Picking up a good few downvotes for this, usually that tells me something is wrong in what I said, looking at my comment, naive bigot may be a little strong, even if before it I wrote 'to me makes you seem'. I thought the comment was out of context, could cause offence to some, and not backed up by any data.
No offence intended, to nonethewiser.
I don't think the original question conveyed anything negative about homosexuality or transgenderism. Only that they were interested if chemicals could have altered human sexuality.
It was asked without the care one would normally use when approaching such a topic and perhaps that reflects badly but I find the question interesting.
What if we are so controlled by the environment around us? Are our likes and dislikes something we have control over or is it just a result of the world around?
HN has a bit of a blind spot around homophobia. If you dig through comment histories, you’ll find that a lot of the people who are “just asking questions” have a definite axe to grind when it comes to gay and trans people. As a gay person I probably have more of an instinct for these sorts of red flags. But for better or worse, anything short of explicit homophobia falls within the HN guidelines, and any criticism of superficially polite posters for repeating the talking points of anti-gay and trans activists does not. Hence this rather disgraceful subthread, where far right panic about gay and trans liberation (clothed in pseudoscientific garb) is being seriously debated without any regard for the gay and trans users of this site. Fortunately there is more to HN than this kind of thread, but it is a repeated occurrence that I am becoming throughly sick of. It’s awfully difficult to complain about this without being flagged into oblivion; but the moderation mechanisms that are supposed to stop discussion veering off in this sort of direction simply don’t work when it comes to homophobia and transphobia.
Since you seem to care strongly about this would you be able to share why discussing potential causes of homosexuality/trans should be off limits?
Unrelated, what do you think are the causes? Gene mutations in child? Womb environment disruption? Pollutants? Pathogens? God just deciding "I'm going to make this one trans"? Social pressures (wat)?
I wish I was the one who cared strongly about this. The people who care most strongly are the ones who like to bring up this topic, and endlessly debate it, even in comments on articles (such as this one) that have nothing really to do with it. You yourself seem determined to provoke a discussion on the subject, here and elsewhere, even though it’s not particularly relevant to my comment or to the article.
I agree that no topic is off limits in principle (and in fact I did not say that this topic should be off limits, contrary to what you suggest). However, some topics attract an overwhelming majority of bad faith participants in the discourse. I have already seen quite enough dispassionate debates on HN on the subject of what exactly is wrong with gay and trans people. I have no wish to fan the flames of another one.
It would be more interesting to debate the causes of heterosexuality. (It’s interesting, for example, that people tend to suggest ‘gene mutations’ as a possible cause for homosexuality but not for heterosexuality, even though any genes underlying human sexuality have presumably mutated many times over our evolutionary history.)
> It would be more interesting to debate the causes of heterosexuality.
Well the cause of heterosexuality seems obvious enough. Making males want to fertilize females will cause babies which spreads the "make male want to fertilize female" mechanism creating genes. So a mutation that makes genes that cause such a feeling will spread.
It's a fairly direct linkage so one could see how genes causing it could reach fixation (and indeed, variations of this desire reached fixation hundreds of millions of years ago).
Conversely, genes that result in, say, mice being sexually attracted to cows wouldn't reach fixation, leading to them being very rare in the mouse population. So most animals will be most attracted to things that have the highest chance they can make healthy offspring with.
That's an evolution 101 explanation of why heterosexuals are not extinct, which is fine as far as it goes. It's not a causal explanation of what makes people straight.
In fact, no-one knows what makes people straight, gay, or otherwise. So there is not much to talk about, from a purely scientific point of view.
But anyway, that was an aside. You haven't responded to the main point of either of my comments. If you really are only interested in having a debate about the causes of homosexuality, I'm not the person you're looking for (and the comments on this article aren't the place for it).
I think debate on the causes of being gay or being trans sets off alarm bells for a lot of people because it feels like medicalization of it. Sure, it might be interesting to know why in a pure intellectual curiosity way, but more often than not veers into people talking about wanting to "treat" it: many gay and trans people are proud in their identity and just want to be accepted for it.
To a libertarian like me people should be allowed to do whatever they want with their bodies, including changing it as they wish or declining other people's attempts to change it (via a "cure"), but I understand this isn't universal.
To me, a discussion on whether homosexuality has a pathogenic trigger is intellectual curiosity, to someone else it's like a Jew overhearing a couple of bald rough looking fellows talking about how there are too many Jewish movie producers and someone should do something to make there be less of them...
