No single gene is responsible for sexual orientation

To The Eagle:

A Genome Association Study involving 500,000 participants from the United States, the United Kingdom and Sweden, studying genes associated with sexual orientation, has confirmed that sexual preferences and behaviors are polygenic: determined by a complex interplay of genetic, hormonal, and environmental influences.*

Since no single gene appears to be responsible for sexual orientation or preference, it seems reasonable then, that gender orientation, and gender dysphoria, would also share the same interplay of complex factors.

Gender dysphoria, a persistent inner perception that one’s gender assigned at birth conflicts with one’s natal genitalia, is not mental illness, nor is it a spurious social construct. It’s been recognized in the clinical community since 1980. Its characteristics were described by Krafft Ebing as far back as 1886. Statistically, about 0.5 to 1.3% of the general population report gender dysphoria.

Gender affirming care -- therapies addressing gender dysphoria -- is now squarely in the crosshairs of prurient conservative Republican legislators, most of whom share profound ignorance about the complexities of human sexual orientation.

It’s been well established that denying gender affirming care to adolescents further marginalizes them, magnifying their often suicidal despair. That hasn’t kept conservative Republican legislatures from passing hasty, ill informed, inhumane legislation demonizing, condemning, and even criminalizing therapies helping those struggling with being ‘stranded between genders.’

Those deeply private struggles have been turned into a voyeuristic political circus by ruthless Republican politicians who are amplifying and directing conservative voters’ reflexive puritanical outrage toward sexual and gender minorities.

This is just the latest battle in the relentless war that pitiless Republican conservatives have been waging with depraved malice against our women, our children, and our most vulnerable minorities.

JB Bouchard

Puget Island

* Nature: There Is No Gay Gene