The main purpose of this is to allow me to copy and paste it into the forums without much hassle, but I figured I might aswell make a blog out of it.
I'm going to say this once, but I'm going to say it in really big letters to make up for it.
THE FACT THAT SEXUALITY IS NOT A CHOICE IS BY NO MEANS SPECULATION
Many people assume that human sexuality is a choice. It is not. I cannot stress how important it is for people to understand that. People discover their sexual orientations; they do not choose them. Sexual preference seems to develop very early, and a child's first indication of the direction of their sexual preference usually does not change as he/she matures. I'm going to outline some of the factors here, and support what I say by links to research papers by well respected psychologists, geneticists, endocrinologists and biologists published in well respected peer reviewed journals. I stress that the papers I post here only represent a fraction of the total amount of evidence confirming what I am saying, but I do have a time limit and searching for journals takes quite a long time even when you have the name of the article.
Clearly this does not account for everything as the research says. So the next thing we have to move on to is Early Hormones (which are also not a choice). A consistent pattern of results has been observed in the research on sexuality and exposure to perinatal hormones (Ellis & Ames, 1987) , which has (for obvious reasons) focused on non-human animals. In rats, hamsters, ferrets, pigs, zebra finches, and doggie woggies, perinatal castration of males and testosterone treatment of females have been shown to induce same-sex preferences. (Adkins-Regan, 1988;Baum et al., 1990; Hrabovzky & Hudson, 2002) It would of course be a mistake to ignore the profound cognitive and emotional components in human sexuality which have no counterpart in laboratory animals. However it would also be a mistake to assume that an incredibly consistent pattern that runs through so many mammalian species has no relevance to humans. (Swaab, 2004) As for human research, there have been quasi-experimental studies conducted. (Ehrhardt, 1985) We also have to look at the fraternal birth order effect, the finding that the probability of a man's being homosexual increases as a function of the number of older brothers that he has (Blanchard, 2004;Blanchard & Lippa, 2007) . A recent study of blended families (families in which biologically related siblings were raised with adopted or step-siblings) found that the effect is related to the number of boys previously born to the mother, not the number of boys one is reared with (Bogaert, 2007). The effect is quite large: the probability of a male's being homosexual increases by 1/3 for every older brother that he has (Puts, Jordan, & Breedlove, 2006), and an estimated 15% of homosexual men can attribute their homosexuality to this effect (Cantor et al., 2002) . It is hypothesised that some mothers become progressively more immune to some masculinising hormone in male foetuses, and the mother's immune system might deactivate the masculinising hormone in younger brothers. This is known as the maternal immune hypothesis.
There was a study that I read about in New Scientist a while back, that showed homosexual men had brain structures more similar to heterosexual women, and vice versa.
There is also evidence that it can be from extrenal stimuli as well. Not necesarily a choice but just outside influences, the same way some personalities are developed. I was watching something about how fetishes are developed and they hypothesized that some cases of homosexuality develop the same, and the hypothesis is that when a person is going through puberty they often get randomly aroused. When this happens their brain will sometimes subconciously absorb the immediate surroundings as a turn on. Obviously this doesn't happen all the time or we'd get off to pencils and the like but it is interesting.
The twin bit is interesting. My sister and I are identical twins from the same egg. Im 100% straight. My sister, however, is bi; almost totally all about females.
well pointed, homosexuality can't be genetic, because gays don't usually have kids ) anyway, the thing is you can't really divide people into Straight and Gay. there are different levels of attraction to each gender for every one of us. Some people are bisexual with an inclination towards being straight, and some prefer their own gender, some can't decide. some people only have gay fantasies but never act them out.
hippie_guy wrote on Dec 27th, 2009 at 10:02pm : well pointed, homosexuality can't be genetic, because gays don't usually have kids ) anyway, the thing is you can't really divide people into Straight and Gay. there are different levels of attraction to each gender for every one of us. Some people are bisexual with an inclination towards being straight, and some prefer their own gender, some can't decide. some people only have gay fantasies but never act them out.
Gay people frequently have kids.
Of course that's irrelevant, even if gay people never had kids it could easily be genetic because of the existence of recessive alleles
michal23 wrote on Nov 20th, 2009 at 7:59pm : There was a study that I read about in New Scientist a while back, that showed homosexual men had brain structures more similar to heterosexual women, and vice versa.
Ya, there was a well publicised study that showed that, however its findings have not been able to be replicated since then.
GisleAune wrote on Dec 28th, 2009 at 7:34pm : Yeah, so Its true that sexuality is natural.
Most in my family are strict gay-haters. exp my litlle brother... and he is a extreme atheist too...wierd.
Well, since he's younger than you he has a greater chance to turn out homosexual according to the fraternal birth order effect. Google reaction formation, and everything seems to fall into place
Craigo wrote on Jan 16th, 2010 at 8:10pm : I keep clicking onto the link to this blog hoping to find someone silly enough to disagree.
*remains in hope*
If you're wanting Christians to come in here and call science teh devilz then you can stop being stupid. Everyone knows being gay isn't a choice, well, the educated do, but it's simple, you can't help what you want.
sfaune92 wrote on Mar 16th, 2010 at 10:55am : I'm one of the 48 % of mono-something twins that are not. But what the hell? So many?
They don't mean that when you're a twin 52% of the time you'll be gay. They mean that 52% of the time if one twin is gay, they both are.
Sexual preference seems to develop very early, and a child's first indication of the direction of their sexual preference usually does not change as he/she matures.
Just so you know, though the majority of what you said is true, this is not. Most children begin sexual experimentation at a young age (around 8-11) and they typically experiment with same sex partners because that is their peer group. It means nothing except that they're maturing normally.
hawttieblonde69 wrote on Mar 23rd, 2010 at 7:59pm : Just so you know, though the majority of what you said is true, this is not. Most children begin sexual experimentation at a young age (around 8-11) and they typically experiment with same sex partners because that is their peer group. It means nothing except that they're maturing normally.
THANK YOU
First reasonable thing I've seen on this forum in a while (somebody copy/pasted in another thread). A person's sexuality is not a choice in any way shape or form. There's no way to tell for sure how much nature or nurture it is, but it's certainly a bit of both.
And it's not nearly as black and white as some people like to portray it. There's straight, there's gay, and there's a massive spectrum in between
That's your blog for dummies, by the way. It's a wee bit condescending (yeah, the dissenter's named Christian. But whatever) but I notice that when you or anyone else uses this blog they say "Herp derp i aint readin no blogs maaayn". The bright colours should keep those people occupied.
This stuff applies to bisexuals and all other manner of queers, I take it?
This is really interesting. I'm linking this blog if that's ok with you to one of my friends who is gay - his dad was giving him a hard time about coming out and stuff and I think he should read this.
