Critical email about my views regarding genetics and sexual orientation


WT

Here is a typical email criticizing my views reagarding sexual orientation:

Dear Doctor:

Same-sex relationships are hard wired in certain individuals. It's simply their genetic make-up. You can fight against this, but you can't change this any more than blue-eyed people can will themselves to have brown eyes.

I am sorry for you that you have staked so much on disproving this. Please open your mind. Are you afraid to do so?

Check it out:

Findings by a team of University of California, Los Angeles researchers suggest homosexuality isn't a choice.

The UCLA scientists discovered 54 genes in mice they say indicate sexual identity is hard-wired into the brain before birth and the development of the sex organs.

Regards,

Jill

Here is my reply:


I frequently receive emails like yours. You sound like an undergraduate and your email reinforces my worries about the quality of undergraduate education.

Problems:

1. Same-sex relationships do not equal same sex identity

2. Mouse models of human diseases might give us some help but such models of human experiences are like comparing apples and oranges

3. Eye color has inheritance patterns that are well established and fixed; self-assessed sexual orientation does not (See the most recent Michael Bailey studies on identical twins - 11-14% pairwise concordance rate; go look up concordance rates on identical twins and eye color and height).

4. You do not supply a reference for your study. If this is the study I think it is (Vilain, et al) then this study is about gender identity and not sexual orientation. Besides read the study, it does not mention sexual orientation. The press release about the study does.

5. Arrogance. People who are in this field know how little we know. Dogmatism like yours is why we have so much strife and hostility in the culture over this issue.

Please educate yourself and do your part to rid the culture of black and white thinking.

Warren Throckmorton, PhD