Gay by Choice? The Science of Sexual Inty – Mother Jon

Contents:

• WHY ARE PEOPLE GAY? GAY BY CHOICE OR IS BEG GAY GEIC?
• WHY WOULD PEOPLE 'CHOOSE' TO BE GAY?
• IS BEG 'GAY' A CHOICE? SCIENCE SAYS Y (BUT NOT THE WAY YOU'RE THKG)
• ‘I AM GAY – BUT I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY’
• GAY BY CHOICE? THE SCIENCE OF SEXUAL INTY
• CYNTHIA NIXON: I'M GAY BY CHOICE
• THERE IS NO ‘GAY GENE.’ THERE IS NO ‘STRAIGHT GENE.’ SEXUALY IS JT PLEX, STUDY NFIRMS
• JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS KEV MAXEN BE FIRST PROFSNAL MALE ACH TO E OUT AS GAY
• GAY BY CHOICE?

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

If we fe beg gay as engagg homosexual behavr (the ncept of “gay” as an inty is a Wtern cultural ncept – people who have sex wh both men and women may ll themselv gay, straight or bisexual, pendg on the l of their culture or subculture), then people stop beg gay as soon as they stop engagg this behavr. If sexual preference n be altered, then people who support gay rights n’t rely on the argument that gay people should be protected om discrimatn bee gay people have no choice but to be gay – an argument that seems like an apology for homosexualy, as if homosexualy is a disease for which there is no cure.

Jt as gay people who are happy as they are should not be forced to change their sexual orientatn, gay people who want to be straight should have the right to change if they n – and the rrect word is “change” – not “cure”. Now, if you fd yourself overwhelmgly attracted to members of the oppose sex, and not at all to members of the same sex (obvly, the are oversimplifitns; sex is not a simple bary), you would be a bad cizen of your language muny to go on and apply the label “gay” to yourself.

But if you’re pable of feelg attractn to members of more than one sex, as many people are, and yet you orient your romantic and sexual behavr primarily around the “same-sex” si of thgs (by dt of your own ee choosg), then go ahead and nsir yourself gay. For some people, there certaly is room for choice wh rpect to their “gayns” (which is, aga, a qutn of inty–how one views onelf and how one acts acrdance wh that self-perceptn); and Cynthia Nixon is one such dividual. The timele of events history that led to the propagatn of the “’s not a choice” unter-argument clearly shows that this is not herently a matter of gay-rights activism, but, rather, a necsary graspg unto somethg prented by a segment of the scientific muny that simultaneoly uld enable a need moment of relief om relentls attacks agast the soul.

WHY WOULD PEOPLE 'CHOOSE' TO BE GAY?

If a group rts s beliefs ( the se of creatnism) or s moral standpot ( the se of gay rights) on a set of claims that are unlikely to be borne out by the evince (or reful nceptual analysis), then risks losg s beliefs, or sacrificg s moral standpot, when the plex realy n no longer be nied. Specifilly, once the relevant facts bee wily unrstood (or when our technologil paci for alterg sexual orientatn improve), the right-wg persecutors of gay men and women will be able to claim victory, and harns the data to their si. While there is no sgle “gay gene, ” there is overwhelmg evince of a blogil basis for sexual orientatn that is programmed to the bra before birth based on a mix of geics and prenatal ndns, none of which the fet choos.

Homosexual members of society n unfortunately expect to regularly be challenged, sctised and nmned by belligerent type who are seemgly nvced that homosexualy is a “liftyle choice” issue has e up aga (for what is possibly the 12, 456, 987, 332nd time) for several reasons. The mastream media has always been somewhat blunt or ham-fisted s portrayal of even heterosexual relatnships (for evince of this, see pretty much any married uple an advert), so was a long shot that they’d show homosexuals accurately.

IS BEG 'GAY' A CHOICE? SCIENCE SAYS Y (BUT NOT THE WAY YOU'RE THKG)

Normally heterosexual characters sudnly displayg homosexual leangs when a boost viewg figur are need is a mon trope the days, so you n sort of see how this might make some people thk ’s a “choice”, if they lack more realistic sayg that sexualy is set stone om birth is also not que right, the ma emphasis of those g the choice argument is that homosexuals have weighed up their optns and nscly cid “I am gog to be gay om now on”. Comedian Todd Glass mak a brilliant pot his book (which is great, I got for Christmas), which is that if you genuely believe sexualy is a choice, then you’re not actually straight, you jt haven’t met anyone persuasive enough those who argue that homosexualy is a choice variably assert that is a wrong choice.

Some of have figured out that, spe beg unrreprented Wtern culture at almost every level, spe facg homophobia and transphobia and genr policg and the disapproval of our fai, beg gay n actually be direct opposn to both the mastream gay movement and Lady Gaga, I would like to state for the rerd that I was not born this way.

You so obvly nnot be gay, was her implitn, bee this is good was 2006, a full five years before Lady Gaga would set the Born This Way argument atop s unassailable cultural perch, but even then the popular unrstandg of orientatn was that was somethg you were born wh, somethg you uldn’t change. But what feels most accurate to say is that I’m gay – but I wasn’t born this people may fd their sir changg directn - and n't jt be explaed as experimentatn (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In 1977, jt over 10% of Amerins thought gayns was somethg you were born wh, acrdg to Gallup.

‘I AM GAY – BUT I WASN’T BORN THIS WAY’

Throughout the same perd, the number of Amerins who believe homosexualy is “due to someone’s upbrgg/environment” fell om jt unr 60% to ias reached cril mass pop culture, first wh Lady Gaga’s 2011 Born This Way and one year later wh Macklemore’s Same Love, the chos of which has a gay person sgg “I n’t change even if I tried, even if I wanted to. ” Around the same time, the Human Rights Campaign clared unequivolly that “Beg gay is not a choice, ” and to claim that is “giv unwarranted crence to roundly disproven practic such as nversn or reparative therapy.

GAY BY CHOICE? THE SCIENCE OF SEXUAL INTY

”People who challenge the Born This Way narrative are often st as homophobic, and their thkg is nsired backwardAs Jane Ward not Not Gay: Sex Between Straight Whe Men, what’s tertg about many of the claims is how transparent their speakers are wh their polil motivatns. ”Gay rights do not have to hge on a geic explanatn for sexualy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)For Aravosis, and many gay activists like him, the public will only accept and affirm gay people if they thk they were born gay. In fact, the homophobic and non-homophobic rponnts he studied shared siar levels of belief a Born This Way Samantha Allen not at The Daily Beast, the growg public support for gays and lbians has grown out of proportn wh the rise the number of people who believe homosexualy is fixed at birth; would be unlikely that this small change opn uld expla the spike support for gay marriage, for stance.

“It don’t seem to matter as much whether or not people believe that gay people are born that way as do that they simply know someone who is currently gay, ” Allen spe of the studi, those who ph agast Born This Way narrativ have been heavily cricised by gay activists. Siarly, Ward has received her own hatemail for phg agast the lg LGB narrativ, wh some gays tellg her she’s “worse than Ann Coulter, ” the ntroversial US thor of books like If Democrats Had Any Bras, They’d Be Republins.

The efforts are potentially harmful, acrdg to the APA, “bee they prent the view that the sexual orientatn of lbian, gay and bisexual youth is a mental illns of disorr, and they often ame the abily to change one’s sexual orientatn as a personal and moral failure. The APA, for example, while notg that most people experience ltle to no choice over their orientatns, says this of homosexualy’s origs:“Although much rearch has examed the possible geic, hormonal, velopmental, social and cultural fluenc on sexual orientatn, no fdgs have emerged that perm scientists to nclu that sexual orientatn is termed by any particular factor or factors.

CYNTHIA NIXON: I'M GAY BY CHOICE

”Siarly, the Amerin Psychiatric Associatn wr a 2013 statement that while the of heterosexualy and homosexualy are currently unknown, they are likely “multifactorial cludg blogil and behavral roots which may vary between different dividuals and may even vary over time. ” Acrdg to LeVay’s rearch, a specific part of the bra, the third terstial nucls of the anterr hypothalam (INAH-3), is smaller homosexual men than is heterosexual as they might, scientists have stggled to inty any particular gen that nsistently predict the directns of our love and sire (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Read moreYou n spot the problem wh this study a e away: were the gay bras LeVay studied born that way, or did they bee that way?

Bis the dividual criqu leveled agast each new study announcg some gay gene disvery, there are major methodologil cricisms to make about the entire enterprise general, as Grzanka pots out: “If we look at the raveno pursu, particularly among Amerin scientists, to fd a gay gene, what we see is that the ncln has already been arrived at. ” Our sir may exprs themselv many different ways that do not all nform to existg notns of ‘gay’, ‘straight’ or ‘bisexual’ is one of the bt takeaways of Ward’s Not Gay, a peratg analysis of sex between straight whe men. ”Gay or not, our sir are oriented and re-oriented throughout our liv (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)In fact, the straight-intified men Ward studied for her book sometim found themselv suatns that sparked the sire for homosexual sex: aterni, ployments, public rtrooms, etc.

I’m claimg that at some pot durg llege, my sexual and romantic sir beme reoriented toward menThkg back to my llege romanc wh women and men, I n beg to unrstand how my own experienc might have helped me to ‘cultivate’ my sire for homosexualy. “Limg our unrstandg of any plex human experience is always gog to be worse than allowg to be plited, ” he gay rights activists pared sexualy to relign - a ccial part of our life that we should be ee to practise however we like (Cred: Ignac Lehamann)So what are we to do wh the Born This Way rhetoric? ”Acrdg to surveys, ls than half of Generatn Z intify as "100% heterosexual", suggtg more and more people have embraced their sexual fluidy (Cred: Ignac Lehmann)Perhaps is time to look to the begng of the gay rights movement.

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

“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. That’s the ual terpretatn of reparative therapy—that to the extent that do anythg, leads people to reprs rather than change their natural clatns, that s claims to change sexual orientatn are an outright d perpetrated by the relig right on people who have ternalized the homophobia of Amerin society, personalized the polil such a way as to reject their own sexualy and stunt their love liv. All the major psychotherapy guilds have barred their members om rearchg or practicg reparative therapy on the grounds that is herently uhil to treat somethg that is not a disease, that ntribut to opprsn by pathologizg homosexualy, and that is dangero to patients whose self-teem n only suffer when they try to change somethg about themselv that they n’t (and shouldn’t have to) change.

For if he’s not a posr, then he is a walkg challenge to the polil and scientific nsens that has emerged over the last century and a half: that sexual orientatn is born and immutable, that efforts to change are bound to fail, and that discrimatn agast gay people is therefore unjt.

Even more important, some rearch shows that sexual orientatn is more fluid than we have e to thk, that people, pecially women, n and do move across ctomary sexual orientatn boundari, that there are ex-straights as well as ex-gays.

JACKSONVILLE JAGUARS KEV MAXEN BE FIRST PROFSNAL MALE ACH TO E OUT AS GAY

Nature, he argued, had divid the human race to four sexual typ: “monosexuals, ” who masturbated, “heterogens, ” who had sex wh animals, “heterosexuals, ” who upled wh the oppose sex, and “homosexuals, ” who preferred people of the same sex.

GAY BY CHOICE?

Another anti-sodomy-law opponent, lawyer Karl Herich Ulrichs, proposed that homosexual men, or “Uranians, ” as he lled them (and he openly nsired himself a Uranian, while Kertbeny was y about his preferenc), were actually a third sex, their attractn to other men a maniftatn of the female soul ridg their male bodi. Hirschfeld was an outspoken opponent of anti-sodomy laws and champned tolerance of gay people, but he also believed that homosexualy was a pathologil state, a ngenal formy of the bra that may have been the rult of a parental “generacy” that nature tend to elimate by makg the fective populatn unlikely to reproduce. Frd was psimistic that homosexualy uld be treated, but doctors abhor an illns whout a cure, and the 20th century saw therapists flict the bt of morn psychiatric practice on gay people, which clud, addn to termable psychoanalysis and unproven meditns, treatments that ed electric shock to associate pa wh same-sex attractn.

The therapi were largely unsuccsful, and, particularly after the Stonewall rts of 1969—the clash between police and gays that iated the morn gay rights movement—patients and psychiatrists alike started qutng whether homosexualy should be nsired a mental illns at all. The apa would lete homosexualy om s Diagnostic and Statistil Manual of Mental Disorrs (dsm) immediately, and furthermore would add a new disease: sexual orientatn disorr, which a patient n’t accept his or her sexual inty.