Ignore
those researchers who claim to have discovered a ‘gay gene’, says Peter
Tatchell: gay desire is not genetically determined. Peter Tatchell
FIRST READ:
Homosexuality:
it isn’t natural
Chicago Researchers Look for 'Gay Gene'
Published October 17, 2007
Associated Press
Julio and Mauricio Cabrera are gay brothers who are convinced their sexual
orientation is as deeply rooted as their Mexican ancestry. They are among 1,000
pairs of gay brothers taking part in the largest study to date seeking genes
that may influence whether people are gay.
The Cabreras hope the findings will help silence critics who say
homosexuality is an immoral choice.
If fresh evidence is found suggesting genes are involved, perhaps
homosexuality will be viewed as no different than other genetic traits like
height and hair color, said Julio, a student at DePaul
University in Chicago.
Adds his brother, "I think it would help a lot of folks understand us
better."
The federally funded study, led by Chicago-area researchers, will rely on
blood or saliva samples to help scientists search for genetic clues to the
origins of homosexuality. Parents and straight brothers also are being
recruited.
While initial results aren't expected until next year — and won't provide a
final answer — skeptics are already attacking the methods and disputing the
presumed results.
Previous studies have shown that sexual orientation tends to cluster in
families, though that doesn't prove genetics is involved. Extended families may
share similar child-rearing practices, religion and other beliefs that could
also influence sexual orientation.
Research involving identical twins, often used to study genetics since they
share the same DNA, has had mixed results.
One widely cited study in the 1990s found that if one member of a pair of
identical twins was gay, the other had a 52 percent chance of being gay. In
contrast, the result for pairs of non-twin brothers, was 9 percent. A 2000
study of Australian identical twins found a much lower chance.
Dr. Alan Sanders of Evanston Northwestern Healthcare Research Institute, the
lead researcher of the new study, said he suspects there isn't one so-called
"gay gene."
It is more likely there are several genes that interact with nongenetic
factors, including psychological and social influences, to determine sexual
orientation, said Sanders, a psychiatrist.
Still, he said, "If there's one gene that makes a sizable contribution,
we have a pretty good chance" of finding it.
Many gays fear that if gay genes are identified, it could result in
discrimination, prenatal testing and even abortions to eliminate homosexuals,
said Joel Ginsberg of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association.
However, he added, "If we confirm that sexual orientation is an
immutable characteristic, we are much more likely to get the courts to rule
against discrimination."
There is less research on lesbians, Sanders said, although some studies
suggest that male and female sexual orientation may have different genetic
influences.
His new research is an attempt to duplicate and expand on a study published
in 1993 involving 40 pairs of gay brothers.
That hotly debated study, wrongly touted as locating "the gay
gene," found that gay brothers shared genetic markers in a region on the X
chromosome, which men inherit from their mothers.
That implies that any genes influencing sexual orientation lie somewhere in
that region.
Previous attempts to duplicate those results failed. But Sanders said that
with so many participants, his study has a better chance of finding the same
markers and perhaps others on different chromosomes.
If these markers appear in gay brothers but not their straight brothers or
parents, that would suggest a link to sexual orientation. The study is designed
to find genetic markers, not to explain any genetic role in behavior.
And Sanders said even if he finds no evidence, that won't mean genetics play
no role; it may simply mean that individual genes have a smaller effect.
Skeptics include Stanton Jones, a psychology professor and provost at Wheaton College
in Wheaton, Ill. An evangelical Christian, Jones last
month announced results of a study he co-authored that says it's possible for
gays to "convert" — changing their sexual orientation without harm.
Jones said his results suggest biology plays only a minor role in sexual
orientation, and that researchers seeking genetic clues generally have a
pro-gay agenda that will produce biased results.
Sanders disputed that criticism.
"We do not have a predetermined point we are trying to prove," he
said. "We are trying to pry some of nature's secrets loose with respect to
a fundamental human trait."
Jones acknowledged that he's not a neutral observer. His study involved 98
gays "seeking help" from Exodus International, a Christian group that
believes homosexuals can become straight through prayer and counseling. Exodus
International funded Jones' study.
The group's president, Alan Chambers, said he is a former homosexual who
went straight and believes homosexuality is morally wrong.
Even if research ultimately shows that genetics play a bigger role, it
"will never be something that forces people to behave in a certain
way," Chambers said. "We all have the freedom to choose."
The Cabrera brothers grew up in Mexico
in a culture where "being gay was an embarrassment," especially for
their father, said Mauricio, 41, a car dealership employee from Olathe, Kan.
They had cousins who were gay, but Mauricio said he still felt he had to
hide his sexual orientation and he struggled with his "double life."
Julio said having an older brother who was gay made it easier for him to accept
his sexuality.
Jim Larkin, 54, a gay journalist in Flint,
Mich., said the genetics study is
a move in the right direction.
Given the difficulties of being gay in a predominantly straight society,
homosexuality "is not a choice someone would make in life," said
Larkin, who is not a study participant.
He had two brothers who were gay. One died from AIDS; the other committed
suicide. Larkin said he didn't come out until he was 26.
"I fought and I prayed and I went to Mass and I said the rosary,"
Larkin said. "I moved away from everybody I knew ... thinking maybe this
will cause the feelings to subside. It doesn't."
Homosexuality:
it isn’t natural
Peter Tatchell
Ignore those researchers who claim to have
discovered a ‘gay gene’, says Peter Tatchell: gay desire is not
genetically determined.
A few years ago, Dr James Watson, the Nobel Prize
winner who co-discovered DNA, reopened the controversy over the so-called gay
gene when he defended a woman’s right to abortion. He was quoted in the Sunday
Telegraph as saying: ‘If you could find the gene which determines
sexuality, and a woman decides she doesn’t want a homosexual child, well, let
her [abort the foetus].’
Much of the reaction to Dr Watson’s statement focused on its homophobic
versus freedom of choice implications. Largely overlooked was the fact that
such an esteemed scientist was giving credibility to the flawed theories which
claim a genetic causation of homosexuality.
Now, these theories have been given a boost by research suggesting
differences in the brain structures of gay and straight people. Last week, a
team of scientists at the University
of Padova in Italy made headlines around the
world when they claimed to have discovered that homosexuality in males may be
caused in part by genes that can increase fertility in females (1).
According to gay gene theory, genetic factors are responsible for sexual
orientation, with our genetic inheritance programming us to desire one sex
rather than the other. This is a very simple, deterministic thesis: A causes B.
I don’t disagree that genes (and hormonal exposure in the womb) influence
sexual orientation. The scientific evidence for these biological influences is
presented in the book
Born Gay (2005), written by Glenn Wilson of the
Institute of Psychiatry in London and Qazi Rahman, a lecturer in psychobiology
at the University of East London.
But contrary to what the authors seem to suggest, an influence is not the
same as a cause. Genes and hormones may predispose a person to one sexuality
rather than another. But that’s all. Predisposition and determination are two
different things.
There is a major problem with gay gene theory, and with all theories that
posit the biological programming of sexual orientation. If heterosexuality and
homosexuality are, indeed, genetically predetermined (and therefore mutually
exclusive and unchangeable), how do we explain bisexuality or people who,
suddenly in mid-life, switch from heterosexuality to homosexuality (or vice
versa)? We can’t.
The reality is that queer and straight desires are far more ambiguous,
blurred and overlapping than any theory of genetic causality can allow.
After studying the sexual experiences of thousands of men, Dr Alfred Kinsey
presented evidence, in
Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male (1948), that
‘many males combine in their single histories, and very often in exactly the
same period of time, or even simultaneously in the same moment, reactions to
both heterosexual and homosexual stimuli’.
Some years later, the Kinsey researchers famously reported the case of a
happily married young woman who, 10 years into her marriage, unexpectedly fell
in love with a female friend. Divorcing her husband, she set up house with this
woman. Many years later, despite a fulfilling ongoing lesbian relationship, she
had an equally satisfying affair with a man. Examples of sexual flexibility,
like that of this woman, don’t square with genetic theories of rigid erotic
predestination.
One of the main original proponents of gay gene theory, Dr Dean Hamer, now
concedes that it is unlikely that something as complex as human sexuality can
be explained solely in terms of genetic inheritance. He seems to accept that
while genetic factors may establish a predisposition towards homosexuality, a
predisposition is not the same as a causation.
Many studies suggest social factors are also important influences in the
formation of sexual orientation. These include the relationship between a child
and its parents, formative childhood experiences, family expectations, cultural
mores and peer pressure.
By about the age of five or six, a combination of biological and social
influences seem to lay the basis of an individual’s sexual orientation. Because
our sexuality is fixed at such an early age, many lesbians and gay men feel
they have been homosexual all their lives and therefore mistakenly conclude
that it must be genetic and that they were born queer.
They also see the gay gene explanation as a useful defence against the
arguments of the religious right, which dismisses same-sex relationships as a
lifestyle choice. But no one sits down one day and chooses to be gay (or
straight). Sexual orientation is not a choice like choosing which biscuits to
buy in a supermarket. We don’t have free will concerning the determination of
our sexual orientation. Our only free will is whether we accept or repress our
true inner sexual and emotional desires.
The relative influence of biological versus social factors with regard to
sexual orientation is still uncertain. What is, however, certain is that if
gayness was primarily explainable in genetic terms we would expect it to appear
in the same proportions, and in similar forms, in all cultures and all epochs.
As the anthropologists Clellan Ford and Frank Beach demonstrated in
Patterns
Of Sexual Behaviour (1965), far from being cross-culturally uniform and
stable, both the incidence and expressions of same-sex desire vary vastly
between different societies.
They found, for example, that young men in some tribes (the Aranda of
Australia, Siwan of Egypt, Batak of Sumatra, Anga of Melanesia and others) had
relationships with boys or older male warriors, usually lasting several years,
often as part of manhood initiation rituals. Eventually ceasing homosexual
contact, they subsequently assumed sexual desires for women.
If sexual orientation was genetically prefixed at conception, as the
proponents of the gay gene claim, these young men would never have been able to
switch between heterosexual and homosexual relations with such apparent ease.
Likewise, a glance at history reveals huge disparities between
configurations of homosexuality in different eras down the ages. Same-sex
behaviour in Ancient Greece was very different, in both its prevalence and
particular manifestations, from homosexuality in Confucian China, Renaissance
Italy, Meiji Japan, Tudor
England and late twentieth-century America. Moral values, social
ideologies and cultural expectations - together with family patterns and
parent-child interaction - seem the only credible explanation for these massive
historical divergences.
Despite obvious theoretical and empirical weaknesses, the claims that
certain genes cause homosexuality have been seized upon and vigorously promoted
by many in the lesbian and gay rights movement (especially in the US).
The haste with which these unproven, questionable theories have been
embraced suggests a terrible lack of self-confidence and a rather sad,
desperate need to justify queer desire. It’s almost as if those pushing these
theories believe we don’t deserve human rights unless we can prove that we are
born gay and that our homosexuality is beyond our control: ‘We can’t help being
fags and dykes, so please don’t treat us badly.’ This seems to be the pleading,
defensive sub-text of much of the pro-gay gene thesis.
Surely we merit human rights because we are human beings? The cause of our
homosexuality is irrelevant to our quest for justice. We are entitled to
dignity and respect, regardless of whether we are born queer or made queer, and
irrespective of whether our homosexuality is something beyond our control or
something freely chosen.
The corollary of the ‘born gay’ idea is the suggestion that no one can be
‘made gay’. This defensive argument was used by some gay leaders during the
campaigns in England against
Section 28, which banned local authorities from ‘promoting’ homosexuality, and
again during the lobbying of the UK parliament for the equalisation
of the age of consent.
Supporters of Section 28 and opponents of an equal age of consent justified
their stance with the claim that people need to be protected against ‘pressure’
and ‘seduction’ into the homosexual lifestyle. Some gay spokespeople responded
by arguing that it’s impossible to ‘make’ someone gay, and that a same-sex
experience at an early age cannot ‘persuade’ a heterosexual person to become
homosexual.
At one level, they are right. Sexual orientation appears to become fixed in
the first few years of life. For most of us, it is impossible to subsequently
change our sexual orientation.
However, what definitely can change as people grow older is their ability to
accept and express formerly repressed queer desires. A person who is ostensibly
heterosexual might, in their mid-30s, become aware of a previously unrecognised
same-sex attraction that had been dormant and unconscious since childhood.
Society’s positive affirmation of homosexuality might help such a person
discover and explore those latent, hidden, suppressed feelings.
The homophobes are thus, paradoxically, closer to the truth than many gay
activists. Removing the social opprobrium and penalties from queer
relationships, and celebrating gay love and lust, would allow more people to
come to terms with presently inhibited homoerotic desires. In this sense, it is
perfectly feasible to ‘promote’ lesbian and gay sexuality and ‘make’ someone
queer. Individuals who have a homosexual component in their character, but are
inhibited by repression or guilt, definitely can be encouraged to acknowledge
their same-sex attraction and act upon it.
Were future generations to grow up in a gay-positive, homo-friendly culture,
it’s likely that many more people would have same-sex relationships, if not for
all of their lives at least for significant periods. With this boom in queer
sex, the social basis of homophobia would be radically undermined.
In this state of greater sexual freedom, where homosexuality becomes
commonplace and ceases to be disparaged or victimised, gayness would no longer
have to be defended and affirmed. Gay identity (and its straight counterpart)
would thus, at last, become redundant. Hurrah!
Peter Tatchell is a human rights campaigner, and a member of the
queer rights group OutRage! and the left wing of the UK Green Party. Visit his
website
here.
. "The lower 10 percent who really have
difficulty, even in elementary school, what's the cause of it?
