Why Yes, People Are Born Gay or Straight

It is rare that I get the urge to deconstruct a political post that originates from the left, and yet I have run across one such post that essentially demands it. The issue of the biological origin of sexual orientation is, in my opinion, fairly settled, and I have never seen anything in recent years to call it into question. It was largely settled all the way back in the 1970s, and when we talk about it now, we specifically are looking for specific causes or triggers, not the underlying concept that it is biological.

No One is Born Gay (or Straight): Here Are 5 Reasons Why

I am going to skip the first reason, as I agree with it in broad strokes if not in the specific details. Simply because a particular concept is expedient or convenient does not determine its veracity. If that were true, Trickle Down Economics and Free Trade Deals would actually work. However, just because we should not accept a premise unquestioningly does not mean it is inherently invalid.

2. The science is wrong (Part 1): People like to cite “the overwhelming scientific evidence” that sexual orientation is biological in nature. But show me a study that claims to have proven this, and I will show you a flawed research design.

 Okay...

Ward, Ingeborg L. "Prenatal Stress Feminizes and Demasculinizes the Behavior of Males." Science 7 January 1972: Vol. 175 no. 4017 pp. 82-84

As I said, settled since the 1970s. In fact, we have a pretty good idea of what specifically happens. Genetics isn't everything. Identical twins have the same genes but have different finger prints, and even when looking extremely similar do have distinct biological differences. The truth lies in epigenetics, which is the study of changes in the gene activity not caused by DNA. Genes require specific hormonal triggers to activate them. Give the gene a different trigger and you get a different result. Hence why identical twins are not perfectly identical, while in the womb they were subject to very small differences resulting in small changes throughout their biology. We think that stress during pregnancy causes hormonal changes in the uterus at a certain stage of fetal development which activates a series of genes resulting in sexual orientation.

But this study makes the same error that countless others have made: it does not properly distinguish between gender (whether one is masculine or feminine) and sexual orientation (heterosexuality or homosexuality).

Actually it did. It differentiated between traits that are commonly biologically associated with males and commonly biologically associated with females, and discovered that lesbians (as a group) have a specific biological trait more in common with males than with females. Now we can argue the validity of sex as a biological concept, but at this point we have to accept it.

We would only assume this if we had already accepted the heteronormative premise that masculine people (or men) are naturally attracted to femaleness and that normal (i.e., feminine) women are naturally attracted to men.

...We aren't assuming that. We are looking at traits broken down by biological sex and then examining them through the filter of sexual orientation.

Many “masculine” women who are heterosexual (have you been to the rural South?) would like you to know that their gender does not line up with their sexual desire in any predictable way. And many very feminine lesbians would like you to know this too.

This is stupendously misconstruing what is being studied. This is taking "masculine" to mean a set of preferences and tastes (for example: watching football, cutting wood, ect.). That is not the definition of masculine being used by the scientists. They are using it to refer to the general traits of males. The males in question can be highly manly or highly effeminate, but their biological sex is still male. This is also presuming that all the lesbians that were studied were very butch and not very femme, a claim for which there is no supporting evidence.

3. The science is wrong (Part II): An even greater problem with the science of sexual orientation is that it seeks to find the genetic causes of gayness, as if we all agree about what gayness is.

No, it doesn't. As far as I can tell, everyone is pretty much in agreement that there is no specific genetic cause of sexual orientation. The latter part of this statement is valid, as linguistic definitions are important and we strive to all be on the same page.

My point here is that a lot of people engage in homosexual behavior, but somehow we talk about the genetic origins of homosexuality as if we are clear about who is gay and who is not, and as if it’s also clear that “gay genes” are possessed only by people who are culturally and politically gay (you know, the people who are seriously gay). This is a bit arbitrary, don’t you think?

I do not think anyone has ever claimed that people were incapable of engaging in sex with the gender that is not their sexual orientation. Both male and female porn stars do it pretty consistently. Cultural expectations, economic conditions, and hundreds of other motivators can compel people to engage in sexual situations with people they are not normally sexually attracted to. They can even enjoy such sexual contact quite a lot (and we should never rule out bisexuality). But really this section is a misunderstanding of how genetics actually work. Let's go back to Gregor Mendel and his studies of pea plants. Mendel had very short pea plants and very tall pea plants, he discovered if he interbred them, in the next generation, the short plants would seemingly vanish. However one out of four members of the third generation would be short. This post assumes that a genetic sexual orientation would be like those pea plants, a perfect binary between two variations. But that's not how genetics tends to work. Look at the world around us, people aren't simply two heights. Instead we have a spectrum going from very short people to very tall people. So is likely the case with sexual orientation, we all fall somewhere on the Kinsey scale and our biology simply determines the broad swath where we land.

Perhaps these personality traits are what are actually being observed under the microscope.

This is a fair point. You should never presume that correlation equals causation. However there are an astounding number of examples of physical variation being examined here.

At the end of the day, what we can count on is that the science of sexual orientation will produce data that simply mirror the most crass and sexist gender binarisms circulating in the popular imagination.

This is being projected upon the studies and not actually featured in them.

It will tell us that straight men simply cannot be aroused by men and that gay men are virtually hardwired to be repulsed by the thought of sex with women.

No, they won't. They will simply say either here are biological correlations or here is a potential cause. Any study making such sweeping, and easily refutable claims is not worth considering.

The fourth point is fairly accurate, but much like the first, it simply states we should never approach anything uncritically.

And now we get to the fifth point... Oy...

5. Secretly, you already know that people’s sexual desires are shaped by their social and cultural context.

Now where have I heard this line of thought before... oh right... this is the exact same line of argument that Evangelical Christians tend to use, claiming that everyone secretly knows Christianity right, Jesus is the messiah and are just "rejecting God" out of spite.

Lots of adults worry that if we allow little boys to wear princess dresses and paint their nails with polish, they might later be more inclined to be gay. Even some liberal parents (including gay and lesbian parents) worry that if they introduce their child to “too much” in the way of queer material, this could be a way of “pushing” homosexuality on them. Similarly, many people worry that if young women are introduced to feminism in college, and if they become too angry or independent, they may just decide to be lesbians. But if we all really believed that sexual orientation was congenital—or present at birth—then no one would ever worry that social influences could have an effect on our sexual orientation.

The author is presuming a lot in this section. First off, the people who think that dresses and college cause homosexuality are more likely to agree with the author that it is a choice. I have never met anyone who ascribed to the innate theory that believed that such minor environmental considerations mattered. But we do not all ascribe to the innate theory, plenty of people ascribe to the choice theory. Oh, and much of this has to do with gender and socialization, rather than with actual sexual orientation.

We know that if the world today were a different place, a place where homosexuality was culturally normative (like, say, Ancient Greece), we would see far more people embracing their homosexual desires. And if this were the case, it would have nothing to do with genetics.

I can agree with this statement, but not the logic behind it. If we lived in that world the closet would not exist and people would be far more likely to act on bisexual desires, neither of which outcomes have much to do with whether or not sexual orientation is biological.

Most of what feels so natural and unchangeable about our desires—including the bodies and personalities we are attracted to—is conditioned by our respective cultures.

This is walking very close to another line of argument used by the religious right, which is claiming fetishes are a sexual orientation. They are not. No one is claiming that sexual attraction of this nature is not shaped by socialization. However, sexual orientation is quite a different matter.

People like to use the failure of “gay conversion” therapies as evidence that homosexuality is innate. First of all, these conversions do not always fail; if you make someone feel disgusted enough by their desires, you can change their desires.

Well this is just false. Asserting they do not always fail does not make it a reality. Anecdotally many people involved in the gay conversion therapies have noted the failure of them to change sexual orientation. Behind closed doors those therapies have a very specific and not all together ambitious notion of what "change" means (hint, it isn't about switching from homosexual to heterosexual, it's more about becoming a good Christian). Furthermore all studies of conversion therapies, including those commissioned and funded by the religious right itself, point to change being an impossibility. Most of their successes are simply people forgoing sex all together. And, of the people who claim to achieve some degree of heterosexuality, it does not resemble heterosexuality as most people know it. Generally speaking, a heterosexual person does not struggle constantly with finding members of their own sex attractive, which is the experience of heterosexuality that these people have. Again no one is claiming that you can't have sex with someone who is the opposite gender of your sexual orientation, nor is anyone claiming bisexuality does not exist.

The rest of the essay is fairly personal and thus outside of my purview to criticise. But the foundational concepts of this post are horribly flawed.