Nobody is ‘born that way,’ gay historians say

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Why does it matter where homosexuality 'comes from'?

As it happens there isn't actually a great deal of evidence for the genetic theory - as has often been the case twin studies have shown diminishing returns - but the social construct theory is too daft, vague and handwavey to make much sense. What evidence there is does point the idea of 'sexual orientations' as somewhat dubious but why is it important?

[Tetro Kornbluth]

Left-wing humanities PhDs don't believe that biology influences society.  They have a large stake in that idea because they want to study society and language, instead of biology because they don't know how to study biology.  They have a bunch of dog-eared copies of Foucault books, not microscopes.  So, no surprise that they want to say sexuality is completely a social construction.  Obviously, that's garbage.

It's not only garbage, it's not what the article or the historians it refers to are saying.  What it is saying that historically, even in those cultures that were accepting of same-sex attraction or even in those that embraced it, there was no social construct that was analogous to that of "gay" as it is commonly understood today.

But does that confuse human consciousness with human self-consciousness? One can be, I can assume, a man can have strong homosexual tendencies without being gay.

(Oh, I've done it now. Haven't I?)

[Tetro Kornbluth]

If I were up to it, I would try to defend the constructionist thesis but I'm lazy. So I would just say one, if we were holding an essentialist position* we would have to explain the reasons for which the historical and anthropological actually seems to contradict this. Of course an ethnography or historical report can never be scientific in the way, say, a population-quantitative analysis can be (Is that bad?) but it's also clear that historians and anthropologists are not creating things out of thin air. Well, except the most demented of Foucault admirers.

(* - As I mentioned earlier, a lot of the claims for the innatist position are based on twin studies. But even the highest twin studies afaik record that in cases of identical twins if one is gay there is only a 52% chance that the other one is. Given that identical twins are supposed to be identical genetically, if homosexuality was purely genetic than that number should be 100%. This suggests that biology of it is more complex than most are willing to admit. There's also a problem of trying to explain how homosexuality could exist under standard evolutionary theory which suggests that such a trait - that isn't passed on to offspring - could exist. There's a lot of "It stands for reason" going on here on both sides. And reason, like common sense, is the collection of prejudices we all get by the age of 18)



Angela and Maria Eagle, identical twins and English politicians - both are Labour MPs for constituencies in Merseyside, both are keen chess players... yet one is a lesbian and the other is straight

Ftr, my position on this is "who cares, really?" But I will admit that I find the notion of sexual identity highly dubious.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

You won't convince them. They have read Foucault. They are 'sage'

Sexual preference; choosing desirable characteristics in a mate is not the same as sexual orientation or sexual drive. You and I know this. It's not f-cking rocket science but constructionists go insane with it. As I said before if you say to someone who is heterosexual your sexual attraction to thefemale is a nothing more than a social construct because you happen to prefer afemale with 36DD breasts or a female with wooden cleft in her pallet and access to 36 goats you will be met, rightfully with ill concealed laughter.

My position has a lot less to do with Foucault than you imagine, and a lot more to do with the practical goal of maximizing rights and freedoms, than you imagine. 

The fact that we have a "gay" identity now, and we didn't hundreds of years ago, is intimately connected with, and in fact a prerequisite to, the rights you enjoy and the ability you have to express your sexuality freely and naturally.

And, yes, the idea of "heterosexuality" as a distinct category is constructed as well.  If people are trying to argue that one is but the other isn't, well then that would be gibberish, and offensive gibberish at that.  Luckily nobody is doing such a thing, not here at least.

That's not the issue.  "Heterosexuality" is a term that categorizes a set of sexual desires which occur in human beings because of their genetic and hormonal makeup.  Maybe the better word for what we mean is "heterosexual desire" or lust.  The same goes for homosexuality.  The desire for sex and intimacy is an innate impulse in humans due to their biology.  How people act on their desire, what words we use to describe it, the particulars of what is attractive in a man or woman, sure, that's influenced by society a great deal.  But, where someone sits on the spectrum of heterosexual/homosexual is not very influenced at all by society.  Do you disagree?

It has previously been suggested that humans are not by nature sexually attracted to other human beings.  Basically, that human nature is to be a masturbating loner, but society has taught us that having sex is desirable activity.  That is ridiculous.  I find that idea fundamentally dehumanizing because it is opposed to the basic nature of the species I belong to.

Just an added line of argument:

Would anyone say, "nobody is born with autism?"  After all, autistic people used to just be called dumb or cretinous or idiotic.  So, autism is a social construct and nobody is born with autism.

Bad argument as there is no definitive definition of autism is. Indeed, defining Autism is exceptionally controversial and changes in diagnosis may have led to a massive increase in diagnosis with now 1 in 68 males in the US diagnosed with some form of it.

Mental health diagnosis are notoriously unreliable so it's a bad idea to base arguments on innateness on them. Which isn't to say there aren't kids around with have traits which equate very strongly to what we call autism.

[Tetro Kornbluth]

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What about an anthropologist who specializes in the Etoro people of Papua New Guinea?

Anyway the idea that it's not an area of potential study for historians is absurd. The thesis is "Homosexuality is an orientation which is at a fixed level in the population, is immutable and is unchanged by cultural or social variation" therefore obviously historians have a lot to say on this given it is they who study cultural and social variation in the past(and there quite a lot of historians who have defended the essentialist position btw).

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Most of these things were not mentioned by anyone in the thread (although, admittedly, they do exist although from my perspective at least they are MUCH less prevalent than in the 90s).

Now my turn to be controversial, whatever the problems of a lot of Foucault/deconstructionist inspired historiography, it is still in the scope of things a very minor intellectual phenomenon which has not been of great external consequences. Meanwhile in the Corporate-Liberal STEM-type social sciences of which Nathan spoke earlier it is actually a running competition between economics and psychology as to which has done more damage not just in intellectual life but much more consequently in health, education and government policy (i.e. the things which affect all of us). Right now economics is currently in front in the damage stakes, but it can't be long before psychology catches up (Neuroscientists say the darnest things, don't they?). Let's me clear I'm not talking about disputes such as those on internet forums, I'm talking about actual crimes - crimes against people and society. The history of both disciplines makes one wonder whether we would better off if government just stopped funding them and they die a death.