|
Description
Genes versus choice. A quick and dirty search of newspaper stories covering scientific research on homosexuality shows that the popular press has settled on this analytic framework to explain homosexuality: either genes cause homosexuality, or homosexuals choose their lifestyle. (1)
The mischief that follows such a formulation is broad-based and more than a little pernicious. Religious fundamentalists and gay activists alike use the genes-choice opposition to argue their case either for or against full citizenship for homosexuals. Biological research now arbitrates civil legal proceedings, and the idea that moral status depends on the state of our genes overrides the historical and well-argued view that we are "endowed by [our] Creator with certain unalienable Rights...." Moreover, rather than framing research projects in terms of the whole of human desire, we neglect to examine one form, heterosexuality, in favor of uncovering the causes of the 'deviant' other, homosexuality.
Intellectually, this is just the tip of the iceberg. When we invoke formulae such as oppositional rather than developmental, innate versus learned, genetic versus chosen, early-onset versus adolescent experience, a gay gene versus a straight gene, hardwired versus flexible, nature versus nurture, normal versus deviant, the subtleties of human behavior disappear.
Linear though it is, even Kinsey's scale has six gradations of sexual expression; and Kinsey understood the importance of the life cycle as a proper framework for analyzing human desire. Academics--be they biologists, social scientists, (2) or cultural theorists--have become locked into an oppositional framework. As a result, they are asking the wrong questions and offering intellectually impoverished accounts of the emergence and development of human desire.
A steady patter of research papers linking genes to homosexuality rains down on us, hitting first the scientific journals; then soaking through to the newspapers, blogs, and television news; and finally growing like mold, often wildly reshaped from the initial tiny spore into the mycelia of popular discourse. As intellectual efforts, each of these articles has technical strengths and weaknesses--one can always criticize the sample size, or the method of recruiting study subjects, or the statistical test employed. But most of them share a similar--and problematic--analytical framework.
We can expose this general framework by considering one recent and widely reported article, "A Genomewide Scan of Male Sexual Orientation," authored by six scientists from five prestigious research institutions dotting the United States from California to Washington, D.C. (3) The article introduces the problem by citing scholarly research linking biological events or genetic structures to male-male sexual orientation. While the authors, Brian Mustanski and his colleagues, concede that the evidence is incomplete (they note the limited number of studies that attempt to locate specific genes related to homosexuality) and that nonbiological factors must also be involved (they mention, for example, two recent twin studies that "report moderate heritability estimates (4) with the remaining variability being explained by nonshared environmental influences" (5)), they ultimately argue that the linkages suggested by such studies are important. Since they believe that many genes are likely to be involved, they decided to scan the entire genome (X, Y, and all of the autosomes) in an attempt to fish out a set of genes related in some way to male sexual orientation.
The authors hoped to avoid false positives caused by "gay men who identify as heterosexual" (6) by only studying self-identified gay men. But the idea that there are gay men who identify as heterosexual suggests that there is some biological essence of gayness that can exist genetically and therefore be measured independently of identity and behavior. This begs the definitional question. The state of being gay (in adulthood) might, in fact, reasonably include identity, behavior, and/or desire.
Indeed, in their groundbreaking work, The Social Organization of Sexuality, E. O. Laumann and his colleagues studied the interrelation of these components of homosexuality in 143 men who reported any inkling of same-sex desire. Of the men surveyed, 44 percent expressed homosexual desire but not identity or behavior, while 24 percent reported having all three of these components. Another 6 percent expressed desire and behavior but not identity, 22 percent expressed behavior but not desire or identity, 2 percent had only the identity, and 1 percent had the identity and desire but not the behavior.
So Mustanski and colleagues selected a subset of men who, judging from the Laumann survey, would comprise only 27 percent of men expressing some component of homosexuality. Thus, even if the authors were to find genetic linkages, genetic studies of this sort give insufficient theoretical attention to the possible meanings of such findings.
The study also compares the DNA of gay men with those of their heterosexual brothers. Since all siblings share 50 percent of their DNA, the DNA regions (genes) that are present in higher frequency in the genomes of the gay brothers then become regions of interest, as potentially related to male homosexuality. But to find... |
More articles from Daedalus
What I learned about sex on the Internet., March 22, 2007
Looking for additional articles?
Click here
to search our database of over 3 million articles.
|
