Born Gay or Ma Gay? How, Why, and Do Matter? | Peter Tatchell

Contents:

• WHY ARE PEOPLE GAY? GAY BY CHOICE OR IS BEG GAY GEIC?
• IS A PERSON ‘BORN GAY’, OR IS BEG GAY A LEARNED BEHAVR?
• THERE IS NO ‘GAY GENE.’ THERE IS NO ‘STRAIGHT GENE.’ SEXUALY IS JT PLEX, STUDY NFIRMS
• ARE WE BORN GAY?
• ARE YOU BORN GAY OR IS A CHOICE? SCIENTISTS MIGHT HAVE FOUND THE ANSWER
• HOMOSEXUALY: ARE GAYS BORN OR MA?
• 'GAY GEN': SCIENCE IS ON THE RIGHT TRACK, WE'RE BORN THIS WAY. LET’S AL WH .
• THE 'GAY GENE' IS A MYTH BUT BEG GAY IS 'NATURAL,' SAY SCIENTISTS
• IS ANYONE BORN GAY?
• BORN GAY OR MA GAY? HOW, WHY, AND DO MATTER?
• MAJORY U.S. NOW SAY GAYS AND LBIANS BORN, NOT MA
• ARE GAYS BORN OR MA?
• ARE GAYS ‘BORN THAT WAY’? MOST AMERINS NOW SAY Y, BUT SCIENCE SAYS NO
• ARE CHILDREN "BORN GAY"?

WHY ARE PEOPLE GAY? GAY BY CHOICE OR IS BEG GAY GEIC?

It very much appears that same-sex sexual attractn is not a choice but actg on is; so if you fe gay as the mere prence of same-sex attractn, then om everythg we unrstand, beg gay is not a choice. If, on the other hand, you nsir someone to be gay only if they act on their same-sex attractn then beg gay n be nsired a choice pendg on an dividual's behavr. Humans have tried to unrstand human sexualy for centuri — and geics rearchers joed the ay the early 1990s after a seri of studi on tws suggted homosexualy ran fai.

IS A PERSON ‘BORN GAY’, OR IS BEG GAY A LEARNED BEHAVR?

“As a teenager tryg to unrstand myself and unrstand my sexualy, I looked at the ter for “the gay gene” and obvly me across Xq28, ” said Fah Sathirapongsasuti, a study -thor and senr scientist at 23andMe, which he joked once led him to believe he hered his gayns om his mother. The rearchers had members of the same-sex muny review the study’s sign and language, and they adm that their termology and fns for gay, lbian and heterosexual do not reflect the full nature of the sexualy ntuum.

THERE IS NO ‘GAY GENE.’ THERE IS NO ‘STRAIGHT GENE.’ SEXUALY IS JT PLEX, STUDY NFIRMS

“[Our study] unrsr an important role for the environment shapg human sexual behavr and perhaps most importantly there is no sgle gay gene but rather the ntributn of many small geic effects sttered across the genome, ” Neale said. But on the other, he totally wrtl wh the image produced by the ia that one might be "born gay, " of a ltle male neonate appearg wh illy pk diapers and graspg a Barbie doll. Maybe we n agree that the image evoked by "born gay"—that ltle girl neonate appearg wearg overalls and graspg a toy tck—do not help thk through qutns of sexual sire and inty.

ARE WE BORN GAY?

It was, LeVay acknowledg, the perfect Frdian recipe for homosexualy-only he was nvced Frd had e and effect backward: hostile fathers didn't make sons gay; fathers turned hostile bee the sons were "unmascule" to beg year, LeVay, now a nroscientist at the Salk Instute La Jolla, Calif., got a chance to exame his hunch up close. Snng the bras of 41 davers, cludg 19 homosexual mal, LeVay termed that a ty area believed to ntrol sexual activy was ls than half the size the gay men than the heterosexuals. It was perhaps the first direct evince of what some gays have long ntend-that whether or not they choose to be different, they are born Bart, meanwhile, got an opportuny to make his own ntributn to the se.

ARE YOU BORN GAY OR IS A CHOICE? SCIENTISTS MIGHT HAVE FOUND THE ANSWER

Two years ago he was reced for an amb study of homosexualy tws, unrtaken by psychologist Michael Bailey, of Northwtern Universy, and psychiatrist Richard Pillard, of the Boston Universy School of Medice. Published last December, only months after LeVay's work, the rults showed that if one intil tw is gay, the other is almost three tim more likely to be gay than if the tws are aternal-suggtg that somethg the intil tws' shared geic makp affected their sexual both studi, the implitns are potentially huge.

For s, scientists and the public at large have bated whether homosexuals are born or ma-whether their sexual orientatn is the rult of a geic roll of the dice or a batn of formative factors their upbrgg. "It would rce beg gay to somethg like beg left-hand, which is fact all that is, " says gay San Francis journalist and thor Randy stead of rolvg the bate, the studi may well have tensified . "A geic ponent sexual orientatn says, ' This is not a flt, and 's not your flt', " says the timatn that an actual gene for gayns might be found some forebodg.

HOMOSEXUALY: ARE GAYS BORN OR MA?

"No parent would choose to have a child born wh any factor that would make life difficult for him or her, " says Lrie Coburn, program director of the Feratn of Parents and Friends of Lbians and Gays (ParentsFLAG) this subject, feelgs are seldom rtraed. "It's part of the society's trsic sexism, " says Penny Perks, public-tn ordator for Lambda Legal Defense and Edutn Fund, which works to promote lbian and gay men's rights. Franc Stevens, edor chief of Denve, a lbian news magaze, adms her personal history supports blogil ; although she me om a wholome "Brady Bunch" fay, she knew she was gay "om day one.

" That's somethg rearchers still have to fd men have their own reasons to be irate: as they see , lookg for a "e" of homosexualy impli is viant and heterosexualy is the norm. When John De Cec, profsor of psychology at San Francis State Universy and edor of the Journal of Homosexualy, began one of his class recently by suggtg stunts discs the of homosexualy, someone lled out, "Who r?

'GAY GEN': SCIENCE IS ON THE RIGHT TRACK, WE'RE BORN THIS WAY. LET’S AL WH .

Acrdg to John Boswell's 1980 book, "Christiany, Social Tolerance and Homosexualy, " thgs didn't turn tly nasty until the 13th century, when the church, on the heels of a diatribe om Sat Thomas Aquas, began to view gays as not only unnatural but our own century of sex et lux, begng wh Sigmund Frd, psychiatrists ascribed male homosexualy to unnsc nflicts and fixatns that have their roots early childhood. ) But that view was officially dropped 1973, when more strgent diagnostic standards-and the lobbyg of gay activists-persuad the Amerin Psychiatric Associatn to expunge homosexualy om the list of emotnal disorrs. But younger psychiatrists now are tght that rather than tryg to "cure" homosexuals, they should help them feel more fortable about rolved to look for sex differenc the bra after the slow, wrenchg ath om AIDS of his pann of 21 years (box).

THE 'GAY GENE' IS A MYTH BUT BEG GAY IS 'NATURAL,' SAY SCIENTISTS

30, 1991, was based on his own yearlong study of the hypothalam 41 davers, cludg 19 self-avowed homosexual men, 16 heterosexual men and 6 heterosexual women. What emerged wh almost startlg clary was that, wh some exceptns, the clter of nrons known as INAH 3 (the third terstial nucls of the anterr hypothalam, which LeVay lls "the bs end as far as sex go") was more than twice as large the heterosexual mal as the homosexuals, whose INAH 3 was around the same size as the women. Later, fact, he examed the bra of a homosexual who died of lung ncer, and aga found INAH 3 much trickier qutn is whether thgs might work the other way around: uld sexual orientatn affect bra stcture?

Many the study were not only disrdant, but dramatilly sexualy studi e the Ksey sle, which rat orientatn on a seven-pot spectm om strictly heterosexual to exclively homosexual.

"If you look at all societi, " says Frerick Wham, who has rearched homosexualy cultur as diverse as the Uned Stat, Central Ameri and the Philipp, "homosexualy occurs at the same rat wh the same kds of behavr. In a 1989 study of attus toward gays four different societi, those who believed homosexuals "were born that way" reprented a mory but were also the least homophobic. Perhaps the most voluble spokman for the "fix " school is Charl Soris, a New York Cy analyst who claims a flourishg practice turng troubled homosexuals to "happy, fulfilled heterosexuals.

IS ANYONE BORN GAY?

") "Psychology and psychiatry have sentially abandoned a whole populatn of people who feel dissatisfied wh their feelgs of homosexualy, " says psychologist Joseph Nilosi, thor of "Reparative Therapy of Male Homosexualy" (Jason Aronson. "Rearch has shown repeatedly that a poor relatnship wh a distant, aloof father and an overposssive, domeerg mother uld e homosexualy mal, " he fact, some of that rearch, datg back to the 1950s, has been discreded bee of flty techniqu, among other problems. Perhaps the most appropriate answer om Evelyn Hooker, who showed an important 1950s study that is impossible to distguish heterosexuals om homosexuals on psychologil tts.

If we unrstand s nature and accept as a given, then we e much closer to the kd of attus which will make possible for homosexuals to lead a cent life society. They asked more than 477, 000 participants whether they had ever had sex wh someone of the same sex, and also qutns about sexual fantasi and the gree to which they intified as gay or straight. “A lot of people want to unrstand the blogy of homosexualy, and science has lagged behd that human tert, ” says William Rice, an evolutnary geicist at the Universy of California, Santa Barbara, who also was not volved the work.

BORN GAY OR MA GAY? HOW, WHY, AND DO MATTER?

Both gay people and those who thk them sners have a polil stake the answer, and one of the most pellg arguments favor of gay marriage has been that if you don’t have a “choice” to be attracted to the oppose sex, then ’s unfair to not be allowed the benefs of matrimony. Those who nmn homosexual behavr, whether out of simple disgt or for relig reasons, have to believe that gay people, ed, do have a choice, and are simply beg willfully immoral.

MAJORY U.S. NOW SAY GAYS AND LBIANS BORN, NOT MA

I n image no form of therapy (at least not volvg hormonal treatments or other chemil terventns) that would somehow persua me to change my heterosexual ways, and I would image that homosexuals feel jt as nstraed by their nate nature. But here we have two people who share the same geic , and shared the same womb at the same time, one (now) reportedly gay and the other reportedly straight, which would seem to be a problem for both theori. It turns out, at least if this study is to be believed, that if one intil tw is homosexual, ’s a flip of the that the other one will be, whereas ’s about one five for aternal tws (that is, same womb, but different DNA).

My gus would be that ’s a skewed distributn toward heterosexualy, wh a long th tail of homosexuals, but a big bulge on the heterosexual si of the sle of folks who n go eher way. My theory would expla why some of the most vocifero opponents of homosexualy often (more often than one might have gused) turn out to be attracted to the same sex — they have a choice, and they feel morally superr to those upon whom they project their own bisexual orientatn, and th assume that people who don’t uphold their own standards of moraly are merely weak-willed. Many homosexuals hold to the belief that they were born that way, and there are some rearchers who suggt, on the basis of several recent studi, that there may be a geic predisposn toward homosexualy some people.

The largt ever study to the existence of a so-lled ‘gay gene’, nducted by NorthShore Rearch Instute, looked at 409 sets of gay brothers an effort to fally put the bate to rt.

ARE GAYS BORN OR MA?

Lead scientist Alan Sanrs said that the work “eros the notn that sexual orientatn is a choice” – but said the study also did not intify a sgle gene which was the direct e of homosexualy. Though some rema sceptil, nroscientist Simon LeVay told the New Scientist: “His study knocks another nail to the ff of the ‘chosen liftyle’ theory of homosexualy. “Y, we have a choice life, to be ourselv or to nform to someone else’s ia of normaly, but beg straight, bisexual or gay, or none of the, is a central part of who we are, thanks part to the DNA we were born wh.

Richard Lane of Stonewall told the Inpennt: “While some people may choose to foc on the ntug bate of whether people are born gay or not, we’ll ntue to foc on makg sure everyone has the same rights and opportuni regardls of who they love. On the other hand, if the dividuals was born gay, do not matter the ndns or environment which he or she was raised, the blogil sexual preference will always prevail. Many theori om the psychologil perspective argue that dividuals wh an absent father tend to velop homosexual tras a way to pensate for the lack of mascule affectn they did not have whilst growg up.

Lks have also been tablished between early homosexual experienc amongst boys and their future sexual orientatn as well as the lk between rape boys and their future sexual orientatn.

ARE GAYS ‘BORN THAT WAY’? MOST AMERINS NOW SAY Y, BUT SCIENCE SAYS NO

Simultaneoly, over the last two s and thanks to advanc science, medice and technology, scientists and rearchers have been able to study more pth the of homosexual behavur om a blogil perspective. The Gay Gene: In 1993, a study published  the journal Science showed that fai wh two homosexual brothers were very likely to have certa geic markers on a regn of the X chromosome known as XQ28. Size and Shape of the Bra: Several studi have been nducted amongst heterosexual and homosexual mal and has been termed that the shape and size of their bra differ slightly.

ARE CHILDREN "BORN GAY"?

In 1991, a study published  the journal Science seemed to show that the hypothalam, (which ntrols the release of sex hormon om the puary gland) gay men differs om the hypothalam straight men. Also, PET and MRI studi performed 2008 have shown that the two halv of the bra are more symmetril homosexual men and heterosexual women than heterosexual men and homosexual women.

The studi have also revealed that nnectns the amygdalas of gay men remble those of straight women; gay women, nnectns the amygdala remble those of straight men. This was the central this of the recent book, Born Gay, by Glenn Wilson, a rear at the Instute of Psychiatry London, and Qazi Rahman, a lecturer psychoblogy at the Universy of East London.

Other scientists have also rried out studi showg differenc between gay and straight people wh rpect to a number of physlogil tras that are associated wh hormonal fluenc. The clu: physique, hearg, bra stcture, fger lengths, penis size (gay men tend to be better endowed than straight men), and the age of puberty (on average lbians mature later than straight women, and gay men earlier than heterosexual men).