#cause again i do think. the twins get the least amount of nuance from the fandom

[kaseyskat]

since ive already been pretty open about this and im not afraid to whack a hornets nest i'll go ahead and say it: if you were raising a kid in a pseudo-apocalyptic setting and then you found out that said kid was going to be the one to defeat the eldritch god that you have tried to defeat for half your lifetime and could never manage. that she was going to FACE that eldritch god it was prophesied. you would teach her how to defend herself and how to fight. like god i am not saying hero's trauma from it wasn't justified because i do think the twins took it too far but the initial process of training her makes so much more sense if you approach it at the angle of "this kid is going to do something we've been trying to do since we were twelve and couldn't manage and we might not even be there to help her so we have to make sure she doesn't die in the process" and not "we're going to make her fix our mistakes" it makes sense. goes along with lark's running theme of not being strong enough in the moments that matter and wanting to make sure nobody else ever feels as helpless as he did when walter was injured. goes along with sparrow desperately tempting fate with normal's name- not because normal was an accident, but because sparrow never wanted to lose even one kid to the doodler and it was a fervent, desperate wish to let normal get to be normal

#dndads #kasey rambles #sorry im feeling especially spiteful today #cause again i do think. the twins get the least amount of nuance from the fandom #tell me how yall were just fighting for glenn so hard and then you turn around and tell me that the twins are evil monsters skahsdkfhkdhsf #like idk. it makes sense to me! #if hero was supposed to fight the doodler but they dont know WHEN it would happen. theyd train her early #make sure it was a fight she could win #and thats also why shes NOT in the chosen one position anymore #she wanted to leave and now that she could reasonably defend herself should she be threatened. its fine! #if they really only wanted her to fix their mistakes she would not have been allowed to leave. lmao #again this isn't to say that she wasn't traumatized from the experience like. #i think the twins shouldve been honest with her and there shouldnt have been so much pressure #but i get why they felt the need to make sure she could handle herself in a fight so early on #also like. this kind of thing happens in so many post apocalyptic settings its not even uncommon #yall just dont see this world as being post apocalyptic and it shows LMAO

[uncloseted]

So I've had a conversation with a friend, and he was telling me that gay people are not Born gay but become gay because of social experiences and I called that homophobic he got really offended and said he was not that he didn't care if someone is gay or not but it's a fact and a point made by many psychologists that people become gay because of their environment, I said what I found homophobic was the implication it's like a mental disease he said he didn't believe it was a disease but that if you say it's inherent it's like saying it's genetic which it's not and that the same person has different chances of becoming gay according to their family and socio cultural experiences. It did got me thinking, are you aware of such studies and their revelance?

The answer to the question “what makes people gay” is really nuanced and I think probably more complicated than you might have expected.  I’ll get into explaining those nuances the best that I can in a second, but I think the best answer to your friend’s argument is just that he has the correlation and causation backwards.  

People who are raised in environments where being LGBT+ is permissible aren’t more likely to be gay; they’re just more likely to come out of the closet because they know they’ll be accepted and that they won’t be in any danger.  In places where homophobia is rampant, of course there appear to be fewer LGBT+ people- the LGBT+ people who are out in those places are disowned, harassed, bullied, attacked, and sometimes killed.  It makes sense that more LGBT+ people would opt to stay in the closet in a situation where violence is a possibility.  This comes out in the data; although it appears that more gay men live in costal cities in the US, the percentage of internet porn searches for gay male porn are the same across all states, around 5%.

Moving on to the “causes” of homosexuality, it’s likely a lot of different things in combination, and there’s not exactly a scientific consensus just yet.  Male homosexuality may have different causes than female sexuality and bisexuality, and trans identities are also a separate set of factors.  For the purposes of this conversation, let’s focus on male homosexuality, as it’s the most studied.

First, a couple of things that it’s not: per the Royal College of Psychiatrists, there’s no evidence that parenting or early childhood experiences play a role in sexual orientation.  Per the American Academy of Pediatrics, “there is no scientific evidence that abnormal parenting, sexual abuse, or other adverse life events influence sexual orientation. Current knowledge suggests that sexual orientation is usually established during early childhood.”  Children who grow up to be non-heterosexual are, on average, substantially more gender non-conforming in childhood (even if they’re bullied for it), supporting the idea that sexuality is established early in life.  Sexual orientation is not a choice (here, here, and here).  In (old, unethical) studies where newborn and infant boys were surgically reassigned into girls and raised as girls, they did not become more feminine or male-attracted than their AMAB counterparts.  Socialization does not induce feminine behaviors in men or make them attracted to men. “Nurture” is a lot stronger than “nature” in this case.  There are no scientifically rigorous studies that support the idea that sexuality can be changed after birth, whether through surgical treatments, lobotomies, hormone treatments, electric chock treatments, aversion therapy, hypnosis, psychoanalysis, or any other type of conversion treatment.  I would love to see his sources on all of these psychologists who supposedly believe people are gay due to their social environment.

Sexual orientation appears to be a complex interplay of biological and environmental (but not social) factors. Nonsocial, biological factors have more evidence to support them than environmental factors, particularly in homosexual men.  So your friend isn’t entirely wrong, although he’s right for the wrong reasons.  Environment is a factor, and so is family (since that’s where you get your genes and epigenetics from) but homosexuality is inherent.

Let’s start with strictly biological factors that go into sexual orientation.

One of the biggest hypotheses for the cause of homosexuality is the impact of hormones on a developing fetus. I’m going to skip over a lot of biology here, but basically the core of this theory is that gay men’s brains may have been exposed to less testosterone in the womb than their heterosexual counterparts, had less receptivity to the masculinizing effects of the testosterone, or experienced fluctuations in hormones at key times in their development.  In women, it’s hypothesized that the opposite is true- lesbians may have been exposed to higher levels of testosterone.  This is supported by right hand finger digit ratios (the length of the index finger divided by the length of the ring finger), which are a marker of prenatal testosterone exposure- lesbians have a lower digit ratio than heterosexual women, while gay men have a higher digit ratio than straight men.  Gay men may have been exposed to more testosterone than their straight counterparts for a number of different reasons, including maternal immune response and fraternal birth order, genes, epigenetics, and prenatal environmental chemical exposure.  We’ll go over each of those below:

Maternal immune responses during fetal development are demonstrated as being a cause of male homosexuality.  During pregnancy of a male child, male cells enter a mother’s bloodstream.  These cells are foreign to the mother, and so her body develops antibodies to neutralize them.  Again, skipping over a lot of nitty-gritty biology here, but basically, the more pregnancies a woman has, the better her body gets at neutralizing male cells (particularly, Y-linked antigens) and the more antibodies she has against those Y-linked antigens.  

In turn, this creates what’s known as the “fraternal birth order effect”- basically, the more male sons a woman has, the more likely it is that her next son will be gay.  One study found that each additional older brother increases the odds of a man being gay by 33%.  Researchers have found that mothers with a gay son have heightened levels of antibodies to the NLGN4Y Y-protein than mothers with heterosexual sons.  The fraternal birth order effect is estimated to account for between 15 and 29% of male homosexuality.  Some studies have identified structural differences in the brains of homosexual men as opposed to heterosexual men that are due to prenatal hormonal exposure.  For example, straight men typically have right hemispheres that are 2% larger than their left, while in gay men the two hemispheres are typically the same size. 

Genes also play a role in sexual orientation.  Identical twins are more likely to share a sexual orientation than fraternal twins or adopted siblings (an estimated 80% of identical twins share a sexual orientation).  The largest study on the genetic basis of sexuality, published in Science, determined that there are at least five different genes that are correlated with homosexuality.  The genes identified do all sorts of different things, and some have functions that are yet to be determined.  An estimated 25% of sexual behavior is attributed to genetics.  Another study found that maternal female relatives of homosexual men tend to have more offspring, suggesting that genetic material that promotes fertility in women and homosexuality in men is being genetically passed down on the X chromosome.  Researchers estimated that this explains about 20% of genetic homosexuality (which is right in line with the estimate that there are four other genes involved).

Epigenetic factors also impact a person’s sexuality.  Epigenetic changes are changes in gene activity that are not caused by changes to the DNA sequence itself.  Epigenetic factors can “turn on” or “turn off” the expression of certain genes.  Per an article from The Guardian, “think of DNA as an orchestral score, the notes on the page unchanging. But the annotations on the manuscript will dictate how the music sounds, with crescendo and lento and adagio. The conductor and orchestra play their annotated manuscript, and each performance is unique, even when the original scores are identical.”  Epigenetic marks can be “turned on” or “turned off” during gestation as well as after birth.  Researchers hypothesize that epigenetic factors change how cells respond to androgen signaling, which is critical to sexual development.  Like we talked about above, fetal levels of exposure to the androgen, testosterone, seem to impact sexual orientation.  In gay men, the epigenetic marks responsible for managing the amount of testosterone the fetus is exposed to are thought to be too aggressive, blocking testosterone from reaching the fetus. This is pretty new research still, so the evidence to support it is limited, but one study found that the methylation pattern (the epigenetic change) in nine regions of the genome appeared to be linked to sexual orientation, and could use it to predict the sexual orientation of a group with 70% accuracy. 

There are a handful of statistical physiological differences between gay and straight man in addition to the difference in brain hemisphere size I mentioned above.  These are averages across populations, so they may not apply to each and every homosexual or heterosexual individual.  The suprachiasmatic nucleus of the hypothalamus is larger in gay men than in non-gay men.  The INAH 3 in the brains of gay men are the same size as the INAH 3 in women; both are smaller than in heterosexual men’s brains. Homosexual and heterosexual brains respond differently to two putative sex pheromones.  The amygdala is more active in gay men than straight men when exposed to sexual material.  Gay men are more likely to be left handed or ambidextrous than straight men.  Gay men are more likely to have a counterclockwise hair whorl than the general population, which is also correlated with left handedness.  Gay men have increased ridge density in the fingerprints on their left thumbs and little fingers compared to straight men.  These are all minor, but support the idea that there is a biological basis to homosexuality.

Now that we’ve gotten through the biological factors, let’s talk environmental.  When we say, “environmental” people usually think of the environment a child is raised in- who they parents are, how their parents act, who their friends are, what kind of activities they do, etc.  But in this case, that’s not what we mean.  The impact of a person’s environment after birth seems to have a weak effect on sexual orientation at best; there is no substantial evidence to suggest that early childhood experiences influence sexual orientation at all.  So in that case, what do we mean by “environmental”?  We’re really talking about the environment the mother was in during the pregnancy, and the prenatal environment that the fetus experienced (the hormonal influences that we talked about above).  These may include things like maternal exposure to anti-androgenic chemicals and endocrine disruptors while pregnant.  However, given that homosexual people have always been present, even pre-industrialization, these factors cannot be considered central to what causes homosexuality. 

#Anonymous #effys-closet #effys closet