(no subject)

[sophiaserpentia]

For many mothers who asked, "Where did i go wrong?" when her son came out as gay, the answer is in: you may have extreme X-chromosome skewing.

Next time, get your chromosomes straightened out before having a son. (Because, you know, being gay is a choice.)

Comments

Re: *rolls eyes*

[fallen-x-ashes.livejournal.com]

I think we should point out here however that the results very much quite likely do not correspond to 25% of all gay men at large. No, this study dealt with gay siblings. If it's anything like the twin study, I expect it to apply to something around .07% of the gay population. In otherwords, this is no real explanation at all. A good read on all of the major genes=gay studies in the past is in a chapter of "What It Means To Be 98% Chimpanzee." In it, you will find in wonderful detail how even all of the studies combined only amount to a very, very, VERY small sliver of the gay population, so much so that it may well really be statistically insignificant.

Personally, I think all of this studies are flawed from the beginning: garbage in, garbage out. The labels of "gay" and "straight" are in fact SOCIAL constructs, with wide, wide, degrees of activity going on between them. A certain percent of the population is even asexual. Studies like these are akin to someone looking for the "Black" or "Asian" gene, race too being a SOCIAL construct, not a biological one.

In order for me to trust the result of any study at all, there needs to be a method to deal with the natural gradient of human sexual activity. I'm thinking something that states if a person is on a particular point on the bell curve for sexuality, then there maybe a few probabilities as to weither a few genes should show up.

And that's totally not considering the "other" epigenetic stuff.

Re: *rolls eyes*

[legolastn.livejournal.com]

Yes, it seems likely the explanatory power is much less than 25%. And it is also not exactly clear what is being "explained" unless/until some sort of causal genetic pathway is established. Which seems unlikely anytime soon.

And, I agree, sexual orientation is a social construction. I actually see all of the above as a great tool for deconstructing this idea of a unified "thing" called sexual orientation (thus the idea of "homosexualities", for example, as one place to start talking about that). Likewise with race. We can't discover a "white gene" or "black gene" but we might find a gene that influences melanin production. Then we can show how little correspondence this gene has with classic ideas about "the races." We can already do this with phenotypic characteristics historically associated with races. We can throw gender in here as well. Even if posession of certain chromosomes, for one example, is correlated with identification as a certain gender...it doesn't explain all the variation out there. Most of my students, somewhat surprisingly, either don't come into class knowing this or only have the vaguest of notions about it.

I would also agree with and extend your idea about of a "gradient of human sexual activity." There are probably a multitude of gradients we could place people on with regards to sexuality (we could use the Klein Grid as one such jumping off point), and again social forces shape how we tend to think and perhaps even how we're able to think about those.

I guess I need to read the book you reference, or at least that chapter, to see what they're asserting.