Dr Paul McHugh – Sexuality and Gender

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Special Report: Sexuality and Gender

 

2014 that “It’s time for the LGBT community to stop fearing the word ‘choice,’ and to reclaim the dignity of sexual autonomy.”2 By contrast, proponents of the “born that way” hypothesis—expressed for instance in Lady Gaga’s 2011 song “Born This Way”—posit that there is a causal biological basis for sexual orientation and often try to bolster their claims with scientific findings. Citing three scientific studies3 and an article from Science magazine,4 Mark Joseph Stern, writing for Slate in 2014, claims that “homosexuality, at least in men, is clearly, undoubtedly, inarguably an inborn trait.”5 However, as neuroscientist Simon LeVay, whose work in 1991 showed brain differences in homosexual men com-pared to heterosexual men, explained some years after his study, “It’s important to stress what I didn’t find. I did not prove that homosexuality is genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay. I didn’t show that gay men are ‘born that way,’ the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain.”6

Many recent books contain popular treatments of science that make claims about the innateness of sexual orientation. These books often exaggerate—or at least oversimplify— complex scientific findings. For example, in a 2005 book, psychologist and science writer Leonard Sax responds to a worried  mother’s question as to whether her teenage son will outgrow his homosexual attractions: “Biologically, the difference between a gay man and a straight man is something like the difference between a
left-handed person and a right-handed person. Being left-handed isn’t just a phase. A left-handed person won’t someday magically turn into a right-handed person….. Some children are destined at birth to be left-handed, and some boys are destined at birth to grow up to be gay.”7

As we argue in this part of the report, however, there is little scientific evidence to support the claim that sexual attraction is simply fixed by innate and deterministic factors such as genes. Popular understandings of scientific findings often presume deterministic causality when the findings do not warrant that presumption.

Another important limitation for research and for interpretation of scientific studies on this topic is that some central concepts—including “sexual orientation” itself—are often ambiguous, making reliable mea-
surements difficult both within individual studies and when comparing results across studies. So before turning to the scientific evidence concerning the development of sexual orientation and sexual desire, we will examine at some length several of the most troublesome conceptual ambiguities in the study of human sexuality in order to arrive at a fuller picture of the relevant concepts.

14 ~ The New Atlantis

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