Do you have a cite for the idea that plastics are making people gay?
It seems if anything low to me, if what’s happening is partly that people who think that under some circumstances they might be up for same-sex relations are now identifying as bi even if their interest in straight relationships is stronger.
No and note that I said “may” in my post. Also note that I said “especially transgenders”. It may or may not make people gay/lesbian.
Bisphenol A (BPA) is a chemical found in plastics that’s an estrogen-mimic and can affect the reproductive system in numerous ways. Pretty much everyone has some in their body. Below is a paper summarizing the scientific literature of what we currently know. It’s an amazing list of effects it has.
I didn’t read the whole paper, but didn’t see anything there about sexuality. However, this paper strongly suggests that transgenderism can be caused by BPA:
https://www.endocrine-abstracts.org/ea/0037/ea0037ep208
I’m not going to quote all the technical details about why they think this. I’ll just note that it’s exposure during the second trimester of fetal development when a key section of the brain develops.
Cool, I’ll go ahead and just disregard that nonsense, then.
It’s suspected to cause fish to change sex
There were a lot of articles about this about a decade ago.
It’s also suspected to affect the development of sexual differentiation in mammals.
But there are records of trans people back as far as there are records of people. And i think the largest factor in more trans visibility today is that it’s less unthinkable, so more people are coming out as trans.
Offer people a multiple choice question with two answers and you’ll get one of those two answers from nearly everyone, plus a very few blanks.
Offer the same crowd a multiple choice question with 7 answers including two that amount to slightly distinguished flavors of “other” / none of the above and you’ll get all 7 answers from a bunch of people and the “other” / NOTA choices will be unnaturally popular as their existence invites hairsplitting between the other more concrete categories.
To be sure, as it applies to gender and gender preference, two choices is artificially restrictive. But 7, or 12, or 27 choices may be largely distinctions without differences. But they will be attractive choices nevertheless, and overrepresented in any survey results.
Doesn’t matter whether we’re surveying preferred flavors of ice cream or preferred choices for gender orientation. Human choice theory dictates this outcome. Bucketizing preferences is not a value-neutral exercise.
What the numbers now suggest is that 4 of those men would be inclined to give other men a try.
Assuming, of course, that there’s no societal pressure forcing them to do things in secret, or feel ashamed of their proclivities. It’s all good, like finding out your hetero wife had sex with another woman in college, it’s just a normal part of their sexual history.
Maybe they prefer 10x as many women as men, but that still puts them within the LGBT umbrella.
One thing that has shifted quite a bit is the reverence for the normative. We tend to focus on the obverse side of this phenomenon, the fact that there is less abhorrence for the queer, that being LGBTQIA+ is no longer considered depraved, pathetic, sick, etc, but let’s think about the flip side of that: if it isn’t so awful to be trans or gay or otherwise atypical, that means we aren’t all walking around thinking that being cis and het is oh so wonderful and perfect in comparison. That really opens the mental doors for looking at the normative and being critical of it.
Gender in particular is full of “shouldn’ts”, and conformity-pressures, and other ways of truncating who you might otherwise be or how you might otherwise express yourself. Now maybe you personally don’t see a lot of positive lure in the notion of being trans, yourself, but you could still see that there’s a lot of unfair and unpleasant stuff wrapped up in “being a man” or “being a woman” as conventionally defined. So once it is no longer a very limited set of options, like either you live as your society expected you to when your birth certificate was filed or else you start taking hormones and prepare for top and bottom surgery, and instead there’s a large array of other choices that your classmates and peers are examining, hey that starts to look at least potentially appealing, you know?
Heterosexuality is more than just what morphology turns you on, too. There is a “man role” and a “woman role” and a huge basketful of assumptions that are still persisting and affect how your behavior is viewed and how others will behave towards you as a sexual person based on your gender. Maybe the confines of what dating and coupling are like is kind of repellent to you even if you don’t fail to find the designated-as-opposite sex unappealing, physically speaking, and in a social environment where there isn’t revulsion and disgust towards people who step outside of hetero, maybe you contemplate how the dating could be different, or the flirting behaviors less confining. And with all those new gender identities, that kind of opens the door to sexual orientation not being confined to “either you’re hetero or you’re gay”.
is that some sort of hiving off, splitting of genes? 
Well, according to Gallup, the total percentage of people who are LGBT is closer to 4.5%. Not only that, Americans tend to vastly overestimate the percentage of the population that is LGBT.
Now granted the definition can be somewhat flexible. But it is also reasonable that some groups would actively seek to inflate those numbers to increase legitimacy and influence.
Taking a look into your link, their measurement was done in 2017, let’s call it 5 years ago.
They also had a measurement in 2012. Over that 5 year period 2012-2017 %LGBT went from 3.5% to 4.5%, an increase of 28%. GenX, BabyBoomers and older were flat. For Millennials, the percentage went from 5.8 to 8.2%, an increase of 40%. Add another 5 years of similar trends and millennials would be at 11.5% now, with GenZ likely higher than that.
Personal anecdote, I’m a leader with a Boy Scout troop, with 20 scouts. 10% of our scouts identify as non-binary/transgender. I guarantee they ain’t doing it because it’s fun, they’re concerned about what the other kids will think, how they will be accepted, so they keep it under their hats.
20% wouldn’t surprise me at all for this cohort, especially when you add in bisexuality and a continuum of interest besides strictly straight and strictly gay.
My research areas aren’t in biology or medicine, but I am pretty savvy on scientific publishing, and this “paper” is just an abstract for an “eposter” and the eposter is just a blow up of the abstract. No data, no references, no analysis. And while it is “peer reviewed”, I suspect it isn’t the type of rigorous peer review one would want for something this important (though it doesn’t look like the publication is a scam publication or anything like that).
Here’s a nice review article from 2005 that put it in words I could understand.
Are EDCs Blurring Issues of Gender? - PMC (nih.gov)
From the article (my bolding):
It’s premature to call it a theory; at this point, it barely qualifies as a hypothesis: some observers are putting forth the proposition that prenatal EDC exposures may affect gender identity—how a person identifies him- or herself, regardless of physical characteristics. This idea presupposes two basic concepts: first, that transgenderism (in which a person experiences “gender dysphoria,” a strong feeling of having been born the wrong sex) is physiological in origin, most likely due to events during prenatal neurological development; second, that intrauterine EDC exposures can and do disrupt prenatal neurological development.
What does “reacts to” mean exactly? I don’t know that nearly half have some sort of consensual homosexual encounter in their lives- that would be something that would be so common that it would be at best an open secret, and more likely just accepted.
I think it probably means that percentage of men get a hard on when looking at naked pictures of other men. Our they use those pictures or videos to take care of their own pleasure.
“Psychic reactions” is not the same thing as “overt experiences” in the questionnaire. The exact wording in the original questionnaire is not clear (or, more likely, I am not reading carefully enough) but it would seem to include cases where the subject saw some guy and experienced “erotic arousal”.
Ermm, I wouldn’t assume that. I’d assume anyone who glances at a same-sex individual and gets a “hey, ya know, that person is kinda CUTE” would totally qualify, whether they have any inclination to act on it or not.
Are psychic reactions where you get all Jeane Dixon about somebody’s crystal balls or something?
That is awesome, and a little unexpected…
As in, can identify that say… Matt Bomer is an extremely good looking man, or notice that he’s extremely good looking in some sort of sexual way?
The former is not necessarily an indication of anything, I would venture, but the latter might be what they were talking about.