Monday, November 25, 2024

Gay Sons

If you search the news for “transgender” all that comes up is politics so I have to go and dig through topics that I have had on the back burners… are we more likely to have older brothers and sisters?
Gay people often have older brothers. Why? And does it matter?
NPR Heard on All Things Considered
By Selena Simmons-Duffin
April 15, 2024


This is something I learned years ago through gay bar chatter: Gay people are often the youngest kids in their families. I liked the idea right away — as a gay youngest sibling, it made me feel like there was a statistical order to things and I fit neatly into that order.

When I started to report on the science behind it, I learned it's true: There is a well-documented correlation between having older siblings (older brothers, specifically) and a person's chance of being gay. But parts of the story also struck me as strange and dark. I thought of We the Animals, Justin Torres' haunting semi-autobiographical novel about three brothers — the youngest of whom is queer — growing up in New York state. So I called Torres to get his take on the idea.
Well I am a younger sibling, so this for me this holds true.
Rooted in a dark past

The first research on this topic did indeed begin in the 1940s and '50s, during that era of investigations into what causes homosexuality, to be able to cure it. At the time, the queer people whom scientists were studying were living in a world where this facet of their identity was dangerous. Plus, the studies themselves didn't find much, says Jan Kabátek, a senior research fellow at the University of Melbourne.
Of course… it is rooted in the fact that they were looking for ways to wipe us out!

No matter in what culture, in what country the findings were the same.
At baseline, the chance that someone will be gay is pretty small. "Somewhere around 2 to 3% — we can call it 2% just for the sake of simplicity," Semenyna says. "The fraternal birth order effect shows that you're going to run into about a 33% increase in the probability of, like, male same-sex attraction for every older brother that you have."

The effect is cumulative: The more older brothers someone has, the bigger it is. If you have one older brother, your probability of being gay nudges up to about 2.6%. "And then that probability would increase another 33% if there was a second older brother, to about 3.5%," Semenyna says.
But still the Republican conservatives still think it is a choice! Why? Because it would go against all their religious persecution, if it is a choice then they can scream… “You’re going to hell!”
Queer and Lefty | Opinion
Outsfl
By Jesse Monteagudo
22 April 2024


According to a 2003 study by Canadian scientists, lesbians and gay men are more likely than others to be left-handed.

Putting together the results of previous studies that involved more than 23,000 men and women, the scientists concluded that the odds of being left-handed are 39% higher in homosexuals than in heterosexuals. Broken down by gender, they found that gay men are 34% more likely to be left-handed and lesbians are 91% more likely to be left-handed. “This is one more piece of evidence that sexual orientation is at least partly determined in the womb,” said Ray Blanchard, head of the Clinical Sexology Program at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health and one of the authors of the study published in the July 2003 issue of Psychology Bulletin. Blanchard and his associates followed that with a 2006 study that suggested that left-handed men without older brothers (like myself) are more likely to be gay than non-right-handed men who have older brothers: “the odds of homosexuality [are] higher for men who have a non-right hand preference.”
But they still think it is a choice! That is why they push "conversion therapy" because we can be “cured!”

In the animal kingdom...
by Aaron N.K. Haiman
June 18, 2019
 
Homosexuality has been observed in just about every species it has been looked for. Transgender animals may not be widely known, but that may just be a matter of less interest in looking for them and/or writing about them.

There are certainly some animal examples that represent various forms of transgender animals in nature. One is the California Sheephead (Semicossyphus pulcher) which is a fish that is born female, and then can become male later in life. Another example is found in the Green Frog (Rana clamitans) that reverses sex in response to various external factors, and this has been observed in other amphibians as well. But both of these examples are in lineages of animals that are pretty distantly related to us humans.
 
Well, research published a couple of years ago in the African Journal of Ecology is an example much closer to us. In a paper by Gilfillan et al. from the University of Sussex, five lionesses in Botswana have been observed to grow manes, regularly roar and scent mark, mount other females, and display other very male-like behaviors such as killing the cubs of rival prides which females lions just about never do but is very common for male lions.
 

The Republicans stick their heads in the sand to the truth.

1 comment:

  1. As a MtF cross dresser and the second born son I have wondered if there was some force that produced my desire to emulate a woman. I have never had an urge to be engage in same sex relationships. When I was a little boy my mother freely expressed that I was "suppose to be a boy" until I rebelled and cried she "did not love me because I wasn't a girl." Being a girl would have rounded out her idea of the "perfect" family: husband and wife, older son and younger daughter." The night I cried about it I had put on one of my mother's nightgown which brought her to stop expressing I was suppose to be a girl. It wasn't until puberty an raging hormones that I started having the desire to wear my mother's clothes as I did not have a sister or female cousins. I never developed the muscle mass other boys acquired. I wonder if my genetic composition was involved in my need to express a feminine side.

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