Hacker News Reader

Comment by Kye | Hacker News Reader

A lot of the search for a gay gene seems trapped in an outdated understanding of sexuality as a binary proposition: "you're either A or B." How do you even begin to contemplate a study on sexuality once you understand it as highly varied and fluid? Same with gender.

They're bimodal distributions at best. You can't just crop off the confounding valleys and call what you do with them good science.

View on HN

Intelligence or height is a spectrum too, yet we can probably explore existence of such genes. You just need to think in probabilities.

Agreed - “no gay gene” is akin to saying “no intelligence gene” or “no autism gene”.

My understanding is that most psychological traits are now thought of as polygenic, so a statement like “there is no gay gene” is really misleading, because genetics simply doesn’t work that way.

Not sure why you're being downvoted. You're right that human sexuality is nowhere near as clear cut as blonde/brown hair, or spotted fur on animals.

Still, that doesn't mean genetics do not play a role in determining human sexuality, binary or otherwise.

Likely because it's just an incorrect statement, and vaguely accusatory. If you have a dataset of people that asks them if they identify as straight or gay, with no alternative, you're going to miss a lot of nuance, but you'll still likely have a useful dataset for extracting genetic effects. Most people would not describe their sexual orientation as fluid at all. You absolutely can crop off valleys and call it good science.

Yes, this study indicates that human sexuality is a trait more complex than many other aspects of humans, i.e. height, eye color, hair color, skin color, etc.

I mean, yes, of course. But the fact that it's not fluid in so many individuals is part of what fascinates me! The supposed binary split is not real of course, but you note yourself a rather strong bimodal distribution. And that distribution is itself, fascinating and hard to explain.

I am gay, and I have been since I hit puberty. It's completely stable, a fixed personality trait my whole life. It's so... exact. That one little thing, completely inverted from a good majority of men. It's like someone flipped one little switch, that affected only that, at least as far as I can tell.

Bisexuality or pansexuality or whatever you want to call it, on the other hand, seems to fit many of the proposed origins, far better than exclusive homosexuality would. E.g., fuzzy pattern matching gone awry for finding a suitable mate, triggering a bunch of false matches. But it's not like that. It's very precise. That has always struck me as ever so strange.

Indeed. Many people on HN talking on this thread are forgetting bisexuality, demisexuality, etc. Even comments as simple as "you see a beautiful [x of opposite sex] and feel no attraction" miss a lot of vitals.

“Same with gender”, but not (in my opinion) sex.

Sex is bimodal, and genetic - though there are are rare chromosomal disorders, and disorders of sexual development, these are not normal variants and shouldn’t be considered a distribution.

There’s a suggestion that gender is innate and therefore (I assume) genetic, but do we really want to recreate the once anachronistic belief that most men and women are genetically predisposed to behave in masculine and feminine ways?

(Not intended to be flame bait, but I thought someone ought to express the now rarely heard gender critical position)

This would be evidence of your argument then.

To be fair the LGBT movement purposefully pushed that misconception because it was more convenient for civil rights purposes.

When you're trying to convince the majority to quit discriminating against you, then you push whatever evidence you've got. Convincing them that it's genetic, and therefore not a choice, is a prime goal.

It was easier to fit in as a bisexual person in the past, than a homosexual person, so bisexual people didn't need as much representation in the past.

Ironically, now we're at a point where that's flipped, and you need to be either gay or straight and can't be somewhere in the middle; but, earlier on, bisexual people could escape persecution and therefore weren't the primary focus.

It's a lot more effective to have the discussion "Dad, I like guys!" and get the father to accept that in the 1950s than it was to say "Hey dad, I like guys and gals". The father could just as easily go "You know, I think there's some good looking men out there, too" and completely miss the point.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com