. With my collectivist hat on: Whether or not something is "a choice" doesn't have any bearing on whether it is good for society. Even a biologically, incorrigibly gay person should reproduce sexually, for the good of the collective.
I can speak to this pretty confidently as somebody living in Utah and raised Mormon: The biology argument does not matter. Religious people acknowledge that some are born with predispositions, even strong ones, to commit certain sins. They consider them challenges to be overcome. They absolutely do not exempt you from the responsibilities of a member of that society.
Like it or not, sexual actions and lifestyles are a choice. Muslims and Christians know this. Fighting the biology battle might lose us ground (to the extent that any evidence at all comes up against it), and it will never gain us any.
Liberal gender and sexual norms are very clearly better for humanity and it is a moral imperative that the rest of the world adopt them. Social conservatism of the sort practiced in most of the world, including but not remotely limited to the Muslim world, is incompatible with basic human rights and freedoms. To be very clear: social conservatism is bad and social liberalism is good.
As someone not from the west, I hold these beliefs very firmly. The abuse and oppression I saw growing up was the inevitable result of patriarchal culture. Traditional gender and sexual norms are not worth saving. I hope some day they're seen in the same light we see feudalism or chattel slavery today.
So, yes, in that sense "born that way" is a compromise with bigots.
There is no reason to treat "social liberalism" as practiced in western countries in 2020 as some inextricable bundle, where each change must be considered "progress" independently. For example, while the sexual revolution tries to ride the coat tails of equal legal rights for women, there is no reason a society can't have equal rights for women without embracing the premises of the sexual revolution. (Don’t forget that the sexual revolution has freed men to do a lot of socially harmful things that burden and hurt women.) Even in the west, it is far from the consensus view that the sexual revolution was a good thing: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/07/sex-re.... Can a society have equal rights without, for example, the epidemic of fatherlessness that plagues the United States?
It’s impossible to deny that socially liberal societies today aren’t doing a great job at one of the fundamental functions of a society: raising children. North America and Western Europe suffer from birth rates so low they’d soon cease to exist if it wasn’t for immigrants from socially conservative countries (Latinos in America, Muslims in Europe).
The low rates of physical teenage sex in the west today are a result of a generation of social liberalism along with technological progress (enabling virtual means to explore one's sexuality). Social liberalism means having a healthy attitude towards sex and gender and being able to talk about them freely, not treating them as taboo subjects.
Low birth rates in the US and EU are a direct result of socially conservative public policy, where having kids generally means one's standard of living goes down. France has the best child support and consequently the highest birth rates in the EU.
> Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.
In Bangladesh, where I'm from, it's taken for granted that getting married, going to mosque, and having kids is the way to a good and happy life. Yes, Bangladeshis are backwards people in many ways. But maybe they’re not wrong about everything. Maybe in this area, Bangladeshis know something about being human that social liberals have talked Americans into forgetting?
Oh wow, the people that are are happy with things as they are and want to "conserve" those things are happier than the people that are downtrodden under the current system and thus want to change it.
> So it’s important that, even then, LGBT rights have a solid justification in the fact that it’s biology, not choice.
... and if the science turns out otherwise? We just ignore reality so people are not harmed? it would be preferable if individual rights are protected regardless. Sorry, just my "western" view.
> Almost all of Asia and Africa accepts that requiring conformity in voluntary lifestyle and personal expression is legitimate.
Everyone has a right to not be executed or go to jail for their sexual orientation or gender identity. This is sadly not the case in many countries.
The sand trap of moral relativism is not the point - people in the 'west' are making the normative claim that this is a fundamental human right.
New information about possible genetic determinants of sexual orientation (or lack thereof) is not fundamental to determining if this is in the "realm of human rights". What is key is: people who are LGBT emphatically cannot choose to 'convert' to some other sexual orientation or gender identity. Thus, any private or public policy that discriminates on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity is wrong.
You and I agree it’s a human right, and the reason why. I said its a human right because it's a "characteristic that cannot easily be changed." You said it's because "people who are LGBT emphatically cannot choose to 'convert' to some other sexual orientation or gender identity."
If there's a difference between that phraseology, I don't mean it to be substantive--I agree with what you said. It's OP who rejects that premise.
Even if it were an easily changeable characteristic, we should consider it wrong for any society to threaten harm or punishment or ostracization for this. That the characteristic is or isn’t easily changed is not relevant.
It’s not a question of moral relativism. You’d have to argue that any behavior is a crime in order for it to be legitimate for perpetrators to suffer consequences. Otherwise, it is wrong that someone should suffer consequences, all else equal.
I like nachos. Tomorrow I might not like nachos. It is wrong in any society if my liking or disliking of nachos results in me being killed, bullied, shamed, etc. Any society that claims a right of legitimacy to impose social norms in this way on the liking or disliking of nachos is a morally wrong society. There’s no debate about this. You can either argue convincingly that nacho preference is a crime, or else any attempt to treat it like a crime is wrong.
Assuming that there are some actions that it is morally just to punish, if not the individual's ability to exert free will to avoid them, then what (in your mind) sets apart those actions from those that it is not morally just to punish?
Or are you making the claim that it is never morally justified for any action to be punished?
>Or are you making the claim that it is never morally justified for any action to be punished?
I'm sorry, but are you terminally stupid? Of course they didn't make that claim, that's why the choose the example of Nachos.
> You’d have to argue that any behavior is a crime in order for it to be legitimate for perpetrators to suffer consequences.
Okay, but there was a time when homosexuality was a crime in the majority of Western countries, and in some places around the world, it still is a crime. What then/there?
Moral reasoning based on current law is partially circular reasoning, and also tends to ossify current law/state of moral progress.
> Okay, but there was a time when homosexuality was a crime in the majority of Western countries, and in some places around the world, it still is a crime. What then/there?
One easy place to start-- are the laws are based on kinds of dubious claims that our own social and scientific history has rejected?
And at least in Africa, Western evangelicals have spent a lot of time and effort exporting their same stupid ideas about homosexuality. So our Western approaches should be pretty easy to copy-paste there. :)
I'm mostly on your side. I agree that choice or not, it should not matter.
But, if I wanted to try to push back, ... your nachos require cheese. Cheese requires cows. Raising of cows are a major source of greenhouse gas etc... Therefore you should not be allowed to eat nachos as it's bad for society at large and you should be forced to stop eating them. (substitute beef or whale meat or whatever it takes to see the point).
Here we're getting into another weird issue where you say "we should consider it wrong"
Why should we consider the moral choices of a culture to which we do not belong wrong? What benefit comes to the people affected, or to us through this mental finger wag?
There's a huge difference between "policing of social norms" and equal rule of law for all regardless of who they choose to have sex with.
Maybe you can argue that it's fine for someone to choose not to be friends with gay people but it shouldn't be OK for the government withhold rights/law/healthcare/social security/education/electricity/water/etc because of it. Who cares if it's genetics or a choice.
Society cares, that’s the point. Society cares about who you have sex with, and society cares about whether something is genetic. If society didn’t care we’d be having a different discussion.
Clearly there are multiple societies, with varying cultural norms (as we can see from the range of opinions here). While you can't have societies without individuals obviously, you can only barely have individual humans without societies (and they're usually not doing too well, a few hermits and mystics notwithstanding).
Neither of those things is okay, because sexual orientation is immutable, not a choice.
As to things that are choices, such as polygamy and adultery, the government can certainly punish people for those, even in western countries. It could set the age of consent to 25 if it wanted to--it would certainly have a rational basis for doing so. That's true even in the west, much less anywhere else.
> Neither of those things is okay, because sexual orientation is immutable, not a choice.
I don’t think it is that uncommon to have phases and be heterosexual for a while and homosexual for another. I haven’t seen a convincing proof that it is immutable, though I think you’re right when you say that it’s not (necessarily) a choice.
But you’re basically using the reasoning the OP found unhelpful, just swapping immutability instead of genetics. You should not be protected from discrimination because you are something you did not chose; you should be protected because you’re a human and deserve the same opportunities as any other. Who cares with whom you want to have sex?
> As to things that are choices, such as polygamy and adultery, the government can certainly punish people for those, even in western countries.
It is just as wrong when it’s done to enforce narrow moral norms and a reactionary view of sexuality. Again, who cares, as long as both parties consent and nobody gets hurts?
Polygamy is different and raise more issues than just 2 humans having sex.
> But you’re basically using the reasoning the OP found unhelpful, just swapping immutability instead of genetics.
There are many things that are (practically) immutable that aren't rooted in genetics, so no, the distinction isn't unimportant.
> It is just as wrong when it’s done to enforce narrow moral norms and a reactionary view of sexuality. Again, who cares, as long as both parties consent and nobody gets hurts?
"As long as both parties consent" is a particular view of human sexuality that is not even fully embraced in the west, and is largely rejected everywhere else. It's perfectly legitimate for societies to enforce what libertines might regard as "narrow" and "reactionary" sexual norms--so long as they don't discriminate against protected classes. A society could decide, for example, that the destructive effect of adultery on families and children warrants its prohibition. That's a choice a society can make, or not make. We can debate the merits of it, but human rights does not require a society to accept the values of the western sexual revolution.
The story is quite different when it comes to immutable sexual characteristics. That elevates it into the realm of issues such as discrimination based on race or ethnicity--into a human rights issue. We regard those very differently.
> There are many things that are (practically) immutable that aren't rooted in genetics, so no, the distinction isn't unimportant.
Yet in this case it’s used for the same purpose, building an argument saying that people should not be punished for it because they can’t change it. It’s moving the goalposts and it is not productive in the long run. There are much better reasons to accept homosexuality.
> "As long as both parties consent" is a particular view of human sexuality that is not even fully embraced in the west, and is largely rejected everywhere else.
Indeed, if you believe in human rights and that having pleasure does not give someone the right to harm someone else. The fact that there are some horrible people or repressive societies does not make that any less true.
> It's perfectly legitimate for societies to enforce what libertines might regard as "narrow" and "reactionary" sexual norms--so long as they don't discriminate against protected classes.
That is very US-specific. Protected classes in itself is a device to afford protection to some people whilst keeping the moral right to be arbitrarily repressive in any other way. Discrimination is wrong regardless of whether the reason is in a list of things politicians feel like protecting.
> A society could decide, for example, that the destructive effect of adultery on families and children warrants its prohibition. That's a choice a society can make, or not make. We can debate the merits of it, but human rights does not make.
Yes, and the loss of freedom is balanced against the gains. If serious studies show evidence of harm from adultery, you have a point. Otherwise it is as sensible as forbidding video games or kitchen knives.
> We can debate the merits of it, but human rights does not require a society to accept the values of the western sexual revolution.
Not being punished for something that is not wrong or for a victimless act is not a concept born during the sexual revolution. It has a long tradition from antiquity, and was quite popular during the enlightenment, and is part of the bedrock of the democratic ideal.
If you accept the concept of human rights, it implies that you accept not to punish people for their choice of sex partners (again, as long as that choice does not violate the human rights of said partners).
> The story is quite different when it comes to immutable sexual characteristics. That elevates it into the realm of issues such as discrimination based on race or ethnicity--into a human rights issue. We regard those very differently.
I know you like to say you do (collectively; there are many examples in this thread), but it does not make it right. It’s also, again, a very US-specific concept.
> Again, who cares, as long as both parties consent and nobody gets hurts?
The problem is that there are some people who honestly believe that homosexuality is self-harm and/or harms society. If everyone believed nobody was getting hurt, then it would be a much easier conflict to resolve.
Certainly there's a lot of plain bigotry in these arguments, but, for instance, I have a friend who was really torn up about attending her brother's gay wedding. She's respectful of her brother's husband and loves her brother deeply, but is honestly concerned about non-provable harm to her brother's eternal soul. She's probably in the minority of those who oppose gay marriage, but as far as I can tell, it comes from a place of pure compassion.
Also, getting back to polygamy, what's your specific objection? That true informed consent is difficult to ascertain? In 50 years, will we be looking back on this as duo-sexual bigotry?
I agree that we shouldn't be discriminating against homosexuals, but it's surprisingly difficult to translate that gut feeling into robust reasoning from widely agreed first principles.
> The problem is that there are some people who honestly believe that homosexuality is self-harm and/or harms society. If everyone believed nobody was getting hurt, then it would be a much easier conflict to resolve.
Right, but that’s a problem. Particularly when the same people are up in arms any time they perceive a threat to their freedom of religion, without realising that they impinge on others’.
> Certainly there's a lot of plain bigotry in these arguments, but, for instance, I have a friend who was really torn up about attending her brother's gay wedding. She's respectful of her brother's husband and loves her brother deeply, but is honestly concerned about non-provable harm to her brother's eternal soul. She's probably in the minority of those who oppose gay marriage, but as far as I can tell, it comes from a place of pure compassion.
This is terrible, though I understand where she’s coming from. I hope she will find the strength to put some of her beliefs aside and accept her brother for what he is. Life is too short to fight about that.
> Also, getting back to polygamy, what's your specific objection? That true informed consent is difficult to ascertain? In 50 years, will we be looking back on this as duo-sexual bigotry?
That is one of my problems, yes. I have accepted that I might not be popular and that people in the future might look down on us as repulsive barbarians. You can’t please everyone, and I won’t pretend that I have no prejudice.
> I agree that we shouldn't be discriminating against homosexuals, but it's surprisingly difficult to translate that gut feeling into robust reasoning from widely agreed first principles.
The core principle is freedom, tolerance and human rights (which are itself not too far from classical Christian values). Everything comes from there. You don’t want other people imposing you their moral principles? Don’t do it to others. You want the freedom to have your religion? Accept that other people will follow another one, or none at all.
Most people just want to live in peace without being persecuted or discriminated against. Even the Catholic Church got the message after centuries of religious wars.
> Neither of those things is okay, because sexual orientation is immutable, not a choice.
How do you actually know that? You can't just state something like that as a fact and assume people are going to accept it especially in response to an article call "No 'gay gene'".
Genetic, immutable, etc, I see absolutely no advantage in how we define the basic concept. There are all sorts of things that are immutable that we don't accept as a society, so saying sexual orientation is immutable solves absolutely nothing. There has long been an argument that pedophiles are "born that way" but it is certainly not going to help advance the acceptance of pedophiles in society. The immutability argument solves absolutely nothing, so maybe that pesky horrible ethnocentric Western idea isn't so bad.
Not entirely true, I remember there was a case where an English rugby player received a concussion and was put in an induced(?) coma and was gay after he woke up.
However we certainly don't have the capability to change it.
>In that context, whether something is a choice, versus a characteristic that cannot easily be changed, is tremendously important. It elevates the issue from ordinary policing of norms into the realm of human rights.
Religious affiliation is a choice and yet it is protected by human rights.
You are on pretty thin ice. Discrimination is a shitty thing to do, against anyone, even criminals. If someone is engaging in morally questionable behavior then there are ways to influence the morals of that individual that do not involve discrimination or at least we hope there are such ways.
Arresting criminals is just a pragmatic response to prevent future crime because in many cases there are no other options. If there was a way to suppress criminal behavior through a simple and voluntary one time treatment (theoretical rehabilitation program with 0% recidivism rate) then prison would be considered extremely cruel or it would be reduced down to a glorified retirement home for the few individuals who refused the rehabilitation.
If there was a treatment for lack of heterosexuality (as opposed to a treatment for homosexuality) it would still not be the right thing to force it upon people. We do not force people to convert their religion so why forcibly change sexual orientation through discrimination?
> That's a radical (and quite ethnocentric) claim.
I don’t think it’s ethnocentric to call out homophobia in other cultures, just like I wouldn’t call it ethnocentric to call out racism, sexism, or anti-semitism in other cultures.
> And of course, it’s ridiculous to say that people “latched on” to sexual orientation to appease “bigots”
Isn’t this pretty much what happened in the sex and gender research communities? I don’t have a cite but, I thought this was pretty well accepted.
> Almost all of Asia and Africa accepts that requiring conformity in voluntary lifestyle... There is nothing special about sexuality in that respect
You seem to be suggesting that it would be radical, then, for us to object to forced homosexuality in a culture that practiced it alongside "conformity".
I agree that one shouldn't support the genetic predetermination theory of sexuality just as a defense for oppression. That's not how science should be done.
That being said, I still doubt that people really have a choice over their sexuality. Otherwise there would be far more stories from people who have "successfully" turned straight or something, instead of stories from people who have tried to suppress their true sexuality for years and who just turned sad in the process.
It might not be genetically determined, but there are so many more immutable determinants to our behaviour that are outside of our control. The brain is a giant state machine and not all of that is plastic all of the time. It might be determined before you are even born, in the womb. It might be determined in your first few years of life. Or it might actually be genetically determined but through a complex interplay from multiple genes, something that our statistical tools can't catch yet, especially as we don't have an objective measure for gayness. Last, there might be multiple ways someone turns gay.
You don't have a choice about anything you like. The closest you can get to choosing what you like is to decide that you want to like something, and expose yourself to it enough that it starts to grow on you (i.e. you find something in it you like and use that to reinterpret the rest that you were negative or indifferent towards.)
It doesn't work that way for sexuality. Sure, you can grow attached to people close to you, even in arranged marriages. But your core circuit of which gender you like remains unaltered by it.
As for having no choice over, idk, beer vs wine, you can certainly live on beer your entire life even if you (continue to) prefer wine. But will it make you happy? Should a society of beer drinkers force it upon wine drinkers? Note that a partner is a core part of our lives, far more than which liquid you drink.
The pretty abject failure of gay conversation therapy underlines this. Lots of people went into these therapies personally wanting to change, exactly because of societal pressure and expectations.
> That being said, I still doubt that people really have a choice over their sexuality.
My response to people who argue about this is generally: "So, when did you decide you liked long legs more than large breasts?" Choose whatever pairing of sexual characteristics drives home the choice to the person involved.
Like so many things about "sexuality", at some point we notice them, but rarely do we actively choose them.
> My response to people who argue about this is generally: "So, when did you decide you liked long legs more than large breasts?" Choose whatever pairing of sexual characteristics drives home the choice to the person involved.
I feel like there is a clear middle ground. I cannot choose to believe in God, but I wouldn't call it in in-born either. It seems like some things develop through a myriad subtle interactions and subconscious inferences that in their totality add up to a sexuality.
I know my taste in women has definitely changed without a change in DNA.
That's not much of an argument. A preference for long legs vs. large breasts is just that: a preference. What if Long Legs is a meth addict and Large Breasts is the mother of your children? Or likewise. At that point it sounds pathological.
That's why I don't like the "gay gene" argument and never did, not even when it was the hot new thing among assimilationists. It's fundamentally flawed, and not only because it suggests an easy solution to the problem by just making sure no more gay people get born. It grounds the discussion in a "we can't help it" attitude that's ultimately self-defeating because it's always vulnerable to the response that "of course you can help it, even alcoholics have AA, do you have no control over yourself whatsoever?" and there's just no good answer to that.
The form of the argument cedes to the hostile interlocutor that an excuse is required for why we are like we are. I've never understood why anyone thinks that is a good idea.
> That's not much of an argument. A preference for long legs vs. large breasts is just that: a preference.
The point is that you didn't consciously choose it. It just "happened".
I don't like cooked bell peppers. I didn't make a conscious choice to dislike cooked bell peppers, and I got forced to eat them as a kid. It's still a "preference" even though I never "chose" it.
Saying that someone "chose" something simply because it isn't written in their DNA is completely off the mark.
> The form of the argument cedes to the hostile interlocutor that an excuse is required for why we are like we are. I've never understood why anyone thinks that is a good idea.
The hostile interlocutor may be someone willing to vote against your rights. You don't necessarily have a choice but to engage them and having a decent argument that hits their own experience can sometimes provoke a change of thought.
I've been thinking it over off and on for close to a week now, and I'm still no nearer understanding how casting anything about the way I am in terms akin to those of sin, deviance, or culpable personal weakness aids me in convincing a hostile interlocutor not to be so.
In any case, to vote is to exercise power. As I discussed elsewhere in the thread, when reason fails, the best thing with which to counter power is power. Arguments exist on a gradient of rhetorical power, too. And handing someone a rhetorical stick to beat me with just seems like giving a lot of that power away right up front. Why on Earth would I do that in an argument I need to win? Why would anyone?
First, you're assuming those things are preferences. We don't actually have any real evidence that your statement is true for anyone, much less that it's true for everyone.
Second, people are very drawn to having excuses for things, it's much more comfortable to say there's nothing that you can do as opposed to saying there's something you can do but you just didn't. Both of those things are more comfortable than aggressively replying that you have every right to do the thing you did.
Not everyone wants to fight everything all the time.
The problem is that if you defend your actions (regarding all sorts of things, not just limited to where you stick your dick) with "because I f-ing feel like it and I'm an individual with free will" you will be inundated with people claiming you don't or shouldn't have free will or that it should be some entity's job to make the consequences of your preference so miserable that you choose something else. Pretending like you don't have agency is just so much more pragmatic on a day to day basis.
I've found it necessary at several points in my life, not recently, to deal with people who were genuinely interested in arguing - or insisting, or enforcing - that I shouldn't behave in accord with my romantic and sexual desires for male partners. I've never found the argument under discussion here to be of any use in convincing them. In fairness, though, the "because I feel like it" argument hasn't worked any better in those cases. The only thing I've found that has, has been something much more on the order of "if you want to try and stop me, take your best shot".
That one works best when you're part of a community that's visibly willing to back you up on it - when it's evident to your interlocutor that, if they make you have to fight about it, at least you won't be fighting alone. That hasn't been the case for me as often as I'd have liked, but when it has been the case, I've found I rarely even need to say a word.
I came out as gay in a Catholic high school, and it actually went really well for me. But, one day right after Matthew Shepard's murder, our religion class hosted a speaker who wanted to talk about how it was a shame but really he brought it on himself, you know the drill. I didn't say a word because I couldn't, but it turned out I didn't have to, because everyone else in the class - all straight as far as I knew then and, with one exception, as far as I know now - they said everything I would have and more besides. Louder and more persistently than I would have, too. And yeah, in theory there was a power differential there, Authority vs. School Kids, but you know what? That woman turned out not even to have what it took to stand up to a room full of teenagers talking. She fled in disarray, and I have never in my life before or since felt more safe than I did at the end of that half hour. Or felt less alone.
That was the point of the original pride parades, maybe you know and maybe you don't. I was there - admittedly as a child, too young yet to really even understand what I was or start to wonder why, but I was there, marching up the middle of a small Mississippi town with my mom and a bunch of other grown-ups with whom I had something in common that I hadn't even realized yet. "We're here. We're queer. Get used to it."
And people did. Not always happily, and it wasn't always easy, but what it would've cost to shove all those people who marched back in the closet was more than anyone was willing to pay. Better put, it was more than everyone was willing to pay, because - as the march's primary purpose was to demonstrate - everyone was what it would've taken. So they got used to it, instead, and then it turned out never to have been such a big deal after all.
Sweet reason is wonderful, as far as it goes. But if it's going to work, you need the other guy to be willing to meet you in the middle. If he won't do that, you need something to fall back on, if for no other reason than to be able to protect yourself. What that "something" is, is power. Maybe you don't have to use it. Ideally, being seen to have it will be enough. But for even that much to happen, first you have to have it.
We used to understand that. I don't think we do any more.
> everyone else in the class - all straight as far as I knew then and, with one exception, as far as I know now - they said everything I would have and more besides. Louder and more persistently than I would have, too. And yeah, in theory there was a power differential there, Authority vs. School Kids, but you know what? That woman turned out not even to have what it took to stand up to a room full of teenagers talking. She fled in disarray, and I have never in my life before or since felt more safe than I did at the end of that half hour. Or felt less alone.
That's such a heart warming story to read. Thanks for posting it here. I read up about Matthew Shepard. He died 20 years ago, which means your story is equally old. Impressive!
There's also the other side: if someone is a homicidal psychopath due to their genetics, then I still do not want them to roam free. So genetically predetermined is not a good argument to use in favor of gay rights. People should be allowed to determine their own sexuality, regardless of whether that determination was preset by their genetics or not, just as people should not be allowed to commit murder regardless of whether that was preset by their genetics. (Same goes for other possible sources of determination.)
That's cheating. A person is only a homicidal psychopath after they have committed homicide. Locking up a psychopath who has committed no crimes is just as fucked up as locking up someone for being gay.
Prison is actually "fucked up" like that in way. Violent criminals are often locked up for longer than minimum of their sentence (denied parole), not for any revenge, punishment, or deterrence reason but only because they're judged as dangerous. That means the remaining time they spend in prison is because of their predicted future crimes.
Whether we lock them up or punish them afterwards is besides the point: in either case the "I'm genetically programmed this way" is not a defense that would (or should) fly when it comes to murder.
I really don't think that is besides the point. Your analogy only holds if the only issue at hand was anti-sodomy laws. But we're also concerned about protected rights and lessening discrimination against gay people who don't have any gay sex.
There may be individuals biologically inclined to commit murder, but they still don't have to. Gay people have no autonomy at all in choosing their sexual orientation. Even if you had a direct mandate from god that engaging in homosexual behavior was immoral, it would be unethical to punish someone for the way they were born. Punishing psychopaths for murdering people might have a weak argument against it, but it still seems reasonable under most legal/civic/ethical frameworks.
I presume they meant ones who have committed crimes, rather than ones who roughly fit a profile of who might commit homicide.
I agree that profiling someone like this could lead into some serious Minority Report territory where you try to arrest someone "before they commit a crime", which will inevitably sweep up a lot of people who wouldn't have committed such a crime.
Having such a deficit in empathy could be considered a disability, like many others, although not one the individual would necessarily be able to recognise, because to them, an absence of empathy would be "normal".
There's another side. Conversion therapy of any form is inhumane. It makes someone deny their very identity. It may even drive them to suicide. And for what, so someone doesn't get offended by their existence?
Why? In particular, why if it’s voluntarily chosen?
Surely if men can want to become women, then so can homosexual people want to becomes straight? (Whether or not they can succeed is of course a different issue.)
Amusingly, before I moved to America and understood it, I thought "sexuality is a choice" was a defence of homosexuality because I believed Americans believed "humans should be free to make choices about themselves". Funny, eh?
But it seemed obvious to me. After all, maybe some people are genetically predisposed to eating babies. Doesn't mean I'm going to be okay with that. Sucks for them but they can either suppress the baby eating or go to prison.
It's more that some people think "people choose to do things society greatly disapproves of", that is going out of their way to be difficult, and they want to punish them for this.
But, then you would have to consider why it is they greatly disapprove of it in the first place, is it as unhealthy and dysfunctional as they think? Is it even their place to complain about someone else's affairs?
> But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control. If it's constructed then it's constructed. If it's not then it's not. People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason.
You are right, I think, to root the conflict in religion. The dominant religion in the West, Christianity, treats the human body as a given. That is to say that while you are more than just your body, you are certainly not less: there is a union of mind and body that separates only at death. If they disagree, a reconciliation must be attempted from the outside (i.e., by God).
Of course today we have technology that puts a veneer of science on what is really a religious idea: we are essentially our mind and not our body. When the two disagree, we needn't change our minds because we can alter the body through hormones and surgery.
On the face of it, I don't see how you could reconcile these two positions. I think the use of genetic predestination was used as an attempt to do this: if I'm made this way then how can it be wrong to be {gay, trans, etc.}? But in general I think the denominations that were predisposed to blessing homosexuality (for example) were unlikely to need scientific persuasions like that. When it became clear that rigid denominations weren't going to budge, it feels like genetic predestination became unfashionable.
Plus it doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective. The Roman Catholic branch and derivatives all believe everyone is genetically predisposed to sin through Adam's lineage, and that is a bad thing, and we don't have a choice in the matter. So saying homosexuality is a genetic predisposition just means it gets lumped into the rest of our fallen attributes. Making it a choice doesn't fix things either, since a choice can be intrinsically sinful. There is no other way than to deny that homosexuality is wrong. Yet that is difficult to do, since sexuality has such an obvious role to play in the perpetuation of the human race. If it were normative then the human race would not exist. So the most straightforward explanation is it is a deviation from the way things should be, as is much else in our human nature, which in turn points to a standard that we deviate from.
> Plus it doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective. The Roman Catholic branch and derivatives all believe everyone is genetically predisposed to sin through Adam's lineage, and that is a bad thing, and we don't have a choice in the matter. So saying homosexuality is a genetic predisposition just means it gets lumped into the rest of our fallen attributes. Making it a choice doesn't fix things either, since a choice can be intrinsically sinful.
I think that's an inescapable conclusion in traditional Christianity. That will or choice is not necessarily a component of responsibility is something we also adopt in law: involuntary manslaughter is different than premeditated murder, even though the outcome is the same. In other words, will is not essential to guilt, although the degree to which we assess punishments certainly is. I don't know what Catholicism says to that, really, but it does seem to me that the arguments concerning genetic predisposition would have failed in most conservative religious approaches because of the premise.
Even so, I think that this is a mostly ancillary concern. The real issue is that there are competing and irreconcilable views of what it means to be human. Are we human because of the bodies we inhabit? Are we human because of how we can feel about who we are? Because we can transcend our bodies? I would postulate that answering this question is an essentially religious exercise, whether your narrative comes from a biology textbook, genetic programming manual, or the Bible. But that's an opinion that is perhaps even murkier to plumb than the roots of homosexuality in human experience.
Ironically, it only makes sense to say humanity is more than the body from a religious perspective. Otherwise all we have is materialism, and this we must be reducible to our matter, i.e. bodies.
> But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control.
Yep, that’s why I simply don’t care anymore what rhetoric modern social movements use. Not only usually it makes zero sense, they are ready to ditch it anytime it benefits them.
There is no point in having a serious discourse with anyone who treats it only as a weapon to achieve their goals.
The big question that this viewpoint misses is what to do with fears that certain things "turn people gay" and the flip side of that fear: that the straight community might use successful conversion therapy to eliminate the gay community.
All of a sudden both of those camps have ammunition for their points.
Saying that it's "genetically determined" (or at least innately determined) very nicely sidestepped that. To the extent that that is not true, then you have to grapple with those other questions.
> The big question that this viewpoint misses is what to do with fears that certain things "turn people gay"
I think "the big question" some people still have is whether being gay is perfectly fine or not. If it is, then that question of things "turning people gay" is not so important. It's like asking if watching the Simpsons will make people like the Simpsons. Well yeah, it might, but there's nothing wrong with liking the Simpsons, so what's the problem?
Put into other words: thinking that having more gay people is a problem depends on thinking that being gay is problem in the first place, and that is the primary issue.
> and the flip side of that fear: that the straight community might use successful conversion therapy to eliminate the gay community.
Nobody will bat an eye if someone discovers they are straight after thinking they were gay. I don't know, maybe they saw one of the million heteronormative movies that are constantly produced and it somehow clicked on them; whatever, it's fine.
What is objectionable though, is to try to force someone into a given sexuality, instead of letting them be and discover their sexuality in their own terms.
> I think "the big question" some people still have is whether being gay is perfectly fine or not.
I think this is very true and is a more fundamental question than what I've posed here.
Another way of stating my point is that the question of "innateness" allowed large swaths of the community to sidestep this question.
And this question is a very deep rabbit hole for the current cultural and political situation in the U.S.
Ask anyone who is comfortable in their sexuality whether they would be willing to take, say a course of therapy, that would change their sexuality. I think the majority would be unwilling, far more than the number of people who would be willing to sign up to a lecture that would promise to make them love the Simpsons. And I think that would be true for people who cherish, abhor, or are even indifferent to homosexuality (the exact proportions among those populations are probably different, but I suspect all of them would rise into the majority). There is of course, often due to mainstream pressure, many homosexual people who are intensely uncomfortable with their sexual orientation and wish to change it, but even taking them into account I still don't think they would make up the majority.
> Nobody will bat an eye if someone discovers they are straight after thinking they were gay.... What is objectionable though, is to try to force someone into a given sexuality, instead of letting them be and discover their sexuality in their own terms.
The problem is what counts as discovering their sexuality on their own terms. To borrow an example from one of my sibling comments, should schools be allowed to offer a gay conversion therapy course? Should schools be allowed to offer a straight conversion therapy course?
I suspect your answer would probably be "yes" if they're electives or both if they're mandatory, but this would already demonstrate how thorny of an issue this is. Nobody would care if a school only offered a "Simpsons' appreciation course" and not a "Simpsons' criticism course" or vice versa. (Of course the riposte is that sexual orientation, as a central component of one's identity, is a far more important topic, but there is yet another endless set of back-and-forths to be had on that topic). But the important thing is that these questions fade into irrelevancy if sexual orientation is immutable, but come immediately to the forefront if sexual orientation is mutable.
To recap my point is not to say that mutability of sexual orientation is the only big or even among the biggest questions, but to emphasize that it is a big question with many implications. To say that the mutability of sexual orientation is irrelevant is to miss a lot of the policy implications that hinge on its truth or falsity.
EDIT: A more apt comparison is probably religion, to the extent that you accept beliefs to be mutable. Should parents be allowed to send their children to religious camps? If yes, should parents be allowed to send their children to conversion therapy? If conversion therapy is too coercive, should they be allowed to send them to conversion camps? At what point does it become coercion?
All of these questions are very nicely sidestepped by immutability. No parents shouldn't send their kids to conversion therapy or conversion camps because they're ineffective and because they are ineffective at best they're a nuisance, at worst they inflict psychological trauma. But if they are effective then all of a sudden the parameters of the conversation shift drastically.
Ah, thanks for the elaborate answer. I think i see your point better now, and yes, it's definitely a more nuanced topic than just "is this OK or not?"
I guess my personal gripe with most arguments against freedom of sexual orientation is that they all seem axiomatic or circular. Like, "because it's bad", "because it's anti-natural", "because this god says so", or some other chain of these that inevitably gets circular.
Your example comparison with religion seems on point, but also super thorny hehe. And since i'm not religious, it doesn't resonate too much either. Sorry.
I don't know if an analogy with musical preferences would be apt. Yes, it seems much more banal, but people also develop their identities around musical preferences sometimes, so it's not completely off!
And if, say, i was a metalhead, then, it wouldn't matter all that much if i've felt immutable love for metal all my life, or my preferences changed over time, or i chose it for some reason, or even if i love other styles! (maybe i'm extending this analogy too much) All that matters is that it doesn't harm other people. On the contrary: i'd share my love for metal with other metal lovers. Win-win.
Maybe it's a super dumb argument, but TBH that's kinda how i feel about sexual orientation or other important preferences. I just don't see the point in invalidating or not accepting other people's preferences and desires, as long as they are not harmful to others.
Thanks for the exchange, and i hope this wasn't too rambly!
I don't think it is possible to turn someone who is straight gay, anymore than it is possible to turn someone who is gay straight. The exception would be where they're bi, but they would already have had some interest in the same sex, and it wouldn't have come from social conditioning.
Why do you think that? I’d say it’s very much cultural... these days, bisexuality is much more acceptable for women than for men, and more women identify as bisexual... in Ancient Greece, men having sex with men were much more common than these days (AFAIK).
But even in ancient Greek culture there was still something akin to homophobia. While err... screwing a guy as a guy was just fine, being screwed by a guy is not. I.E. being the receptive partner as a male was heavily socially stigmatized. It seems this was viewed as being basically being effeminate, and unsurprisingly that was viewed negatively.
It seems to be extremely common over the ages that women acting like men is more accepted than men acting like women. Even during times when women acting like men in some respect was highly taboo, the reverse almost always seems to be viewed as worse. (I.E. back in the days when a woman wearing pants was scandalous, it generally seems like a guy wearing a woman's dress was even more scandalous).
This dislike of men acting like women definitely seems to be one factor in modern homophobia (although it is not the only factor). It also seems to factor a lot into transphobia (which seems to be much more focused on trans women than on trans men). Of course I suspect that transphobia in men is frequently intertwined with homophobia. The idea being the revulsion found in the idea of finding out that the woman you are dating "is really a man" (in the bigot's mind), making them effectively gay.
I feel like the culture seems to be the big variable there than the preferences, to be honest. Or, people are going to express what they like based on their environment and how they perceive it will respond.
> I don't think it is possible to turn someone who is straight gay, anymore than it is possible to turn someone who is gay straight.
Indeed if that's true, i.e. that there is an innate immutability between the two, then the whole question is conveniently moot and we can instead turn our attention to figuring how to combat these fears at a rhetorical and cultural level (still a Herculean task but at least a step forward).
The fear, on both sides of that coin, comes from if that's not true.
Indeed nature does not care. But the point of the parent comment, summarized in a single sentence as far as I understand it is "the issue of whether homosexuality is innately determined is irrelevant, policies and attitudes should be entirely unaffected by whether it is innately determined."
Taken at face value that is a far stronger statement than "nature does not care about convenience." This is saying "in this instance, we should not care about the truth of nature. There is no policy value to be attained by finding out the truth of the matter."
We certainly should not let convenience dictate our policies. That a statement happens to be convenient should not be why we accept its truth. But that's a different statement than the parent comment. All I'm trying to explain is why certain segments of the population would believe it valuable to figure out whether innateness is true or not.
EDIT:
> If this gets disproven, then what?
There are significant policy repercussions if this were to be conclusively disproven (the unlikely extreme would be if it turned out that sexual orientation was entirely mutable given the right external situation). In education alone, arguments of whether certain curricula or environments "turn people gay" or "turn people straight" would take on a far more urgent tone for large swaths of the population.
Could a local government mandate exposure to effective gay conversion therapy in a school environment (just exposure, not forcing a course of therapy)?
Culturally whether conservative parents would allow their children to play with gay children or children from gay families would likewise take on an additional urgency.
Many issues of policy have basically been decided on the assumption of "whether you like homosexuality or not, it's immutable so you may as well as treat it as if it were to stay," which is already controversial enough. If that's not true, then policy must grapple with the question of whether sexual orientation is an intrinsically valuable thing (and given that mainstream society is predominantly heterosexual, that would inevitably morph into whether homosexuality is an intrinsically valuable thing, since I suspect most people who identify as heterosexual value their own heterosexuality), which is an even more divisive topic in the U.S.
> given that mainstream society is predominantly heterosexual, that would inevitably morph into whether homosexuality is an intrinsically valuable thing
Society presently allows extreme leeway on providing value in every other way imaginable. We allow people to work in ad-tech for crying out loud. Ok, that was a bit of a joke, but the point is that society not only allows people to not contribute to the social good, it perniciously promotes people perpetuating palpable public harm for personal profit. Singling out sexuality on this particular front is patently perfidious.
> since I suspect most people who identify as heterosexual value their own heterosexuality
You may be correct about the percentage of people with this particular value, but I think it would be because of something other than mainstream predominance. I think it's more likely that "value" is an inapt word and that most people just don't ever imagine any alternative as being realistic given their...uhh...predicament.
> Singling out sexuality on this particular front is patently perfidious.
Perfidious it may be, but the question of innateness has very real policy effects. The best comparison is probably religion. Parents are allowed to send their children to religion camps. Should they be allowed to send their children to conversion therapy camps? Perhaps therapy is too coercive, but what about something less coercive, but more effective?
If it is innate then conversion therapy can be easily banned on grounds of inefficacy and therefore active harm. If sexual orientation is entirely mutable then the question shifts altogether.
> I think it's more likely that "value" is an inapt word
I very intentionally chose "value" because I think many members of the homosexual community value homosexuality in the same way that I think many members of the heterosexual community value heterosexuality. This is the whole point of why "pride" is more than just a simple slogan.
Indeed I think even the very act of calling "singling out sexuality to be perfidious" demonstrates just how much value it holds for people. If it were as simple as whether one liked broccoli or not, why would anyone ever care?
I've mentioned this elsewhere, but I think an illuminating example is the Deaf community's attitude towards cochlear implants, where large swaths of the community actively reject cochlear implants and value their own Deafness as an intrinsic attribute to be celebrated on its own. Indeed among members of that community there is a tendency to try to value Deafness as an immutable attribute and to shun attempts to make it mutable (it is extremely controversial for parents to outfit children with cochlear implants, even were these cochlear implants to perfectly replicate normal hearing and for people born Deaf segments of the community view it as a sort of betrayal for them to attempt to use cochlear implants).
The question of mutability remains an important one that has many implications.
> Parents are allowed to send their children to religion camps.
Society's desire to bend itself backward to accommodate religious sectarian meme indoctrination is a huge moral blind spot. I don't think many communities are able to honestly discuss consent as applied to religious obedience and obeisance. That doesn't mean we should consider it a moral standard.
> Indeed I think even the very act of calling "singling out sexuality to be perfidious" demonstrates just how much value it holds for people.
It's not the sexuality that has value. The value is in not being the subject of a lie constructed to mask arbitrary oppression because of a religious meme.
> If it were as simple as whether one liked broccoli or not, why would anyone ever care?
I think we can turn this on its head to make it more apt to demonstrate why this reasoning doesn't work for me. Heterosexual people don't form communities for themselves on the basis of heteroidentification (I mean, some definitely do, but it's also definitely an extreme minority). There are communities and there are LGBTQ-oriented communities and there are even (we should acknowledge) straight-exclusionary communities, but we might rightly look askance at anyone who desires LGBTQ-exclusionary communities. So then we have to ask ourselves why, and we can look to your broccoli example...
Maybe you enjoy eating broccoli. Let's say you do. For the sake of argument, let's also say that while you like broccoli you don't identify yourself as "a broccoli person". Like...when you're at parties and people ask you what things you enjoy, you don't even mention broccoli. Then someone comes along and says "everyone who enjoys broccoli has to die". That's you. You're the person who they want to die. Now you care about the broccoli situation, but you care about not being oppressed and you care about solidarity and support, not about broccoli. In that environment you will form bonds with other broccoli eaters, not because of the broccoli, but because oppression forges bonds among the oppressed.
Now non-broccoli-eaters, on the other hand, don't have to spend their lives in fear that someone will beat them up or kill them for enjoying broccoli (because they don't), which means that broccoli isn't on their minds. Like basically ever. At best you could say that once in a while a non-broccoli-eater might be relieved that they aren't in the difficult position of someone wanting them dead because of what they like eating.
The bonds of identification are a consequence of the oppression, not of the broccoli. Broccoli is just the point of intersection.
> People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason.
Completely agreed. I don't think we should shy away from trying to understand and explain it though. It's been a puzzling question that people have tried to grapple with for a long time now. I think it would be interesting to understand humans better.
And.. if it is definitively proven that it is nature and not nurture, it might make the lives of individuals easier by not having to deal with as many attacks from those that were intolerant but have changed their minds when exposed to the science. I agree that ideally, those individuals wouldn't be discriminated against in the first place, but that's not the world we live in right now. I would argue that if anyone could do anything to alleviate some of that discrimination with science, it would be an incredibly worthwhile endeavor.
Not saying all or even a majority of people would or do change their minds based on research, but I would expect there to be at least some open minded people that are just on the other side of the fence on the issue that would change their minds given evidence supporting the opposing viewpoint.
Make that 40 since it was considered a serious danger by scientists. The effect itself was known for more than a century. But yes, you’re obviously right and there is always a strong tendency to dismiss science to avoid cognitive dissonance.
It’s very common for people to make decisions that they regret for the rest of their lives.
If someone is straight and they have a gay experience that is something that could haunt them for the rest of their life. This seems to be less of a thing in the other direction. Maybe this is societies fault though. The lack of acceptance causes the inner shame.
But the notion of letting people be free to choose is pretending that there is nothing that will influence the choices they make. Most people will be straight genetically and that is the way society leans today.
Encouraging experimentation can have negative consequences.
I think there's also an element of constructed boxes to put people into as well.
Would I rather say to you, some random person, "I'm gay" and move on? Or do I want to get into "I'm gay, it's complicated" and have to explain more? Most of the time I just don't want to get into it further.
And I've had conversations with some folks who outwardly say they're straight but privately have described themselves pretty similarly to "Well mostly straight, it's complicated."
It's tiring, and I'd like it if we all came to an agreement that it's complicated, the edges don't line up nicely, and we should all just accept that it's weird. It'd make my life way easier
People have very strong feelings about self-categorization, whether or not the person's feelings are "accurate". We struggled with accepting gay people. We're struggling now with accepting transgender people. In twenty years the big culture war might be about people who think they were born the wrong ethnicity, or otherkin, or some other area in which our failure to produce an indiscriminate society runs up against the rules of behavior to which we've limited them.
The biggest danger of using genetics as a reason is that at some point someone is going to say, "we have unequivocally ID'd the genes involved and we can ensure your offspring are of the orientation of _your_ choice". Or in more authoritarian regimes, the state's choice.
It never made sense. Hitler (yes, sorry to go there) also thought that homosexuality was genetic, which is why it made sense to him to mass murder homosexuals.
Something being genetic/inherent has very little to do with whether it should be viewed as morally acceptable.
Of course, I am well aware of how troublesome it is to find empirical grounding in morality, but it always seemed to me that sexual relationship between two consenting partners was nobody else's business, least of all mine. Choice, genetics, curiosity, etc: what difference does it make?
I am about as "straight" as it comes: I for the life of me can't figure out the sexual appeal of men, but it also isn't at all obvious to me why I should be offended by the idea that there are people that think otherwise. And even if tomorrow Casanova came out and decided publicly that he is making a conscious choice to from now own only sleep with men, after decades of sexual adventures with women--well, what difference does it make?
I read this as well intentioned but ultimately poor reasoning. Things that are intrinsic about a person are a good baseline, no-question quality that we should not antagonize people for. Sexual orientation, race, disabilities, gender, appearance etc. These seem like important issues to get right on civic protections.
Saying we must offer respect to everyone's choices is just wrong. We certainly don't want to ensure someone's right to be a homophobic asshole in a workplace for example. And it's not as simple as just saying being LGBTQ is a private thing that doesn't affect others either. Trans bathroom rights, marriage license rights, adoption rights, etc.. The argument to ban gay conversion camps seems much harder to make if one believes identity is purely a choice. If homosexuality is perceived as a choice, then onlookers will wonder who influenced someone to make a choice to be gay, which muddies the perception of being gay being a personal private thing.
Homophobia is bad, but wishing it weren't a thing doesn't change the reasoning that intrinsic qualities are a lot more important to protect than choices.
Sexual orientation is more deserving of protection than, say, holocaust denialism. Religion is the only protected class that is a choice, but for many people, it's not so much a choice as an inherited identity and similarly fixed.
> Things that are intrinsic about a person are a good baseline, no-question quality that we should not antagonize people for.
That's false though. Being intrinsically an asshole doesn't mean we shouldn't try to prevent people from being assholes. You have no more reason to believe that some people aren't intrinsically assholes, and that leads to the next part of my argument...
> Saying we must offer respect to everyone's choices is just wrong.
You're constructing a horrendous straw-man here. The distinction you're missing is the boundary between anti-social behavior and pro-social behavior. Homophobia is inherently anti-social. Queer sexuality is not. Murder and theft are anti-social. Sex with someone who looks like you is not.
> The argument to ban gay conversion camps seems much harder to make if one believes identity is purely a choice.
No it isn't, because the argument to ban gay conversion camps is based on the fundamental principle of consent. That's why the predominant conversation is about _minors_ and _forced_ conversion therapy with additional important conversations about whether adults are able to consent to it.
> You're constructing a horrendous straw-man here. The distinction you're missing is the boundary between anti-social behavior and pro-social behavior.
I disagree. In a universe where being gay is a choice, there are many additional assumptions to be made that make that extend to effects on others besides yourself. I mentioned a few. I think the trans example is particularly salient, though uncomfortable.
> No it isn't, because the argument to ban gay conversion camps is based on the fundamental principle of consent. That's why the predominant conversation is about _forced_ conversion therapy with additional important conversations about whether adults are able to consent to it.
I disagree. The reason there are movements to ban them is that they're detrimental pseudo science with evidence of harm. There's plenty of alternative places to ship kids that they don't want to go to that we deal with. Religious camps and what not. In a world where being gay is 100% just a choice people make, gay conversion camps might still be ineffective, but at worst they're just trying to change someone's mind.
If you want to evaluate the ethics of accepting homosexuality if its a choice, you have to first center your world view in all of the side effects that entails. Which is annoying because a lot of them are also misinformed conservative talking points. But its not just people are instead having gay sex by choice and that's the only difference. Now there is a conversation to be had over how that choice is being made across society.
What we should respect it what is not harmful. Hate and homophobia are oppressive and destructive. People having sex is not. So some things deserve to be fought and limited whilst the other does not.
A group of people getting sex changes is arguably destructive if it's just due to a whim. Look at the suicide rates. In the real world where it's not a choice, I'd look to blame bigots for a lot of those suicide rates. In the world where it is completely a choice, I'd look to blame people who encouraged them along that path as the proximate cause.
That's a pretty gross perspective to write out, and I don't really want to write such things anymore, so I'll likely stop. But there's a perspective, and from what I casually observe, is a genuine concern among some more conservative leaning folks. People are concerned that young people are being pushed into harmful surgeries. To some dumb extent, they have a point if trans feelings are "just a choice". They have no point in reality, because it's not a choice.
> A group of people getting sex changes is arguably destructive if it's just due to a whim. Look at the suicide rates. In the real world where it's not a choice, I'd look to blame bigots for a lot of those suicide rates. In the world where it is completely a choice, I'd look to blame people who encouraged them along that path as the proximate cause.
Yes. In the present world unfortunately I don’t think we have lots of data to say either way, though it’s probably a combination of both. We should be tolerant, and also accept that not wanting to conform to gender stereotypes does not necessarily means that one needs to change sex, though sometimes it does.
> But there's a perspective, and from what I casually observe, is a genuine concern among some more conservative leaning folks. People are concerned that young people are being pushed into harmful surgeries.
I think that’s a very valid concern, considering the irreversibility of it and the potential harm. Being conservative is not in itself a bad thing: you can be conservative, empathetic and tolerant. There is no such excuse for homophobia, though, when there is no harm done to anyone.
In the INCORRECT alt world where being gay is a choice? The implication is that gay parents would demonstrate parenting that encourages gay children. spiraling into some stupid ideas about feedback loops which can't be supported by real world data because this isn't a real thing. The real world just can't be explained by plausible mechanics with homosexuality secretly being a choice without some fairly extreme side effects.
Imagining it were a choice has so many additional implications, which, while dumb, are genuine fears of some conservative worldviews, but I guess would be real problems. Frustrating, circuitous logic.
And here lies the problems of finding causation not correlation:
- gay is not binary neither through time (people do evolve both way while getting old) neither through ‘space’ (some people are half/half, some people have some preference for love and others for sex, and so on)
- genes are not expressed linearly, and one slight expression in the womb can mean something big, or nothing or maybe something?
- social pressure about sexuality start early even though we may get better at avoiding some: blue for boys, pink for girls, boys do sports, blablabla and so on
- internal development and expression of sexuality does not happen at the same pace and at the same amplitude for everybody (some people really are asexual their whole life) and of course the familly, sister/brotherhood, socio-economical environment influence it too
So in these studies of sexuality and even worse, with the metastudies, I’m always left with the feeling that the hypothesis tested by it was broken from the start. What was the question they were trying to answer?
« Is it biologically complicated? » Ok yes.
« Do we have the tool to even make the distinction between a weak correlation due to the sample bias? » Can’t see how in this study.
What am I missing?
> - internal development and expression of sexuality does not happen at the same pace and at the same amplitude for everybody (some people really are asexual their whole life) and of course the familly, sister/brotherhood, socio-economical environment influence it too
Some people IS asexual. Asexuality it's a valid sexual orientation like being bi/pan/homo or heterosexual. It isn't lack of sexual development or sexual expression or result of family, socio-economical environment influences.
I was not suggesting it was, I was talking about expression of sexuality, both in the construct of the self and in society, that was a different part of my questioning. To be precise, it’s non-applicability in the case of asexual people, but I simplified to make my point to say it is extremely diverse and complicated and these studies are really not helping (I believe) by using a very large hammer to nail a multi-dimensional non-euclidian nail.
Appreciate the correction on the grammar though and I knew that resource already but it’s always helpful to reread :-)
I was trying to point that a person can't become asexual (on the same way that no body can change is sexual orientation). Asexuals are born asexuals. Like a homosexual is born homosexual, etc.
Kind of hopeful we can stop using genetics as a way of justifying queer peoples' existence. Whether it's conditioning, a choice, or genetics, shouldn't really be a factor in how you treat queer people.
That would be ideal, but some people need to be convinced that it is not a choice before they will consider treating gay people with respect. So long as they think it's just a behavioral decision, they can rationalize their bigotry.
What they found was 5 areas of the genome that had predictive potential for people being gay or straight. Combined, they were able to predict about 25% of what makes someone gay. The other 75% is environmental.
Note that some "environmental factors" may still be genetic in nature. For example there is strong evidence in animals that the prenatal environment has an impact on homosexual behavior. Which means that a mother's genetics can be correlated with her children's sexuality. Therefore a gene could impact homosexuality through changing the environment in the mother's womb. In that case the child having that gene would be correlated with the child being homosexual and the gene would show up in this study. But the differences between the child's genetics and the mother's would be an environmental factor.
I don't think it's making that strong a claim. They can't identify a specific gene. That's not quite "you are not born a homosexual." Plenty of studies over the years have shown statistically very significant genetic links. We just can't explain the exact mechanism yet.
Those people are going to be bigots regardless, towards all the other things that are behavioral, such as most mental illness, addictions, sports accidents, drug convictions, political persuasion, religion, etc. So many ways to be judgmental of people's behaviors.
If you want people to be treated equally, wouldn't you want their existence to be justified?
It's difficult to think of a PC analogy here, so maybe... super villain mind control device strapped to someone's head. Provably unjustified behaviors due to the mind control device implies the ethical thing to do is try to remove the device. Treating someone normally implies an implicit belief that they're normal. Sound biological evidence that being queer is just how some people are feels like the best way to reinforce that belief and remove requirements for heteronormativity.
I acknowledge this is the prerequisite a lot of people need to justify queer peoples' existence.
> wouldn't you want their existence to be justified
In my ideal world, I would want my existence to be justified even if I 100% chose to be bisexual, gay, trans, etc. So yes, I do want it to be justified, but I don't want genetics to be the justification.
Hmm, maybe this is a pointless semantic argument, but being justified by a choice sounds like its just passing the ball to justification for the choice. In a world where identity is proven to be 100% just a choice, that sounds like its not justified, and while not deserving of discrimination, to some extent committed to being non-normative.
This paper suggests genetics control at least 25% of variance in sexual orientation. We know hormone profiles control another decently large proportion. Are you saying you are upset that deterministic factors cause queer identities? or are you trying to say you wish a deterministic factor for queer identities wasn't necessary for equal treatment?
The first feels strange, the latter makes a lot of sense.
I do feel rather strongly that we should not persecute people suffering from pedophilia, especially as a lot of it seems to come from suffering from abuse as a kid. That doesn't make you an active child rapist. You may hate that about yourself. Well, at least I assume that to be the case. I can't say I'm familiar with it.
The predictability of something isn't the issue though. It's whether or not something is actually in your control. Being gay is not a choice.
If homosexuality were purely a choice then there would be great perceived harm in allowing gay individuals to influence other individuals to be gay. It's hard to construct examples of this because being gay is not a choice, and any hypotheticals here would come off as very bigoted. There's people in this very thread already jumping on the opportunity to suggest that if it's not all genetic that maybe we're culturally encouraging kids to be trans. Consider for a moment that opinions like this aren't out a desire to oppress people, but fear that kids are being manipulated into sex change operations. That's FALSE, but in an alternate universe where its just a choice... it's arguably true. The harm is dependent on the nature of it. Trans suicide rates are really high. In this INCORRECT alt world where we're 100% its just a choice, people being supportive of trans gender folks look like they're the ones at fault for leading people down a dark path.
> The reason we should be tolerant of homosexuality is because it's as healthy and harmless as heterosexuality,
I agree. But the reason we MUST be tolerant of it is because its an inherent natural part of human nature.
That's a different semantic definition of human nature, and, as an aside, is likely just not accurate. Close relative primates don't murder and rape other primates within their own social group. Rape is a strategy of desperation for males who can't get any and are likely outcasts from an effective group. Social cohesion is really important for survival. There may be coups to be the top dog, but intra community killing is very rare.
Trans cross dressing can make some people very uncomfortable. I think it should be protected nonetheless if not directly relevant to the needs of the business.
I'm also ok with furries, but I don't think they're so intrinsic that we need to protect fursuits and light animal roleplaying in the workplace.
apologies if something I said there was off color in terminolgoy
One of the sad things about the state of sex ed is that this isn't taught in school. The interplay between genetics (homosexuality is at least somewhat heritable) and environmental factors (each older brother a boy has from the same mother increases the chance he will be gay by about 40%).
Also, this study and many others uses the term "men who have sex with men" not gay. These are two overlapping but different groups.
Plus you need yo look at evidence that sexuality is a modern construct. The Kinsey scale and attitudes to sex in other societies (where men who have sex with men are sometimes considered a third gender or where its more a matter of taste/fancy than a rigid part of identity) would help people understand actual sexuality more effectively.
What you end up with is some genetics, some epigenetics and some environmental factors creating preferences of various strengths. Those are then buried under a layer of socially acceptable behaviour. Which in turn is filtered through identifies ("I'm not gay, I just do it with my mate").
Genes aren’t a good way to explain most things. They’re more like LEGO blocks. It’s how the cells use and express the genes that matters.
So you want to look at regulatory regions of the genome, promoters, and even how and when the dna folds up to inactive large regions. That’s where all the action is.
There are two meanings to "gene" here. What you describe as lego blocks are segments which code for a protein, which is one meaning.
The other is just any code which affects the phenotype, including promotors etc. The SNPs mentioned in TFA are just known fairly common single-point differences, but aren't necessarily in coding DNA. Of course these are still heritable, just like coding changes.
This may be a stupid question, but I'll ask it anyway: How did gay people live in pre-historic times?
Arguably, in our current culture, it is pretty obvious that gay people will produce less offspring than heterosexuals. However, looking on an evolutionary timescale, this culture is rather young. In tribal times, most males did not reproduce - lessening the impact of homosexuality. Maybe the higher female-to-male-gene reproduction rate is factor?
This is just rough speculation, my knowledge is really limited. But it seems plausible at first glance.
I think it's a mistake to see homosexuality as a binary on/off switch; in many cases it's a gradient.
I'm generally heterosexual, but I've also had sex with a man. It's was okay, I guess, but I'd prefer women. On a scale of 0-100 my "gayness score" is probably about 10-20. A hard strong 0 or 100 is probably a lot less common than it's often portrayed: it's more of a bell curve.
One explanation I've read is that gay men are more likely to be left alone with women as they're perceived to be less threatening; giving the gay man a chance to propagate his genes through infidelity (infidelity is fairly common throughout human history). The ever-eqloquent Richard Dawkins once called this "the sneaky fucker strategy".
Something similar could also apply to women.
It's hard to be sure of these kind of things, since it's, well, pre-history, but there are some models which can explain the propagation of homosexual genes and/or behaviour.
I wonder if anyway has attempted a more qualitative study on this. Asking exactly what attributes attract and what the person is thinking when they look at images of men and women.
Do gay men think the same as women? Is it a spectrum?
For straight men it seems mostly tied to women’s ability to carry children, coupled with a genderless beauty evaluation (e.g. symmetry) and then some measure of femininity (which is kind of like anti-masculine maybe). Femininity is really hard to quantify but it’s definitely a “know it when you see it” kind of thing.
An interesting finding is the fraternal birth order effect. The more older brothers you have, the more likely you are to be homosexual (for men). Seems to indicate in-utero mechanisms are involved.
I can certainly interpolate my personal experiences but I'm afraid I would miss something. Also, doing so would not explain this:
Why some people dress or act similar to opposite sex to appear attractive to someone of the same sex? I mean, voice gestures etc. Hm...I should not said act, it's likely their trait. Anyway, why would someone who is gay be attracted to that person rather than opposite sex. I think sexuality is quite more fluid and calling someone gay does not mean much beyond 'not straight'.
If this question is strictly about the study in OP and not a broader philosophical question, then it's worth pointing out that the study doesn't actually use the word gay but instead:
> In this study, we use the term “same-sex sexual behavior,” which is defined as having ever had sex with someone of the same sex.
I'm quite (socially) liberal and I thought your post was simply wrong, for starters. Among the places you can ask the question "what is being gay" without getting "dogpiled" are countless gay sites. Aren't gay sites part of the internet?
The statement I take issue with is "[...] this might be one of the last places left on the internet you can ask a question like this without getting dogpiled."
There are lots of places on the internet where asking honest questions about the gay experience is not scary and will not get you flamed. Indeed, the existence of such venues is crucial to the self-discovery of gay people — especially gay people who live in hostile environments, and who may be in great need of a kind confidant.
"What does it mean to be gay?" is a question that gay people ask themselves, especially while forming their identities. So there are many, many places where you can find kind and thoughtful answers to it.
I think a lot of straight people would, however, feel a degree of repulsion towards the idea of kissing and having sex with someone of the their non preferred-sex. A consideration which, due to culturally norms, is probably pushed into the heads of gay people.
Anecdotally I think most of my gay friends have commented on how gross vaginas are to them. Add whatever clarifications on fluidity and spectrums that you want....
I assume it’s a physical attraction to members of the same sex, with the emotional dimension developing in the same way as it does between any two individuals in a mated pair.
In the simplest terms, it’s seeing a beautiful naked body of the opposite sex and getting zero sexual pleasure out of it. That’s it. Being gay doesn’t stop you from forming close bonds with the opposite sex just like being straight doesn’t stop you from having best friends of the same sex.
Is there any trait that is strongly linked to a single gene?
Whenever I hear a news article that there is no X gene, I am completely unsurprised. The idea that a single gene would uniquely determine a particular trait, as if it were a variable in a program like "bool has_blue_eyes", seems oversimplified and unrealistic.
> Is there any trait that is strongly linked to a single gene?
Sure.
Sickle-cell anaemia is one classic case, one (recessive) gene.
Huntington's disease is another, it's about a specific repeat number.
But, as you say, most complex traits (such as height) aren't like that, and involve hundreds or thousands of different genes. IIRC eye color is actually fairly simple, not one gene but much of the control in just a handful? Maybe hair color too? (But not super-sure.)
Yes. MC1R which people with red hair carry. It's a very strongly associated gene. Also "People with freckles and no red hair have an 85% chance of carrying the MC1R gene that is connected to red hair. People with no freckles and no red hair have an 18% chance of carrying the MC1R gene linked to red hair."
i dont get it. whats the problem with accepting that homosexuality might have traits other than where people want to put their genitalia. perhaps its about sending information down via genes and culture? seems homosexuals are amazingly beautiful at generating art and cracking nazi spy codes. maybe their families have other genes and we are just focusing on the whole where people put their genitalia thing vs the "wow maybe gays have a lot to contribute with, you know, just as women or men who are sterile." still find it hilarious that people have been obsessing about this since i was born and longer. accepting homosexuality took me like 1 minute. 45 seconds of laughing at two genitals of the same kind not fitting, and 15 thinking about i love my friend and i want her to be happy because she deserves to feel loved the way she needs too.
Makes me wonder if there was a lot of thought given to ethics when planning this study.
If we've learned anything, we should know that people will be terrible enough to want to "cure" homosexuality or detect it before birth, like trisomy 21, if it ever will become possible - and research like this will lead to that.
What they're describing is a very broad range of variations across multiple genetic loci with subtle effects that do not predict, only relatively vaguely correlate with, sexual behavior. They say as much, too, although at much greater length and complexity.
I get the concern for potential risk around selective abortion, IVF, etc; I was around for the "gay gene" debate in the 90s. This isn't that. This disproves that. And what they're reporting could not be used in that way.
My experience has been that we are not generally very good at propagating our own history!
On that note, if you haven't read Randy Shilts' And the Band Played On, I strongly recommend it. The events it describes are, I think, the single strongest influence on everything about US (at least) gay culture that's thus far followed.
Tangentially related; question to those who are pro-choice: why is regular abortion okay but sex-selective abortion, aborting downsies, etc. not? My understanding of the pro-choice argument is that if a fetus is not yet a person, it's not wrong to kill it. Why is it more wrong to abort a fetus because it is a boy/girl? I am pro-life and so view this differently, hence not understanding the reasoning here.
I think you'll find that pro-choice folks are split (perhaps many different ways) on this question. Personally the way I view the problem is through the lens of minimizing harm to all parties involved -- and as such, I wouldn't say that it's "not wrong" to kill a fetus, just that in most cases it is the lesser harm than forcing a woman to carry an unwanted child and to bear the life long responsibilities that it entails.
In that lens, imagine a scenario where a woman is happy to be pregnant and excited about becoming a parent. Then she learns the child will be male, and she decides to abort it. There's a wide gulf between between the harm of "didn't want to be a parent" and the disappointment of "didn't want a son". It may help to imagine this with even more trivial features: "oh the baby is going to have blue eyes? never mind then...".
For something like trisomy-21, I find myself of mixed mind. On one hand, there are many things that can happen to a child through their life that could end up posing a similar impediment to the child and burden on their parent. On the other hand, since we're able to detect it so early, perhaps it is the best way to minimize harm.
It would be nice if they included the upper bound of the genetic component from twin studies. Without that it's hard to say whether the 8-25% they found here is as much as we'll get, or if large studies are needed.
It would be pretty surprising if they found a single gene though. The omnigenetic theory says that every complex trait is influenced by small contributions from many genes.
A lot of the search for a gay gene seems trapped in an outdated understanding of sexuality as a binary proposition: "you're either A or B." How do you even begin to contemplate a study on sexuality once you understand it as highly varied and fluid? Same with gender.
They're bimodal distributions at best. You can't just crop off the confounding valleys and call what you do with them good science.
Agreed - “no gay gene” is akin to saying “no intelligence gene” or “no autism gene”.
My understanding is that most psychological traits are now thought of as polygenic, so a statement like “there is no gay gene” is really misleading, because genetics simply doesn’t work that way.
Likely because it's just an incorrect statement, and vaguely accusatory. If you have a dataset of people that asks them if they identify as straight or gay, with no alternative, you're going to miss a lot of nuance, but you'll still likely have a useful dataset for extracting genetic effects. Most people would not describe their sexual orientation as fluid at all. You absolutely can crop off valleys and call it good science.
Yes, this study indicates that human sexuality is a trait more complex than many other aspects of humans, i.e. height, eye color, hair color, skin color, etc.
I mean, yes, of course. But the fact that it's not fluid in so many individuals is part of what fascinates me! The supposed binary split is not real of course, but you note yourself a rather strong bimodal distribution. And that distribution is itself, fascinating and hard to explain.
I am gay, and I have been since I hit puberty. It's completely stable, a fixed personality trait my whole life. It's so... exact. That one little thing, completely inverted from a good majority of men. It's like someone flipped one little switch, that affected only that, at least as far as I can tell.
Bisexuality or pansexuality or whatever you want to call it, on the other hand, seems to fit many of the proposed origins, far better than exclusive homosexuality would. E.g., fuzzy pattern matching gone awry for finding a suitable mate, triggering a bunch of false matches. But it's not like that. It's very precise. That has always struck me as ever so strange.
Indeed. Many people on HN talking on this thread are forgetting bisexuality, demisexuality, etc. Even comments as simple as "you see a beautiful [x of opposite sex] and feel no attraction" miss a lot of vitals.
Sex is bimodal, and genetic - though there are are rare chromosomal disorders, and disorders of sexual development, these are not normal variants and shouldn’t be considered a distribution.
There’s a suggestion that gender is innate and therefore (I assume) genetic, but do we really want to recreate the once anachronistic belief that most men and women are genetically predisposed to behave in masculine and feminine ways?
(Not intended to be flame bait, but I thought someone ought to express the now rarely heard gender critical position)
It was easier to fit in as a bisexual person in the past, than a homosexual person, so bisexual people didn't need as much representation in the past.
Ironically, now we're at a point where that's flipped, and you need to be either gay or straight and can't be somewhere in the middle; but, earlier on, bisexual people could escape persecution and therefore weren't the primary focus.
It's a lot more effective to have the discussion "Dad, I like guys!" and get the father to accept that in the 1950s than it was to say "Hey dad, I like guys and gals". The father could just as easily go "You know, I think there's some good looking men out there, too" and completely miss the point.
When you're trying to convince the majority to quit discriminating against you, then you push whatever evidence you've got. Convincing them that it's genetic, and therefore not a choice, is a prime goal.
There's a theory* that says things like autism, creative genius and homosexuality are caused by suppression of innate characteristics of our species. If so, then it makes sense why there isn't a "gay gene", since there aren't also specific genes for more than 90% of autistics.
> Some homosexually displaying males eventually paired with females, but such males were significantly slower in heterosexual pairing than males that did not display homosexually. In two extraordinary cases, same-sex pairs learned each other’s calls, an essential step in the pairing process. The frequency of such pairs was much lower than among displaying couples, significantly so for males. Finally, the frequency of homosexually displaying pairs was significantly lower than expected from random assortment of displaying birds, for both males and females. We examined possible explanations for same-sex display and its biological significance. A population sex-ratio bias in favor of males and high concentration of male sex hormones may help to explain non-reproductive homosexually displaying pairs.
There's no "gay gene"? Does that also mean there's no heterosexual gene either? If propagation is essential for the species, wouldn't it make sense that sexuality is hardwired?
Just wanted to chime in here and say that my younger brother is gay. Everyone in my family knew from when I was 8 years old and he was 6. We love him and we accept him.
No, it just means that within the population they studied, the variation in whether individuals identified as gay could be explained more with environmental factors than genetic ones. It doesn't say that being gay is 25% genetic and 75% environmental, that's a huge misconception. If parents all treated their kids the same way, and they all had the same treatment in schools, etc, then you'd probably see more influence of genetics than environment. That's how heritability works, it's relative to the population and how homogeneous it is.
But if they worked they wouldn’t be objectionable?
Being forced into them would be objectionable, but being forced into your family farm doesn’t mean farming itself is bad. If conversion therapy was a thing that worked and you could choose it if you wanted, it would be like any other life choice - changing career, religion, nationality, etc.
My question would be closer to, how would you feel if someone high up decided to strip away your attraction to women, and replace it with an attraction to men, because they deemed this more "appropriate", or positive to society.
And now, for the rest of your life, you view having sex with women as disgusting. Would this not be the slightest bit alarming and distressing?
How would you feel if someone high up decided to shave all your hair off? Can we agree it's not the existence of hair clippers which is the bad thing in this scenario, and that it's the "forcing things on people without their consent" which is bad?
So if conversion therapy actually worked, and was just a thing you could freely do or not do - like you can migrate and become a citizen of another country, or join another religion, or learn another language, or get a tattoo, or participate in consenting BSDM, or any other personal choice about your body or life, would it be automatically worse because it's conversion therapy?
They have never worked. It's a well-known truth amongst gay people that the conversion therapy "success stories" are people who chose to go back into the closet for the rest of their lives.
I think my comment isn't clear enough. That they don’t work is why they shouldn’t be legitimised. They are offering a fraudulent or misleading service to anyone choosing to attend, and forcing someone to attend is a cruelty.
I read the parent comment as saying “I hope homosexuality isn’t learned /because/ that would legitimise conversion therapy”, but I say that would be a fine hypothetical world - it’s objecting to the wrong thing, conversion therapy isn’t inherently a bad thing, it’s only bad in worlds where it doesn’t work, like the real world.
Another way of saying it is, if homosexuality is socially determined (in the real world), why fear that would “legitimise” a conversion therapy which doesn’t work (in the real world)?
> conversion therapy isn’t inherently a bad thing, it’s only bad in worlds where it doesn’t work, like the real world
I think large sections of the gay community would disagree. Many gay people view homosexuality as a trait with intrinsic value (this is the whole point of pride).
A similar dynamic plays out in the deaf community, where there is a proven equivalent of conversion therapy, namely cochlear implants. Cochlear implants are very controversial in the deaf community. Part of this is because it's cochlear implants don't yet fully replicate normal hearing, but there are many objections to the very purpose of cochlear implants and in that sense, perfect cochlear implants would be even worse. Certain segments of the community liken cochlear implants to cultural genocide.
The term "cultural genocide" is clickbait; the main bad part about genocide is all the humans who die, I don't get as upset about nobody making the traditional baklava recipe anymore especially when they could if they wanted to. Culture isn't alive, it doesn't die, it can't be killed; it can be lost to history and that can be sad, but shouldn't have the same connotations as acutal murder.
"Cultural genocide is the systematic destruction of traditions, values, language, and other elements which make a one group of people distinct from other groups" - having a cochlear implant does not stop someone using sign language, does not inherently change their values or force them into different traditions, and giving one person an implant they asked for is not a systematic destruction. If they do willingly want to use sign language and so on after getting an implant, the culture won't be lost. If nobody willingly wants to use sign language of their own free choice, the culture may be lost and that's better than the alternative of forcing people against their will into a state where they have no choice but to keep the culture going, for the sake of the culture. That is, hearinged people forcing cochlear implants on unconsenting deaf people would be bad, deaf people forcing deaf people to stay deaf against their will (e.g. by getting cochlear implants banned) would be bad. Medical people (hearing or deaf) offering cochlear implants, and deaf people making a case to tempt deaf people to stay deaf, and the result being a free choice for invididuals, isn't genocide. You could move the point to hearinged parents of deaf children, and say that they will never let the child experience deaf culture, but parents always have the right to act as a proxy for their young child - if deaf people can't convince the parents that deafness has value, what right do they have to take the choice away, anymore than a Christian has rights to force atheist parents to raise their child as a Christian and then let the child decide, for the sole purpose of not letting Christianity be lost?
> "Many gay people view homosexuality as a trait with intrinsic value (this is the whole point of pride)."
And nobody should be forced out of that situation unconsentingly, or discriminated against for being homosexual - regardless of whether it was nature, nurture, or free choice. Neither should people be forced to stay in that situation unconsentingly if there was another option and they wished to take it. You could say that the choice isn't free and fair in a world where there is a dominant heterosexual society which discriminates and abuses homosexuals, and that of course that would "force" (indirectly) people to opt for conversion therapy unfairly (if it worked) and without freely given consent. But I'd turn that round and say that forcing someone else to stay homosexual against their will, to increase the overall numbers in an attempt to redress the bad treatment that way to improve the chances of a better life for the forcers, is bad; if the dominant society is abusive it could be noble to fight against that, but it's valid for an individual to choose to join it instead to have an easier life. People saying "baldness should not be a problem" have a point; people taking Finasteride and having hair transplants don't have to agree with that.
I think most likely some men are 'born gay' (whether through genetics or developmental changes in the womb etc.) while there are also men out there who are socialized to be gay - and that is ok too. But certain parts of society finds the later a lot more scary (when really its not a big deal).
On an aside, I have heard 'straight' men in prisons can have intimate relationships with other men (its not just brutal gang rapes). I can't cite a reference here though.
I've always thought hormones had something to do with sexuality, because as Wikipedia says "sex hormones control the ability to engage in on the motivation to engage in sexual behaviors." What I'm thinking here is that motivation. Some people are motivated to engage with one gender or sexuality, and it becomes hard wired through that developmental process.
hmm sounds like it could be related to a parasitic influence then. Many behavior modifying parasites infect mammals,wouldn't be surprised on its affects on humans.
Why do you think it would be a parasite, as opposed to any other environmental factor? I don't know of any parasite that affects behavior in that way, but if you have some further information, I'd be interested in hearing it.
Absence of proof from an infinite pool of choices isn't proof of absence, but complete understanding of the genome would eliminate it by exhaustion.
In terms of XY exclusively-gay, I think epigenetic is still the leading hypothesis and not genetic by itself. It would be interesting to learn how the genetics set-us up for epigenetic influences.
Other non-heterosexual and flexible sexualities for XX and XY seem more fluid and complicated to unpack. For example, I am unsure what proportion of lesbians are gold star and cannot be aroused at all by males, but I suspect it is low.
> The study authors also point out that they followed convention for genetic analyses by dropping from their study people whose biological sex and self-identified gender did not match. As a result, the work doesn’t include sexual and gender minorities (the LGBTQ community) such as transgender people and intersex people.
I don't get it, isn't this the whole point of the study? The G in LGBTQ stands for "gay", did they exclude people who self-identify as gay from a study meant to find the genetic basis of being gay?
Narrowing things down is easier when you control for one aspect instead of multiple ones.
If, hypothetically, being trans inverted the expression of the gene for being gay, you'd have a harder time finding the gene until you accounted for it. By eliminating the possibility, you make it easier to find the gene you're looking for.
If you can't find the gene in the smaller pool of subjects, you weren't going to find it in the larger one. But if you did find it, you can learn how it affects everyone in a different study.
> If, hypothetically, being trans inverted the expression of the gene for being gay
That, although always possible, seems pretty far-fetched.
> If you can't find the gene in the smaller pool of subjects, you weren't going to find it in the larger one.
Except that here the larger one includes precisely the community of people that has the highest incidence of same-sex attraction. Imagine trying to determine the influence of genetics on skin colour after having removed from your study everyone who self-identifies as black.
The text I quoted says "sexual and gender minorities (the LGBTQ community)". The G in LGBTQ stands for "gay".
It also says "people whose biological sex and self-identified gender did not match" which seems to include biological males who identify as women. (But maybe you're right and the article is imprecise, and what they meant is just that they excluded F to M transsexuals).
Then we could also question whether there is or not a a higher probability for gays to also initiate a gender transition- my hunch is that there is, although of course being gay doesn't per se imply a desire to transition to the opposite sex.
> Then we could also question whether there is or not a a higher probability for gays to also initiate a gender transition- my hunch is that there is, although of course being gay doesn't per se imply a desire to transition to the opposite sex.
While there's probably a slightly higher probability, the perils and feelings that most trans persons will describe are not something that will match with the experience of someone who is gay.
Imagine you suffered serious injury to most of your body, disfiguring you and making it hard or painful for you to recognize yourself in the mirror. That's effectively what puberty was to me. As a young child, I was aware that I was different, but I was mostly okay until my body started changing in the wrong way.
I've found that most (though certainly not all) trans persons I've talked to resonate with that description. Interestingly, among transwomen in America studies have shown that roughly 60% report experiencing attraction to women, and it's only around 20% that report exclusively feeling attracted to men.
Did anyone ever actually think there was a gay gene-- more accurately, allele? Homosexuality clearly has a genetic component, and we've known that for decades. But we've also known for decades that most traits are not controlled by a single gene and that human sexuality is not a binary matter.
This seems like describing a launch to the ISS with the headline "No firmament".
Looking inwards, attraction feels like pattern recognition combined with catecholamine release. So perhaps genes, but also hormones/environment would be responsible.
Fascinating! To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and produces an effeminate male instead - a gay son.
Alternatively, some kind of meta-level mechanism to reduce competition over women in the community, ultimately improving its collective health and well-being.
Given the number of comfortably-masculine gay men I've known, I have a feeling the womb isn't necessarily trying to ensure it eventually creates a Disney Princess. It feels a bit far-fetched, to be honest.
This is a dangerous stereotype that is equally harmful to people of any sexuality, I'd encourage you to correct it. Most of the gay folk I know personally tend towards the athletic end of the spectrum
Is there some law of the internet that when someone corrects someone, they often commit the error they're pointing out?
Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic?
The inverse of effeminate by definition is butch, I purposefully avoided using it as it invokes yet more popular and inaccurate gay stereotypes that in no way capture the folk I was describing
>Did you mean to imply that effeminate -- showing characteristics more associated with females than males -- was at the other end of a spectrum from athletic?
Agreed, the terminology used by the parent comment was a bit strange, but I got the idea of what they meant.
They were talking about an effeminate skinny type of a male compared to a very masculine athletic "macho man"-looking type. In terms of celebrities and purely their appearances, think of young David Bowie vs. Arnold Swarzenegger.
I guess the parent comment simply conflated athleticism with masculinity, but that's just an aspect of it, and not all kinds of athleticism are inherently "masculine" (think yoga or acrobatics or figure skating).
You're really swinging to the opposite end of credibility, bending over backwards to put on blinders and assert that gayness has absolutely no relation to some effeminate qualities. It goes against people's own ability to observe facts and undermines your position. Maybe it's not true for every gay male, but it is certainly an observable phenomenon.
Definitely. I'm straight and I love watching Jane Austen, Anne of Green Gables, Musicals, Hallmark, Downton Abbey, Romcom, etc. movies with my wife. But I'd never let any of my male friends know.
One would think that standing by your choices and not trying to hide then away, would be the assertive and self-confident approach. If your friends are really so fickle as to think less of you based on the TV shows you watch and the love you show for your wife, are they really worth keeping around?
My best friend died in his 20's. So, I have a cynical view on friendship.
It's very time intensive to find new friends and filter out the one's that don't make the cut. Not to mention the awkwardness that comes with breaking up with the one's that don't make the cut.
I know the struggle, I've completely abandoned three separate circles of friends due to moving cross-country and interpersonal drama, over a period of 10 years.
Building up a new circle of friends where I live now took some time, and was initially kicked off by reconnecting with a childhood friend. A huge positive is that we're all mid-30s to mid-40s and more mature, less concerned about outward appearances, so it feels more real and down to earth.
Just being able to be yourself in the company of others is refreshing, because you can relax and lower your guard.
Round of beers, one friend asks for a diet soda? Sure thing. Heck, I have a standing agreement with another friend that I'll bring him a soda even if he asked for a beer and I think he's had one or two too many, because he knows he has a tendency to drink a bit too much. He'll grumble about it, but because we've talked it through, he knows I'm looking out for him.
My best friend is a huge metalhead, but also loves sugary J-pop with a burning passion. And nobody thinks less of him for it. We don't believe in guilty pleasures, you like what you like.
Honestly, and I know this doesn't apply to everyone, I would rather have no friends at all if I couldn't be 100% myself around my friends :-)
Go up to a group of supposedly all straight men and ask who is interested in watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice (ideally they will ask “which one?” and you can respond “the one with Colin Firth”). Then do the same thing with a group of women. Maybe you live somewhere unusual, but in my experience you will have no takers from the men but many takers from the women.
While on the subject, is liking Downton Abbey or Anne of Green Gables effeminate? That's news to me. Huge fan of "Anne with an E" here -- still can't get over the fact they canceled it.
I'm really masculine. I'm tall, reasonably heavily muscled, assertive, hyper competitive, dominant, etc. I've still had some friends tell me that they wouldn't have been surprised if I was gay/bi. The only explanation I have is that they struggle to understand my refusal to conform to norms and I'm interpreted as "different".
Isn’t “being attracted to males” a predominantly female characteristic in animals that reproduce sexually? On the “sexuality” dimension, do not gay men fall closer to the female cluster than the male cluster?
I assume you mean more in that direction than a typical male?
Because I’m pretty sure that homosexual men aren’t overall more like heterosexual women than they are like heterosexual men, at least in terms of appearance.
By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men. In N-dimensional space, they are biased slightly away from dead center of the male cluster towards the female cluster because of the female bias of the attracted-to-men trait.
You could say the same thing about long-haired men. It doesn’t mean you’re implying that any other traits are more feminine, because the one trait in question is already biased female.
I suppose this is true along the dimension labelled "attracted to dudes". There are probably many many more dimensions where homosexual men are not biased towards the female cluster, while many heterosexual men are.
> By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men
In some ways, homosexual men might very well cluster away from females, even more so than heterosexual men.
> In some ways, homosexual men might very well cluster away from females, even more so than heterosexual men.
Aren't we back to what the person I was originally replying to would describe as "dangerous stereotypes"?
The point I was trying to make is that the only thing you can say about homosexual men without invoking stereotypes is that they are attracted to men. And in a statistical sense, that is a feminine characteristic.
I think your initial premise is flawed - that males and females form neat clusters with perfect Gaussian distributions, on any reasonable number of dimensions. Yes, on the axis for attraction to men, gay men are shifted towards the female group. On the majority of dimensions, males and female are probably hard to distinguish. On some dimensions, gay men may indeed cluster away from women.
You're overstating my premise. I was not saying very much, and you're implying I was saying a lot. Who said the clusters were neat? Or that characteristic distributions were Gaussian?
"Women" and "Men" are words that we associate with observable characteristics. They are extremely messy, so much so that there isn't even one characteristic in all of the many dimensions that we would all agree evenly cleaves the "Men" set from the "Women" set. And yes, most observable characteristics are far more shared than not; that's why it's easier to tell a human from a cat than it is a man from a woman.
Please, stop trying to enlarge my claims. The idea that males and females form clusters that could be described as "neat", or that the distribution of any human characteristic is Guassian, are extremely large claims that should be backed up with evidence. I don't know how they even made their way into this discussion.
To restate: Male homosexuality can be described as a trait that male homosexuals share with women. If we assume the default about all other characteristics, i.e. that they are distributed in the same manner as they are in other males, then that would mean homosexual men are ever so slightly skewed female in distribution. That's it. Note that the "if" clause isn't a claim I am making, it is simply a proposition on which the argument is predicated. If it is false, the argument no longer stands. I am not making any judgement about that claim, I am only building on it in the hypothetical universe where it is true.
You're right: you didn't make claims about the nature of the distribution, or that how neat those clusters would be. I did, with the hope that it clarifies the very narrow set of conditions in which your premise holds - which I don't think it really does. It was not my intent to put words in your mouth.
I do agree with the very narrow premise of your original claim:
> Isn’t “being attracted to males” a predominantly female characteristic in animals that reproduce sexually? On the “sexuality” dimension, do not gay men fall closer to the female cluster than the male cluster?
I don't, however, agree with your later claim:
> By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men. In N-dimensional space, they are biased slightly away from dead center of the male cluster towards the female cluster because of the female bias of the attracted-to-men trait.
I would hold that this isn't true, because I would suggest that N here is extremely large, and in many of those dimensions, homosexual men are skewed away from women, even more so than heterosexual men. I do not know what those dimensions could be - perhaps something as esoteric as
"Testosterone Levels", "Median Household Income", "Toxic Fathers", "Suicidal Ideation", "Substance Abuse", or "Gut Microbial Diversity". In some dimensions, homosexual men are probably hypermasculine. In N-dimensional space, humans as a whole are probably indistinguishable, let alone homosexual or heterosexual men.
I do not agree either with the claim:
> The point I was trying to make is that the only thing you can say about homosexual men without invoking stereotypes is that they are attracted to men. And in a statistical sense, that is a feminine characteristic.
[...]
> To restate: Male homosexuality can be described as a trait that male homosexuals share with women. If we assume the default about all other characteristics, i.e. that they are distributed in the same manner as they are in other males, then that would mean homosexual men are ever so slightly skewed female in distribution. That's it. Note that the "if" clause isn't a claim I am making, it is simply a proposition on which the argument is predicated. If it is false, the argument no longer stands. I am not making any judgement about that claim, I am only building on it in the hypothetical universe where it is true.
Yes, the only thing we can say about gay men with certainty that distinguishes them from straight men without invoking sterotypes is that they are attracted to men. It does not follow, however, that they are alike in every other way. On this singular dimension, yes, male homosexuals are shifted towards females. However, the original top level comment that we're responding to had used terminology suggesting gay men == effeminate men. Your initial premise is right, but only if we regard attraction as the defining characteristic and discard everything else. If we expand that definition to N-dimensional space as you did, then no, it's very likely not true, because of all the many ways in which gay men are probably shifted away from women.
> Fascinating! To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and produces an effeminate male instead - a gay son.
You know that a homosexual not are "effeminate males" ? Man, try to revise these stereotype that you have.
I'm not sure the parent comment meant effeminate in demeanor. There is some indication that the brains of homosexual men have some similarities to female brains[1]. The GP's speculation doesn't need to rely on "stereotypes" to describe the homosexual male brain as closer to (heterosexual) female than the heterosexual male brain.
That's fair. I suppose I just find it plausible that the parent commenter made a minor misnomer between feminine and effeminate, instead of jumping to conclusions about stereotyping. But I know I usually have a terminal case of being too charitable, so maybe this is just a blind spot for me.
lol @ all these comments immediately jumping to stereotypes. My English is great but it's not my first language. What's the right word here? Feminine? "More female in brain structure"?
I’d say there is no “right word” at the moment, and the topic is a euphemism treadmill because, as with so many other disenfranchised groups, social norms have not yet universally settled onto “that’s fine, no seriously it’s fine”.
The only way to 'nudge' the chances of a girl baby is to select the sperm based on which sex genes they carry. Any hormonal or such changes induced in the fetus down the line is too late to have any effect on genetic gender.
Also, the Y chromosome has slightly lower mass, and so the male sperm swim slightly faster.
I would suspect, though I haven't seen any studies, that some fertility treatment steps unintentionally have mass-sorting properties similar to the barrier diffusion Uranium enrichment technique used in the Manhattan Project.
It seems more likely for it to be an emergent property of children serving as hunter/gatherer resources but not competing for procreation. It is either a novel mutation or something that is selected for.
Evolutionary psychology is always such a stretch, but I had never considered that possibility before. If there are a lot of extra males, if all were heterosexual there could be destructive competition over female mates. So asexual/homosexual/etc may become selected for if a disproportionate number of males were in a community (still community resources as you say but not destructively competing for mates).
>To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter
But if that were true, it must succeed sometimes. Evolution doesn't select for things that don't work. We should see an equally strong correlation with sex of offspring and birth order. We don't.
One possibility is that the effect reduces the harmful effects of sibling rivalry by making second sons more empathetic. However, this is basically a random guess — there are so many variables in biology that it could be a million other things instead.
The question is not whether they are more empathetic overall, but whether they are more empathetic towards similarly aged men, and when considering that specific object of empathy, I would imagine there is a strong correlation.
> But if that were true, it must succeed sometimes. We should see an equally strong correlation with sex of offspring and birth order.
There is a correlation in the opposite direction between sex and birth order, but that could be explained with a slight variation on the upthread hypothesis; instead of trying to bend things toward girls and sometimes failing with an effeminate boy, one could speculate that it is “trying” to bend things toward boys and sometimes succeeds incompletely, resulting in an effeminate boy.
(“Trying" in this case meaning nothing having to do with intentionality, but merely the effect of the process for which it was selected.)
That... seems unlikely. That implies a woman's reproductive system knows and remembers or at least keeps a tallies of the sex of the offspring it has produced...
> That implies a woman's reproductive system knows and remembers or at least keeps a tallies of the sex of the offspring it has produced...
It doesn't require a tally, it just requires that the body stores something that correlates with number and gender of previous children. Like, say, indefinitely retaining genetic material from each of them. Which, you know, mother's bodies do:
“Not only fetal cells, but also fragments of fetal DNA can be present in the maternal circulation indefinitely after pregnancy. This finding has practical implications for non-invasive prenatal diagnoses based on maternal blood, and may be considered for possible pathophysiological correlations.”
Or that exposure to a fetus for prolonged periods of time has a measurable effect. You can reliably tell the sex of a fetus with a mother's blood test a couple months after conception.
I still think it's a bit unlikely that there's a meaningful connection to be had there, but I wouldn't be totally shocked if I were proven wrong.
The article in Wikipedia seems to imply the mother's womb does "remember" prior pregnancies; after all, what are antibodies and the immune response if not a form of memory?
From Wikipedia:
> The mechanism is thought to be a maternal immune response to male fetuses, whereby antibodies neutralize male Y-proteins thought to play a role in sexual differentiation during development.
The article states even interrupted pregnancies are thought to generate this response.
In what sense does this go beyond? Generating antibodies or an immune response is a form of "remembering". It's how your body "remembers" past invading viruses and "learns" how to fight them.
The reproductive system doesn't "want" anything any more than your immune system "wants" to fight viruses and invading pathogens.
Purely speculative: but I wouldn't be surprised if this level of intelligence were going on in life. The seeds of a plant do remember their previous growing environment.
You’ve made valid points cogently, and asked relevant questions that could be answered using scientific methods, but you’re getting downvoted, which is a polemic response.
Not sure, but perhaps statements like "Comments like these are so hilariously idiotic. Props for making me guffaw out loud." are why people downvote. Personally I think that OP contributed to the conversation so I wouldn't have downvoted (if I could), but maybe some people did because of that.
> Personally I think that OP contributed to the conversation so I wouldn't have downvoted
Same. He's saying the emperor has no clothes, with respect to the thread, which kicked off with this comment:
> To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and produces an effeminate male instead - a gay son.
I find it disturbing that his comment has been flagged and removed. All he did was call out some baseless extrapolation. How did "effeminacy" even enter the conversation?
The original "study" doesn't provide any evidential basis for any of this speculation. Its only data point is the supposed reporting by study participants that they have had more than zero same sex encounters in their life. How does that account for the thesis that a mother's body is generating effeminate homosexual males in a failed bid to generate daughters???
It's cause I said it with vitriol. I also included vulgar language like ass-fucking and dick-sucking. These phrases likely made more squeamish readers who wanted to continue talking about "the homosexuals" in abstract uncomfortable for a reason they didn't quite understand.
But I couldn't keep my anger in my throat. Saying a woman's body would want the boy to be more effeminate and therefore gay, is an idea made of swiss cheese. It's constructed nonsensically. But folks eat it up, cause "sucking dick is feminine"
Should I calmly let the emperor know that they are wearing no clothes? Be quiet, polite, deferential, and be sure to respect the politeness of this space? I'd rather scream he's been an idiot - you go out angry but at least you keep your pride.
I didn't hear "vitriol". Your language was more jocular and incredulous than vitriolic or offensive. Those vernacular terms for sexual behaviour are neither here nor there in a site frequented by linguistic, semantic, and ontological virtuosos.
The comment you were replying to doesn't respect "the politeness of this place." It is base identity politics, or wantonly offensive ignorance, couched in some form of "acceptable" language which seeks to describe a logical chain of thought.
But the logic is jello nailed to the wall. It's not even sham science. It's a red neck fairy story. That's why I considered it an abuse of moderator privileges to downvote your comment.
Anybody concerned about the standard of discourse on HN should feel the same, or be able to defend the "logic" you were responding to cogently, which they can't because it is the rhetorical equivalent of a stream of shit from a horses asshole.
If I am to "assume good faith", which is always an advisable thing to do, the bizarre fairy story stream springs from ignorance of "the homosexuals", not malice. The downvoting of your comment is a different matter.
The "born that way" argument was always a compromise/simplification.
The true argument is that gay relationships, regardless of cause, are just as worthwhile and life affirming as straight relationships.
But, if you're stubborn, and refuse to acknowledge that, "they're born this way" might temporarily get you to acknowledge the absurdity of your position. It feels cruel to condemn someone for something they can't control. But that's not much of an argument--I don't think pedophiles choose to be attracted to minors. The difference is that pedophilic relationships are harmful, not worthwhile and life-affirming.
1) Several other posts in this thread explain that genetics isn't the only way you can be born a certain way. The environment includes the prenatal womb. So the premise isn't false. It's part of a sound argument that you should not persecute homosexuals. It is just that the truth is that you should view homosexual relationships as the full equal of straight relationships, equally real and valuable. Once you realize that, the first argument is just a stepping stone.
2) Even more importantly, this discussion only happened because ignorant moral codes prohibited homosexuality. But such a moral principle is no better than demanding that people crack their eggs from a certain side. In fact, it's worse, because you can just switch sides of the egg with no consequences. Meanwhile, in the real world, these moral codes prevented people from experience love in peace.
You don't get to embrace an absurd and stupid moral code, then whine because someone didn't use a perfect argument to knock you out of your ignorance.
No. Being able to explain 25% of sexual behavior does not mean that the remaining portion has to be explained by other factors. Ignoring the fact that other things, like hormone profiles, have additional explanatory power, many biological processes are subject to noise. The best algorithm in the world can only predict a fair die toss 1 in 6 times.
It may be possible that culture is a factor, but literature reviews of sexual orientation incidence suggest that it does not vary significantly across time or place, which is a pretty compelling reason to think culture is an important factor.
Others are pointing out that non-genetic biological factors (e.g. prenatal hormones) can still mean that a person's sexuality could still be determined (or significantly predisposed) at birth.
And others are pointing out that gay people shouldn't need to argue that they were born gay, with the implication that if a choice were possible there would be a right or a wrong choice justifying marginalization or shaming or discrimination.
But I think it's worth flipping around: What is the source of some people's persistent desire to legislate, regulate, punish, mock or vilify other people's loving relationships? Whenever I encounter this behavior in others, I hope that it's just a phase that they'll grow out of. I worry that they'll pass these traits on to kids by modeling their behavior in public. I'm guessing the cause is cultural. I wonder if it can be fixed.
> What is the source of some people's persistent desire to legislate, regulate, punish, mock or vilify other people's loving relationships?
Western morals are still primarily rooted in Judeo-Christian beliefs which see any sexual expression other than heterosexual, monogamous sex within Christian marriage to be sinful, or at least taboo. The Bible condemns homosexual sex but in theory not homosexuality itself, as the "heterosexual/homosexual" dynamic is a modern invention which would not have existed at the time, but in practice Christendom considers any orientation besides heterosexuality to be at best a form of sexual deviance and immorality, sometimes seen as equivalent to pedophilia and bestiality, and at worst and affront to God.
LGBT sexuality is also often seen as undermining the mainstream paradigms of masculinity and femininity, and by extension gender roles, and by further extension the traditional foundations of society itself.
Yeah, but the bible also is disapproving of premarital sex between straight people, but I don't remember seeing people fight over whether fornicators should be allowed in the military, or could adopt children.
The Bible also disapproves of people who contact swine, but no one fights for the rights of employers to fire pork-eaters based on their religious convictions. Or people wearing clothing of mixed fibers, etc.
And Jesus said it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of god, but no one really debates whether Christians in the bible belt would be willing to vote for a rich guy.
All this is to say, I don't think "the Bible condemns it" is a sufficient explanation for some straight people's fixation with gay sex. That preoccupation seems downright unhealthy. Maybe someone should put it in the DSM.
Just because you don't remember doesn't mean it didn't happen. The conversation needs more specification here. Are we talking about the US? Europe? I'm not faulting your comment, the whole chain seems totally mixed up. Like the Bible has been brought into it, but in a weird way---just because something is condemned somewhere in the Bible doesn't tell us the teaching for Christians. The rule about wearing of mixed fibres has an underlying symbolism and purpose. Christians are exempt from most dietary laws in the Bible. Adultery is technically punishable by dishonourable discharge in the modern US military (idk how often it's enforced). They don't seem to worry about fornication now, but in some places and times that debate has been had. Allowing "fornicators" to adopt children is probably very new (and even difficult still). I am commenting just to express my confusion at this change and to say that I think there is a coherent way to make an argument based on Christian tradition and teaching which is not sunk by the supposed inconsistencies pointed out here. If you want to fight the idea that some of the opposition is truly religious (as opposed to some underlying disorder), it would be more interesting to fight a stronger argument. [edit: change --->charge].
This is a legitimate question. Has our sexuality changed in recent decades (in aggregate), or are we just more open about our differences which were always present?
> An argument for gay rights has been that people are "born that way". That appears to be false
Only if you take the strict literal definition of the phrase "born that way" to mean your genetic make-up.
A person has little to no control over their environmental factors during their upbringing. Everything from average air temperature, food nutrient makeup, airborne particles, etc are environmental factors that we know influence other aspects of human development.
Your comment is making the assumption that the environmental factor that causes homosexuality is witnessing other members of the species be homosexual, which is a large leap of logic to make. Especially knowing that homosexuality is quite common in the animal kingdom despite penguins not participating in Pride Months.
"Your comment is making the assumption that the environmental factor that causes homosexuality is witnessing other members of the species be homosexual, which is a large leap of logic to make."
I think research has found that people are more likely to engage in a behavior if they see others doing the same. For example, someone who would not ordinarily shoplift may do so during a riot where many people are looting stores. A 2019 survey found that "U.S. adults estimate that 23.6% of Americans are gay or lesbian", while Gallup estimates the fraction to be 4.5%. Link: https://news.gallup.com/poll/259571/americans-greatly-overes... . I think this overestimation may influence some behavior at the margin.
I'd be interested in hearing the voices of those downvoting this. Is one of the claims in the comment false, or do you disagree with the conclusion "I think this overestimation may influence some behavior at the margin." [note1] (or both)?
Additionally, what if the conclusion is right (hypothetically)? Is it really that improbable? And if the greater acceptance of homosexuality as of recently (compared to, say, the 19th century) does cause some otherwise-straight people to be gay, what exactly is the problem with that? Would that be something we should address?
And more generally, if we did find an environmental factor that was linked to homosexuality, would we want to address that factor?
Note 1: User Bostonian uses the term "at the margin" in their comment, and I don't know what they meant by that. I'm taking it to be the subset of people who are unsure of their sexuality, though perhaps the author was referring to something else.
The cultural factors related to being gay could easily be unrelated to how much being gay is accepted by society. Especially considering how many famous people are now known to have been gay during a time when it was not acceptable.
Also, there are lots of social studies that seem to suggest having gay family members can be beneficial to the family as a whole, so reducing the amount of homosexuality in the world may actually be undesirable.
I thought they determined already it was a hormone released in the womb during pregnancy, similar to left-handedness. That’s how you can get identical twins, but one is straight and the other is gay.
Not necessarily. My twin boys who just turned 3 are identical according to a genetic test, but were in different sacs with different placenta. This is uncommon, but not THAT uncommon. I think it's not unreasonable that they would have received different amounts of chemicals. They are certainly very similar, but have many differences, and were a pound apart at birth.
See [2]: "Mothers of gay sons, particularly those with older brothers, had significantly higher anti-NLGN4Y levels than did the control samples of women, including mothers of heterosexual sons." There's something going on during pregnancy, and it's starting to be identifiable, but it's not understood yet.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraternal_birth_order_and_male...
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5777026/