A new annoyance

[lydy]

There's an argument that idiots use when arguing about whether or not homosexuality is a bad thing, unnatural, etc., that totally drives me spare. It's the argument that homosexuals do not have children. This argument is usually in conjunction with the argument that homosexuality is not genetic, but rather a choice, since it could not possibly be passed on in the genes.

To which I want to say, "Hello! Sitting right here! Eldest of four, and my father was a homosexual. What the fuck are you talking about?"

The idea that homosexuals don't have children is weirdly, massively wrong. Quite aside from the various technological possibilities now available, I suspect that homosexuals have been busy having kids since as long as there were, you know, people. There is the incredible social pressure to marry and have kids. Many people have married and procreated with people they didn't particularly care for. Some of them were homosexual. And the drive to have children isn't tied to sexual orientation. Lots of people have had sex with partners they didn't particularly care for in order to procreate. This is one more way to try to ignore the real, lived complexity of people's lives. And it attempts to erase me. Which really, really pisses me off.

Comments

[supergee.livejournal.com]

Blogging this; thanx

[netmouse.livejournal.com]

Nodnod. And aside from the various technological possibilities available now there has also been the method of find someone you do like who knows about you and likes you anyway and have kids together.

I also find it kind of weird that modern society seems to assume that in all of history non-hetero orientation was something everyone absolutely had to hide. Despite plenty of evidence of societies where that wasn't necessarily true.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I nod back at you. Ancient Greece comes to mind as the really easy one.

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

This gets over into the widely varying social constructions of "homosexuality". What constitutes "homosexual behavior" varies enormously from place to place.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

(Also you can have recessive genes that your gay siblings help you nurture because aunties and uncles are incredibly useful for infant care. Because human infants are a PITA and extra adults are always useful. But it doesn't matter because, as you say, homosexual people can in fact have kids.)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Yup. That seems like an interesting argument for why gayness might be conserved evolutionarily. But the thing about people is that they're complicated, and live complicated lives, and very little about them is as complicated as their sex lives. It seems to me that the whole gay-straight-bi thing is simple in ways that are not always helpful. Sexual orientation is a thing, but so is sexual behavior. And the one does not absolutely predict the other because lives are complicated, sex is complicated, people are complicated, and society is complicated.

[fjm.livejournal.com]

I was particularly amused when a link was spotted between women who have large families and homosexuality; apparently they are more likely to have a gay brother.

Cousin Marsha: six kids, a gay brother and one gay son. Check.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Or, women who have a gay (and childless) brother are more likely to choose to have large families?

[fjm.livejournal.com]

The connection was very much the other way around (ie it worked even where the brother came out after starting a family)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

That's actually really interesting. One wonders what the mechanisms are.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

It is. And narratives about politics? Narratives about politics are not complicated. Because if what you want is for A to turn to B down at the bar and tell your narrative and for B to repeat it to C at the senior center and so on, you can't really risk them getting the details wrong. So you have to come up with a narrative you're sure that A, B, C, and any idiot friend of theirs you can imagine will remember.

Narratives like, "In my day we didn't have Those Gays, and there's no reason to start now!", those are easy to remember.

See also: "In my day we didn't have suicides. What do you mean about Grandpa S? No, that was just a farm accident, who told you that? No, Cousin D had a hunting accident! There were lots of accidents back then. Dangerous times. Anyway, what I was saying was, we don't need to fund this mental health care stuff, because they just make it up, and it never used to be a problem."

And so on. Simplifying means people remember the narrative.

Also means the narrative is farther and farther from true.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Well, but everybody knows that gayness was invented in the '70s. I remember it well...

I had forgotten that nobody ever committed suicide (except for Sylvia Plath) but that, too, was a part of my childhood. Mine was particularly weird on the mental health front because the fundies believed that mental illness was really just sin, and that any attempt to get treated for mental illness was an attempt to avoid dealing with your sinful nature.

[mrissa.livejournal.com]

Gayness, suicide, drugs--everyone knows drugs were invented in 1968, which leaves a lot of unanswered questions about the 1920s, but still, everyone knows it, so there we are.

It was a busy time then.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

So very busy! I'm surprised that anyone at all had children, frankly.

(oy.)

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

dayum! If the fool had patented it, he'd be as rich as facebook!

Shocked!

[lsanderson.livejournal.com]

I'm just shocked! Are you trying to tell me that all families are not from 1950's TV sitcoms? ;-)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

So sorry to break it to you. Sad that you had to find that out on the internet.

[novapsyche.livejournal.com]

Heh. That's obviously without watching Roseanne in the meantime. Pretty sure that was the first featured dysfunctional family on TV.

Edit: That was commentary on 1950s TV, nothing more.

[fgherman.livejournal.com]

Argh!

I have to look no further than my sisters-in-law; one is gay with 3 children (2 that she gave birth to), and the other who is bi who's wife is gay, with one child.

We won't mention the 3rd one who is still so far in the closet, she's in Narnia.

As for there being a genetic component, the moment I realized my blue-eyed daughter was left-handed like her aunt's, I knew she was probably going to be gay also. And she is.

[mplsfish.livejournal.com]

My father is also gay. I didn't find out until I was in my 30's. The two wives threw me off.

I'd love to compare impressions with you on that topic some time.

[bibliofile.livejournal.com]

...or another person I know, with a couple of siblings and divorced parents, whose dad's own "roommate" kinda rolls his eyes at the dad's elision of their partnership in casual conversation. (I met them once.)

And don't get me started about married men-and-women who have NO KIDS, it's UNNATURAL I TELL YA. [high five]

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I was 18. The revelation was, um, memorable. Catch me in person some time, we'll compare notes.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

I don't suppose that bi people who choose a gay lifestyle, will ever be denied gay privileges because they don't have the right gene/s?

[kalmn.livejournal.com]

Bisexual invisibility and biphobia in the queer community are real things; but they are also not at all what Lydy is talking about. (If I know you and you'll be at Minicon, find me and ask me.)

[lydy.livejournal.com]

This seems very weird and sideways to what I was talking about.

I didn't assert, nor do I necessarily believe, that homosexuality is a genetic trait. It might have a genetic component. However, sexual behavior is, as I've tried to say, a complicated human behavior, and I doubt that it is entirely one thing or the other.

I can't help but think that you're trying to derail things, unless you are trying to be funny. If you're trying to be funny, I totally missed the joke.

[houseboatonstyx.livejournal.com]

Just looking too far ahead, perhaps.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, that's a bizarre argument, especially considering the pressure from the same people for homosexuals to deny their nature and live heterosexually married and procreative lives.

That's beside the possibility of the accuracy of the scientific theory that sexual orientation is not genetic in the strict sense, but caused by fetal hormonal fluxes: just as immutable in the finished human, but of a slightly different cause.

[mle292.livejournal.com]

As an argument, it is irrelevant. People are not required to produced offspring, or even to want to produce offspring.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I find that a huge amount of evo-psych is not actually a scientific discussion so much as an attempt to prove that one's prejudices are natural and scientifically based. There are small amounts of people doing actual, useful work in the evo-psych area, but most of them are wankers.

[guppiecat]

I actually disagree with this. Most of the evolutionary psych articles I've read are well thought out pieces, though difficult to prove.

Much of the ev psych stuff in the mass media is bunk, but pundits suck in all fields.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I now must confess that what I'm reacting to is actually popular press coverage of evo-psych, and not evo-psych itself. I apologize, I should not have conflated the two.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

I like the idea that "homosexual" should be used to describe behavior rather than individuals. Clearly, engaging in homosexual behavior does not make people unable to produce children. Engaging EXCLUSIVELY in homosexual behavior does (absent recent technological innovations like artificial insemination). So this becomes a semantic problem. Some people are using one definition and some are using the other.

A few years ago the dictator of one of the African countries declared that homosexuality did not exist in Africa until it was imported by devil white people. On the face of it, this sounded ridiculous. But it turned out that if you used the local definitions in whichever country this was, it was true. They had no CONCEPT of homosexuality until it was imported. The key thing in that culture was whether a man could engender children. If he could, nobody really cared if he engaged in sexual activity with other men on the side (and many did). If he couldn't make babies, then he was SOL - not really considered a man - no matter what the reason was for this failure. And I don't think anybody cared all that much what the women did as long as they weren't having other men's babies.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

I agree with everything you say, and I was going to say it all again, and then realized that you had already said it really well, so now I'm just gonna sit over here and nod a bunch.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Good points. Thanks for the reminder.

[laurel]

There are many reasons this argument always bugs me, but the one that hits me closest to home is the way it also seems to denigrate heterosexuals who don't procreate. Because if "real marriages" are for procreation and the raising of families, then what about all the married folks who choose not to do so? Or who can't?

Strange how this argument from conservatives as one reason homosexual marriage is bad simultaneously devalues a bunch of heterosexual marriages.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Yes. Every argument that homosexual shouldn't marry because they can't procreate applies to heterosexual couples who choose not to, who want to but are infertile, who are past the age of possibility, and so on.

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Which is one of the reasons they keep on losing their court challenges. They are completely unable to draw a useful distinction between two people in their eighties who want to marry and are heterosexual, and two people who are of the same gender who want to marry.

I find it interesting that the argument has multiple ways to offend people, and that people are taking offense based on their personal experience. Amusing, even. (This is not a criticism. We live where we live, you know?)

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty offense-proof on all grounds. I just think it's stupid.

On second thought, I'm intellectually offended!

What this kind of viewpoint never does is take the next step, or as Sturgeon said, "Ask the next question."

[lydy.livejournal.com]

The "argument" is actually designed to close off questions. It's supposed to be a show-stopper, a way of keeping people from moving forward in their thinking.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

I had two close male friends in high school who both married [women] and had children and later came out as gay. One of them raised his three kids as a single father after he and his wife divorced, as she had no interest in parenting and he, as he told me, "took to it like a duck to water."

[graydon saunders (from livejournal.com)]

It's profoundly unlikely that gayness is genetic in the Fra Mendel's peas sense of simple dominant and recessive genes.

That's in part because those give clear statistical patterns which are not evident and in part because human sexuality, like language, is not directly expressed; you get a mechanism for building one in both cases, you don't get the thing directly.

Then you get into, well, yeah, genes are how stuff gets recorded, but genes aren't what gets selected, phenotypes get selected, there's a lot of developmental plasticity, the idea that we're genetically determined like something built to a blueprint is just wrong. (Widespread, even in biology as a field of study, but erroneous.)

So not only is the argument that being gay means you don't have kids observationally wrong (and never mind that in selection terms two neeves is one kid), the underlying "if it was real it would select out!" arguement, aside from being obviously false observationally, won't work because you're talking about a very complex developmental interaction with development that goes back a couple generations at least, like everything else. (In the same sorts of ways that your grandparents having been starving as children ups your odds of type II diabetes.)

So, really, it's genetic? No. Choice? No. and good luck getting that through anybody's head, because "genetic" is popularly equivalent to "God willed it".

[lydy.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it seems real unlikely that "gayness" is a simple, genetic encoding. And your last sentence is exactly right. The argument that being gay is not a choice leads people inevitably to argue that it is some other thing, and the thing that seems likely to be persuasive is genes. In some ways, it's a useful evolution in the discussion, but it introduces error. I feel the same about arguing that mental health is the same as physical health, and that mental disorders are really diseases. This is a huge step forward from claiming that these things are moral failings, but at the same time, the disease model is badly flawed for understanding what's really going on. Worse, mental health practitioners often get confused about this, and treat the metaphor as if it were the map.

I'm a middle class white girl, and it's not often that I face erasure. I do understand that people in other circumstances run up against it more often than I do. But it's a little surprising to me how personally I take it. Which is a useful object lesson for understanding other people's anger.

[browngirl.livejournal.com]

*makes a note of this cogent refutation*