GAY TRUTH

That’s what two recent headlines proclaim. What are we to make of this?  Before we evaluate these announcements, it’s important to understand that we are not discussing people who are intersex. Those people have a biological or chromosomal abnormality in terms of their sex. By very definition, they are born that way. It’s Not the First Time It’s also important to remember the many sensational headlines that proclaimed a gay gene (or the like) had been discovered. Every few years, a new “discovery” would be made “proving” that people were born gay. That would soon be replaced by the latest “discovery.” None proved definitive. Back in February 1992, a cover story for Newsweek featured the face of an infant. Printed on its face was question, “Is This Child Gay?” In July 1993, The New York Times ran a story titled, “Report Suggests Homosexuality Is Linked to Genes.” Yet today, 25 years later, even left-leaning, LGBT -affirming organizations do not claim people are born gay. Gro

A judge of the Federal Court of Australia , Justice Jagot, handed down a decision recently in which her Honour said that a Tribunal’s reasoning, based on the assumption that a person could never change their sexual orientation , was “affected by illogicality of the kind required to constitute jurisdictional error”- para [15]. The decision, in  Abboud v Minister for Immigration and Border Protection  [2018] FCA 185 (2 March 2018), was a sharp reminder that bureaucratic decisions must be based on evidence and not pre-conceived policy stances. The comments may have wider implications for arguments that are often unthinkingly presented about the possibility of someone changing their sexual orientation. Factual Background The facts of this case at first seem unlikely to raise fundamental issues about human sexuality. Ms Abboud had arrived in Australia on a student visa and over-stayed her visit. Later, however, she married Mr Abboud, who was himself originally from Lebanon , but

This  study , led by  Alan Sanders  at Chicago's North Shore University HealthSystem Research Institute, directly compared about 2,000 homosexual and heterosexual men in order to find genetic differences between them.  They didn't find much. The researchers picked up some signal near several genes that are expressed in the brain. They also detected some genetic differences near the gene for the thyroid stimulating hormone receptor.   This gene plays a role in Graves' disease , a thyroid autoimmune disorder that, according to a  recent Danish study , occurs more often in gay men . These and other related findings, write Sanders and his colleagues, "point to a possible connection between thyroid function and sexual orientation in men." What can we take away from these modest results? The study, as the authors recognize, is fairly small as far as modern genetic studies go, and so its power to find genes linked to same-sex differences is li