Soy, the Silent Queerer

Or maybe: Soylent Green is People, Gay People!!!

I wonder how much this has spread in the media, but I found it funny. I’m a habitual reader of World Net Daily (yes, it’s a bad habit, but again “know your enemy” :-)). There I found the following article: “Soy is making kids ‘gay’”

“There's a slow poison out there that's severely damaging our children and threatening to tear apart our culture. The ironic part is, it's a "health food," one of our most popular.”

The culprit? Soy formula and tofu, of course. But how does this “““health food””” threaten out culture?

“Homosexuals often argue that their homosexuality is inborn because "I can't remember a time when I wasn't homosexual." No, homosexuality is always deviant. But now many of them can truthfully say that they can't remember a time when excess estrogen wasn't influencing them.”

Ah, it makes us “““““gay”””””.

Where to start :-)? Does he know what “deviant” means?

But it gets better, another article, (here). This one addresses:

“’If soy is so harmful as to potentially alter sexual physiology and behavior, why haven't the Chinese and Japanese all died off or become homosexual centuries ago?’”

It’s full of nonfunctioning links, and generally boring. Notice though how he often writes about “homosexuals” as though no women are included in the category (he could just as easily, with as much evidence claim it’s decimating the lesbian population), and uses “female” and “feminine” as near insults :-).

Next, in what I’m sure will be a series is here. This gay causing substance causes other horrors it seems:

“Here this cause of gays is linked to “childhood leukemia [3-6], the failure to prevent heart disease [7-8], infertility [9-10], or thyroid damage, with its symptoms of weight gain, fatigue and depression [11-13].”

It’s useful to link your opponent to ugliness, and childhood leukemia is pretty ugly.

Note “the failure to prevent” there.

Oh, and this gem:

“My larger concern is that the increasing number of less robust 15-year-olds who are already "struggling with their sexual identity" will be shoved over that thin line into homosexuality. No, they won’t wake up some morning with floppy wrists and a nasal lisp, but they may begin to gravitate toward social circles where they feel more comfortable — and less expected to be rowdy or brag about a string of sexual conquests. And once a teen is ensconced in a homosexual milieu, breaking free from it could mean abandoning his best friends. ”

The thin line, huh? :-) Brag about sexual exploits? Homosexual milieu? Best friends? This is all news to me.

Oh, I see, this guy understands little about being gay, and knows a lot about being “gay”.

Finally take a look at his references. I see none that support the original title: “Soy is making kids ‘gay’”.

But okay, I’m sure the estrogen like compounds can have an effect, and maybe I’ve been too dismissive, but surely this man’s style and hostility deserves a similar response.

Nevertheless, one more in my list of supposed “nurture” causes (again, with the inevitable nature basis) to homosexuality that I don’t have in my past. I had the natural stuff as a babe and never had tofu or soy milk until well into my adulthood and soy milk makes my throat itchy. I'm allergic to a cause of gaiety :-).

Playing the Odds

To add to that last post, I thought it would be interesting to do a back-o-the-envelope calculation as to how many people have these supposed gay causing events in their history. I mean, it seems like a lot of kids felt alienated at one time or another and many kids are from split families, right? So down the same list:

1. Sexual molestation: It’s not easy to find good numbers on child sexual abuse, as secrecy can be a huge problem, but, when asked as adults, it seems “20% of adult females and 5 to 10% of adult males recall a childhood sexual assault or sexual abuse incident” (1). I’ve seen numbers reported as high as 38%, but couldn’t find a traceable reference. Let’s just say that’s 10% of the population and ignore the likely substantial underreporting problem.

2. Early consensual homosexual experience. Of course consensual would indicate the orientation was already there, but… The best I could find here was a study of which I’m already dubious for reasons I hope to get to eventually, mainly for the conclusions drawn regarding adult sexual orientation using people as young as 12. But they did ask about the same-sex behavior in this group of 12 to 18 year old kids. About 1.5% report same sex intimacy (which is to be taken with a grain of salt as, at such an age for example, I wouldn’t have reported such but one of my straight friends would have :-)) (2). But there’d likely be significant underreporting by the closeted. Let’s just say 1.5%.

3.The demonization or glorification of sex. Boy, I’ve no idea how one would get numbers on that. Let’s just say 0% of the non-gay population experiences either and generously leave it out.

4. Weak or effeminate males (and I suppose strong and tomboyish girls). Again, how to find the percentage of the general public who fall into this category? Let’s just say 5% of the population are noticeably outside their assigned gender roles when they’re young. Seems more than fair, doesn’t it?

5.Having an older sibling of the same sex on which to fixate. It seems the average male has 0.6 older brothers. How to translate that into the odds that any male would have at least one older brother? Thinking back 7 years to Statistics... Oh my, where’s my text? Let’s just say the average person has a 50% of having an older sibling, and then a 50% chance they’re of the same sex. That’d be 25% and because I fudged it let’s error against my argument and say 15%.

6. Domineering mother and distant father, or vice versa. As I can’t find numbers on it let’s just give it to the other side and say everyone but gays have perfect parents in the minds of conversion therapists. Sad as this is supposedly a big one for them, but they win by forfeit here :-). 0% then.

7. By the age of 15, about 40% of the US population born into a union has experienced that union’s split (3). About 17% of us are born outside of a union, married or cohabitation, and 50% in total will have experienced living outside a home with a parental union by the age of 15. So, to be generous again, let’s just say 40% odds of not having an intact home by age 15.

8. Fitting in with peers of own sex. Again, how to find numbers on this one? I’d say only about 10% of kids go through their teens never feeling substantially left out, the popular elite :-). But lets, for caution’s sake, reverse that and say only 10% feel left out of their peer group, alienated or “different” (Isn’t that how most describe being a teenager? :-) I am a generous man in my statistics.).

In the end we have 10%, 1.5%, 0%, 5%, 15%, 0%, 40%, and 10%. Let’s see… subtract from one… multiply… carry the teen angst… Okay: 61%.

Even with all those concessions I gave, which are substantial :-), the average person, who over 90% of the time ends up straight, would have over a 61% chance of having at least one of these characteristics in their “nurture.” (Note that this has some weak assumptions about the independence of some of these but I did error on the side of caution.)

So, simply, if you’re gay and you’re dad left home at a young age or you didn’t get along well with your peers or you were molested as a child, I’d hesitate before assuming such event as a cause in who you are today. Even assuming some of these events do influence a person’s orientation, gays do exist without such in their past, and so certainly gay men who are gay for reasons having nothing to do with these events may still have them in their past, as most straight people do.

I’d fear if such a man were to go into conversion therapy, the therapist may reflexively seek out, say, the fact that a he was from divorced parents. I’d fear that a therapist in such a business would reflexively (not necessarily out of homophobia mind you) build upon such facts a false, though well-honed psychological narrative that could possibly be convincing to the gay man without any part in reality.

On the other side, for this same reason, you can’t yet claim or know that, for example, having a gay older brother means you're gay by nature. Many people have gay older brothers; just as many spent their youth without their dad in the home. Even for the fraternal birth order effect, it’s calculated by the theory’s major proponents that only 24% of gays with one older brother can attribute their homosexuality to such an effect (4). Thank goodness there’s no cure being sold for the nature side of the fraternal birth order effect, yet :-).

Lastly, instead of making another post of this, I’d like to point out, as many have, how the causality in such nurture arguments may easily be muddled. Choosing homosexual experiences in a young age is said to lead to homosexuality, but to me such behavior, of course, suggests homosexuality in the first place. We’ve already gone over the older brother effect (here and here) and nurture in that one has been significantly undermined. As far as being effeminate goes for men, well, of course. Homosexuality, for men is having a typically female trait in a male mind. It’d be no surprise that whatever mechanism feminizes men or masculinizes women in one way, may also do it in a range of other ways, on other aspects of their personalities. Then, of course, those made with such a noticeable difference from the rest of their peers, don’t fit in as well, and may feel like an outsider, particularly when the strong emotions of attraction tell them they should be much closer to even same-sex peers who do not treat them as different.

Anyway, what a complicated mess, huh? :-)

1. Finkelhor, D. 1994. Current Information on the Scope and Nature of Child Sexual Abuse. The Future of Children, 4(2):31-53. Center for the Future of Children, The David and Lucile Packard Foundation.
2. Bearman, P. and H. Bruckner (2002). "Opposite-Sex Twins and Adolescent Same-Sex Attraction." American Journal of Sociology 107: 1179-1205.
3. Andersson, G. (2002). "Children's Experience of Family Disruption and Family Formation: Evidence From 16 FFS Countries." Demographic Research 7: 344-364.
4. Blanchard, R. (2004). "Quantitative and theoretical analyses of the relation between older brothers and homosexuality in men." Journal of Theoretical Biology 230: 173-187.

Insufficient, Unnecessary

Can nurture play a role in being gay? I'd bet it can.

When I came out, though, and looked at those telling me I could change my orientation, I was immediately brought to the conclusion that they were all a bunch of charlatans. None of what they were telling me about my gayness or causes thereof was true, and yet they’d be insistent. I’m sure they lose many gays that way, telling them they must be wrong, as though they don’t know their own life :-).

Down the list:

1. I was never molested. I had in fact never heard of such happening until I heard some really obnoxious classmate associate it with gays in a high school class.

2. I had no homosexual experience (other than maybe dreams I can’t remember) until after I realized I was attracted only to men in that way and found imagining the same attraction to women felt aberrant and wrong. In fact I’d only kissed a couple girls, and only ever went to second base after I’d realized my true attraction, in hopes it would change me. Sorry again girls :-).

So, it was not sexual experience, even imagined, creating my attraction (unless it made me less gay than I’d otherwise be :-)). Funny, I was so unclear on what sex was that I couldn’t really imagine it, let alone gay sex. I don’t know how to put this politely, but I never even figured out how to M*beep*bate until well into my 16th year. As I’ve said, I was naive and sheltered and, when you think about it, doing that for fun really isn’t obvious from a dynamics standpoint. Ah, the surprise of discovery :).

3. Despite my freakish innocence, sex was never demonized (nor was it glorified) in my youth. It was simply nothing that had come to mind until after I was marinated in pubescent hormones.

4. I was never weak or effeminate; my early play activities were far from Barbies and dress up. I spent a good deal of my playtime, for example, on the back of a 3-wheeler with a homemade pvc bottle-rocket gun in hand. I’ve the scars to prove such stupidity ;-). Never have I seen the allure of women’s clothing; seems like a lot more work than what men are required to do :-).

5. Though I had older brothers, I was raised without them in the home, a perfect candidate to test the fraternal birth order effect. I was never left out by them or fixated on them as some suggest is the cause of the big brother effect (see more on it here and here). They were more like uncles as the youngest of them was 18 and out of the home by the day I was born.

6. I didn’t have a domineering mother or distant father, or vice versa (odd how I’ve seen opposites claimed to do the same thing). I had and have wonderful parents, and in very traditional male/female roles. Stop insulting them. :-)

7. In the same vein, my home was kept intact and it was far from unstable.

8. I’ve had more than my full measure of male friends and great male friendships throughout my life. I “fit in” far more than the average teen; my house was the house. R was the same. He was, in fact and as I like to brag, prom king :-).

In short, if there was something in my upbringing that made me gay, I'm at a loss as to what it might be, and it seems most conversion therapists are as well. So, yes, I reflexively look at how I experience it, at the natural causes (Which I’ve touched on and will do so some more), just as most straight folks would.

Still, today, I can’t say for sure not having my childhood might help make others gay. Maybe there are gays out there who are so because, along with a predisposition, something happened to them in their youth. [removed the too flippant] I suppose that could be the case, for them.

But one should always keep in mind that all of what we label as the nurture causes of any human characteristic are ultimately based on nature. As I was getting at here, there must be a switch in us to be flipped in the first place. It must be flappable :-), and the wiring that causes a result in the personality must be there and connected. Sometimes even a lock to keep the new state in place may be there and set after the rush of the hormones of puberty, hormones that give most all of us sexual orientation anyway, in a very natural way.

In short, I’d not say with certainty that nurture cause aren’t there for some gays, but I don’t think such causes are near necessary or sufficient for homosexuality in general, nor should one expect them to lead to a more malleable orientation. I bet you could have a childhood the opposite of mine, and still end up immovably straight :-).

N N u a r t t u u r r e e

Before I go too far into the science regarding gays, I best give my general view.

The nature/nurture debate is relatively unimportant to me, personally. Why should it matter? You don’t hear this sort of debate with, say, handedness ;-), even though it’s far more out of the genetic category. What if someone did choose to only be attracted to their same sex, a choice as simple as one to, say, date a brunet or practice a particular religion? If a person wants to date a man I don’t see why they want that should matter, be they a man or a woman.

But it does matter to many minds. Gay-rights opponents hope to control other’s agency, coerce them into not having relations with men, either remain celibate or marry women, and so on. They best gain that control over their neighbors, politically and socially, by posing gay attraction as chosen or alterable. Gay’s just have to want to be good, bad enough. Then, because nurture strikes most as more alterable than nature, nurture is their favored cause of gayness.

Of course, because they don’t want to be coerced or controlled, most gays tend to be biased to favor nature.

But, nature or nurture, it’s fuzzy territory.

What is the practical difference between an event that causes a person’s sexuality occurring one week before birth, and one occurring one week after? What’s the important difference between an event that occurred in an egg ten years ago, a sperm yesterday, or in a newborn boy 10 months from now? The effect is undeniably there; gay people are there. To me, the causes of being attracted to men are only important from the standpoint of discovery, be they in the genes, prenatal hormone exposure, the actions of siblings, birth order, family size, or any other event in a person's life.

An infinite web of events come together to make a person who they are, from their eye color to their religion, but there is no real need to segregate these events into post and pre-birth or pre-conception slots. A hormone or gene combination, for example, can be just as valid an effect on a person as being orphaned or losing their arm in an accident. In fact all such events, which we categorize as either nurture or nature, may be enduring or alterable (even, someday, the genetics).

So “nature”, “nurture”, “narture”, whatever; they are all merely causes. As to the more potent of them, I do favor what most would call nature for homosexuality and I feel those causes may be sufficient (I’ll go into why in my other posts on the topic in great detail, as I have in a small part here). But I don’t discount nurture, nor do I disbelieve it may be a cause for some gay men. If there’s one thing I’m sure of, there are many causes for human sexual orientation.

One last thing I want to point out is that, regardless, all sexual attraction has a very natural cause. All our wants, if traced back far enough, have to come from outside us: nature, god, the teachings of others, space aliens ;-) and so on. The debate here is over the desire’s focus, which, again, must originate from outside us, in nurture or nature. Hunger, for example is undeniably natural. It is the basis of the human act of eating and without that innate drive of achieving the pleasure in eating or avoiding the pain of hunger (and the drive to live) we’d not eat. What you want to eat, though, is certainly a mix of nature and nurture, but it all remains contingent upon the nature of hunger with which we all come pre-programmed.

Sexuality is one area where children in general are much less ridiculous than adults, by far :-); most never even think about it, let alone make awful decisions because of it. But, come puberty and the new, very natural expression of our once dormant genes, that all changes. No one would attribute puberty to early childhood upbringing. All sexual attraction, even mine, is and was brought on by the very natural effects of some well known chemicals. But when my switch was flipped, I got more of a surprise than most; I got what the female half of the population gets, and, unfortunately, that’s important in these days (though, gratefully, not as important as it was centuries past).

Big Brother Makes You Gay

I’m going to start cracking open my folders of pdfs on gay science (poor Nietzsche…). I think I’ll start with one of the largest non-genetic factors contributing to human gayness, what’s been called “The most consistent biodemographic correlate of sexual orientation” (10): big brothers.

I’d like to not simply give dry findings, but give a bit of the history behind them, to both emphasize the case and simply because the progress of science is interesting stuff (to me ;-)). Also I’ll not go tracking down the full text of the older studies (pre-1980), only those I can find online.

As far as I can tell, the first significant published hint of homosexuality having anything to do siblings came in a study by the German Jensch, in the midst of WW2 (1). Earlier findings had been published but this seems to be the first major work, using a rather large group, 2,072 gays (one has to wonder about the likely awful way in which he found so many gays in 1941 Germany). Jensch found a ratio in their family of 114 male sibling live births to 100 female. In the general population, the ratio is about 106 per 100.

A number of smaller studies followed, some showing less and some more of an apparent correlation. Then in a paper entitled Homosexualitat als genetisches Problem (Homosexuality as a genetic problem), which I’m sure is a read every bit as delightful as the title, especially in his native tongue :-). Lang presented another large set of data, and found, in a group of 1,777 gays, a ratio of 126 brothers to 100 sisters (2).

So by the 1960s it’s pretty clear and repeatedly shown that gays have more brothers than the general public. But these studies were missing a great deal of the true picture, as we’ll see.

About this time researchers began looking at a possible effect in birth order. The Slater index is the number of older sibling one has divided by their total number of siblings. Thus, if birth order had no effect, the average gay's Slater index should be 0.50.

In 1962, Slater found the average of his humbly named index was 0.58 for a group of 337 gay men (3). Over the years this study was repeated, with Tsoi et al. in 1977 again finding an index of 0.58 (4), and Hare and Moran in 1979 finding an index of 0.55 (5).

Incidentally, I’ve a couple older brothers and my Slater index is 1, and from a typically large LDS family :-).

So we now have two pieces of the puzzle: gay men 1. have more brothers and 2. are born later in the line of their siblings. But again, something is missing. It will take putting these two pieces together to make the next big step in this process. Still, at this point one should pause, as there are some important implications already.

A couple of popular theories as to why a boy is gay are losing ground here (though you’ll still see them hanging on today). For one, it was assumed that if boys grew up around women, without maleness around, they’d grow up queer, taking on the effeminate attributes they predominately observed. The evidence shows though, a house full of sisters or being an only child is more likely to produce heterosexual men, and it’s brothers that contribute to a boy being gay. Another theory, and one with some data to back it up, was that being gay correlates with an absent father. It does correlate, but likely because being born last makes you more likely than your siblings to grow up with an absent father, say, due to his death or abandonment.

Moving on, it seems Blanchard et al. was one of the first to put the two pieces together and find the connection between older brothers and homosexuality. He published two studies in quick succession (5,6), 1995 and 1996. Each study had two matched groups of homosexuals with heterosexual, 458 subjects. Among his results (my emphasis):

“Logistic regression analysis showed that homosexuality was positively correlated with the proband's number of older brothers but not with older sisters, younger brothers, younger sisters, or parental age at the time of the proband's birth. Each additional older brother increased the odds of homosexuality by 33%.

So the reality was painted into an even smaller corner. It seems the past studies all included sisters in their Slater indexes, and weren’t accounting for birth order in their research on brothers, thus diluting the actual effect in both cases. It is also important to note that this effect is only found for gay men, and a similar effect for women has proven either slight or nonexistent (another important hint that will lead to new hypotheses; as we all know, only women carry homosexual children ;-)).

So what is it about older brothers? Is this a congenital, more nature thing, or a learned, more nurture thing? Many on the anti-gay side promote nurture first, you know, not something God intended, something “reparable”, and something kind of sordid would help too. They already went after our fathers (and still do); now it’s our brother’s turn. Here’s one: maybe those older brothers are molesting their younger siblings and that mental trauma makes the kid addicted to sex with men.

So this, of course, was examined (as, sure, I suppose it should be ruled out, and I was a bit too quick-tempered above :-)).

Skipping a number of studies that repeated the above research reported on by Blanchard, Bogaert compiled a similar study, in 2003 (8). But this time the participants were questioned on their early “same-sex play” and other sexual experience. His paper reports on two separate and large national probability samples (one of 18,876 People and the other of 3,432). He reports:

“fraternal birth order predicted same-sex attraction in men, with each additional older brother increasing the odds of homosexual attraction by an average of 38%. Results also indicated that the fraternal birth order/same-sex attraction relationship in men was independent of sexual behavior, including early same-sex behavior. No sibling characteristics predicted sexual orientation in women. Results suggest experience-based theories (e.g., early same-sex play) of the fraternal birth order effect in men are unlikely to be correct.”

So, they found no correlation between adult sexual orientation and early sex play, related to an older brother or not, but again they found that older brother effect. Still, the question was only winnowed down; it seems it has nothing to do with sexual activity. Instead, could this effect somehow involve something less scandalous, something like early identification or de-identification with older brothers?

At this point a review was published. In 2004, Blanchard conducted a rather large meta-analysis representing 10,143 men in 14 different studies. He also takes into account a fetal birth characteristic, weight (9). In part, he reports:

“ Research on birth order, birth weight, and sexual orientation suggests that the developmental pathway to homosexuality initiated by older brothers operates during prenatal life. Calculations assuming a causal relation between older brothers and sexual orientation have estimated the proportion of homosexual men who owe their sexual orientation to fraternal birth order at 15% in one study and 29% in another.”

FYI: I’m holding back on some of the other material in this paper (and some other papers) as I’ll get to it in posting on the biological hows and whys of this big brother effect within a week. I mainly want to establish the phenomena here.

Anyway, so there’s another effect that seemingly comes with having an older brother, lower birth weight. The male baby weighs less than it would if it had older sisters. This is another hint. There seems to be something that goes on in utero with regards to having an older brother that affects us in an easily measurable way. Is it the same thing that will account for some of our homosexuality? Even if low birth weight comes with older brothers, the likelihood of, say, a post-birth identification or de-identification psychological mechanism behind homosexuality would only be weakened.

Gratefully, such questions were settled to a significant degree by Bogaert, and just this year (2006) (10).

“Four samples of homosexual and heterosexual men (total n 944), including one sample of men raised in nonbiological and blended families (e.g., raised with halfor step-siblings or as adoptees) were studied. Only biological older brothers, and not any other sibling characteristic, including nonbiological older brothers, predicted men’s sexual orientation, regardless of the amount of time reared with these siblings. These results strongly suggest a prenatal origin to the fraternal birthorder effect.”

Note first, this was published in PNAS. Fancy ;-).

So, men raised with older biological brothers were compared to gay men raised as adoptees, or with half- or step brothers. The only sort of brother that seemed to significantly correlate with being gay was the older biological brother, even if the gay man wasn’t raise in his same family. That’s a pretty good bit of work to show that, no, it’s not being raised with older brothers in the home that helps makes one gay. It’s only having the same mother as another male human. It’s sharing a womb, not a room (har har :-)).

Next: the research on why and how this effect exists.

Lastly, occupational habit makes me disclaim: questions are never settled in any science, even with regards to laws established for decades and observed daily. We simply have a really good idea and a heck of a lot of data on this one, more than enough to reasonably count on it. I also want to be clear: this is only one effect among many; it’s just one of the more significant effects. So, if you don’t have older brothers, don’t get all offended; I’m not calling you a hetero ;-).

References:
1. Jensch, K. (1941). "Weiterer Beitrag zur Genealogie der Homosexualitat
[A further contribution to the genealogical study of homosexuality]." Archivfur Psychiatrie und Nervenkrankheiten 112: 679-696.
2. Lang, T. (1960). "Homosexualitat als genetisches Problem [Homosexuality as a genetic problem]." Acta Geneticae Medicae et Gemellologiae 9: 370-381.
3. Slater, E. (1962). "Birth order and maternal age of homosexuals." Lancet: 69-71.
4. Tsoi, W., L. Kok, et al. (1977). "Male transsexualism in Singapore: A description of 56 cases." British Journal of Psychiatry 131: 405-409.
5. Hare, E. and P. Moran (1979). "Parental age and birth order in homosexual patients: A replication of Slater's study." British Journal of Psychiatry 134: 178-182.
6. Blanchard, R., K. Zucher, et al. (1995). "Birth order and sibling sex ratio in homosexual male adolescents and probably prehomosexual feminine boys." Developmental Psychology 31(1): 22-33.
7. Blanchard, R. and A. F. Bogaert (1996). "Homosexuality in men and number of older brothers." American Journal of Psychiatry 153: 27-31.
8. Bogaert, A. F (2003). "Number of older brothers and sexual orientation: New tests and the attraction/behavior distinction in two national probability samples." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 84(3): 644-652.
9. Blanchard, R. (2004). "Quantitative and theoretical analyses of the relation between older brothers and homosexuality in men." Journal of Theoretical Biology 230: 173-187.
10. Bogaert, A. F. (2006). "Biological versus nonbiological older brothers and men’s sexual orientation." Proceedings of the National Acadamy of Science 103(28): 10771-10774.