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The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

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Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#441

Post by klmadfejno »

tgb wrote: post #439
klmadfejno wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's cheating. A person is only a homicidal psychopath after they have committed homicide. Locking up a psychopath who has committed no crimes is just as fucked up as locking up someone for being gay.

Whether we lock them up or punish them afterwards is besides the point: in either case the "I'm genetically programmed this way" is not a defense that would (or should) fly when it comes to murder.

I really don't think that is besides the point. Your analogy only holds if the only issue at hand was anti-sodomy laws. But we're also concerned about protected rights and lessening discrimination against gay people who don't have any gay sex.

There may be individuals biologically inclined to commit murder, but they still don't have to. Gay people have no autonomy at all in choosing their sexual orientation. Even if you had a direct mandate from god that engaging in homosexual behavior was immoral, it would be unethical to punish someone for the way they were born. Punishing psychopaths for murdering people might have a weak argument against it, but it still seems reasonable under most legal/civic/ethical frameworks.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#442

Post by throwaway2245 »

rootusrootus wrote: post #57
bonoetmalo wrote: post #41

Kind of hopeful we can stop using genetics as a way of justifying queer peoples' existence. Whether it's conditioning, a choice, or genetics, shouldn't really be a factor in how you treat queer people.

That would be ideal, but some people need to be convinced that it is not a choice before they will consider treating gay people with respect. So long as they think it's just a behavioral decision, they can rationalize their bigotry.

Bigots can accuse you of being genetically defective just as well as they can accuse you of sinful behaviour.

Pandering to what bigots need is not productive or helpful.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#443

Post by jsmith45 »

tomp wrote: post #223
suizi wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is possible to turn someone who is straight gay, anymore than it is possible to turn someone who is gay straight. The exception would be where they're bi, but they would already have had some interest in the same sex, and it wouldn't have come from social conditioning.

Why do you think that? I’d say it’s very much cultural... these days, bisexuality is much more acceptable for women than for men, and more women identify as bisexual... in Ancient Greece, men having sex with men were much more common than these days (AFAIK).

But even in ancient Greek culture there was still something akin to homophobia. While err... screwing a guy as a guy was just fine, being screwed by a guy is not. I.E. being the receptive partner as a male was heavily socially stigmatized. It seems this was viewed as being basically being effeminate, and unsurprisingly that was viewed negatively.

It seems to be extremely common over the ages that women acting like men is more accepted than men acting like women. Even during times when women acting like men in some respect was highly taboo, the reverse almost always seems to be viewed as worse. (I.E. back in the days when a woman wearing pants was scandalous, it generally seems like a guy wearing a woman's dress was even more scandalous).

This dislike of men acting like women definitely seems to be one factor in modern homophobia (although it is not the only factor). It also seems to factor a lot into transphobia (which seems to be much more focused on trans women than on trans men). Of course I suspect that transphobia in men is frequently intertwined with homophobia. The idea being the revulsion found in the idea of finding out that the woman you are dating "is really a man" (in the bigot's mind), making them effectively gay.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#444

Post by rayiner »

rayiner wrote: post #430
damnyou wrote: post #405

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Liberal gender and sexual norms are very clearly better for humanity and it is a moral imperative that the rest of the world adopt them. Social conservatism of the sort practiced in most of the world, including but not remotely limited to the Muslim world, is incompatible with basic human rights and freedoms. To be very clear: social conservatism is bad and social liberalism is good . As someone not from the west, I…

There is no reason to treat "social liberalism" as practiced in western countries in 2020 as some inextricable bundle, where each change must be considered "progress" independently. For example, while the sexual revolution tries to ride the coat tails of equal legal rights for women, there is no reason a society can't have equal rights for women without embracing the premises of the sexual revolution. (Don’t forget t…

I'll also add a striking data point--even in the United States, conservatives are happier than liberals: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/08/opinion/sunday/conservati...

> Fifty-two percent of married, religious, politically conservative people (with kids) are very happy — versus only 14 percent of single, secular, liberal people without kids.

In Bangladesh, where I'm from, it's taken for granted that getting married, going to mosque, and having kids is the way to a good and happy life. Yes, Bangladeshis are backwards people in many ways. But maybe they’re not wrong about everything. Maybe in this area, Bangladeshis know something about being human that social liberals have talked Americans into forgetting?

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#445

Post by memling »

yters wrote: post #174
memling wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But that's always been a fucked up idea. It shouldn't matter whether it was predetermined or otherwise not in your control. If it's constructed then it's constructed. If it's not then it's not. People shouldn't be oppressed for their sexuality full stop, regardless of reason. You are right, I think, to root the conflict in religion. The dominant religion in the West, Christianity, treats the human body as a given.…

Plus it doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective. The Roman Catholic branch and derivatives all believe everyone is genetically predisposed to sin through Adam's lineage, and that is a bad thing, and we don't have a choice in the matter. So saying homosexuality is a genetic predisposition just means it gets lumped into the rest of our fallen attributes. Making it a choice doesn't fix things either, since a cho…

> Plus it doesn't make sense from a Christian perspective. The Roman Catholic branch and derivatives all believe everyone is genetically predisposed to sin through Adam's lineage, and that is a bad thing, and we don't have a choice in the matter. So saying homosexuality is a genetic predisposition just means it gets lumped into the rest of our fallen attributes. Making it a choice doesn't fix things either, since a choice can be intrinsically sinful.

I think that's an inescapable conclusion in traditional Christianity. That will or choice is not necessarily a component of responsibility is something we also adopt in law: involuntary manslaughter is different than premeditated murder, even though the outcome is the same. In other words, will is not essential to guilt, although the degree to which we assess punishments certainly is. I don't know what Catholicism says to that, really, but it does seem to me that the arguments concerning genetic predisposition would have failed in most conservative religious approaches because of the premise.

Even so, I think that this is a mostly ancillary concern. The real issue is that there are competing and irreconcilable views of what it means to be human. Are we human because of the bodies we inhabit? Are we human because of how we can feel about who we are? Because we can transcend our bodies? I would postulate that answering this question is an essentially religious exercise, whether your narrative comes from a biology textbook, genetic programming manual, or the Bible. But that's an opinion that is perhaps even murkier to plumb than the roots of homosexuality in human experience.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#446

Post by wombatmobile »

tofery wrote: post #380
wombatmobile wrote: post #378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’ve made valid points cogently, and asked relevant questions that could be answered using scientific methods, but you’re getting downvoted, which is a polemic response. Why?

Not sure, but perhaps statements like "Comments like these are so hilariously idiotic. Props for making me guffaw out loud." are why people downvote. Personally I think that OP contributed to the conversation so I wouldn't have downvoted (if I could), but maybe some people did because of that.

> Personally I think that OP contributed to the conversation so I wouldn't have downvoted

Same. He's saying the emperor has no clothes, with respect to the thread, which kicked off with this comment:

> To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and produces an effeminate male instead - a gay son.

I find it disturbing that his comment has been flagged and removed. All he did was call out some baseless extrapolation. How did "effeminacy" even enter the conversation?

The original "study" doesn't provide any evidential basis for any of this speculation. Its only data point is the supposed reporting by study participants that they have had more than zero same sex encounters in their life. How does that account for the thesis that a mother's body is generating effeminate homosexual males in a failed bid to generate daughters???

Removing this guys post is bizarre.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#447

Post by irrational »

circlefavshape wrote: post #423
irrational wrote: post #385

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely. I'm straight and I love watching Jane Austen, Anne of Green Gables, Musicals, Hallmark, Downton Abbey, Romcom, etc. movies with my wife. But I'd never let any of my male friends know.

/me blinks Liking Jane Austen is effeminate?

Go up to a group of supposedly all straight men and ask who is interested in watching the BBC production of Pride and Prejudice (ideally they will ask “which one?” and you can respond “the one with Colin Firth”). Then do the same thing with a group of women. Maybe you live somewhere unusual, but in my experience you will have no takers from the men but many takers from the women.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#448

Post by rcoveson »

drdeca wrote: post #424
rcoveson wrote: post #420

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t “being attracted to males” a predominantly female characteristic in animals that reproduce sexually? On the “sexuality” dimension, do not gay men fall closer to the female cluster than the male cluster?

I assume you mean more in that direction than a typical male? Because I’m pretty sure that homosexual men aren’t overall more like heterosexual women than they are like heterosexual men, at least in terms of appearance.

By default, let’s assume that homosexual men have the same distribution of all other traits as heterosexual men. In N-dimensional space, they are biased slightly away from dead center of the male cluster towards the female cluster because of the female bias of the attracted-to-men trait.

You could say the same thing about long-haired men. It doesn’t mean you’re implying that any other traits are more feminine, because the one trait in question is already biased female.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#449

Post by camgunz »

rayiner wrote: post #176
BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #94

People latched onto the idea that sexuality is genetically determined because it seemed like the only viable way to defend themselves against rampant religious bigotry and oppression. It was a rope dangling into the well you were trapped in, and the well was filling with acid, but if you could just manage to climb that rope then you'd make it out. The reasoning went something like "if I can prove that sexuality is ge…

You're collapsing a huge societal design space into a narrow, ultra-individualistic western viewpoint. Your point only makes sense in societies that take it as a given that individual autonomy trumps the right of society to enforce behavioral, moral, and social norms. That approach is not morally required and almost no non-western society embraces that viewpoint. Almost all of Asia and Africa accepts that requiring c…

> That's a radical (and quite ethnocentric) claim.

I don’t think it’s ethnocentric to call out homophobia in other cultures, just like I wouldn’t call it ethnocentric to call out racism, sexism, or anti-semitism in other cultures.

> And of course, it’s ridiculous to say that people “latched on” to sexual orientation to appease “bigots”

Isn’t this pretty much what happened in the sex and gender research communities? I don’t have a cite but, I thought this was pretty well accepted.

Re: The largest study to date on the genetic basis of sexuality (2019)

#450

Post by 4b11b4 »

mc32 wrote: post #308
hypertele-Xii wrote: post #272

Fascinating! To me this sounds like the mother's body is trying to "nudge" the odds towards a daughter after several sons, but sometimes the process "fails" and produces an effeminate male instead - a gay son. Alternatively, some kind of meta-level mechanism to reduce competition over women in the community, ultimately improving its collective health and well-being.

That... seems unlikely. That implies a woman's reproductive system knows and remembers or at least keeps a tallies of the sex of the offspring it has produced...

Purely speculative: but I wouldn't be surprised if this level of intelligence were going on in life. The seeds of a plant do remember their previous growing environment.
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