# There are no genetic markers associated with sexual orientation **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [July 15, 2017, 11:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356 "2017-07-15T23:00:31Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 17\ **Page:** 3
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2017, 12:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/41 "2017-07-17T00:57:06Z")
No worries. After your response I figured you just dropped a word or something. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2017, 4:59am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/42 "2017-07-17T04:59:19Z")
> [@Bryan\_Ekers](#): > > Have we? Not so much. In the '60s, not too long after the condition was first discovered, there were some studies that linked XYY syndrome to increased criminality, like the Jacobs study and the Telfer study, but those studies had some pretty serious flaws (they pretty much just looked at institutionalized people, and really, what they managed to prove was that people in prison had greater criminality than the general population). Later studies have pretty much not shown any link, and now, the only thing you can say with certainty about XYY males is that they tend to be taller than average. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2017, 1:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/43 "2017-07-17T13:55:47Z")
> [@Una\_Persson](#): > > I don’t know of recent well-run polling on this. My anecdote is that that I have never in all my life experience, having met in person at least 2,000 transgender persons and I don’t know how many online, found a transgender person who said “I always wanted/hoped I would be transgender.” > > The debate of “if there was a magic pill you could take and not have to be trans” comes up at everything from Sunday morning brunches to late-night club talk. I’d say about a third of us would take a pill to magically make us cisgender in our original gender presentation. Most would not, or else would want to be cisgender in our new gender presentation. It kinda trends with support levels. Those who are unemployed, newly divorced, ostracized by family, friends, church, the victims of abuse - most of them would take the pill. Those with less abuse in their lives are more likely not to. Those who found strong support in their lives (a small population) are militantly against the magic pill. Well a lot of people wouldn’t want to erase all the experiences that made them who they are. But maybe the choice would be different for your children. Would you take a pill that ensured your child was born cisgender? ---
**Author:** ![Corry\_El](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/ecae2f/32.png) [@Corry\_El](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Corry_El)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2017, 2:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/44 "2017-07-17T14:14:20Z")
> [@eschereal](#): > > Then, of course, we have the religion issue, which wants to paint any non het-norm behavior as wrong. Take away the “moral” pressure and no one will have much interest in the origins of homosexuality, because it would not even matter where or not it is a choice. That, I think, is a more desirable goal than trying to find an elusive biological origin. That strikes me as possibility taking the same oversimplified approach that says sexual orientation has a straight forward cause. It assumes ‘religion’ makes human society rather than any causality the other way around. The politics of genetic cause of homosexuality have shifted IMO. There’s a less fierce defense of ‘relatively simple genetic cause we just have to finish nailing it down’ from the PC (for lack of a better term) POV than there was only fairly recently. The reason I think is the general change in societal attitudes to be less hostile to homosexuality, as far as laws and open customs. Active debate about ‘lifestyle choice’ v ‘born that way’ has faded to the margins. But OTOH it’s feared a relatively pure genetic cause if identified would lead women to abort\* babies who would be gay, since there’s still a deeper bias against homosexuality. If that’s viewed as a simple product of ‘religion’\*\* which will be ‘solved’ by people turning from religion, probably oversimplified IMO. \*if one has a view that abortion is morally neutral or at least a moral question strictly for the women involved and no one else, why care her reasons? But again here, people’s attitudes are more complicated. \*\*by which it’s typically meant Christianity. But societies in other religious traditions have had a quite negative view of homosexuality, others not as much, even where it’s argued (nowadays especially) that the other religions themselves don’t or didn’t have a clear position. It’s not as simple as a few explicit passages in a religious text entirely causing a society’s view, IMO. ---
**Author:** ![watchwolf49](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/e9c0ed/32.png) [@watchwolf49](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/watchwolf49)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2017, 2:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/45 "2017-07-17T14:52:51Z")
> [@Fiveyearlurker](#): > > DNA sequence is not the only component of genetics. Epigenetics no doubt has a role; Lamarck wasn’t so wrong afterall. The idea that there would be some identifiable “gay gene” that would fit into a Punnet square was always naive … [snip] This was my first thought when I read the OP … and several posters have include other perfectly reasonable ideas … it might be more complicated than just a single gene somewhere or a single environmental condition … Just wanted to add that the biology of “falling in love” isn’t very clear right now … and if the two people just happen to be the same sex then perhaps we won’t find a inheritable link … they just simply fell in love … ---
**Author:** ![Buck\_Godot](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/buck_godot/32/6573_2.png) [@Buck\_Godot](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Buck_Godot)\ **Post date:** [July 17, 2017, 5:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/46 "2017-07-17T17:03:47Z")
As a researcher who does this sort of thing for a living, I’m not particularly surprised by this revelation, and would point out that the fact that they didn’t find any association doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. One can compare looking for the genetics for a particular pheontype to looking for a needle in a haystack, except that 1. The needle you are looking for is made of hay 2. The needle may be broken into several pieces which have to be put together in the right combination. 3. Some or all of the needle pieces you need may not actually be in the haystack you are looking in but instead in one on the next farm over. It is actually relatively rare to find a single gene that has 1 to 1 correspondence with anything. , and this is with diseases that are binary in their presentation. With something as complicated as sexuality it is probably influenced by a number of factors some of which are genetic and some of which could be environmental. When you are trying to find a single SNP difference, that means that you are looking at 602,000 things each of which could by chance appear to be related to sexuality, If you start looking at combinations of 2 SNP’s you end up with over 360 billion combinations, So you will get many many combinations that by chance match extremely well with sexuality, and there is not way to distinguish between these false positives and real results of the same significance. ---
**Author:** ![abashed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c6cbf5/32.png) [@abashed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/abashed)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2017, 9:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/47 "2017-07-18T09:42:36Z")
> [@Roderick\_Femm](#): > > I am not an expert by any means in this field, but I don’t think this is a useful way of looking at things. There are indeed two areas to look at, feelings and actions. You can refuse to act on same-sex attraction, either by faking it with the opposite sex or by being celibate. You can be bi-sexual and only perform sexually with one or the other sex. But you have whatever feelings you have, and those feelings define your sexual orientation (in my opinion) much more than your actions do. If there is a spectrum of however-finely-distinguished degrees of difference, you are somewhere on that spectrum at any point in time. Your position on the spectrum may change over time, although probably not much after adulthood. Yes, I see your point, but I think this a complex area because there might be some people who may not experience terribly strong feelings for the same sex yet, because of their kind of personality, be prepared to explore what feelings they do have and ‘appear’, at least, to be more overtly gay than another individual who has really strong same-sex attractions yet, because of things like personality, social pressures, etc., chooses to suppress them. But another point is how can we differentiate between a conscious decision to explore homosexuality for reasons of curiosity and experimentation and a very basic bio-chemical predisposition to become homosexual? ---
**Author:** ![Roderick\_Femm](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/roderick_femm/32/14875_2.png) [@Roderick\_Femm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Roderick_Femm)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2017, 10:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/48 "2017-07-18T10:00:13Z")
> [@abashed](#): > > Yes, I see your point, but I think this a complex area because there might be some people who may not experience terribly strong feelings for the same sex yet, because of their kind of personality, be prepared to explore what feelings they do have and ‘appear’, at least, to be more overtly gay than another individual who has really strong same-sex attractions yet, because of things like personality, social pressures, etc., chooses to suppress them. But another point is how can we differentiate between a conscious decision to explore homosexuality for reasons of curiosity and experimentation and a very basic bio-chemical predisposition to become homosexual? _We_ may not be able to differentiate from outside observation, but each individual knows the difference in his/her own feelings. “How gay are you?” is a question that anyone who is honest with him/herself can answer. “How did you get that way?” is probably not. Frankly, I doubt if anyone would honestly say “Well, I tried it and I liked it so I kept doing it” without also acknowledging significant previous attraction. ---
**Author:** ![abashed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c6cbf5/32.png) [@abashed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/abashed)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2017, 10:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/49 "2017-07-18T10:36:24Z")
> [@Buck\_Godot](#): > > As a researcher who does this sort of thing for a living, I’m not particularly surprised by this revelation, and would point out that the fact that they didn’t find any association doesn’t mean that there isn’t one. > > One can compare looking for the genetics for a particular pheontype to looking for a needle in a haystack, except that > > 1. The needle you are looking for is made of hay > 2. The needle may be broken into several pieces which have to be put together in the right combination. > 3. Some or all of the needle pieces you need may not actually be in the haystack you are looking in but instead in one on the next farm over. > > It is actually relatively rare to find a single gene that has 1 to 1 correspondence with anything. , and this is with diseases that are binary in their presentation. With something as complicated as sexuality it is probably influenced by a number of factors some of which are genetic and some of which could be environmental. > > When you are trying to find a single SNP difference, that means that you are looking at 602,000 things each of which could by chance appear to be related to sexuality, If you start looking at combinations of 2 SNP’s you end up with over 360 billion combinations, So you will get many many combinations that by chance match extremely well with sexuality, and there is not way to distinguish between these false positives and real results of the same significance. Very interesting. So, given all this indeterminacy, what would you say the role of a conscious decision to adopt a same-sex relationship could be? Or is this a meaningless question? ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2017, 5:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/50 "2017-07-18T17:22:19Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > Well a lot of people wouldn’t want to erase all the experiences that made them who they are. But maybe the choice would be different for your children. Would you take a pill that ensured your child was born cisgender? It depends upon the political climate and environment and with wanting your child to have a rich experience in life but balancing that with safety. Right now I don’t know. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2017, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/51 "2017-07-18T17:37:07Z")
Well there’s a lot of ways to have a rich life experience without spending your adolescence wondering if you are a boy/girl/in between possibly followed by years of hormone therapy plus possible surgery. I know there’s elements in the deaf community that wouldn’t want to eiminate deafness. Do you sympathize with that position? Is that an unfair comparison? ---
**Author:** ![AHunter3](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ahunter3/32/368_2.png) [@AHunter3](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/AHunter3)\ **Post date:** [July 18, 2017, 8:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/52 "2017-07-18T20:01:15Z")
I don’t have a same-sex attraction and therefore arguably don’t have even a small puppy in this dogfight, even if I do crowd under the LGBTQIA umbrella. I’ve always thought it was a pisspoor idea to get overly invested in the notion that IF it is biologically built-in THEN hey it has to be acceptable since bigots cannot then say it’s a freaking choice. Racists do not seem to doubt that racial characteristics are biologically built-in (if anything, they’re more committed to that notion than biologists are) but that hasn’t rendered them unable to hate and to continue to be non-accepting. And horrid things have been done to folks diagnosed schizophrenic, most of them by people with the mindset that schizophrenic is a built-in biological differences kind of thing. You don’t see warm community welcomes from people who think schizzies are inherently different from mainstream normative folks. OK, so let’s posit that there are is no built-in physical basis for variations in sexual orientation, for the sake of argument if not necessarily as scientifically established fact. Same-sex sexualities are harmless to others and to society as a whole (at worst), the people who do have such attractions enjoy being who they are (for the most part, at least in the relative absence of hostility violence and general condemnation) and it is quite literally no one else’s fucking business. And that’s why bigotry should be rejected, and that should be entirely sufficient. All of which, incidentally, mirrors how I feel about the phenomenon of being transgender as well. Let’s not get overly vested in embracing a biological built-in distinction that may or may not be borne out by evidence. It shouldn’t be necessary and it isn’t sufficient and it’s a herring of the redmost variety. ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2017, 1:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/53 "2017-07-19T01:42:30Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > Well there’s a lot of ways to have a rich life experience without spending your adolescence wondering if you are a boy/girl/in between possibly followed by years of hormone therapy plus possible surgery. I know there’s elements in the deaf community that wouldn’t want to eiminate deafness. Do you sympathize with that position? Is that an unfair comparison? All I’m saying is I don’t know what I would choose for a child of mine. Is “I don’t know” not an acceptable response? This isn’t a simple question. ---
**Author:** ![CarnalK](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnalk/32/486_2.png) [@CarnalK](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/CarnalK)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2017, 2:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/54 "2017-07-19T02:08:35Z")
No, that’s fine. I was honestly just asking. Just let me know how it goes if you bring it up at your next brunch. 🙂 But I would still like to know if the deaf thing was an unfair comparison. If you don’t know or just don’t feel like answering then you won’t get any grief from me. ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2017, 2:43am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/55 "2017-07-19T02:43:41Z")
> [@CarnalK](#): > > No, that’s fine. I was honestly just asking. Just let me know how it goes if you bring it up at your next brunch. 🙂 > > But I would still like to know if the deaf thing was an unfair comparison. If you don’t know or just don’t feel like answering then you won’t get any grief from me. It could be a fair comparison. That’s wishy-washy but it’s not exactly the same thing. Being transgender is considered a disability by many, but some consider it to be just part of being human. My experience is skewed because I have privilege. ---
**Author:** ![abashed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/a/c6cbf5/32.png) [@abashed](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/abashed)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2017, 10:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/56 "2017-07-19T10:22:33Z")
At the risk of being controversial, what did people do (before modern surgical techniques) who felt they were in the wrong body? Now, I’m not saying some people do not have a real problem with the body the inhabit but I have to wonder whether, because of the opportunities nowadays of being able to change gender, some individuals feel they have to go ahead and do it. If gender reassignment did not exist would people still feel the same as they do now? ---
**Author:** ![Una\_Persson](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/una_persson/32/346_2.png) [@Una\_Persson](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Una_Persson)\ **Post date:** [July 19, 2017, 9:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356/57 "2017-07-19T21:05:00Z")
What we did is we tried our best to take on the gender role and presentation in society that aligned with our mental gender. Those who were discovered were ridiculed, attacked, imprisoned, ostracized, and murdered. Those who could not even try to take on the role suffered silently, until they died either by chance or their own hand. I’ve read some of the biographies, of people in the 1800’s who lived their entire life with the wrong body and wrong gender presentation. I recall one transgender woman who wrote words to the effect of “My God! I’m 64 and I am going to die in this loathsome shell! Life imprisonment for the woman I am!” Transgender persons weren’t created by surgery, surgery was created for us. All medicine and favorable legal and societal treatment has done is make us more visible, not changed our prevalence. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/there-are-no-genetic-markers-associated-with-sexual-orientation/791356.md?page=2)