The Gay Gene(s)
October 4, 2023 8:18 AM Subscribe
Born This Way? (Radiolab) - "Today, the story of an idea. An idea that some people need, others reject, and one that will, ultimately, be hard to let go of."
The Homosexuals (CBS Reports episode) - "'The Homosexuals' is a 1967 episode of the documentary television series CBS Reports. The hour-long broadcast featured a discussion of a number of topics related to homosexuality and homosexuals. Mike Wallace anchored the episode, which aired on March 7, 1967. Although this was the first network documentary dealing with the topic of homosexuality, it was not the first televised in the United States. That was The Rejected, produced and aired in 1961 on KQED, a public television station in San Francisco."
LULU: And so is he immediately like, "Oh my gosh! Is there a—is there a genetic component to sexuality?also btw...
MATT: Well actually he says, like, no. Dean says he really just wanted to learn about genes and sexuality. And the first thought, he said, wasn't even about himself, it was ...
DEAN HAMER: Hmm. You know, because I'm gay, I know where I can get subjects.
MATT: ... other gay people.
DEAN HAMER: Because whenever you're interested in a trait, the only powerful way to study it is to study the minor version of the trait. Because if you study something that everybody has, it's almost impossible, through genetics, to figure out how it works.
MATT: So the hope is by studying gay people, like, that's actually the path into understanding the genetics of sexuality more broadly.
The Homosexuals (CBS Reports episode) - "'The Homosexuals' is a 1967 episode of the documentary television series CBS Reports. The hour-long broadcast featured a discussion of a number of topics related to homosexuality and homosexuals. Mike Wallace anchored the episode, which aired on March 7, 1967. Although this was the first network documentary dealing with the topic of homosexuality, it was not the first televised in the United States. That was The Rejected, produced and aired in 1961 on KQED, a public television station in San Francisco."
Of course, finding genetic corollaries with homosexuality is quite menacing in the age of CRISPR and violent anti-queer/anti-trans politics.
There was a movie about this back in the mid-90s - Twilight Of The Golds.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:14 AM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
There was a movie about this back in the mid-90s - Twilight Of The Golds.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:14 AM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
> but there is some research that shows finger length corresponding to sexual orientation
The study title: "Are 2D:4D finger-length ratios related to sexual orientation? Yes for men, no for women"
Here's an NBC News article on a different study: "Typically in women, the index and ring fingers are similar in length, while in men there is a greater difference between the two fingers. However, lesbians were found to have more “male-typical” finger-length ratios than their straight co-twins — but just in their left hand." (emphasis mine)
This sounds, uh, significant in the same way that green jelly beans cause acne.
Also check this out: "More than 1400 studies rely on a ratio that many researchers think is meaningless."
posted by AlSweigart at 9:24 AM on October 4, 2023 [12 favorites]
The study title: "Are 2D:4D finger-length ratios related to sexual orientation? Yes for men, no for women"
Here's an NBC News article on a different study: "Typically in women, the index and ring fingers are similar in length, while in men there is a greater difference between the two fingers. However, lesbians were found to have more “male-typical” finger-length ratios than their straight co-twins — but just in their left hand." (emphasis mine)
This sounds, uh, significant in the same way that green jelly beans cause acne.
Also check this out: "More than 1400 studies rely on a ratio that many researchers think is meaningless."
posted by AlSweigart at 9:24 AM on October 4, 2023 [12 favorites]
It's phrenology of the fingers. A... phingerology, if you will.
...
...
(I never apologize for my puns.)
posted by AlSweigart at 9:25 AM on October 4, 2023 [21 favorites]
...
...
(I never apologize for my puns.)
posted by AlSweigart at 9:25 AM on October 4, 2023 [21 favorites]
The finger length correlation has not held up super well to replication, though: some studies find that it only "works" for gay men or only for lesbians, and in general it's a fairly minor effect with a weak correlation. And the studies assaying it generally take an extremely binaristic approach to both human sexuality and gender, which doesn't really reflect how complicated both sexuality and gender can get!
posted by sciatrix at 9:28 AM on October 4, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by sciatrix at 9:28 AM on October 4, 2023 [9 favorites]
ha--jinx!
posted by sciatrix at 9:28 AM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by sciatrix at 9:28 AM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
I always thought about it this way: There has to be at least some partially inborn genetic or epigenetic component to homosexuality, because if there wasn't, wouldn't that be equivalent to saying that something exists out there in the world, something one could encounter or ingest or be exposed to that... turns people gay?
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:38 AM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 9:38 AM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
I’m fairly sure I have seen directly contradictory claims about digit ratio in gay men - some studies found that it was more “masculinized” while others found that it was more “feminized” though of course the public tended to latch onto the latter. Anyway it’s not the most convincing body of research.
posted by atoxyl at 9:39 AM on October 4, 2023
posted by atoxyl at 9:39 AM on October 4, 2023
I don't think we can satisfactorily answer this question using the available data set. We'd need generations of completely free sexuality, with absolutely no societal/cultural/familiar/internal pressure to conform to strict heterosexuality.
posted by rhymedirective at 9:41 AM on October 4, 2023 [32 favorites]
posted by rhymedirective at 9:41 AM on October 4, 2023 [32 favorites]
Sorry if I derailed this discussion into a finger length morass!
posted by latkes at 9:41 AM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by latkes at 9:41 AM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
Are essentialists born that way, did their environment make them essentialists, or did they choose to be essentialists?
posted by larrybob at 9:42 AM on October 4, 2023 [52 favorites]
posted by larrybob at 9:42 AM on October 4, 2023 [52 favorites]
The Pluto Gangsta: it could be hormonal environment in the womb.
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:44 AM on October 4, 2023
posted by Nancy Lebovitz at 9:44 AM on October 4, 2023
I will say I’m not a big fan of the way “modern studies have failed to find genes with large effects” often seems to get reported as “evidence of limited genetic influence.” You can still have a significant genetic influence in a model with few large effects, it just suggests all sorts of traits are tangled up in complex ways.
But of course there’s also direct evidence of sexual behavior being situationally flexible so it clearly isn’t all genetic regardless.
posted by atoxyl at 9:45 AM on October 4, 2023 [4 favorites]
But of course there’s also direct evidence of sexual behavior being situationally flexible so it clearly isn’t all genetic regardless.
posted by atoxyl at 9:45 AM on October 4, 2023 [4 favorites]
My hot take is there's likely a genetic component to sexual expression, just as there are social & cultural components, but what's important is to decouple any 'debate' regarding our rights from what role genetics has in people's sexual orientation.
Maybe I was born this way, maybe I choose to be this way because queer sex is hot and rad, but that question has no bearing on my right to exist and thrive.
posted by latkes at 9:46 AM on October 4, 2023 [88 favorites]
Maybe I was born this way, maybe I choose to be this way because queer sex is hot and rad, but that question has no bearing on my right to exist and thrive.
posted by latkes at 9:46 AM on October 4, 2023 [88 favorites]
Could be an emergent property of being around other people. Could be an emergent property mediated through developmental influences in the womb! Could be random?
Plus latkes’ point.
posted by clew at 9:49 AM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
Plus latkes’ point.
posted by clew at 9:49 AM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
previously, by the way, on the last time this general story came up. I'm still actually really pissed about that one.
LULU: Have they heard of bisexuality?
MATT: [laughs]
LULU: Did bisexuality not exist in people's minds then?
MATT: Wait. Hang on. I'm sending you something. I'm sending you something. Okay.
You know, I used to run a journal club on [human] asexuality, and I've publicly commented on these kinds of "the genetics of homosexuality" presentations a number of times, and so I've read quite a bit of the literature on the 'genetic' origins of human sexual preference. Would you believe it but human sexuality researchers are often really.... fucking... bad... at remembering that bisexuality exists? They are also bad at distinguishing homosexuality from gender, and they are furthermore generally pretty bad at disentangling attraction from behavior. Like.... incredibly bad. Part of the problem is that funding for these things is thin on the ground, and so budding researchers often find themselves discouraged from pure basic research--that was explicit guidance I got from one guy in the field as an undergraduate, by the way, that happened to me personally--and part of the problem is just that academics don't fucking bother to pay attention outside of their own assumptions half the time. It is so incredibly frustrating.
It's incredibly frustrating and it really makes me brace myself and start twitching when we talk about genetics, the brain, and queerness: there's so much of this reflexively politic knee-jerk appeal to Science that if queerness is Genetic, it is therefore Unchosen, so discriminating against queer people is Wrong. If queerness carries some element of choice--even as simply as being attracted to people of a variety of genders and choosing to engage in relationships with people who share your own gender--does that therefore make disgust-based discrimination and religiously motivated attempts to suppress all deviation from heteronormativity okay?
No! It fucking well doesn't! So while I understand this historical value of 'born this way' as an activist line, a) increasingly, with the advent of genetic testing, any labeled variants will be used to identify and marginalize people, and b) behavior, preference, identity, and attachment are all so much more wildly complicated than that! Gender is complicated! Sex is complicated! There is so much variation that we collapse into stupidly simplistic models of the world, and reduce to some kind of bioreductionist approach without understanding that the experiences we have and our emotional responses to those experiences shape us in incredibly profound and powerful ways! It is maddening!
Do not get me started on behavior genetics and the frankly piss-fucking-poor education those people get on population and molecular genetics qua genetics in addition to a poor education on neuroscience, variation, and behavioral variation generally. I just sat through an entire year of seminars from and to quantitative behavior geneticists working on addiction in one of the institutions with the oldest and most well-regarded history of the field, and I spent most of my time either bored or perplexed: no one understood basic population genetics maxims about the structure of variation that date to the fucking 1930s, no one understood what a "reaction norm" is in the context of environmental variance, and almost no one even bothered to measure environmental variation when constructing, again, models of highly loaded traits with huge potential to hurt real people. One student, working on "the inherited basis of propensity to save money regardless of income," could not explain to me what "heritability" was or how it is calculated (a simple! linear regression! between two plotted sets of points!) when asked.
I often want to approach the entire field with a flamethrower. Do not get me started on sex differences, which is a big component of what I am currently working on, or the interaction between sex and gender and how that is usually totally elided by these studies. (Yes, they just routinely throw intersex, binary trans and usually nonbinary people out of the dataset entirely, and everything gets collapsed to the simplest possible binaristic categories.)
posted by sciatrix at 9:51 AM on October 4, 2023 [94 favorites]
LULU: Have they heard of bisexuality?
MATT: [laughs]
LULU: Did bisexuality not exist in people's minds then?
MATT: Wait. Hang on. I'm sending you something. I'm sending you something. Okay.
You know, I used to run a journal club on [human] asexuality, and I've publicly commented on these kinds of "the genetics of homosexuality" presentations a number of times, and so I've read quite a bit of the literature on the 'genetic' origins of human sexual preference. Would you believe it but human sexuality researchers are often really.... fucking... bad... at remembering that bisexuality exists? They are also bad at distinguishing homosexuality from gender, and they are furthermore generally pretty bad at disentangling attraction from behavior. Like.... incredibly bad. Part of the problem is that funding for these things is thin on the ground, and so budding researchers often find themselves discouraged from pure basic research--that was explicit guidance I got from one guy in the field as an undergraduate, by the way, that happened to me personally--and part of the problem is just that academics don't fucking bother to pay attention outside of their own assumptions half the time. It is so incredibly frustrating.
It's incredibly frustrating and it really makes me brace myself and start twitching when we talk about genetics, the brain, and queerness: there's so much of this reflexively politic knee-jerk appeal to Science that if queerness is Genetic, it is therefore Unchosen, so discriminating against queer people is Wrong. If queerness carries some element of choice--even as simply as being attracted to people of a variety of genders and choosing to engage in relationships with people who share your own gender--does that therefore make disgust-based discrimination and religiously motivated attempts to suppress all deviation from heteronormativity okay?
No! It fucking well doesn't! So while I understand this historical value of 'born this way' as an activist line, a) increasingly, with the advent of genetic testing, any labeled variants will be used to identify and marginalize people, and b) behavior, preference, identity, and attachment are all so much more wildly complicated than that! Gender is complicated! Sex is complicated! There is so much variation that we collapse into stupidly simplistic models of the world, and reduce to some kind of bioreductionist approach without understanding that the experiences we have and our emotional responses to those experiences shape us in incredibly profound and powerful ways! It is maddening!
Do not get me started on behavior genetics and the frankly piss-fucking-poor education those people get on population and molecular genetics qua genetics in addition to a poor education on neuroscience, variation, and behavioral variation generally. I just sat through an entire year of seminars from and to quantitative behavior geneticists working on addiction in one of the institutions with the oldest and most well-regarded history of the field, and I spent most of my time either bored or perplexed: no one understood basic population genetics maxims about the structure of variation that date to the fucking 1930s, no one understood what a "reaction norm" is in the context of environmental variance, and almost no one even bothered to measure environmental variation when constructing, again, models of highly loaded traits with huge potential to hurt real people. One student, working on "the inherited basis of propensity to save money regardless of income," could not explain to me what "heritability" was or how it is calculated (a simple! linear regression! between two plotted sets of points!) when asked.
I often want to approach the entire field with a flamethrower. Do not get me started on sex differences, which is a big component of what I am currently working on, or the interaction between sex and gender and how that is usually totally elided by these studies. (Yes, they just routinely throw intersex, binary trans and usually nonbinary people out of the dataset entirely, and everything gets collapsed to the simplest possible binaristic categories.)
posted by sciatrix at 9:51 AM on October 4, 2023 [94 favorites]
I've never been a fan of the "I can't help being gay please give me equal rights anyway it's not my fault" argument. I'm strategically wrong about this - "born this way" was the most effective argument in a lot of the gay rights struggle 1995-2015. It just wasn't exactly my personal experience, nor fits with many other gay men I know. Also it's such a weird basis for civil rights in the US. We manage to respect the rights of people of different religions and it's not like anyone was born genetically Catholic or Southern Baptist or whatever. In fact it's a much simple matter to choose to be of a specific religion than to choose to prefer heterosexual relationships.
posted by Nelson at 9:54 AM on October 4, 2023 [37 favorites]
posted by Nelson at 9:54 AM on October 4, 2023 [37 favorites]
We manage to respect the rights of people of different religions
A rather large number of Muslims, Sikhs, atheists, and Jews (and that's just off the top of my head) might have a few things to say about the accuracy of this particular phrase.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:58 AM on October 4, 2023 [13 favorites]
A rather large number of Muslims, Sikhs, atheists, and Jews (and that's just off the top of my head) might have a few things to say about the accuracy of this particular phrase.
posted by EmpressCallipygos at 9:58 AM on October 4, 2023 [13 favorites]
The Homosexuals should be the name of an old TV series. Crime drama. Everyone in the entire cast of every episode is clearly (to us) queer but appropriately closeted in 1960s style. A Quinn Martin Production. "Tonight's episode: Dick's Hatband"
posted by pracowity at 9:58 AM on October 4, 2023 [35 favorites]
posted by pracowity at 9:58 AM on October 4, 2023 [35 favorites]
I always thought about it this way: There has to be at least some partially inborn genetic or epigenetic component to homosexuality, because if there wasn't, wouldn't that be equivalent to saying that something exists out there in the world, something one could encounter or ingest or be exposed to that... turns people gay?
No! There isn't! Because you can plausibly say, something exists out in the world where two things coincided for one person that created a negative association with this mode of being, and failing to meet this social expectation soured over time, and at the end point it's more motivating and enjoying to engage in attachment and sexual behaviors with this category of people than that one, and you can incredibly easily end up with preferences that are wholly learned and yet wholly un-chosen and un-predictable. Because preference is complicated.
It's all stochastic, baby! The interplay between experience and genes--nature and nurture--is so wildly fucking complicated that, when you add that to the reality that we can't study one without the other it's almost impossible to disentangle even with the most powerful tools we have at our disposal and massive amounts of resources! And both the set of all experiences that happen after fucking conception--which is your total set of environmental influences--and the total set of genetic variations--most of which have neutral and/or very small effects on phenotype, but which can also unpredictably respond to one another through pleiotropy--are fucking enormous and incredibly, incredibly variable.
You can't erase that complexity by willing it into a simple fucking binary category. You can't disentangle choices, experiences, emotions and orientation. Environment isn't one thing. There is no such thing as a neutral environment. And people impose these incredibly simplistic schemas about how humans work, based on the simplest possible versions of our own social constructs to explain wildly complex, personal, and individual preferences, onto population data and call it an insight even when it explains the actual variation of the sample incredibly poorly!
It makes me froth at the fucking mouth on both an intellectual and a political level! We don't have the evidence to say that even two cis gay men are cis gay men for the same reason or origin mechanism, because we do not have the faintest idea what we are looking for beyond the shared preference!
Do not get me started about the use of genital engorgement monitors of various types to 'experimentally determine sexual preference,' because arousal and actual preference to engage in sexual activity by choice and for enjoyment are not even remotely perfectly overlapping categories. Not even close.
posted by sciatrix at 10:02 AM on October 4, 2023 [58 favorites]
No! There isn't! Because you can plausibly say, something exists out in the world where two things coincided for one person that created a negative association with this mode of being, and failing to meet this social expectation soured over time, and at the end point it's more motivating and enjoying to engage in attachment and sexual behaviors with this category of people than that one, and you can incredibly easily end up with preferences that are wholly learned and yet wholly un-chosen and un-predictable. Because preference is complicated.
It's all stochastic, baby! The interplay between experience and genes--nature and nurture--is so wildly fucking complicated that, when you add that to the reality that we can't study one without the other it's almost impossible to disentangle even with the most powerful tools we have at our disposal and massive amounts of resources! And both the set of all experiences that happen after fucking conception--which is your total set of environmental influences--and the total set of genetic variations--most of which have neutral and/or very small effects on phenotype, but which can also unpredictably respond to one another through pleiotropy--are fucking enormous and incredibly, incredibly variable.
You can't erase that complexity by willing it into a simple fucking binary category. You can't disentangle choices, experiences, emotions and orientation. Environment isn't one thing. There is no such thing as a neutral environment. And people impose these incredibly simplistic schemas about how humans work, based on the simplest possible versions of our own social constructs to explain wildly complex, personal, and individual preferences, onto population data and call it an insight even when it explains the actual variation of the sample incredibly poorly!
It makes me froth at the fucking mouth on both an intellectual and a political level! We don't have the evidence to say that even two cis gay men are cis gay men for the same reason or origin mechanism, because we do not have the faintest idea what we are looking for beyond the shared preference!
Do not get me started about the use of genital engorgement monitors of various types to 'experimentally determine sexual preference,' because arousal and actual preference to engage in sexual activity by choice and for enjoyment are not even remotely perfectly overlapping categories. Not even close.
posted by sciatrix at 10:02 AM on October 4, 2023 [58 favorites]
One could well argue that being "born this way" has specifically been the primary historical argument to deprive people of their rights, given the history of racialization as a tool to justify enslavement, resource extraction, and apartheid systems of governance.
posted by latkes at 10:03 AM on October 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
posted by latkes at 10:03 AM on October 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
I listened to this episode the other day. I kept waiting for them to mention the Kinsey scale, but they didn't. What if "genetic or a choice" isn't a real binary, and neither is "gay or straight"?
My hot take is that none of us has much control over anything about ourselves. The whole complex mess... our genes, our environment, the way people treat us, the resources we have, the stress levels we've faced, our personal histories and circumstances, the constraints on our choices in the here and now, the results of our choices in the past, our prospects for the future... It all shapes who we are and what we want.
Being fat. Being an addict. Depression. Novelty seeking. Good evidence that all of them are partly genetic, and also that genes are not destiny. How about I just decide I don't need to know exactly how somebody got the way the are to accept that it IS who they are, and refrain from judging?
This is harder with personality disorders, anger issues, criminal behavior, but even there, I find I can usually manage to think "there but the grace of God go I." If I were in that person's shoes, in their body, I'd probably do the same things... I think.
So, being gay? Partly genetic, I'm sure. Hormones and whatnot. But even if it weren't, it wouldn't be for me to judge. Not my body, not my shoes.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:04 AM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
My hot take is that none of us has much control over anything about ourselves. The whole complex mess... our genes, our environment, the way people treat us, the resources we have, the stress levels we've faced, our personal histories and circumstances, the constraints on our choices in the here and now, the results of our choices in the past, our prospects for the future... It all shapes who we are and what we want.
Being fat. Being an addict. Depression. Novelty seeking. Good evidence that all of them are partly genetic, and also that genes are not destiny. How about I just decide I don't need to know exactly how somebody got the way the are to accept that it IS who they are, and refrain from judging?
This is harder with personality disorders, anger issues, criminal behavior, but even there, I find I can usually manage to think "there but the grace of God go I." If I were in that person's shoes, in their body, I'd probably do the same things... I think.
So, being gay? Partly genetic, I'm sure. Hormones and whatnot. But even if it weren't, it wouldn't be for me to judge. Not my body, not my shoes.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:04 AM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
We can't even figure out for sure in a clearly predictable why some people like coffee and some people like tea, and we think we're going to fucking solve the mystery of variation in sexual preference for gender and sex tomorrow. Look at us, we're scientists, we play with big numbers and we make shiny graphs, bloo bloo be bloo blooooooooh
useful context: sciatrix is a postdoctoral researcher who needs to go back to manipulating her stupid giant behavioral dataset to try to tease apart small differences in repetitive motion between two mouse genotypes now
posted by sciatrix at 10:05 AM on October 4, 2023 [64 favorites]
useful context: sciatrix is a postdoctoral researcher who needs to go back to manipulating her stupid giant behavioral dataset to try to tease apart small differences in repetitive motion between two mouse genotypes now
posted by sciatrix at 10:05 AM on October 4, 2023 [64 favorites]
This whole episode seems to conflate the idea of something being innate or inborn and its being genetic, but those are not the same thing. There are all kinds of important things with lasting consequences that can happen during early human development yet would not have much to do with the genes of the human in question. I read through it pretty quickly, so maybe I missed a very short discussion of this possibility, but I was disappointed they didn’t seem to make that distinction.
posted by en forme de poire at 10:06 AM on October 4, 2023 [9 favorites]
posted by en forme de poire at 10:06 AM on October 4, 2023 [9 favorites]
> that something exists out there in the world, something one could encounter or ingest or be exposed to that... turns people gay?
I'm a straight cis guy, and the only reason Prince hasn't turned me gay is because Sigourney Weaver is slightly more powerful at turning me straight.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:07 AM on October 4, 2023 [19 favorites]
I'm a straight cis guy, and the only reason Prince hasn't turned me gay is because Sigourney Weaver is slightly more powerful at turning me straight.
posted by AlSweigart at 10:07 AM on October 4, 2023 [19 favorites]
I listened to this episode the other day. I kept waiting for them to mention the Kinsey scale, but they didn't. What if "genetic or a choice" isn't a real binary, and neither is "gay or straight"?
YEAH. WHAT IF. WHAT IF THE NATURAL STATE OF WILLINGNESS TO ENGAGE IN SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IS BASICALLY INDISCRIMINATE WITH RESPECT TO SEX. DID ANYONE EVER THINK OF THAT.
sorry I'll be in my angry dome
posted by sciatrix at 10:07 AM on October 4, 2023 [32 favorites]
YEAH. WHAT IF. WHAT IF THE NATURAL STATE OF WILLINGNESS TO ENGAGE IN SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IS BASICALLY INDISCRIMINATE WITH RESPECT TO SEX. DID ANYONE EVER THINK OF THAT.
sorry I'll be in my angry dome
posted by sciatrix at 10:07 AM on October 4, 2023 [32 favorites]
important things with lasting consequences that can happen during early human development
Yeah, and during later human development too! You can be shaped by the things that happened to you. A lot of that has nothing to do with choosing. You don't choose everything that happens to you.
I guess I always figured "born this way" was a sort of shorthand for "I didn't choose to be this way. It's just who I am and have been for as long as I can remember." The narrower "it's genetic" interpretation has always seemed a little problematic to me, for the reasons the episode gets into. But were most people really interpreting it that way?
Anyway, I kind of wish we could change it to something more like "it's not a choice" to account for all of the ways we can be affected by things we didn't choose, beyond just our genes, and even after our birth.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:17 AM on October 4, 2023 [4 favorites]
Yeah, and during later human development too! You can be shaped by the things that happened to you. A lot of that has nothing to do with choosing. You don't choose everything that happens to you.
I guess I always figured "born this way" was a sort of shorthand for "I didn't choose to be this way. It's just who I am and have been for as long as I can remember." The narrower "it's genetic" interpretation has always seemed a little problematic to me, for the reasons the episode gets into. But were most people really interpreting it that way?
Anyway, I kind of wish we could change it to something more like "it's not a choice" to account for all of the ways we can be affected by things we didn't choose, beyond just our genes, and even after our birth.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:17 AM on October 4, 2023 [4 favorites]
this is one of the better recent radiolab episodes. the hosts seem to have realized that saying 'like' every third word does not make for a good listening experience. The search of a gay gene reminds me of a search for a language gene (FoxP2 anyone?). Likely multi-determined nature and nurture but at this point nobody knows.
posted by bluesky43 at 10:22 AM on October 4, 2023
posted by bluesky43 at 10:22 AM on October 4, 2023
>In fact it's a much simple matter to choose to be of a specific religion ...
I have found that , many (most?) religious people don't respond well to framing their religion as a choice.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 10:27 AM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
I have found that , many (most?) religious people don't respond well to framing their religion as a choice.
posted by mrgoldenbrown at 10:27 AM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
sciatrix: Apologies for having caused you to go into your angry dome. Thanks for your extensive response to my question.
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:29 AM on October 4, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by The Pluto Gangsta at 10:29 AM on October 4, 2023 [5 favorites]
I am really sick today and so am very glad everyone else has the energy to be angry about this topic in the way that I'm usually angry about this topic! Every word science has ever written about gayness is stupid, every little political argument where "if we say X about gayness then the right will do Y" is stupid. Even lumping a whole bunch of guys with wildly different attractions into a single group is a little bit weird and stupid but in a historically-contingent way that makes more sense than "i bet there's a gene that makes you really fascinated with portraits of st. sebastian in high school."
posted by mittens at 10:31 AM on October 4, 2023 [8 favorites]
posted by mittens at 10:31 AM on October 4, 2023 [8 favorites]
Sigourney Weaver is slightly more powerful at turning me straight.
Ha! Her and the movie The Hunger in general was a key part of turning me gay. Or rather, recognizing the gay in me. It was interesting to be totally hot for her and Catherine Deneuve smoldering on screen and realizing "oh this means I like men". David Bowie helped.
I have found that many (most?) religious people don't respond well to framing their religion as a choice.
I've found that too! It's particularly confounding among folks who practice forms of Christianity where Confirmation is an important rite.
posted by Nelson at 10:36 AM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
Ha! Her and the movie The Hunger in general was a key part of turning me gay. Or rather, recognizing the gay in me. It was interesting to be totally hot for her and Catherine Deneuve smoldering on screen and realizing "oh this means I like men". David Bowie helped.
I have found that many (most?) religious people don't respond well to framing their religion as a choice.
I've found that too! It's particularly confounding among folks who practice forms of Christianity where Confirmation is an important rite.
posted by Nelson at 10:36 AM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
Not to derail on religion, but when I told my parents I was an atheist (as a young teenager) they sure thought it was a choice, and a bad one. But I was like "Look, I really wish I could still believe in all this stuff! And still have your approval and participate in our church-based social activities and take comfort from prayer when bad things happen and not feel weird about singing hymns!" I very much did want to still believe in God. I just couldn't. Didn't make sense to me. It felt like trying to believe that 2+2=5.
So I'm sticking with my "hardly anything about us is a choice" thing.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:45 AM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
So I'm sticking with my "hardly anything about us is a choice" thing.
posted by OnceUponATime at 10:45 AM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
"THAT'S NO HATBAND!"
posted by MonsieurPEB at 11:10 AM on October 4, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by MonsieurPEB at 11:10 AM on October 4, 2023 [6 favorites]
the only reason Prince hasn't turned me gay
Ah, the love that dare not speak its former name.
posted by pracowity at 11:17 AM on October 4, 2023 [22 favorites]
Ah, the love that dare not speak its former name.
posted by pracowity at 11:17 AM on October 4, 2023 [22 favorites]
I'm a straight cis guy, and the only reason Prince hasn't turned me gay is because Sigourney Weaver is slightly more powerful at turning me straight.
Able was I ere I saw Idris Elba.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:21 AM on October 4, 2023 [26 favorites]
Able was I ere I saw Idris Elba.
posted by kirkaracha at 11:21 AM on October 4, 2023 [26 favorites]
I am not a geneticist, but from what I've read, "a gene for X" is an outmoded way of thinking. There's gene expression, timing of gene expression, gene interaction, environmental factors, epigenetics, and probably more.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:38 AM on October 4, 2023 [10 favorites]
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:38 AM on October 4, 2023 [10 favorites]
sciatrix: Apologies for having caused you to go into your angry dome. Thanks for your extensive response to my question.
....belatedly, I want to clarify: your question did not make me go into the angry dome. The entire field makes me want to yell and shake people, and I thought it was maybe a good idea to go try some other work for a while. You did nothing wrong or particularly unexceptional, and I would like to make that explicitly clear rather than worry you're feeling singled out because I'm off on a tear.
posted by sciatrix at 11:55 AM on October 4, 2023 [10 favorites]
....belatedly, I want to clarify: your question did not make me go into the angry dome. The entire field makes me want to yell and shake people, and I thought it was maybe a good idea to go try some other work for a while. You did nothing wrong or particularly unexceptional, and I would like to make that explicitly clear rather than worry you're feeling singled out because I'm off on a tear.
posted by sciatrix at 11:55 AM on October 4, 2023 [10 favorites]
Choosing to be who you decide to be rather than accepting who you're told you are is profoundly subversive.
No wonder so many of us have imposter syndrome, we're not supposed to do that.
posted by Zumbador at 12:19 PM on October 4, 2023 [6 favorites]
No wonder so many of us have imposter syndrome, we're not supposed to do that.
posted by Zumbador at 12:19 PM on October 4, 2023 [6 favorites]
As ar as I know, the only real thing that has been studied well that can be replicated is the birth order effect on sexual orientation on males, which is that every boy born into a family has a greater chance of being gay the more older brothers he has.
WHAT IF THE NATURAL STATE OF WILLINGNESS TO ENGAGE IN SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IS BASICALLY INDISCRIMINATE WITH RESPECT TO SEX.
I think there's a real confusion in our society between who one is willing to engage in sexual behavior with and who one wants to form a relationship with. And I think it's this relationship building factor that more works into the gay/straight continuum. I've known a lot of men who would engage with sex with men but who couldn't imagine themselves in a long-term relationship with a man.
Now, whether this is due to societal pressures, public appearances, etc diverting what might be a natural urge toward coupling with the same gender is something that probably hasn't been and can't be easily studied. I know plenty of men who have much much closer relationships with the men in their lives but who are entirely straight in terms of their public social bonding behavior. Would they possibly be gay under different social circumstances?
And then we get into situations where someone might be bonded with someone of the opposite gender but desires sex with the same gender. I'd say vice-versa, but in our society that generally isn't really an "issue", insofar as many people involved in relationships that aren't fully heteronormative have sorted through issues involving sex and attachment and are statistically more forgiving of sexual contact outside of a primary relationship. If not actually not caring about such "transgressions" at all.
Genetics are so complex... we don't have a genetic marker for left-handedness, although strong evidence is that it is genetic because it can run in families. But if being homosexually-oriented were genetic, it should be much more rare because a homosexual relationship cannot produce children. Although perhaps two factors influence this -- social pressures having people who trend toward homosexual relationships being in heterosexual, child-creating relationships, and the newer trends of homosexual couples having children that are not adopted.
In a world where there were no social pressures, everyone only hooked up with their preferred gender, and there were no children produced by homosexually-oriented people, then MAYBE we'd see if homosexuality were genetic. But we don't live in that world, and it's already established that at least birth order in males can affect sexual orientation well outside of family genetics.
posted by hippybear at 12:21 PM on October 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
WHAT IF THE NATURAL STATE OF WILLINGNESS TO ENGAGE IN SEXUAL BEHAVIOR IS BASICALLY INDISCRIMINATE WITH RESPECT TO SEX.
I think there's a real confusion in our society between who one is willing to engage in sexual behavior with and who one wants to form a relationship with. And I think it's this relationship building factor that more works into the gay/straight continuum. I've known a lot of men who would engage with sex with men but who couldn't imagine themselves in a long-term relationship with a man.
Now, whether this is due to societal pressures, public appearances, etc diverting what might be a natural urge toward coupling with the same gender is something that probably hasn't been and can't be easily studied. I know plenty of men who have much much closer relationships with the men in their lives but who are entirely straight in terms of their public social bonding behavior. Would they possibly be gay under different social circumstances?
And then we get into situations where someone might be bonded with someone of the opposite gender but desires sex with the same gender. I'd say vice-versa, but in our society that generally isn't really an "issue", insofar as many people involved in relationships that aren't fully heteronormative have sorted through issues involving sex and attachment and are statistically more forgiving of sexual contact outside of a primary relationship. If not actually not caring about such "transgressions" at all.
Genetics are so complex... we don't have a genetic marker for left-handedness, although strong evidence is that it is genetic because it can run in families. But if being homosexually-oriented were genetic, it should be much more rare because a homosexual relationship cannot produce children. Although perhaps two factors influence this -- social pressures having people who trend toward homosexual relationships being in heterosexual, child-creating relationships, and the newer trends of homosexual couples having children that are not adopted.
In a world where there were no social pressures, everyone only hooked up with their preferred gender, and there were no children produced by homosexually-oriented people, then MAYBE we'd see if homosexuality were genetic. But we don't live in that world, and it's already established that at least birth order in males can affect sexual orientation well outside of family genetics.
posted by hippybear at 12:21 PM on October 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
“Also it's such a weird basis for civil rights in the US. We manage to respect the rights of people of different religions and it's not like anyone was born genetically Catholic or Southern Baptist or whatever.”
There's this really misguided thing that's very common, you can find many comments saying it on mefi, that only things you don't have a choice in can put you in a protected class. It's a bad idea with bad implications.
More broadly, I've been speaking publicly against the "I was born this way" argument for gay rights and its implications — that it's short-term helpful but long-term harmful — for fucking thirty years and, wow, was that a heretical position for a long time. Maybe I can find people attacking me for it here in the mid-00s. I've been kinda pissed about this for a long time; I've been feeling a lot of "I told you so" satisfaction about the shift on this for a few years, now. I guess I noticed the change about 5-10 years ago, it's approaching conventional wisdom in crowds like here, but it's still pretty firmly embedded in the popular consensus, especially casual allies.
Even more generally, I've been critical of the tendency to take strong nature/nurture science-inflected positions in civil rights issues all my adult life, partly for the scientific reasons sciatrix discusses, partly because of pragmatic considerations that this is a good way as a civil rights activists to find your enemies have suckered you into a position than can be used against you.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:43 PM on October 4, 2023 [13 favorites]
There's this really misguided thing that's very common, you can find many comments saying it on mefi, that only things you don't have a choice in can put you in a protected class. It's a bad idea with bad implications.
More broadly, I've been speaking publicly against the "I was born this way" argument for gay rights and its implications — that it's short-term helpful but long-term harmful — for fucking thirty years and, wow, was that a heretical position for a long time. Maybe I can find people attacking me for it here in the mid-00s. I've been kinda pissed about this for a long time; I've been feeling a lot of "I told you so" satisfaction about the shift on this for a few years, now. I guess I noticed the change about 5-10 years ago, it's approaching conventional wisdom in crowds like here, but it's still pretty firmly embedded in the popular consensus, especially casual allies.
Even more generally, I've been critical of the tendency to take strong nature/nurture science-inflected positions in civil rights issues all my adult life, partly for the scientific reasons sciatrix discusses, partly because of pragmatic considerations that this is a good way as a civil rights activists to find your enemies have suckered you into a position than can be used against you.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 12:43 PM on October 4, 2023 [13 favorites]
I'm a straight cis guy, and the only reason Prince hasn't turned me gay is because Sigourney Weaver is slightly more powerful at turning me straight.
that's so funny because i was gonna be a straight cis guy and Sigourney Weaver turned me lesbian.
jokes aside i love everything sciatrix et al had to say in this thread. i always think the researchers who try to reduce gender and sexuality into strict binaries must be coming from a place of strict binary simplicity - i'm this and i'm attracted to that and that never changes and there are no exceptions. please please go meet some queer/trans/enby folks that show you how blurry those lines can truly be
posted by sharktopus at 12:44 PM on October 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
that's so funny because i was gonna be a straight cis guy and Sigourney Weaver turned me lesbian.
jokes aside i love everything sciatrix et al had to say in this thread. i always think the researchers who try to reduce gender and sexuality into strict binaries must be coming from a place of strict binary simplicity - i'm this and i'm attracted to that and that never changes and there are no exceptions. please please go meet some queer/trans/enby folks that show you how blurry those lines can truly be
posted by sharktopus at 12:44 PM on October 4, 2023 [3 favorites]
But if being homosexually-oriented were genetic, it should be much more rare because a homosexual relationship cannot produce children.
I swear I read a theory/report of a study that suggested that the sisters of gay men had more children or something similar. Which is just to say that there's a plausible mechanism if you consider wider genetics. On the other hand, do we even know if being gay runs in families? Because that's often the reason why we suspect heritability/genetics in other features of humans.
posted by plonkee at 1:09 PM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
I swear I read a theory/report of a study that suggested that the sisters of gay men had more children or something similar. Which is just to say that there's a plausible mechanism if you consider wider genetics. On the other hand, do we even know if being gay runs in families? Because that's often the reason why we suspect heritability/genetics in other features of humans.
posted by plonkee at 1:09 PM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
I swear I read a theory/report of a study that suggested that the sisters of gay men had more children or something similar. Which is just to say that there's a plausible mechanism if you consider wider genetics.
But is this in response to having a gay male in their family who culturally would have fewer children of his own, or is this a response on a different level to having a gale male in their family? Is the more children, if that is indeed a fact, a factor of culture pressure or of some kind of other more base possibly genetic factor?
posted by hippybear at 1:14 PM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
But is this in response to having a gay male in their family who culturally would have fewer children of his own, or is this a response on a different level to having a gale male in their family? Is the more children, if that is indeed a fact, a factor of culture pressure or of some kind of other more base possibly genetic factor?
posted by hippybear at 1:14 PM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm trans and dislike the "born this way" narrative for a number of reasons (especially because, yes, it feels like apologizing for my existence as a queer person which I'm not going to do) but also I, and many other trans people I know, found their sexualities shifted when they came out to themselves; I used to identify as a bisexual woman and now I'm a straight man. I know a trans man who went from gay to gay for a different gender. I know people who went from gay to bi/pan and straight to straight and people who identified as straight men and are now lesbians. It's complicated! That can be fun and exciting but it's also really messy sometimes and there's not a simple narrative that's going to explain it.
posted by an octopus IRL at 1:32 PM on October 4, 2023 [16 favorites]
posted by an octopus IRL at 1:32 PM on October 4, 2023 [16 favorites]
Same-sex sexual activity and relationships have been observed in other animals. If I recall correctly, rates have been observed to increase with population pressure. Which might indicate more of an epigenetic component, at least in other animals with less complex consciousness than humans. (Obligatory “… in mice”.)
posted by eviemath at 1:33 PM on October 4, 2023
posted by eviemath at 1:33 PM on October 4, 2023
Ha! Her and the movie The Hunger in general was a key part of turning me gay.
Ahem. I think you will discover that was Susan Sarandon, not Sigourney Weaver. This is an excellent season to watch it again, however.
In an interview, Sarandon, when asked what the most difficult part of her acting had been in the film said that it was pretending reluctance to have sex with Catherine Deneuve.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:05 PM on October 4, 2023 [10 favorites]
Ahem. I think you will discover that was Susan Sarandon, not Sigourney Weaver. This is an excellent season to watch it again, however.
In an interview, Sarandon, when asked what the most difficult part of her acting had been in the film said that it was pretending reluctance to have sex with Catherine Deneuve.
posted by GenjiandProust at 2:05 PM on October 4, 2023 [10 favorites]
Is There a Heterosexual Gene That Turns People Straight, And Will Science Find a Cure?
...is a headline you'll never see.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:30 PM on October 4, 2023 [13 favorites]
...is a headline you'll never see.
posted by AlSweigart at 2:30 PM on October 4, 2023 [13 favorites]
I think there's a real confusion in our society between who one is willing to engage in sexual behavior with and who one wants to form a relationship with. And I think it's this relationship building factor that more works into the gay/straight continuum. I've known a lot of men who would engage with sex with men but who couldn't imagine themselves in a long-term relationship with a man.
I agree! This is absolutely a thing for humans of all genders: sometimes, our desires for social attachments/romantic relationships/nuclei of a family unit do not neatly dovetail with our desires for a fuckin' partner. Asexual communities call this "romantic orientation," having stolen and renamed it from the bisexuals' "affectional orientation," and it's reasonably common for there to be different gender breakdowns between them.
Which is one of the reasons that the uncritical acceptance of the idea that homosexuality means you're automatically nonreproductive drives me fucking batty. (Hence the paper in that last link, which argues that you don't need to explain same-sex-directed-sexual behavior as a function of 'lost offspring' in animals, because sex is cheap and you might as well give it a shot unless there's a more direct social or predation cost--after all, you never know what's going to yield offspring or not, so might as well give it a shot.)
Y'all. Y'all, humans have sex for so many different kinds of reasons. And we organize our love lives, in every sense of the term, in all kinds of ways from culture to culture depending on the social opportunities to us within our hierarchies and on the ways our societies are structured. For humans in particular, I would argue--since so much of the cost of raising offspring for us is in the raising of that offspring, not the conception of same--it's quite easy for someone who prefers sex without any reproductive potential to engage in just enough sex to produce kids, which can then be raised in whatever configuration you want. How many queers do y'all know with kids? Especially among queer people with convenient access to functioning uteruses? Do you think that's new?
Sexual orientation and the way our society organizes our social construct of sexual preferences is only about two hundred years old, as a concept. This is not to say that queerness is a recent innovation (lolno), but that the concept of thinking about people's sexual and romantic preference as a uniform, predictable, even-keeled thing is really quite new--and frankly, the notion of treating a single relationship as the central nucleus of someone's whole life is also real new. That process of sexual orientation, the concept, taking over the world starts with the medicalization of homosexuality as contrasted against 'normalcy'--which then sparks the concept of heterosexuality. You get bisexuality and asexuality as general terms for discussion later, as people start raising their hands and going "hey, your binary don't fit?" at the same time as the concept of sexual orientation starts spreading through Anglo-speaking culture and permeating all classes and walks of life. That's also the process where sexual orientation winds up being disentangled from gender identity as a cultural understanding.
The last two centuries, then, have created a really specific social construct of how sexuality works and how to parse it. As with all social constructs you wind up with a lot of scientists getting caught up in applying their preconceptions to their conceptions of the natural world, and that creates some really impressive opportunities for bad science. You see the same kind of thing in sex differences work. For example, sex differences in mice probably don't line up with sex differences in humans one to one, but we should be looking anyway because artificially filtering out huge sources of variance in our biological samples as irrelevant opens us up to so many failures to identify findings that are robust enough to apply to ourselves. I spend a lot of time right now in a biomedical discipline screaming that most diversity is neutral, and there's a lot of it because we have this huge cultural tendency to assume that "normal" or "functioning" means "uniform," and it don't. We've made that discovery like four or five times: allozymes and microsatellites and SNPs and protein variations and mutation rates ahoy! Variation is part of life at its most basic. As scientists, we tend to want to minimize all the variation we don't care about and focus in on the 'default' case, but there is no default case for a biological organism. There's only variable individuals.
That's another thing that I want to yell about: none of these fuckers seem to have studied queer history worth a damn! The way we categorize ourselves and think about our queerness is so sensitive to cultural change even in what, four or five human generations? That's nothing in population genetic time. Oh, these are bioessential, immutable categories such that every gay dude in our sample would never have sex with a woman and every straight one would never fuck a dude? Well, hang on, how do we have written records that allow us to understand totally different ways of conceptualizing sexuality, relationships, and the point of the same going back only a few generations? Humans are both messy and extremely variable, and you have to wonder if the people confidently sorting people into hard categories have ever noticed how much messiness really exists once you look at how queerness, and the cultural mores of queers, has changed and adapted over time.
Our preferences about sex for fun do not stop us from having sex--reproductive or otherwise--in order to secure social or economic status, produce offspring to look after, win a desired favor, feel better about ourselves, explore new sensations, or claim the status of adulthood. We are messy, complicated creatures, and we are intensely social, messy creatures.... and sex is one of the most charged activities we engage in, not only because of the vulnerability of our bodies but also for the potential to create, pass down, and extend our social networks through time and space. Sex is inherently social, and it's an inherently social behavior as performed by perhaps the most flexible, plastic, and social species the world has ever seen. Of course it's going to be wildly variable and used for all manner of purposes. Social animals repurpose sex for other functions too. Just ask a hyena sometime.
posted by sciatrix at 3:02 PM on October 4, 2023 [27 favorites]
I agree! This is absolutely a thing for humans of all genders: sometimes, our desires for social attachments/romantic relationships/nuclei of a family unit do not neatly dovetail with our desires for a fuckin' partner. Asexual communities call this "romantic orientation," having stolen and renamed it from the bisexuals' "affectional orientation," and it's reasonably common for there to be different gender breakdowns between them.
Which is one of the reasons that the uncritical acceptance of the idea that homosexuality means you're automatically nonreproductive drives me fucking batty. (Hence the paper in that last link, which argues that you don't need to explain same-sex-directed-sexual behavior as a function of 'lost offspring' in animals, because sex is cheap and you might as well give it a shot unless there's a more direct social or predation cost--after all, you never know what's going to yield offspring or not, so might as well give it a shot.)
Y'all. Y'all, humans have sex for so many different kinds of reasons. And we organize our love lives, in every sense of the term, in all kinds of ways from culture to culture depending on the social opportunities to us within our hierarchies and on the ways our societies are structured. For humans in particular, I would argue--since so much of the cost of raising offspring for us is in the raising of that offspring, not the conception of same--it's quite easy for someone who prefers sex without any reproductive potential to engage in just enough sex to produce kids, which can then be raised in whatever configuration you want. How many queers do y'all know with kids? Especially among queer people with convenient access to functioning uteruses? Do you think that's new?
Sexual orientation and the way our society organizes our social construct of sexual preferences is only about two hundred years old, as a concept. This is not to say that queerness is a recent innovation (lolno), but that the concept of thinking about people's sexual and romantic preference as a uniform, predictable, even-keeled thing is really quite new--and frankly, the notion of treating a single relationship as the central nucleus of someone's whole life is also real new. That process of sexual orientation, the concept, taking over the world starts with the medicalization of homosexuality as contrasted against 'normalcy'--which then sparks the concept of heterosexuality. You get bisexuality and asexuality as general terms for discussion later, as people start raising their hands and going "hey, your binary don't fit?" at the same time as the concept of sexual orientation starts spreading through Anglo-speaking culture and permeating all classes and walks of life. That's also the process where sexual orientation winds up being disentangled from gender identity as a cultural understanding.
The last two centuries, then, have created a really specific social construct of how sexuality works and how to parse it. As with all social constructs you wind up with a lot of scientists getting caught up in applying their preconceptions to their conceptions of the natural world, and that creates some really impressive opportunities for bad science. You see the same kind of thing in sex differences work. For example, sex differences in mice probably don't line up with sex differences in humans one to one, but we should be looking anyway because artificially filtering out huge sources of variance in our biological samples as irrelevant opens us up to so many failures to identify findings that are robust enough to apply to ourselves. I spend a lot of time right now in a biomedical discipline screaming that most diversity is neutral, and there's a lot of it because we have this huge cultural tendency to assume that "normal" or "functioning" means "uniform," and it don't. We've made that discovery like four or five times: allozymes and microsatellites and SNPs and protein variations and mutation rates ahoy! Variation is part of life at its most basic. As scientists, we tend to want to minimize all the variation we don't care about and focus in on the 'default' case, but there is no default case for a biological organism. There's only variable individuals.
That's another thing that I want to yell about: none of these fuckers seem to have studied queer history worth a damn! The way we categorize ourselves and think about our queerness is so sensitive to cultural change even in what, four or five human generations? That's nothing in population genetic time. Oh, these are bioessential, immutable categories such that every gay dude in our sample would never have sex with a woman and every straight one would never fuck a dude? Well, hang on, how do we have written records that allow us to understand totally different ways of conceptualizing sexuality, relationships, and the point of the same going back only a few generations? Humans are both messy and extremely variable, and you have to wonder if the people confidently sorting people into hard categories have ever noticed how much messiness really exists once you look at how queerness, and the cultural mores of queers, has changed and adapted over time.
Our preferences about sex for fun do not stop us from having sex--reproductive or otherwise--in order to secure social or economic status, produce offspring to look after, win a desired favor, feel better about ourselves, explore new sensations, or claim the status of adulthood. We are messy, complicated creatures, and we are intensely social, messy creatures.... and sex is one of the most charged activities we engage in, not only because of the vulnerability of our bodies but also for the potential to create, pass down, and extend our social networks through time and space. Sex is inherently social, and it's an inherently social behavior as performed by perhaps the most flexible, plastic, and social species the world has ever seen. Of course it's going to be wildly variable and used for all manner of purposes. Social animals repurpose sex for other functions too. Just ask a hyena sometime.
posted by sciatrix at 3:02 PM on October 4, 2023 [27 favorites]
Is there Google Translate for hyena?
posted by hippybear at 3:09 PM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by hippybear at 3:09 PM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
You get bisexuality and asexuality as general terms for discussion later
I never thought I would WELL ACTUALLY a sciatrix comment, but one of the things that has always delighted me about this history is, we get homosexuality and bisexuality as clinical entities at the same time in Krafft-Ebing (at least in translation)! "Upon what this enigmatical phenomenon of acquired homo-sexual instinct depends is still inexplicable, and only a matter for hypothesis. Careful examination of the so-called acquired cases makes it probable that the predisposition also present here consists of a latent homo-sexuality, or, at least, bi-sexuality, which, for its manifestation, requires the influence of accidental exciting causes to rouse it from its slumber."
It takes a little while longer to fully extract bisexuality from its earlier connotations of having characteristics of both male and female, but that distinction is suggested surprisingly early in Ferenczi: "I suggest that the term ambisexuality be used in psychology instead of the expression 'bisexual predisposition.'" (He then proceeds to get weird with the term bc Freud.)
posted by mittens at 3:49 PM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
I never thought I would WELL ACTUALLY a sciatrix comment, but one of the things that has always delighted me about this history is, we get homosexuality and bisexuality as clinical entities at the same time in Krafft-Ebing (at least in translation)! "Upon what this enigmatical phenomenon of acquired homo-sexual instinct depends is still inexplicable, and only a matter for hypothesis. Careful examination of the so-called acquired cases makes it probable that the predisposition also present here consists of a latent homo-sexuality, or, at least, bi-sexuality, which, for its manifestation, requires the influence of accidental exciting causes to rouse it from its slumber."
It takes a little while longer to fully extract bisexuality from its earlier connotations of having characteristics of both male and female, but that distinction is suggested surprisingly early in Ferenczi: "I suggest that the term ambisexuality be used in psychology instead of the expression 'bisexual predisposition.'" (He then proceeds to get weird with the term bc Freud.)
posted by mittens at 3:49 PM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
I listened to this broadcast while driving home after a gig. IIRC, the position of the guy who did the study was that this gene / these genes could be just one of an unknown number of factors contributing to homosexuality.
Of course, the popular press fucked it up like they fuck up everything else that's science-related.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 3:50 PM on October 4, 2023
Of course, the popular press fucked it up like they fuck up everything else that's science-related.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 3:50 PM on October 4, 2023
My particular bugaboo in this area is when people state that "[sex act A] is (un)natural" because some animal does/doesn't do it.
My reaction is to explain lobster reproduction, which, apologies to Jordan Peterson, would, if applied to humans, lead to young men tearing off each others' limbs in hopes that a woman would pee on the winner. Afterwards, they would have sex and jointly eat her skeleton.
Or there is a species of aphid whose young are carried internally. The embryos consist of one male and 7 females, The male drills a hole in each of his sisters, inseminates them, then dies. The females then eat their way out of their mother, killing her while carrying their own doom within them.
What lessons are humans to take from these examples? Really?
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:00 PM on October 4, 2023 [10 favorites]
My reaction is to explain lobster reproduction, which, apologies to Jordan Peterson, would, if applied to humans, lead to young men tearing off each others' limbs in hopes that a woman would pee on the winner. Afterwards, they would have sex and jointly eat her skeleton.
Or there is a species of aphid whose young are carried internally. The embryos consist of one male and 7 females, The male drills a hole in each of his sisters, inseminates them, then dies. The females then eat their way out of their mother, killing her while carrying their own doom within them.
What lessons are humans to take from these examples? Really?
posted by GenjiandProust at 4:00 PM on October 4, 2023 [10 favorites]
I mean, that all sounds pretty hot to me, so...??
posted by latkes at 4:13 PM on October 4, 2023 [5 favorites]
posted by latkes at 4:13 PM on October 4, 2023 [5 favorites]
The females then eat their way out of their mother, killing her while carrying their own doom within them.
Rachel Cusk has a new book out?
posted by mittens at 4:30 PM on October 4, 2023
Rachel Cusk has a new book out?
posted by mittens at 4:30 PM on October 4, 2023
Yep, so I basically came in to say, “something doesn’t have to be genetic to be nobody’s damned business.,” but you guys seem to have it well covered.
posted by gelfin at 5:35 PM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by gelfin at 5:35 PM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
O certainly never 'chose' what type of people to be attracted to, nor would I have ever chosen to be transgender. I can only attempt to judge how safe those expressions are.
posted by Jacen at 5:43 PM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by Jacen at 5:43 PM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]
I don’t think I was born this way, but I’ve definitely been a cat person as long as I can remember.
posted by slogger at 5:51 PM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by slogger at 5:51 PM on October 4, 2023 [2 favorites]
I'm less interested in the question "what makes people [insert form of queerness]" and more interested in "how do we get people to stop investigating that question?" The instant we have an etiology of queerness it's going to be a weapon against queer people; it's something our society cannot have, cannot be allowed to pursue, until this is a far better and safer world.
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:24 PM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:24 PM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
You know reflecting on this piece made me think about how "opposite gender" as a term is misleading, and why I don't personally like homosexual/heterosexual terminology. Not merely because of the existence of intersex and nonbinary folks and all the transphobia one can find associated with these terms, but because treating women as the opposite of men, and acting all people of one gender are the same, and all gay and lesbian desire are the same (ignoring things like butch and femme desire) is erroneous, sexist and heteronormative.
posted by Chrysopoeia at 11:45 PM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
posted by Chrysopoeia at 11:45 PM on October 4, 2023 [7 favorites]
This thread is such a breath of fresh air. Thank y'all so much. Really.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:06 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 3:06 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
Sticking to a vegetarian diet may be partly genetic, study finds
Seems everything is partly genetic. Almost nothing is solely genetic.
The Radiolab episode is really interested in the wrong question. "Genetic or not" just isn't that meaningful.
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:01 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
Seems everything is partly genetic. Almost nothing is solely genetic.
The Radiolab episode is really interested in the wrong question. "Genetic or not" just isn't that meaningful.
posted by OnceUponATime at 4:01 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
I (super straight and cisgendered) could see at the time that "born this way" was a good idea because it was trying to make orientation a characteristic and not a choice, so as to take away political advantage from conservatives; and also a bad idea, because a lot of people clearly aren't born that way and do shift during their lives, consciously or no.
I think it might work better were it simply framed as a pursuit of happiness issue: so long as it's consenting adults, it's none of my business how you care to frame your sexuality, or even whether you care to frame it. But I can also see a lot of persuadable voters being not quite ready for that, and of course pretty much nobody is trying to stop me from or haze me for being straight and cisgendered. I mean, I get that some queer people are willing to throw anything at the wall in order to get conservatives to shut the fuck up and leave them be, but like others have said, genetics/epigenetics/environment are all way too complex to make trying to find a gene to point at and say "that makes you gay" as a worthwhile endeavor.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:04 AM on October 5, 2023
I think it might work better were it simply framed as a pursuit of happiness issue: so long as it's consenting adults, it's none of my business how you care to frame your sexuality, or even whether you care to frame it. But I can also see a lot of persuadable voters being not quite ready for that, and of course pretty much nobody is trying to stop me from or haze me for being straight and cisgendered. I mean, I get that some queer people are willing to throw anything at the wall in order to get conservatives to shut the fuck up and leave them be, but like others have said, genetics/epigenetics/environment are all way too complex to make trying to find a gene to point at and say "that makes you gay" as a worthwhile endeavor.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 7:04 AM on October 5, 2023
I do wonder how much the idea of the political necessity of a 'born this way' outlook was driven by the AIDS crisis. The history of the rhetoric isn't clear to me, but I know there was this moment in the late 80s/early 90s when it seemed like "born this way" was the settled approach; this was a bone of contention in my queer studies classes at that time, and the sense was that "born this way" was more apt to be used by gay men than lesbians (and possibly more...ah...conventional middle-class gay guys? Am I wrong about that?). There is an essential passivity to the idea that may have been reinforced by the utter helplessness in the face of the virus? A message to the government, to the public, jfc, have some sympathy here, people are dying, at a time when the public was saying, you deserve it, you brought it upon yourselves. (Clearly this wasn't some hegemonic approach everybody believed; you only have to look at ACT UP to see that not everyone was interested in a rhetoric of passivity.)
It's weird to think that a bit of verbiage that may have been seen as necessary at one point in time, would so govern how we think about things years later. But then, given how inextricable the history is from medicalization, maybe there was never going to be a modern approach that didn't have an undertone of "let's figure out what causes this...so we can cure it!"
posted by mittens at 7:35 AM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
It's weird to think that a bit of verbiage that may have been seen as necessary at one point in time, would so govern how we think about things years later. But then, given how inextricable the history is from medicalization, maybe there was never going to be a modern approach that didn't have an undertone of "let's figure out what causes this...so we can cure it!"
posted by mittens at 7:35 AM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
I think it might work better were it simply framed as a pursuit of happiness issue:
I don't see the conservative movement being interested in any kind of nuanced discussion. As a straight man, it probably isn’t my place to say it (and sorry if it goes without saying) but seeing the cultish way conservatives have been able to pivot on any point lately, I can imagine that a genetic test for gayness would provide a eugenics based exception for abortion.
posted by brachiopod at 7:38 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
I don't see the conservative movement being interested in any kind of nuanced discussion. As a straight man, it probably isn’t my place to say it (and sorry if it goes without saying) but seeing the cultish way conservatives have been able to pivot on any point lately, I can imagine that a genetic test for gayness would provide a eugenics based exception for abortion.
posted by brachiopod at 7:38 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
I would imagine that a genetic test for gayness would provide a eugenics based exception for abortion.
In 1993 the Daily Mail certainly looked forward hopefully to such an eventuality.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:41 AM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
In 1993 the Daily Mail certainly looked forward hopefully to such an eventuality.
posted by Pope Guilty at 7:41 AM on October 5, 2023 [3 favorites]
I don't see the conservative movement being interested in any kind of nuanced discussion.
Of course not. But there are a lot of small-c conservative people out there who are quite persuadable and without whom any hope of leftward movement is limited to college towns and other gerrymandered dark blue districts.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:08 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
Of course not. But there are a lot of small-c conservative people out there who are quite persuadable and without whom any hope of leftward movement is limited to college towns and other gerrymandered dark blue districts.
posted by outgrown_hobnail at 8:08 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
If there were a way to bulk-upvote @sciatrix's comments I would do that.
It really is one of life's ironies, how "born this way" was a route to sympathetic acceptance for gays, while still retaining its original function as a way to consign brown people to dumpsters.
I am increasingly convinced that there is a strong tendency for people to believe in just-world metaphysics, with all sorts of bad consequences.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:26 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
It really is one of life's ironies, how "born this way" was a route to sympathetic acceptance for gays, while still retaining its original function as a way to consign brown people to dumpsters.
I am increasingly convinced that there is a strong tendency for people to believe in just-world metaphysics, with all sorts of bad consequences.
posted by Aardvark Cheeselog at 8:26 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
I do wonder how much the idea of the political necessity of a 'born this way' outlook was driven by the AIDS crisis.
mittens, you are 100% correct. The "born this way" position was absolutely necessary in the 80s and 90s to combat the bigots' framing that homosexuality was a "lifestyle choice," and therefore gay men only had themselves to blame for contracting AIDS. Because of that, politicians and public figures let people suffer because AIDS was seen as a punishment for their bad choices. It was also during that time that the movement pushed for "sexual orientation" instead of "sexual preference."
I absolutely agree that whether someone is "born this way" should have zero impact on their rights -- in fact, even if something is a "lifestyle choice," that shouldn't be justification for depriving someone of their rights. But it's also absolutely true that there was a ton of rhetoric in the 80s of "I don't approve of your lifestyle" that simply had to be combatted.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:27 AM on October 5, 2023 [6 favorites]
mittens, you are 100% correct. The "born this way" position was absolutely necessary in the 80s and 90s to combat the bigots' framing that homosexuality was a "lifestyle choice," and therefore gay men only had themselves to blame for contracting AIDS. Because of that, politicians and public figures let people suffer because AIDS was seen as a punishment for their bad choices. It was also during that time that the movement pushed for "sexual orientation" instead of "sexual preference."
I absolutely agree that whether someone is "born this way" should have zero impact on their rights -- in fact, even if something is a "lifestyle choice," that shouldn't be justification for depriving someone of their rights. But it's also absolutely true that there was a ton of rhetoric in the 80s of "I don't approve of your lifestyle" that simply had to be combatted.
posted by Ben Trismegistus at 8:27 AM on October 5, 2023 [6 favorites]
Metafilter: a finger length morass.
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:51 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
posted by CynicalKnight at 9:51 AM on October 5, 2023 [1 favorite]
I'm nonbinary and trans.
I can see the deep comfort that a person of marginalised gender or sexuality might gain from finding a biological source for gender identity or sexual orientation.
So many of us are wracked by imposter syndrome, and accused of being frivolous, "it's a trend" or "wanting attention". Biological causes would remove so much uncertainty.
But I myself found comfort in the realisation that it doesn't matter whether or not I'm "truly" nonbinary, that's irrelevant,because I can also decide to be nonbinary.
I do feel that I was born this way, but that aspect is not relevant to what I truly am.
The key for me is to acknowledge that people are different from one another. Some people (both cis and trans) have a strong sense of their gender identity. Some people (both cis and trans) don't. Some people have a shifting level of awareness of gender.
Honoring one person's right to choose what they are doesn't invalidate the fact that another person couldn't choose, and was born that way.
posted by Zumbador at 10:09 AM on October 5, 2023 [10 favorites]
I can see the deep comfort that a person of marginalised gender or sexuality might gain from finding a biological source for gender identity or sexual orientation.
So many of us are wracked by imposter syndrome, and accused of being frivolous, "it's a trend" or "wanting attention". Biological causes would remove so much uncertainty.
But I myself found comfort in the realisation that it doesn't matter whether or not I'm "truly" nonbinary, that's irrelevant,because I can also decide to be nonbinary.
I do feel that I was born this way, but that aspect is not relevant to what I truly am.
The key for me is to acknowledge that people are different from one another. Some people (both cis and trans) have a strong sense of their gender identity. Some people (both cis and trans) don't. Some people have a shifting level of awareness of gender.
Honoring one person's right to choose what they are doesn't invalidate the fact that another person couldn't choose, and was born that way.
posted by Zumbador at 10:09 AM on October 5, 2023 [10 favorites]
I just listened and felt they covered many of the issues and concerns raised here well. I also lived through the 90s and I don't recall the Born This Way argument to have been as hegemonic as it is being remembered. But my reference point was as a Queer Nation member and surrounded by queers who took pride in our difference. Part of "reclaiming" the word queer was owning that our sexuality and or our genders were subversive, in opposition to the assimilationist strategy that was also going on in other wings of the movement at the time. That's not to say I never appealed to the 'natural' argument.. The radiolab piece does include that there have always been dissenters from this argument or strategy.
posted by latkes at 11:17 AM on October 5, 2023 [6 favorites]
posted by latkes at 11:17 AM on October 5, 2023 [6 favorites]
I also see "born this way" rhetoric being used in the movement against conversion therapy, for understandable reasons - even homophobic people can be persuaded against conversion therapy by the idea that it is simply ineffective or impossible, so it's hard to set that tool aside. At the same time, that rhetorical strategy is incomplete and unsatisfying, including for the reasons set forth here. Among other things, it bothers me how much ground it seems to give up - it isn't as full-throated as PRIDE. One of the reasons it can work well is that it doesn't require a position on whether a non-heterosexual orientation is normal, or OK, or a good thing. It's just too compatible with homophobia. Which makes it useful, but uncomfortable at the same time.
posted by prefpara at 11:52 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
posted by prefpara at 11:52 AM on October 5, 2023 [2 favorites]
acting all people of one gender are the same ... is erroneous, sexist and heteronormative.
Definitely erroneous and sexist, but not heteronormative, since there's plenty of variation of what us straight people find attractive, though I'd guess less variation than among gay and lesbian desire.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:42 PM on October 5, 2023
Definitely erroneous and sexist, but not heteronormative, since there's plenty of variation of what us straight people find attractive, though I'd guess less variation than among gay and lesbian desire.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 1:42 PM on October 5, 2023
sciatrix's latest comment flagged as fantastic.
Thank you for sharing your deep and specific and impassioned knowledge with us, sciatrix - I, for one, benefit immensely, learning from you.
posted by kristi at 2:06 PM on October 7, 2023
Thank you for sharing your deep and specific and impassioned knowledge with us, sciatrix - I, for one, benefit immensely, learning from you.
posted by kristi at 2:06 PM on October 7, 2023
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posted by latkes at 8:57 AM on October 4, 2023 [1 favorite]