It turns out that I have more to say about 'gay gene' research. (Publicly accessible version of my previous rant here
https://twitter.com/Red_Amber/status/1167852748714516481)
Spoiler alert, I think it's bollocks. Which is good because that makes it hard for homophobes to exploit it.
Genetics and evolution is only ever a history of *reproduction*. If we extrapolate from that to make judgements about human's sexual identities, sexual desires or even what kind of non-reproductive sex they are having, we are on shaky ground and need to be very careful about our assumptions.
Bisexuality complicates genetic research on same sex attraction. We mess up the purity of their gay and straight sample sets. But more fundamentally, this research is based on some fallacies that bisexuals refute by their very existence.
Fallacy 1 - Sexual orientation is a binary - you are either 100% gay or 100% straight.
Fallacy 2 - Gender is a binary - people are either male or female and you can tell their gender by their bodies.
Fallacy 3 - Sexual Orientation = Sexual Attraction - people only ever experience sexual attraction to their normally preferred gender(s).
Fallacy 4 - Sexual Attraction = Sexual Behaviour - people only ever have sex because of sexual attraction.
Fallacy 5 - Sexual Behaviour = Sexual Orientation - your sexual orientation can be determined by the gender of your current partner.
Fallacy 6 - Sexual Attraction is the same as the desire to reproduce.
It is trivially easy to disprove all of these fallacies by looking at what people actually *do*.
Disproving Fallacy 1 - Bisexual people exist.
Disproving Assumption 2 - Transgender, nonbinary and intersex people exist.
Disproving Fallacy 3 - Many (possibly even most?) people have experienced attraction to someone who is not their preferred gender (if they have one).
Disproving Fallacy 4 - People have sex for many reasons apart from sexual attraction. These can include experimentation, social bonding, social necessity (eg marriage), wanting to conceive and rape.
Disproving Fallacy 5 - Linked to the previous example - being currently in a same sex relationship is not the same as NEVER being in a mixed sex relationship.
Disproving Fallacy 6 - This works in two ways - people may have sex with people of their non-preferred gender in order to conceive and people may avoid conception when it is possible. This is not just a modern phenomena - people have been using contraceptives/abortifacients/controlling reproductive access since prehistory.
All the fallacies combine into one big error - equating sexual attraction and identity with reproduction. That allows us to ignore the complexity of human relationships and attractions. It produces bad, lazy science and meaningless paradoxes.
Another problem with this approach is it treats same-sex attraction as an oddity or a mistake. We are invisible in the genetic record, therefore we can't be that important. But humans are weird and creative and contrary. We always had many genders and we have always been attracted to many genders.