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Chapter 2

Understanding the History and Science of Gender and Sexuality

I have talked to some very confused parents, both in real life and online, about why their child is gay. Though we are living a decade+ into the 21st century, myths and stereotypes about LGBTQ people abound. And these myths have been around for a while; for instance, my grandmother told my mother the reason my sister was gay was because she had been breastfed for too long.

These anxiety-ridden parents, who I really do believe love their children and want what’s best for them, are trying to understand why this has “happened” to them and to their child. In extreme cases, parents may resort to harmful conversion/reparative therapies. These therapies and camps boast that they can “turn” people straight through prayer and/or psychological “treatment” of some type. These therapies are never the answer and have been condemned by medical and mental health authorities for decades. Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to these therapies, and children who have been subjected to conversion therapies are at increased risk of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, homelessness (they would rather run away than be subjected to more conversion therapy), and suicide.12

Some of the parents who email me are supportive of their child, but their spouse may not be. Many times, these parents come from a deep religious tradition and they are honestly worried about their child’s soul and whether their child will end up in heaven in the afterlife. Some of these emails I don’t respond to—I don’t see the point. If someone’s belief system is so entrenched that they take every single word of the Bible as literal and holy, I don’t think my lapsed Catholic’s vision of the afterlife is going to be useful to them. But one email I received a couple of years ago said, “You and your daughter are going to hell.” I hit reply and responded that if my daughter was going to hell just for being who she is, then I wanted to be there, too. The man responded with something like, “eternal suffering and damnation, away from the light of God for you both.” I again responded that if God wanted no part of my daughter, I wanted no part of Him. (And isn’t it interesting how we use such gendered words to describe a being that is supposed to be beyond time and space?)

I was a devout churchgoer, going once a week at minimum, and many times twice a week. I miss my Catholic faith. I miss knowing exactly what liturgical time of year it is. I miss singing in the choir. I miss the Eucharist. I miss the incense on Holy Days. I miss the community of people at my former church. But I also could not sit through one more homily from a certain priest about how if a person acted on their homosexual urges they weren’t welcome in the Catholic Church. I couldn’t read what Pope Benedict said about LGBTQ people without feeling over and over again like I had been stabbed in the stomach, knowing so many good, kind, and loving LGBTQ people—including my own sister and daughter. (The former Pope Benedict opposed same-gender marriage, wanted to ban even celibate gay priests, and repeatedly said things along the lines that gays were distorted and not natural creation.) And I was really angry at the hypocrisy of a Church that could cover up the rape of innocents for years but felt free to condemn my daughter for the very basic human need of wanting to meet a nice person and have a relationship with them.

This is a parenting book—not a theological one. So if your concern truly is for your child’s eternal soul, I would start doing some research. I would talk to leaders of all different faiths. I would read books and articles and talk to other parents of LGBTQ children. I’ve included resources at the back of this chapter to help explore this question of faith and queerness. But the bottom line, the tough love version of this is, you have to leave your child’s relationship with God to them. They’ve lived in your house. They’ve absorbed your teachings, values, and morals for years. It is not your place to judge them. Leave the judging to God and continue to do what is expected of you—loving and supporting your child. If you are a Christian who believes the Bible, Jesus does not once mention or condemn homosexuality. But the word “love” occurs over 200 times in the New Testament.

Sometimes a parent says the reason for not accepting their child’s queerness is fear for their child’s eternal soul. But what they really fear is that their child’s queerness will humiliate them in front of their church family. They believe their LGBTQ child will reflect badly on their parenting. These parents either believe they have done something wrong to cause their child to “become” LGBTQ, or they fear their peers will believe they have done something wrong, and they will lose their friends and their standing in their church and/or community.

This visceral feeling of connection to our children—our pride when they do well and are well thought of, and our shame when they fail and we place the blame on ourselves and what we have done and haven’t done—is completely normal. I believe every parent has felt some version of this in some circumstance. But it is important to recognize the feeling, feel it, and then realize (this is an ongoing realization in my case) that it isn’t about me—it’s about them. Our kids have quite enough of their own stuff to deal with without us forcing them to take on our issues as well. (Or as my sister Tonya used to say, “I don’t have issues; I have whole subscriptions.”)

I do feel for these parents. The United States is a very strange place. Women can show cleavage in low-cut dresses, and their full breasts in R-rated movies, but a woman who is breastfeeding in public should “cover herself.” We are supposedly a “god-fearing” people, but our church and temple pews are pretty empty. We are supposedly a nation of forgiving Christians, but gun violence was on the rise in 2015. It can get pretty confusing living in our society, and the urge to protect our children from these extremes and raise them with the right values to contribute to the world is to be commended.

Unfortunately, we seem to have come to the point in the United States where we can’t even agree on facts. I’m not sure how that happened, but we’re in an age where someone will present a fact, well-documented and well-supported, and some other person will respond, “I don’t believe that. It’s not true.” And that is it. The fact is discarded and is refused entry into someone’s belief system, even for consideration. Maybe it’s because we have more information at our literal fingertips than ever before. Maybe it is information overload. But here are some history and facts about how and why people are LGBTQ. If you find yourself resisting some of this history or science, ask yourself why.

There Have Been LGBTQ People Throughout History

There is a funny scene in a Thanksgiving episode of Saturday Night Live where a family (with all different political beliefs) sits down at the dinner table and the only thing they can agree on is Adele’s song “Hello.” One of the family members says something to the effect of, “There weren’t any of those transgender folks back in my day.” I’ve also heard statements like this in real life—that the United States is going downhill because many of us are reconsidering the societal construct of gender and sexual orientation.

Egyptologists discovered two men buried in a tomb (dated approximately 2400 BC) buried in the same position a husband and wife would be buried in. Some researchers thought this meant they were brothers, or twins, but both men were very high-ranking in the society (you had to have serious dough and stature to rate a tomb), and the hieroglyphics for their professions indicated that they were manicurists, probably some of the few people who could actually touch the Pharaoh. Other hieroglyphics indicate that their names, Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep, were joined together as one name, which was an indication of marriage.13

Homosexuality and bisexuality have been practiced in almost every world culture that has been researched by historians. In some times and places, homosexuality and bisexuality were fully accepted and commonplace. In other times and geographies, it was extremely prohibited and taboo.14 Perhaps most known and most referred to is the very licentious sex lives of the ancient Greeks and Romans, but there is also historical evidence in early societies that gay people existed within even our most nomadic and ancient tribes, and far from being ostracized, they were gratefully given orphan children of their relatives and the tribe to raise.

A Hindu medical text dated around 400 BC talks about homosexuality, transgender, and intersex people.15

In Native American cultures, there were “two-spirit” people. These people wore the clothing and did the work of both genders. Native people believe in the existence of male-females, and female-males. Some sort of two-spirit or cross-gender people have been documented in over 155 tribes in pre-European North American. Two-spirit people were often considered special in tribes because of their unique attributes, and were the tribe’s visionaries, healers, medicine people, and the nannies of orphans.16

A pope in the 15th century legalized sodomy in the summer months.17

A Virginia court in 1629 recorded the first gender ambiguity among American colonists. Thomas(ine) Hall was declared both a man and a woman so that colonists wouldn’t be confused. Hall was ordered by the governor to wear both men’s and women’s clothing (together) each day.18

This is by no means even close to an exhaustive list. I’m just giving you a few examples of LGBTQ history. It is, in all seriousness, the history of the world itself.

The Science Behind “Baby, I was Born this Way.”

This section will cover the science behind the LGB in LGBTQ. I will talk more about gender in the upcoming non-binary and transgender chapter.

Sometimes people are reluctant to talk about the science behind sexual orientation because they fear a dark future where gayness is “cured” by gene selection, or perhaps they think scientists are searching for a cure, or that a scientific explanation means that being gay is “not normal,” a message gay people already hear quite enough. I certainly understand all these concerns, because there have been too many times in human history where there have been ethnic or religious cleansings. Societies have always preferred a certain set of traits, and the desire is strong to select for those traits, whatever they may be. So this is not just a LGBTQ concern, it is a concern of any person who has any characteristic that doesn’t conform to whatever the impossible standards are of a given society. My take on the scientific research is that it is actually very reassuring to many LGBTQ people and their families. Our society is still so homophobic and unforgiving that it is a relief to just be able to know, “I was born this way. This is who I am.”

The hereditary (a set of characteristics passed through families) link of LGB has been established for decades now, but scientists knew it was not a strictly genetic link, because there are identical twins who have different sexual orientations. Scientists from the National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis theorize that homosexuality seems to have an epigenetic, not a genetic link. LGB is linked to epi-marks—conduits of information that control the expression of certain genes. These epi-marks usually disappear between generations. In LGB people, the epi-marks don’t disappear. Instead, they pass from father-to-daughter or mother-to-son, William Rice, a biologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara and lead author of the study, said. 19

“There is compelling evidence that epi-marks contribute to both the similarity and dissimilarity of family members, and can therefore feasibly contribute to the observed familial inheritance of homosexuality and its low concordance between [identical] twins,” Rice said in a 2012 US World and News Report article.

Rice’s theory makes total sense; if homosexuality was just a genetic trait, scientists would expect the trait to become rarer, because homosexuals would probably not reproduce. But epi-marks helped the parents of the LGB children when they themselves were in the womb. Epi-marks protected the fathers of LGB children from underexposure to testosterone, and protected the mothers of LGB children from overexposure to testosterone while they were developing embryos and fetuses themselves. Rice also said that homosexual behavior is common in the animal kingdom and has been observed in black swans, penguins, sheep, and other animals.

But epi-marks aren’t the whole story. Sex hormones in prenatal life also play a role. Girls born with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, which results in increased levels of male sex hormones, often report same-gender attraction as teenagers and young adults.20 There are also cases of genetic males who, through accidents, or having been born without a penis, were subjected to sex change and raised as girls.21 As teenagers and young adults, these men are typically attracted to girls and women. The fact that you cannot make a straight genetic male sexually attracted to another male by raising him as a female makes any “choice” or social theory of sexual orientation seem pretty unlikely.

A 2015 article in the Guardian22 said that brain scans of gay and heterosexual people show their brains also appear to be organized in different ways. Gay men appear on average to have more female typical organization in brain pattern responses, and lesbian women are somewhat more male typical in their responses. Scans also show differences in cognition between gays and straights. Not bad or worse, just different. But these scans might also help explain why so many LGB people are talented business people, athletes, and original artists. Differences in cognition may mean differences in psychology, personality, and relationships, and difference can also mean creativity and original problem-solving, which are real assets in any society. I like to think that though things are hard for our children, they may have also received gifts along with their challenges.

Another important note from The Guardian article: It’s good to remember that sexual orientation is not a behavior, nor is it the sex acts someone may enjoy. People have had sex with people of the same or different genders without labeling themselves, and the sex acts might still feel good or be enjoyable. Sexual orientation is a “pattern of desire,” it’s who you fall in love with, who you want to spend time with. It’s not just who you want to have sex with.