References to Journal Articles about links between biology and homosexuality?

Chake99

Hallo. I recently entered into a small argument with some members of an islamic forum around homosexuality. I was questioning the reasoning behind persecuting the gays and as well as why God would create a section of the population to be discriminated against, with some evidence in the form of articles referencing studies to support the argument that people do not control their sexual orientation.

I was told that there are no proven links between genetics and homosexuality (which is funny cause I was talking about general biology) and that I should produce a

paper please from a scientific journal, with test conditions, results, stats etc, not an article.

The wikipedia articles on the topic seem like they reference some pretty good stuff (but its wikipedia...) so I was wondering if someone with access to a good dbase (lowly HS student here!) could provide references to a bunch of reputable studies that discuss the link between biology and sexual orientation (something on the prenatal hormonal hypothesis would be good) and/or the fact sexual orientation isn't controlled.

Its for a good cause! (If you know, you think arguing that homosexuality shouldn't be a sin is a good cause)

I think I only need the article references, if the complainer cannot access them I can explain that that's the reason for my original link to news articles.

Thanks in advance!

Feral

You'll find a shitload of good stuff on Simon LeVay's web page: http://members.aol.com/slevay/page22.html

He's the author of The Sexual Brain and a very famous 1991 autopsy study showing that gay men tend to have a smaller hypothalamus than straight men (disclosure: that study suffers from a confound that all of the gay subjects were HIV positive at the time of death).

I should point out a few problems with your line of argument. First, showing that sexual orientation is biological is not the same as showing that it is genetic. Differences in hormone expression or brain structure can have environmental causes. Prenatal hormones are a good example of this - if sexual orientation is caused by prenatal hormone exposure, what would it mean if said hormone exposure were affected by, say, nutrition, or acquired pituitary abnormality, or infection, or prior use of birth control pills? Secondly, somebody who is dead-set against the notion of homosexuality being genetic is going to find holes in any study you link. Like the LeVay study above... all of the gay subjects were HIV+ at the time of death, so maybe it was HIV that caused the smaller hypothalamus. (Highly unlikely, but we have to recognize the confound anyway if we want to be intellectually honest.)

I personally think that sexual preference does have a large biological component but is also highly culturally influenced. I think that everybody fall on a spectrum of whether they prefer their own gender or the opposite gender, and that culture pushes people to make a choice and label themselves heterosexual or gay. In other words, I think everybody is a little bit bisexual, some people are more bisexual than others, but it's not culturally acceptable to say "I prefer women but I occasionally like men too" or vice versa - especially for men - so we push people to put themselves in a box labeled "gay" or "straight." But that's just my opinion.

Third, and most importantly, whether or not homosexuality is biological is ultimately largely irrelevant to the question of whether it should be tolerated. Human behavior is not defined by our biology - a strong case could be made that some people are biologically predisposed to violence, for instance, or infidelity. That's not an excuse to tolerate violent behavior or infidelity. We have the power to resist our basic urges.

Homosexuality should be tolerated because homosexuality doesn't hurt anybody, and gay people are more happy if they're allowed to be gay. There's no consequential reason to discourage homosexuality, and it's ultimately more beneficial to gay people (and to society at large) if we let that 2-10% of human beings to love the people they want to love.

Specularity

Well, my biopsychology textbook supports that hypothesis, though it was put together by my professor, so I'm not sure you could access it. Does your school give you EBSCO access? I can't remember how it works, really, because I never actually used it while I was in high school, but I believe your school might grant students access to articles.

vonPoonBurGer

The Wikipedia page on biology and sexual orientation has a very detailed references section. Generally speaking, there is some evidence to suggest that your genes or prenatal development can predispose you towards homosexuality, but the exact mechanisms aren't fully understood and it's not a simple on-off switch. If you're looking to argue that homosexuality is genetic, I think you'd be hard pressed to defend your stance in the face of the fact that the latest twins study on this issue hasn't found any meaningful connection between genes and homosexuality. That study (Bearman & Bruckner, 2002; details in the references section on the wiki page) was specifically designed to address the methodological flaws of earlier twins studies looking at homosexuality (self-selection biases, etc.).

I like Feral's argument, by the way, but I know it probably won't fly if you're arguing with fundamentalists (regardless of whether they're Christian, Muslim, or anything else). But if that's the case, you should really be asking yourself why you're wasting your time arguing with fundamentalists. :P