Are you born gay or do you turn gay
In a poll released on Wednesday, Gallup found that 42% of Americans think homosexual people are born homosexuals, rather than becoming so due to factors such as upbringing and environment. 37% voiced the opposite perspective, and another 21% didn’t answer. Nobody asked me, but if they had, I’d have responded with some questions of my own: why are those the only options? How come you’re asking random strangers of unknown sexual orientation rather than actual queer people? And don’t you think that’s caring of a loaded question?
Via Gallup. I looked for the corresponding “why are straight people straight” poll, but for some reason, I couldn’t find it.
Gallup has a drawn-out history of polling the general widespread about queer issues, sometimes problematically. In the case of this particular doubt, it fits into the larger narrative being told by a particularly vocal set of lgbtq+ rights activists. That narrative goes something like this: gay rights are the civil rights strife of our moment. As we realize, it’s wrong to discriminate on the basis of race, because people are born that way. Similarly, it’s untrue to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation, because p Late last month, a team of MIT and Harvard scientists published a landmark study of the genetic basis for sexual orientation in the journal Science. The examine, which was based on an examination of the genetic material of almost half a million individuals, definitively refutes the concept that being gay is an innate condition that is controlled or largely compelled by one’s genetic makeup. The study contained two key findings. First, it found that the consequence of the genes we inherit from our parents (known as “heritability”) on same-sex orientation was very weak, at only .32 on a scale from 0 (none) to 1 (total) heritability. This means that a person’s developmental environment—which includes diet, family, friends, neighborhood, religion, and a host of other life conditions—is twice as influential on the probability of developing same-sex deed or orientation as a person’s genes are. Second, rebutting decades of widespread faith, the study established that “there is certainly no single genetic determinant (sometimes referred to as the ‘gay gene’ in the media)” that causes queer sexual behavior. On the contrary A few years ago I was giving a seminar on issues around sexuality at New Wine summer conference. During the questions at the end of the seminar, someone neighboring the back asked ‘Are people born gay?’ I was aware that this can be a loaded question, so I offered a very careful reply, highlighting what I knew of research but also pointing out that the answer to that doubt (in either direction) did not offer an immediate answer to questions of sexual ethics, and that for many people (on all sorts of issues) the question of ‘Am I born this way?’ is personal, loaded and sensitive. I thought I had done a justified job—until the end of the seminar when I woman pushed through the group waiting to communicate to me and started shouting, waving her hands. ‘I brought a collective of gay teenagers here from my church—and you have told them God hates them!’ I hadn’t done that at all—in fact, quite the opposite—but it confirmed to me that the question of causation is one that is felt strongly and personally within this debate. So, at one level, it was not that surprising that there was quite a bit of coverage of a piece of research published in August 2019 in Sc Massive Study Finds No Unattached Genetic Cause of Queer Sexual Behavior Few aspects of human biology are as complex—or politically fraught—as sexual orientation. A clear genetic link would suggest that gay people are “born this way,” as opposed to having made a lifestyle choice. Yet some fear that such a finding could be misused to “cure” homosexuality, and most research teams hold shied away from tackling the topic. Now a fresh study claims to dispel the notion that a single gene or handful of genes make a person prone to gay behavior. The analysis, which examined the genomes of nearly half a million men and women, start that although genetics are certainly involved in who people choose to contain sex with, there are no specific genetic predictors. Yet some researchers interrogate whether the analysis, which looked at genes paired with sexual activity rather than attraction, can doodle any real conclusions about sexual orientation. “The message should remain the same that this is a complex behavior that genetics definitely plays a part in,” said study co-author Fah Sathirapongsasuti, a computational biologist at genetic testin Being queer is not a choice for people. Instead, it appears to be a fundamental part of who someone is. It is not a learned action. Which also means that people cannot “unlearn” their sexual orientation. Of course just because we understand it isn’t usually a learned conduct, that doesn’t imply that we include a good explanation for what is going on biologically. We don’t. What we do know is that there isn’t one single gene that explains homosexuality. Something as complicated as sexual orientation is going to involve lots of genes. And not only that, but it will involve the environment too. Now by the environment I don’t just mean an overprotective mom or a domineering dad. “Environment” is a catchall for everything that isn’t a gene. For instance, what the fetus experienced while in the mother’s womb can affect its progress and influence deed later on in life. So even though you might anticipate that the environment only causes temporary changes, that’s not always the case. The environment can cause brains to be wired in a certain way as it develops. This wiring can’t be changed easily. Right now the
“Born That Way” No More: The New Science of Sexual Orientation
Is a person ‘born gay’, or is being gay a learned behavior?