IF THERE is one thing that has always seemed obvious about homosexuality, it's that it just doesn't make sense. Evolution favors traits that aid reproduction, and being gay clearly doesn't do that. The existence of homosexuality amounts to a profound evolutionary mystery, since failing to pass on your genes means that your genetic fitness is a resounding zero. "Homosexuality is effectively like sterilization," says psychobiologist Qazi Rahman of Queen Mary College in London. "You'd think evolution would get rid of it." Yet as far as historians can tell, homosexuality has always been with us. So the question remains: If it's such a disadvantage in the evolutionary rat race, why was it not selected into oblivion millennia ago?
Immediately, this article sets up evolution as the guide to whether or not something “makes sense.” Of course, evolution here is code for reproduction, as the second sentence makes clear. If homosexuality doesn’t aid reproduction, and thus doesn’t make sense, doesn’t that mean that any behavior that doesn’t aid reproduction doesn’t make sense, such as heterosexual sex with a condom (i.e. safe sex)? Kunzig would probably make the distinction between behavior and a biological identity. But his own question would be answered by an understanding of homosexuality not based on biology but on social construction (in other words, Kunzig needs to read The History of Sexuality by Michel Foucault).
Kunzig does mention Freud to argue that non-biological understandings of homosexuality are wrong:
Twentieth-century psychiatry had an answer for this Darwinian paradox: Homosexuality was not a biological trait at all but a psychological defect. It was a mistake, one that was always being created anew, in each generation, by bad parenting. Freud considered homosexuality a form of arrested development stamped on a child by a distant father or an overprotective mother. Homosexuality was even listed by the American Psychiatric Association as a mental disorder, and the idea that gays could and should be "cured" was widely accepted. But modern scientific research has not been kind to that idea. It turns out that parents of gay men are no better or worse than those of heterosexuals. And homosexual behavior is common in the animal kingdom, as well-among sheep, for instance. It arises naturally and does not seem to be a matter of aloof rams or overbearing ewes.
Of course, there was more to psychiatric explanations of homosexuality than bad parenting, and more to constructionist views of homosexuality than psychiatry, so dismissing bad parenting by invoking sheep is not enough to prove that homosexuality is biological. I find it very interesting that Freud’s idea of homosexuality as gender inversion is not mentioned, since some of the “scientific” language used in the article is remarkably similar.
No one has yet identified a particular gay gene, but Brian Mustanski, a psychologist at the University of Illinois at Chicago, is examining a gene that helps time the release of testosterone from the testes of a male fetus. Testosterone masculinizes the fetal genitalia-and presumably also the brain. Without it, the fetus stays female. It may be that the brains of gay men don't feel the full effects of testosterone at the right time during fetal development, and so are insufficiently masculinized.
Gender inversion is the idea that sex and gender naturally lead to heterosexual desire, so homosexual desire must be an inversion of biological sex and gender. How have we moved past Freudian ideas of inversion if we use science to say that gay men’s brains are “insufficiently masculinized?”
But if that gene does prove to be a gay gene, it's unlikely to be the only one. ... Gay genes could be genes for hormones, enzymes that modify hormones, or receptors on the surface of brain cells that bind to those hormones. A mutation in any one of those genes might make a person gay. … More likely it will take mutations in more than one gene. And that, as Rahman and Wilson and other researchers have suggested, is one solution to the Darwinian paradox: Gay genes might survive because so long as a man doesn't have enough of them to make him gay, they increase the reproductive success of the woman he mates with. Biologists call it "sexually antagonistic selection," meaning a trait survives in one sex only because it is useful to the other. Nipples-useless to men, vital to women-are one example, and homosexuality maybe another. By interfering with the masculinization of the brain, gay genes might promote feminine behavior traits, making men who carry them kinder, gentler, more nurturing-"less aggressive and psychopathic than the typical male," as Rahman and Wilson put it. Such men may be more likely to help raise children rather than kill them-or each other-and as a result, women maybe more likely to choose them as mates.
Gay men = feminine, more like women than men. These genes are later referred to in the article as “feminizing genes.”
Perhaps, he suggests, the mothers of some homosexuals have a "man-loving" gene. In women, it would be adaptive, causing them to have more sex and more children. But in men, the "manloving" gene would be expressed differently, causing homosexuality. To the gay sons, that would be an evolutionary disadvantage-but one outweighed by the advantage to the mothers, who would have more than enough other children to compensate. And so gayness in men would persist in these families-as a side effect of a trait that is beneficial to the women.
Oh, now it makes sense. Homosexuality is a side effect of a natural process that aids heterosexual reproduction. Here, as elsewhere in the article, heterosexuality is central, and needs no explanation. Homosexuality is what needs explanation. Only through a benefit to heterosexual reproduction can something “make sense.”
The biggest gap in the science of homosexuality concerns lesbians: Much less research has been done on them than on men. That's because women's sexuality seems to be more complicated and fluid-women are much more likely to report fantasizing about both sexes, or to change how they report their sexual orientation over time-which makes it harder to study. "Maybe we're measuring sexual orientation totally wrong in women," says Mustanski. Rahman and Wilson suggest that lesbianism might result from "masculinizing" genes that, when not present to excess, make a woman a more aggressively protective and thus successful mother-just as feminizing genes might make a man a more caring father.
This is the only reference to lesbianism in the entire article. As usual, lesbians are invisible. The difference between men’s sexuality and women’s sexuality is attributed to some natural difference between the two, not because of a difference in how men and women can express non-normative sexuality in our culture. If lesbians are considered at all, it is assumed that results of studies done on gay men can just be reversed.
Homosexuality seems to arise as a result of various perturbations in the flow from genes to hormones to brains to behavior-as the common end point of multiple biological paths, all of which seem to survive as side effects of various traits that help heterosexuals pass along their genes.
The two key terms here are “perturbations” and “side effects.” Homosexuality is a “perturbation,” a mistake. The article is structured to make homosexuality a problem that must be explained away, and it eventually it is explained because of how it “helps” heterosexual reproduction. I suspect that evolution is not a useful field of study for queers because of the centrality of (heterosexual) reproduction, but I would be interested in seeing a queer make use of evolutionary theory.
1 comment:
(I'm obviously not reading your posts in order but) this article is terrible. I don't know any queer people who are interested in "helping" hetero people for any reason at all, let alone on some misconstrued hetero-normative evolutionary basis. That's it. We should go on strike until this is all cleared up.
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