Genetically Gay
There is an interesting article in the June 2007 special edition of the magazine, Discover. The title is “Born Gay?” by Michael Abrams if you are interested in looking it up, which I would recommend because I won’t do it justice here. But it begins to answer one of the biggest questions that I have: Why am I gay?
At first, I refused to even think that I was gay. I thought that I had normal adolescent feelings and that everyone goes through it. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t anything more than admiration of guys that I wanted to be like.
Progressing in my religious studies, I understood homosexuality to be a sin. Since everyone is born with original sin, there is a burden that everyone has to overcome. Homosexuality was my burden and I thought it was a burden that every person probably had. I was just weaker at suppressing my sinful desires.
Finally, when I finally admitted it to myself that I was gay, I clung to the belief that God made me this way. The problem is that it doesn’t cut it anymore. That doesn’t tell me why I am the way I am. Even though God and I have a direct relationship (a jab at my Protestantism), we don’t have conversations. So the answer to my question is going to have to be answered somewhere else.
Many people’s beliefs on how homosexuality comes about fall into one of two categories: nature or nurture. Many of the religious and social conservatives tend to go with nurture. They would argue that homosexuality is a choice or is at least caused by something in a person’s experience. Then there are others that believe that there is something genetic about homosexuality and that it can’t be helped.
Discover’s article is fascinating in that it brings up various studies that may be pointing us to the answer. By now, many gays are probably familiar with news articles that have tried to indicate that homosexuality it genetic. Some probably legitimate, but most are probably trash. The ones I’m familiar with off the top of my head are:
Anyways, this article comes up with something new and, which sounds to me, more promising. Researches believe that while there may not be a gay gene per se, there is something on the X chromosome. This solves the problem of, “If gays are less likely to reproduce then eventually their genetics would die out.” Since the X chromosome is passed on by the female, the gay genetics can keep getting passed down.
Again, there isn’t a gay gene. Otherwise, we would see identical twins with the same sexual orientation but we don’t. It is suspected that what causes homosexuality is the switching on or off of certain sections of genetic code, a process called methylation. What causes these switches is largely unknown but it could be something as simple as diet or even a reaction to medication.
I have wondered how news of genetically caused homosexuality would be taken. Mostly by the right and left wingers that have an entrenched positions on the issue. Why am I gay? I fear an answer would bring up tons of follow-ups. How would religious conservatives react? Would they drop the “gay is a choice” bullshit? Would secular progressives allow the abortion of fetuses shown to be gay? Would genetic modification be an option to parents who don’t want gay children?
This post probably would have made it to Peering but I thought that since it wasn't really about a personal experience of mine, I might as well post it here.
At first, I refused to even think that I was gay. I thought that I had normal adolescent feelings and that everyone goes through it. I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t anything more than admiration of guys that I wanted to be like.
Progressing in my religious studies, I understood homosexuality to be a sin. Since everyone is born with original sin, there is a burden that everyone has to overcome. Homosexuality was my burden and I thought it was a burden that every person probably had. I was just weaker at suppressing my sinful desires.
Finally, when I finally admitted it to myself that I was gay, I clung to the belief that God made me this way. The problem is that it doesn’t cut it anymore. That doesn’t tell me why I am the way I am. Even though God and I have a direct relationship (a jab at my Protestantism), we don’t have conversations. So the answer to my question is going to have to be answered somewhere else.
Many people’s beliefs on how homosexuality comes about fall into one of two categories: nature or nurture. Many of the religious and social conservatives tend to go with nurture. They would argue that homosexuality is a choice or is at least caused by something in a person’s experience. Then there are others that believe that there is something genetic about homosexuality and that it can’t be helped.
Discover’s article is fascinating in that it brings up various studies that may be pointing us to the answer. By now, many gays are probably familiar with news articles that have tried to indicate that homosexuality it genetic. Some probably legitimate, but most are probably trash. The ones I’m familiar with off the top of my head are:
Nature Abhors a Crowd: Gays—One more way nature likes to control the population.
The Helpful Uncle Theory: Nature likes to make gay people so that they will increase the chances of survival of their family.
The Ring Finger Test: If your ring finger is bigger than your index, you have a higher chance of being gay due to the hormones present during fetal development.
Gay Brains Smaller: Comparisons between gay men and straight men show that gay brains are smaller in a certain area. (In the article, it mentions this to be the INAH-3 brain region of the anterior hypothalamus.)
Sibling Placement: The more older male siblings a guy has, the greater his chances of being gay.
*Sniff*: A development quirk causes homos to like the scent of people of the same sex rather then the opposite.
Anyways, this article comes up with something new and, which sounds to me, more promising. Researches believe that while there may not be a gay gene per se, there is something on the X chromosome. This solves the problem of, “If gays are less likely to reproduce then eventually their genetics would die out.” Since the X chromosome is passed on by the female, the gay genetics can keep getting passed down.
Again, there isn’t a gay gene. Otherwise, we would see identical twins with the same sexual orientation but we don’t. It is suspected that what causes homosexuality is the switching on or off of certain sections of genetic code, a process called methylation. What causes these switches is largely unknown but it could be something as simple as diet or even a reaction to medication.
I have wondered how news of genetically caused homosexuality would be taken. Mostly by the right and left wingers that have an entrenched positions on the issue. Why am I gay? I fear an answer would bring up tons of follow-ups. How would religious conservatives react? Would they drop the “gay is a choice” bullshit? Would secular progressives allow the abortion of fetuses shown to be gay? Would genetic modification be an option to parents who don’t want gay children?
This post probably would have made it to Peering but I thought that since it wasn't really about a personal experience of mine, I might as well post it here.
Comments
No one has even substantiated the notion that heterosexuality is the "proper" state of mankind, except to say that heterosexuals are in the majority, therefore anyone in a minority has got it wrong somehow.
Exactly the same reasoning was until recently used to "explain" left handedness - and therefore in some cultures to justify demonising left handed people.
There were numerous attempts to prove that a hormonal abnormality or genetic error caused some people to prefer using their left hand. We still don't know why people turn out left handed, but there was never any good evidence that it's the result of a mistake, nor any evidence that it isn't just part of natural human variation.
You list some hypotheses:
(1) Nature abhors a crowd. It's a possibility, and it makes homosexuality an integral part of nature's grand plan, but there's no way to check whether it's true.
Plus, it assumes that nature has a grand plan, presumably worked out in advance by a god-like being.
(2) Helpful uncle. Again, plausible. But again it assumes a grand plan.
More than that, it relies on the notion that, where there is a phenomenon, it must (a) serve a function, (b) serve no other function at the same time and (c) serve that function particularly well.
Such a notion makes sense if you believe in a god-designed universe, but evolution doesn't work like that.
(3) Ring finger. This one comes back every few years, and makes no sense at all. The idea is that gay men have more female hormones than straight, which would mean gay men ought to have a more female body shape, higher body fat. larger breast tissue, wider hips, more hair on their head, less on the rest of them, and be shorter than straight men. Oh, and they'd have smaller genitals too.
None of this is the case. Yet we're asked to believe that high estrogen levels cause finger lengthening and a flipping of sexual orientation, but nothing else.
(3) Gay brains. This relates to research carried out into hypothallimal cell density, on the brains of men who'd died from AIDS. Firstly, AIDS could cause the observed differences, and second it suffers the same problems as the Ring Finger idea.
(4) Sibling placement. Almost certainly statistical fluke, the result of having a small sample size. Besides, even if younger siblings do have a greater chance of being gay than older, this tells us nothing about why.
(5) 'Sniff' developmental quirk. Maybe. But calling something a 'quirk' doesn't explain it. It just assumes that something has gone wrong.
If there are sections of genetic code responsible for homosexuality, and they're switched on (or off) by diet or medication, then proportions of homosexuals in the population would vary according to what people ate and what drugs they took. So some countries and cultures would have vastly different proportions of gay people to straight.
So far as anyone can tell, they doesn't. There are no definitive figures on which areas or cultures have what proportions of gay members, but it seems pretty constant.
As for how rightwingers would respond, that's easy. If people are gay by genetics, they'll talk about "bad genes". If there's no genetic componant, they'll talk about "bad choice" and "godless upbringing".
At the moment, genetic modification is expensive, unrelible, and tends to have side effects. Future improvements are of course unknowable.
I suspect that any parent both rich enough and crazy enough to have a foetus screened for being gay, will also be crazy enough to abort if the results come back positive. The irony is, if sexuality is carried on the X-chromosone, their next child is just as likely to be gay.
In the early 90s I looked out for reports in science journals of a "gay gene" being discovered. I found five completely seperate "discoveries", all later disproven. There was also a great deal of speculation based on no evidence at all, but I'm not counting that.
So, no one knows why some people are gay, no one knows why some people become gay or straight after being the opposite for years or decades, and no one knows just how many gay people there are in the world.
There's just a lot of gay people out there who wish they weren't, and think if only they knew what went wrong, they could reverse it, and folks would stop hating them.
Someone explained it in terms of being left handed that I've always remembered: It's normal, but not common.
Although Crowd and Uncle seem like theory, I can see it being possible without the "grand plan." (Odd since you are the atheist and I am not.) But if other organisms can actually switch their genders as a result of environmental stress, I think that it's perfectly plausible that a certain kind of switch exists in humans. I'm not saying that you're penis is going to fall off and you'll develop a uterus, but I'm just saying...
As for Ring Finger and Sibling Placement, I never bought into them. The first sounded utterly ridiculous and I'm a first born and so are the few gay guys that I know about.
I think that the genetic code on the X chromosome does have some merit. Apparently the switching process is still rare enough to support the current incident rates. This goes to the study of identical twins. Why one will end up gay and the other didn't even though there is a higher probability that they would be in comparison to fraternal twins or regular siblings.
"There's just a lot of gay people out there who wish they weren't, and think if only they knew what went wrong, they could reverse it, and folks would stop hating them." --That's not the case here. I am interested in knowing.
As for the brain area that's smaller, that too has been duplicated and AIDS as a cause has been definitively ruled out.
@anon: Do you have a site or a post with more details?