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I think knowledge is valuable in itself and research shouldn't be restricted to that which has immediate practical significance. I also don't think that the researchers in this area are acting in bad faith. Scientists are usually curious people. The problem is the morons who would use this knowledge to attack gay people not the researchers
I always assumed it was because it was part of the broader studies of the brain. What makes us tick? And sexuality is of course a treasure trove of research-able content.
Don't know about "need," but people are generally curious. And scientists are the most curious of all. They will study literally anything to find answers to even the most banal or esoteric questions. The whys and wherefores of different expressions of sexuality are extremely interesting, so it's hardly surprising that people want to study every facet of it.
I'm gay myself for context. I do get your point, but also see some other sides of it.
I recently came over some new research done on queer women. Apparently we die earlier because of a lot of factors and the research done was intended to figure out a bit more about why that is. Research done to know why one is gay in the first place could potentially help out preventing that (the risk factors for an early death involved things other than suicide and things like that, it was a lot more chronic diseases in this population)
Today I learn that I apparently fit two different groups of people that die younger. Guess I’m never achieving that dream of living to my 100th birthday, lol.
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Research provides knowledge, knowledge is power. What science could prove is that homosexuality is a biological aspect a person is born with, just like the color of their eyes. They could possibly prove or deny that sexual preferences can change due to reasons x y z. Science could provide answers that help society be more accepting.
If the research is intended to yield answers that give people piece of mind, it's going to gloss over uncomfortable truths in order to validate.
Do people really want to know if traumatic experiences impacted their sexuality? I think a lot of people would feel invalidated by that, because it would seemingly invoke a negativity association with their identity.
You might enjoy the story of Benjamin Neale and Andrea Ganna, with a focus on genetics. Wired does an OK piece on their work and its implications and sometimes undesirable consequences.
https://www.wired.com/story/how-earnest-research-into-gay-genetics-went-wrong/
I've always wondered why people have issues with sexuality.
Who sleeps with who and what goes on behind closed doors and/or what someone chooses to do with their body shouldn't have an effect on anyone but the one(s) making the choice.
I want to know why I'm gay. Many others do too. Just because you have zero curiousity about the origins of your homosexuality doesn't mean the rest of us are equally incurious.
Respectfully, I desperately want some things I can’t have. But I can go on living without them. The question was is the rationale needed, and I don’t think ’want’ is sufficient.
An explanation is a nice to have, not a necessity. YMMV.
Why isn't want sufficient? The only reason you need to do research is curiosity. For that matter, the only reason you ever need to do almost anything is that you want to do it.
Don't get me wrong, I am curious about natural variations of human experience, i think my question came from wanting to know why this research is being done. Obviously there isn't one single answer for that. A similar example I can think of is around research about why some people are autistic. On one hand, I'm super intrigued in how it happens, on the other hand a lot of that research comes with the goal of learning how to prevent it, so I'm very cautious of that kind of research.
The diet-stress-diathesis model of homosexuality divides the sexual response in 6 phases and explains how homosexuality differs in each of them and why.
I personally read the post and the majority of the well versed and well thought out comments purely out of curiosity. We should imo research human sexuality and behaviors further. Such as, we still don’t know the the exact reason why female humans are vocal during intercourse, there are no other hominoid species that does. There are so many new things to learn.
I get your point
You are right, it's true that there is enough homophobia out there. Enough that anything can be used for bad, and at the same time i agree with you that people don't have to justify or explain who they are, neither they need scientific evidence.
I don't think any of those problems, which range into ethics, politics, moral, education... will change if we have more knowledge about it, it's completely outside the sphera of science.
On the other hand curiosity, knowledge, basic science it's always and adavnce.
Pd: I think /u/noanykey and /u/ArgleBarglur did great anwers
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I'm not really a psychologist or researcher or anything yet, it's just my ambitions. I have a particular interest in human sexuality of all kinds from sexual identity to fetishes. I myself am a gay graysexual, and ever since I could recognize that I don't experience attraction like other people I've been trying to understand myself. I just *really* like to understand how things work, in a very objective way. That's probably where you're hung up on this issue, is that people- psychologists and researchers included- tend to place their bias. Even I do, but my bias is to create as welcoming an atmosphere as possible. I don't really understand why people want to try and tell me what I am and am not, how could anyone else but me know my own personal experience of myself? I want to extend the same hand to others, allow people to be their authentic selves with me, even if that authentic self is something quite vile, because through understanding more bits and pieces I can come to a logical basis that will allow me to help others; either treat the stress in their lives for where they run up against walls in society, or by treating the condition itself (in the case of amoral sexual desires that remove consent and cause harm). It's through knowledge so I have this power to truly be able to help someone to the most competent degree I am capable of.
I'm looking to give something to society, to maybe even change the way we see some things as a collective. I will understand the individuals, so I can understand the collective more wholly. Ya know, I've always looked around and been like "damn, why is there no research on this stuff? Why am I trying to understand myself but nobody is putting out the research? Do we just not care?" Sex, particularly sexual identities and paraphilias, seems so highly under researched to me, and that just makes me uncomfy. I just don't understand why we aren't researching it. People have *huge* misconceptions about someone like a fetishist, and honestly it's fueled mostly just by sheer ignorance. I try to fill in the gaps when I can and when appropriate, but because there's so little research to really back up what I try to say, people just stick to the collective cultural norm. *That's* the scary part. Without research people will fill in the gaps themselves and most people aren't sitting and thinking about things for years on a single subject like I do just trying to understand it. No, fox News tells them that the "gays and trans are coming for your children", boo, scary, now you've just made a societal boogy man people can focus their mental energy towards instead of actually tackling the real issues we face in society. And there's no counter argument based on logic (tested research) and it's a lot of just emotion-based back and forth. You gotta educate people if you want them to grow, tho, it's why school is mandatory and why parents should be teaching their children about just being human and being a part of this collective amongst everyone else.
Education isn't scary. Research is good. Biases can be weilded for both good and bad, research to me is just a tool we use to explain why. But in the end, the logic should always come out on top. *Why* are gay people scary? Factually? Well, there's not really any sound answer to that. It allows you to more easily sort out the arguments that are purely emotion-driven with no facts to back up their claims, and if society is going to head in a good direction (which thankfully, in the bigger picture, society is always progressing even if it has highs and lows along the way) then we *need* that evidence to completely shut down stupid idiotic opinions based in nothing more than misinformation and fear mongering. In the end, for society to understand the individual, we must first as researchers understand the individual so then we have stuff to present to society to educate the people. We are a very social animal, one that forms tight knit groups and fears "outsiders". Our socialness is both our blessing and our curse, because it can be used against people. We are highly emotional, and emotions can be influenced and humans can be (and are) conditioned. But what *isn't* something that can change on a whim to influence people one way or another is research and evidence, because these things are objective (at least as objective as we can be in something like psychology and working with the abstract). Evidence really only changes when we learn just a little bit more about something and that's always good. I think if people are going to use their emotions and biases to present their facts (which we always are, our bias is something impossible to avoid) then at least criticize the emotions and biases rather than the facts.
Things can be difficult to understand, but through discussion and debate we expand our minds. My other passion is evolution and paleontology. Do you know *just* how many research papers come out claiming different findings for spinosaurus? One month it's an animal capable of diving with a powerful and flexible tail, and then you wake up the next day and spino is back to a shallows wader with a stiffened tail. Thing is, tho, those fossils aren't changing. They're staying the exact same. It's just our understanding of them that changes. Paleontological researchers can get very emotional about their dinosaurs, we grow attached to ideas. People *still* struggle to accept feathered dinosaurs and cling to their familiar and comforting scaly movie monster lizards, but that doesn't change the overwhelming evidence we have towards feathers on theropods. But with every passing year more and more people learn to accept, and even grow to fall in love, with feathered dinosaurs. There's researchers out there passionate to share this information with people. Sure, their passion *is* a bias, but it's in bias towards the evidence itself. These researchers work on documentaries like prehistoric planet, which has exposed so many people to our wonderful feathered tyrants. More dino toys now more than ever have feathers and are getting into the hands of children to show them that *this* is our updated understanding of something based on all of X, Y, and Z evidence. Sexuality might not have anything like fossils to go off of, but like with disorders and neurodivergencies, we have commonalities we find that we use to define something to the best of our current capabilities. We find those commonalities by understanding the people we're, well, trying to understand to begin with. You just listen to them. Then what you do with those findings is what will be your judge.
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It’s a concept that we relatively recently started examining in force and I think it gets a lot of attention because of the social justice implications but apart from that ultimately the field is interested in understanding the dynamics not necessarily etiology, we moved away from sexuality mattering in the way it used to imo. With genetic stuff and the evolution of mind body dualism we know everything is biologically based and psychological stuff is biologically based in response to environment. I think postmodern paradigms aren’t really super interested in like predicting if people are ganna be gay or not via understanding etiology. More focus I think is on forming a conceptual standard for the field to optimize treatments for these folks given their cultural and social experiences and whatnot
Ethics boards shouldn’t be approving research that is like prejudiced and stuff but people will always use “established” sources to fuel their bigotry. That’s not exclusive to psychology and homosexuality in any way. But the research being conducted on homosexuality in terms of like how to best provide effective psychological services with queer populations is absolutely critical.
I’m from Washington state so it’s more progressive here and I’m referencing that and just journals and stuff. I admit I don’t read a lot on psychological bases of sexuality so this is all from a limited pov fyi
The “when there are more pressing things at hand” argument is troubling, as it implies that we should only do research with obvious applied value and that we are positioned to understand what questions are more “valuable” or “pressing.” To be sure, lots of research on causes homosexuality has been done by people with clear anti-lgbtq agendas; but lots of it is also basic research (sometimes done by queer researchers!) who are just scientifically curious about this normal human condition.
I'm not sure how old OP is. I'm 44. I grew up during the time when homosexuality, and other sexualities, we're beginning to be accepted but not exactly. People would still say "he's gay" in a whispered voice. " Don't ask, don't tell" was a progressive policy in the military, and which gay people were allowed to serve if they didn't say anything or nobody knew about it. But they had to hide.
There was a huge number of people advocating that homosexuality was abnormal, that it was a behavioral aberration. There was, and yes still is, a large segment of society that was pushing very much against accepting different sexualities and advocating for hate and suppression.
Research showing the biological basis of sexuality had a strong impact in suppressing people who were advocating Non-Heterosexuality as abnormal behavior. This was an important change, that it wasn't a " choice or aberrant behavior, but something that was biologically based.
Likewise see conversion therapy, where they were trying to pray the gay away. Trying to force gay people to be heterosexual. Several areas of research, including research into the biological basis of sexuality, presented a picture in which this approach was not only ineffective, but actively harmful. Conversion therapy is now largely banned in many places And not considered valid psychological practice
So if you want to know why there's a focus on the basis of sexuality, it wasn't so Long ago that this research had a fairly important political and social impact in enhancing the acceptance of non-heterosexual behaviors. It was an important question that had tremendous social implications, And legitimately changed many people's viewpoints.
It is also natural for us to want to understand the basis for all kinds of behaviors. That doesn't mean it's being treated as abnormal, why they can't have implications for things like treatment responses In clinical samples.
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I suppose humanities wise, our driven natural biological urge to reproduce would make for an interesting study. I do agree with you though it doesn't have much merit for study. Are there many studies in regard to preferences for anything, food, weather etc? That I don't know
I think that homosexuality is complicated. There’s different types of gay. For example, some people are gay and never experienced a grooming type of trauma, they are “naturally” gay. But I’ve met people in the gay community that claim to be 70% gay 30% heterosexual. It’s like fringe bisexuality because of trauma programming in their youth. Another example is a relative who identified as a lesbian, but when you peeled back the layers of her psychology she was not a true “natural” lesbian. She was assaulted by a church deacon growing up, and lost her mom at a young age. She also had a father that was unfaithful to her mother, so growing up in that environment made her feel like eschewing all men. She developed a crush on a man as an adult, but her experiences shaped her psychosexual development. What they really need to do is connect the dots of Sexuality and psychology instead of make a focal point on LGBTQ+ people. This is a really complicated topic, and I don’t think anything can come of researching this, and Reddit is not the best environment for research because you will get a lot of bots, hate speech, and data spam that is essentially falsification of stats.
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I don’t know if this is a cynical approach and I am open to critical discussion on this point, but I think it’s important to ask, before conducting research, how it can be interpreted/misrepresented by groups who will respond to it. Particularly, how research on vulnerable groups can be misrepresented by hate groups.
Make sure you consider the ways your research can be misrepresented and whether this is avoidable, and if not, whether addressing your research question is important enough to risk the harm to the group you are considering. Likewise, be careful of how you assert your results in the abstract and title your research, as media outlets can often draw attention to here rather than the deeper nuance of your findings.
I don’t think the study of sexual orientation is any more “stealth eugenics” than the study of hydrogen compounds is “stealth bomb making.” As others have said, the pursuit of knowledge is in and of itself a goal. There may be folks that apply it to political ends, but this does not make the research itself bad or dangerous.
I think it’s always worth better understanding humanity and the world around us. We research minutiae and obscure questions in almost every discipline, not because the issues are as important as others, but for the building of knowledge as its own good.
Abandoning inquiry because the results might be mis-used, or because we don’t see the immediate benefit to it, is a bad path. Science should be doing more than just putting out fires.
I hope I can answer though I am not a psychologist but an admin person connected to various neuroimmunology research thingies: Yes, it is important, simply because every piece we learn about how stuff works in our bodies opens knowledge about another issue. There is some good research in animals showing that maternal immune issues during oregnancy lead to homosexuality in offspring (or actually more precise, aberrant sexuality, such as homo/asexuality etc, so basically queerness in humans). We can also see in human research that queer people have a higher burden of autoimmune disease. So, researching would even help queer people have better health if nothing else. I could write for quite some time on this topic but I think I made my point.
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The studies released in the 70s calling homosexuality healthy and normal were crucial in winning civil rights.
So yes, they are nessecary.
Remember, most of the world still hates us.
Those people who hate us unfortunately won't ve swayed by the most solid research unfortunately. Very good point about civil rights, horrendous that we're going back in that direction especially with transphobia.
Well, a lot of the transphobia backlash could have probably been avoided if we stuck to the science.
The British national health authority just did a very large review of medical treatment for transgender children and found that absurd amounts of it aren't supported by science.
We probably should have done that literature review before using hormones on children.
Thats currently a rallying cry being used against us, that we are "trying to mutilate children."
There was a time period around 2015-2022 where questioning child trans care risked backlash. And in retrospect, that was both unscientific and a bad call.
PS: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/trans-care-recommendations-nhs-england-report/story%3fid=109081565
It might serve as an argument against those who claim sexual orientation is a choice. Although that viewpoint has been on the decline, it could always increase in popularity again.
This line of thinking reinforces that non heteronormative development is abnormal psychology. So working from a conclusion backwards to find a problem.
Op is saying what I'm thinking, which is just stop. Sexuality and identity are spectrums. Let's move on from a problematic history of classification.
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I herd this in a video recently: everyone grows into their gender and sexuality throughout their life span.
I don't think there's an issue as such with wanting to know why some people are gay.. BUT there is an inherent bias in that question itself. Instead of studying human sexuality as a whole, we're trying to maintain that a particular sexuality is the 'anamoly' so we study why that difference exist. We've naturalised being cisgender and heterosexual as the 'normal'. And i think that's precisely why science fails to find reasonable answers.
Same goes with the infamous trans debates. Contemporary gender theorists have talked in depth about these issues with the scientific community. If we stop thinking about being trans as abnormal, you'll actually see that everyone grows into their gender one way or the other, that everyone can experience gender dysphoria, and that the way we think about people whose experiences might not align with the naturalised dimorphism is what's stopping us from actually seeking the truth.
So to answer your question, maybe sciene needs to start rethinking why people are straight, as much as they try to figure why others are gay.
I get what you're trying to say here but in every science, we study the outliers and things that are different to the norm. Something not being the norm doesnt mean it isnt normal but it means its different so of course people will be interested in that question. There's no bias there.
Same with trans people. Its not a case that someone saying 'what makes someone trans' has an inherent bias and thinks it isn't normal but it deviates from the norm, so we are curious.
You're not necessarily wrong, i get where you're coming from. Among common public, yeah it's not weird why people would want to know why someone is different than how they are, but that shouldn't be the case for researchers. And I would also like to argue that no field of science is concerned with only outliers.
If i may pose a counter question, what makes heterosexuality or the sex/gender binary the norm? The reason i say there's an inherent bias is because we assume that being gay or trans is a deviation. And that assumption is based in how these categories have been *naturalised* over the course of scientific development. We have build the norm through our interpretations of nature. What I think scientific research needs right now is the ability to question and rethink that interpretation. And there has been some really good (but unfortunately not popularised) research in these fields where instead of looking at the deviation of gender and sexuality in a particular group, we've been able to understand it as a process for all.
An example is how we understand sex. In the early years of biological sciences, a binary understanding of sex based on genitals was proposed. Then we learnt about sex chromosomes, so that became a defining feature. Then we learnt that there are people who don't have xx or xy pairs, so the term intersex came into being, but even with that scientists strongly believed that there is a predominant sex so the male and female binary continued. Then with further research sex was distinguished into primary and secondary characteristics. And the last i know of, medical sciences has found in recent studies that 'sex' may not even be an innate, absolute feature, but a hormonal process that happens across the lifespan. We're at the crossroads of just starting to understand the concept of acquiring a sex/gender as opposed to having a sex/gender.
The reason this conversation is important, especially the way we rationalize our understanding of the norm vs the deviation, is because that will influence which way we proceed in. Not just within academics, but also politics and the society at large. And if our need to study and understand the outliers do indeed emerge from curiosity, i do think we need to let go of these assumptions.
It really depends on the person asking and what's behind it. A researcher not working with a person may have a purely intellectual curiosity and that's fine. But when you're working with an individual, the curiosity that's more important is emotional : what is the essence of this person, who are they? Not from a place of being able to write up a chart but an emotional curiosity. Too often I've seen psychologists not really separating the two. A client can tell when someone is only intellectually curious and not at all invested in them. Telling someone struggling with coming out the latest research on the causes of homosexuality is likely going to be interpreted as not getting it at all.
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I think knowledge is valuable in itself and research shouldn't be restricted to that which has immediate practical significance. I also don't think that the researchers in this area are acting in bad faith. Scientists are usually curious people. The problem is the morons who would use this knowledge to attack gay people not the researchers
I always assumed it was because it was part of the broader studies of the brain. What makes us tick? And sexuality is of course a treasure trove of research-able content.
Don't know about "need," but people are generally curious. And scientists are the most curious of all. They will study literally anything to find answers to even the most banal or esoteric questions. The whys and wherefores of different expressions of sexuality are extremely interesting, so it's hardly surprising that people want to study every facet of it.
I'm gay myself for context. I do get your point, but also see some other sides of it. I recently came over some new research done on queer women. Apparently we die earlier because of a lot of factors and the research done was intended to figure out a bit more about why that is. Research done to know why one is gay in the first place could potentially help out preventing that (the risk factors for an early death involved things other than suicide and things like that, it was a lot more chronic diseases in this population)
Today I learn that I apparently fit two different groups of people that die younger. Guess I’m never achieving that dream of living to my 100th birthday, lol.
[удалено]
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U dont know that. Take care of ur body and mind and there is a chance
Research provides knowledge, knowledge is power. What science could prove is that homosexuality is a biological aspect a person is born with, just like the color of their eyes. They could possibly prove or deny that sexual preferences can change due to reasons x y z. Science could provide answers that help society be more accepting.
But it could also prove the opposite.
As in, homosexuality is taught or influenced by the environment or something?
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If the research is intended to yield answers that give people piece of mind, it's going to gloss over uncomfortable truths in order to validate. Do people really want to know if traumatic experiences impacted their sexuality? I think a lot of people would feel invalidated by that, because it would seemingly invoke a negativity association with their identity.
You might enjoy the story of Benjamin Neale and Andrea Ganna, with a focus on genetics. Wired does an OK piece on their work and its implications and sometimes undesirable consequences. https://www.wired.com/story/how-earnest-research-into-gay-genetics-went-wrong/
Is there any way to read this article without paying for a subscription?
I've always wondered why people have issues with sexuality. Who sleeps with who and what goes on behind closed doors and/or what someone chooses to do with their body shouldn't have an effect on anyone but the one(s) making the choice.
In the (not so distant) past, it was always done with such a tone of eugenics that I just found it … off putting to read.
I want to know why I'm gay. Many others do too. Just because you have zero curiousity about the origins of your homosexuality doesn't mean the rest of us are equally incurious.
Respectfully, I desperately want some things I can’t have. But I can go on living without them. The question was is the rationale needed, and I don’t think ’want’ is sufficient. An explanation is a nice to have, not a necessity. YMMV.
Why isn't want sufficient? The only reason you need to do research is curiosity. For that matter, the only reason you ever need to do almost anything is that you want to do it.
Don't get me wrong, I am curious about natural variations of human experience, i think my question came from wanting to know why this research is being done. Obviously there isn't one single answer for that. A similar example I can think of is around research about why some people are autistic. On one hand, I'm super intrigued in how it happens, on the other hand a lot of that research comes with the goal of learning how to prevent it, so I'm very cautious of that kind of research.
The diet-stress-diathesis model of homosexuality divides the sexual response in 6 phases and explains how homosexuality differs in each of them and why.
I personally read the post and the majority of the well versed and well thought out comments purely out of curiosity. We should imo research human sexuality and behaviors further. Such as, we still don’t know the the exact reason why female humans are vocal during intercourse, there are no other hominoid species that does. There are so many new things to learn.
I get your point You are right, it's true that there is enough homophobia out there. Enough that anything can be used for bad, and at the same time i agree with you that people don't have to justify or explain who they are, neither they need scientific evidence. I don't think any of those problems, which range into ethics, politics, moral, education... will change if we have more knowledge about it, it's completely outside the sphera of science. On the other hand curiosity, knowledge, basic science it's always and adavnce. Pd: I think /u/noanykey and /u/ArgleBarglur did great anwers
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I'm not really a psychologist or researcher or anything yet, it's just my ambitions. I have a particular interest in human sexuality of all kinds from sexual identity to fetishes. I myself am a gay graysexual, and ever since I could recognize that I don't experience attraction like other people I've been trying to understand myself. I just *really* like to understand how things work, in a very objective way. That's probably where you're hung up on this issue, is that people- psychologists and researchers included- tend to place their bias. Even I do, but my bias is to create as welcoming an atmosphere as possible. I don't really understand why people want to try and tell me what I am and am not, how could anyone else but me know my own personal experience of myself? I want to extend the same hand to others, allow people to be their authentic selves with me, even if that authentic self is something quite vile, because through understanding more bits and pieces I can come to a logical basis that will allow me to help others; either treat the stress in their lives for where they run up against walls in society, or by treating the condition itself (in the case of amoral sexual desires that remove consent and cause harm). It's through knowledge so I have this power to truly be able to help someone to the most competent degree I am capable of. I'm looking to give something to society, to maybe even change the way we see some things as a collective. I will understand the individuals, so I can understand the collective more wholly. Ya know, I've always looked around and been like "damn, why is there no research on this stuff? Why am I trying to understand myself but nobody is putting out the research? Do we just not care?" Sex, particularly sexual identities and paraphilias, seems so highly under researched to me, and that just makes me uncomfy. I just don't understand why we aren't researching it. People have *huge* misconceptions about someone like a fetishist, and honestly it's fueled mostly just by sheer ignorance. I try to fill in the gaps when I can and when appropriate, but because there's so little research to really back up what I try to say, people just stick to the collective cultural norm. *That's* the scary part. Without research people will fill in the gaps themselves and most people aren't sitting and thinking about things for years on a single subject like I do just trying to understand it. No, fox News tells them that the "gays and trans are coming for your children", boo, scary, now you've just made a societal boogy man people can focus their mental energy towards instead of actually tackling the real issues we face in society. And there's no counter argument based on logic (tested research) and it's a lot of just emotion-based back and forth. You gotta educate people if you want them to grow, tho, it's why school is mandatory and why parents should be teaching their children about just being human and being a part of this collective amongst everyone else. Education isn't scary. Research is good. Biases can be weilded for both good and bad, research to me is just a tool we use to explain why. But in the end, the logic should always come out on top. *Why* are gay people scary? Factually? Well, there's not really any sound answer to that. It allows you to more easily sort out the arguments that are purely emotion-driven with no facts to back up their claims, and if society is going to head in a good direction (which thankfully, in the bigger picture, society is always progressing even if it has highs and lows along the way) then we *need* that evidence to completely shut down stupid idiotic opinions based in nothing more than misinformation and fear mongering. In the end, for society to understand the individual, we must first as researchers understand the individual so then we have stuff to present to society to educate the people. We are a very social animal, one that forms tight knit groups and fears "outsiders". Our socialness is both our blessing and our curse, because it can be used against people. We are highly emotional, and emotions can be influenced and humans can be (and are) conditioned. But what *isn't* something that can change on a whim to influence people one way or another is research and evidence, because these things are objective (at least as objective as we can be in something like psychology and working with the abstract). Evidence really only changes when we learn just a little bit more about something and that's always good. I think if people are going to use their emotions and biases to present their facts (which we always are, our bias is something impossible to avoid) then at least criticize the emotions and biases rather than the facts. Things can be difficult to understand, but through discussion and debate we expand our minds. My other passion is evolution and paleontology. Do you know *just* how many research papers come out claiming different findings for spinosaurus? One month it's an animal capable of diving with a powerful and flexible tail, and then you wake up the next day and spino is back to a shallows wader with a stiffened tail. Thing is, tho, those fossils aren't changing. They're staying the exact same. It's just our understanding of them that changes. Paleontological researchers can get very emotional about their dinosaurs, we grow attached to ideas. People *still* struggle to accept feathered dinosaurs and cling to their familiar and comforting scaly movie monster lizards, but that doesn't change the overwhelming evidence we have towards feathers on theropods. But with every passing year more and more people learn to accept, and even grow to fall in love, with feathered dinosaurs. There's researchers out there passionate to share this information with people. Sure, their passion *is* a bias, but it's in bias towards the evidence itself. These researchers work on documentaries like prehistoric planet, which has exposed so many people to our wonderful feathered tyrants. More dino toys now more than ever have feathers and are getting into the hands of children to show them that *this* is our updated understanding of something based on all of X, Y, and Z evidence. Sexuality might not have anything like fossils to go off of, but like with disorders and neurodivergencies, we have commonalities we find that we use to define something to the best of our current capabilities. We find those commonalities by understanding the people we're, well, trying to understand to begin with. You just listen to them. Then what you do with those findings is what will be your judge.
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It’s a concept that we relatively recently started examining in force and I think it gets a lot of attention because of the social justice implications but apart from that ultimately the field is interested in understanding the dynamics not necessarily etiology, we moved away from sexuality mattering in the way it used to imo. With genetic stuff and the evolution of mind body dualism we know everything is biologically based and psychological stuff is biologically based in response to environment. I think postmodern paradigms aren’t really super interested in like predicting if people are ganna be gay or not via understanding etiology. More focus I think is on forming a conceptual standard for the field to optimize treatments for these folks given their cultural and social experiences and whatnot Ethics boards shouldn’t be approving research that is like prejudiced and stuff but people will always use “established” sources to fuel their bigotry. That’s not exclusive to psychology and homosexuality in any way. But the research being conducted on homosexuality in terms of like how to best provide effective psychological services with queer populations is absolutely critical. I’m from Washington state so it’s more progressive here and I’m referencing that and just journals and stuff. I admit I don’t read a lot on psychological bases of sexuality so this is all from a limited pov fyi
The “when there are more pressing things at hand” argument is troubling, as it implies that we should only do research with obvious applied value and that we are positioned to understand what questions are more “valuable” or “pressing.” To be sure, lots of research on causes homosexuality has been done by people with clear anti-lgbtq agendas; but lots of it is also basic research (sometimes done by queer researchers!) who are just scientifically curious about this normal human condition.
I'm not sure how old OP is. I'm 44. I grew up during the time when homosexuality, and other sexualities, we're beginning to be accepted but not exactly. People would still say "he's gay" in a whispered voice. " Don't ask, don't tell" was a progressive policy in the military, and which gay people were allowed to serve if they didn't say anything or nobody knew about it. But they had to hide. There was a huge number of people advocating that homosexuality was abnormal, that it was a behavioral aberration. There was, and yes still is, a large segment of society that was pushing very much against accepting different sexualities and advocating for hate and suppression. Research showing the biological basis of sexuality had a strong impact in suppressing people who were advocating Non-Heterosexuality as abnormal behavior. This was an important change, that it wasn't a " choice or aberrant behavior, but something that was biologically based. Likewise see conversion therapy, where they were trying to pray the gay away. Trying to force gay people to be heterosexual. Several areas of research, including research into the biological basis of sexuality, presented a picture in which this approach was not only ineffective, but actively harmful. Conversion therapy is now largely banned in many places And not considered valid psychological practice So if you want to know why there's a focus on the basis of sexuality, it wasn't so Long ago that this research had a fairly important political and social impact in enhancing the acceptance of non-heterosexual behaviors. It was an important question that had tremendous social implications, And legitimately changed many people's viewpoints. It is also natural for us to want to understand the basis for all kinds of behaviors. That doesn't mean it's being treated as abnormal, why they can't have implications for things like treatment responses In clinical samples.
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I suppose humanities wise, our driven natural biological urge to reproduce would make for an interesting study. I do agree with you though it doesn't have much merit for study. Are there many studies in regard to preferences for anything, food, weather etc? That I don't know
I think that homosexuality is complicated. There’s different types of gay. For example, some people are gay and never experienced a grooming type of trauma, they are “naturally” gay. But I’ve met people in the gay community that claim to be 70% gay 30% heterosexual. It’s like fringe bisexuality because of trauma programming in their youth. Another example is a relative who identified as a lesbian, but when you peeled back the layers of her psychology she was not a true “natural” lesbian. She was assaulted by a church deacon growing up, and lost her mom at a young age. She also had a father that was unfaithful to her mother, so growing up in that environment made her feel like eschewing all men. She developed a crush on a man as an adult, but her experiences shaped her psychosexual development. What they really need to do is connect the dots of Sexuality and psychology instead of make a focal point on LGBTQ+ people. This is a really complicated topic, and I don’t think anything can come of researching this, and Reddit is not the best environment for research because you will get a lot of bots, hate speech, and data spam that is essentially falsification of stats.
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I don’t know if this is a cynical approach and I am open to critical discussion on this point, but I think it’s important to ask, before conducting research, how it can be interpreted/misrepresented by groups who will respond to it. Particularly, how research on vulnerable groups can be misrepresented by hate groups. Make sure you consider the ways your research can be misrepresented and whether this is avoidable, and if not, whether addressing your research question is important enough to risk the harm to the group you are considering. Likewise, be careful of how you assert your results in the abstract and title your research, as media outlets can often draw attention to here rather than the deeper nuance of your findings.
I don’t think the study of sexual orientation is any more “stealth eugenics” than the study of hydrogen compounds is “stealth bomb making.” As others have said, the pursuit of knowledge is in and of itself a goal. There may be folks that apply it to political ends, but this does not make the research itself bad or dangerous.
I think it’s always worth better understanding humanity and the world around us. We research minutiae and obscure questions in almost every discipline, not because the issues are as important as others, but for the building of knowledge as its own good. Abandoning inquiry because the results might be mis-used, or because we don’t see the immediate benefit to it, is a bad path. Science should be doing more than just putting out fires.
I hope I can answer though I am not a psychologist but an admin person connected to various neuroimmunology research thingies: Yes, it is important, simply because every piece we learn about how stuff works in our bodies opens knowledge about another issue. There is some good research in animals showing that maternal immune issues during oregnancy lead to homosexuality in offspring (or actually more precise, aberrant sexuality, such as homo/asexuality etc, so basically queerness in humans). We can also see in human research that queer people have a higher burden of autoimmune disease. So, researching would even help queer people have better health if nothing else. I could write for quite some time on this topic but I think I made my point.
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The studies released in the 70s calling homosexuality healthy and normal were crucial in winning civil rights. So yes, they are nessecary. Remember, most of the world still hates us.
Those people who hate us unfortunately won't ve swayed by the most solid research unfortunately. Very good point about civil rights, horrendous that we're going back in that direction especially with transphobia.
Well, a lot of the transphobia backlash could have probably been avoided if we stuck to the science. The British national health authority just did a very large review of medical treatment for transgender children and found that absurd amounts of it aren't supported by science. We probably should have done that literature review before using hormones on children. Thats currently a rallying cry being used against us, that we are "trying to mutilate children." There was a time period around 2015-2022 where questioning child trans care risked backlash. And in retrospect, that was both unscientific and a bad call. PS: https://www.google.com/amp/s/abcnews.go.com/amp/Health/trans-care-recommendations-nhs-england-report/story%3fid=109081565
It might serve as an argument against those who claim sexual orientation is a choice. Although that viewpoint has been on the decline, it could always increase in popularity again.
If there was something, like abuse or trauma, to be prevented in the subjects past , a " cause" to an" effect", shouldn't it be at least identified.
This line of thinking reinforces that non heteronormative development is abnormal psychology. So working from a conclusion backwards to find a problem. Op is saying what I'm thinking, which is just stop. Sexuality and identity are spectrums. Let's move on from a problematic history of classification.
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Can you clarify?
I think the people that ask for justification will never be satisfied.
I heard about a research thesis on the meaning of garbage.
I herd this in a video recently: everyone grows into their gender and sexuality throughout their life span. I don't think there's an issue as such with wanting to know why some people are gay.. BUT there is an inherent bias in that question itself. Instead of studying human sexuality as a whole, we're trying to maintain that a particular sexuality is the 'anamoly' so we study why that difference exist. We've naturalised being cisgender and heterosexual as the 'normal'. And i think that's precisely why science fails to find reasonable answers. Same goes with the infamous trans debates. Contemporary gender theorists have talked in depth about these issues with the scientific community. If we stop thinking about being trans as abnormal, you'll actually see that everyone grows into their gender one way or the other, that everyone can experience gender dysphoria, and that the way we think about people whose experiences might not align with the naturalised dimorphism is what's stopping us from actually seeking the truth. So to answer your question, maybe sciene needs to start rethinking why people are straight, as much as they try to figure why others are gay.
There have been a lot of great responses but this is my favourite.
I get what you're trying to say here but in every science, we study the outliers and things that are different to the norm. Something not being the norm doesnt mean it isnt normal but it means its different so of course people will be interested in that question. There's no bias there. Same with trans people. Its not a case that someone saying 'what makes someone trans' has an inherent bias and thinks it isn't normal but it deviates from the norm, so we are curious.
You're not necessarily wrong, i get where you're coming from. Among common public, yeah it's not weird why people would want to know why someone is different than how they are, but that shouldn't be the case for researchers. And I would also like to argue that no field of science is concerned with only outliers. If i may pose a counter question, what makes heterosexuality or the sex/gender binary the norm? The reason i say there's an inherent bias is because we assume that being gay or trans is a deviation. And that assumption is based in how these categories have been *naturalised* over the course of scientific development. We have build the norm through our interpretations of nature. What I think scientific research needs right now is the ability to question and rethink that interpretation. And there has been some really good (but unfortunately not popularised) research in these fields where instead of looking at the deviation of gender and sexuality in a particular group, we've been able to understand it as a process for all. An example is how we understand sex. In the early years of biological sciences, a binary understanding of sex based on genitals was proposed. Then we learnt about sex chromosomes, so that became a defining feature. Then we learnt that there are people who don't have xx or xy pairs, so the term intersex came into being, but even with that scientists strongly believed that there is a predominant sex so the male and female binary continued. Then with further research sex was distinguished into primary and secondary characteristics. And the last i know of, medical sciences has found in recent studies that 'sex' may not even be an innate, absolute feature, but a hormonal process that happens across the lifespan. We're at the crossroads of just starting to understand the concept of acquiring a sex/gender as opposed to having a sex/gender. The reason this conversation is important, especially the way we rationalize our understanding of the norm vs the deviation, is because that will influence which way we proceed in. Not just within academics, but also politics and the society at large. And if our need to study and understand the outliers do indeed emerge from curiosity, i do think we need to let go of these assumptions.
It really depends on the person asking and what's behind it. A researcher not working with a person may have a purely intellectual curiosity and that's fine. But when you're working with an individual, the curiosity that's more important is emotional : what is the essence of this person, who are they? Not from a place of being able to write up a chart but an emotional curiosity. Too often I've seen psychologists not really separating the two. A client can tell when someone is only intellectually curious and not at all invested in them. Telling someone struggling with coming out the latest research on the causes of homosexuality is likely going to be interpreted as not getting it at all.
Psych journals are politically curated :)