Born This Way?

SPEAKER_04: Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash-back rewards program unlike other credit cards. You earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily, and can grow it at 4.15% annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the Wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC terms apply. SPEAKER_22: This week on The New Yorker Radio Hour, the novelist Jennifer Egan on how we could end the enormous problem of homelessness if we had the will to do it. That's The New Yorker Radio Hour. Listen wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_04: Lulu Miller, this is Radiolab. And a little while ago, our reporter Matthew Kelsey came to me with the story of an idea. Yeah, the idea that you were born into a sexual orientation. SPEAKER_17: This is like the Born This Way idea? Yeah, yeah, the Born This Way idea. Okay. Which SPEAKER_17: I always believed to be true for much of my life. But in the past few years, that idea felt essentially like under assault in these pretty public ways, in ways that were happening on both the right and the left. And so it's like on one hand, you have something like the bill in Florida, the Don't Say Gay bill, where you can't teach kids third grade and SPEAKER_17: below anything about sexual orientation or gender identity because the logic there is that by talking about sexuality and gender or reading a book about it or whatever, we SPEAKER_26: will make sure that parents can send their kids to school that those things will like SPEAKER_17: change a kid's identity to get an education, not an indoctrination. Yeah. And the foundation SPEAKER_17: of the thing is just this idea that like tiny little things in a kid's school environment is going to change them radically. So that's going on on the right. Uh huh. And on the SPEAKER_13: left. So there are many different theories of gender and mine is just one. In the past SPEAKER_17: several years, you've had these ideas that become much more mainstream ideas like how social norms and cultural values and politics and history, how all these things are maybe the most important thing in shaping your own sense of self and your own sexual preferences. But again, like that it's the environment outside you that is really the thing that is making you. Yeah, I will. And I will, I don't know if this matters, but I will just SPEAKER_04: say here that as a queer lady, uh, married to a lady, someone who identifies as bi, um, and somebody who's like read about this stuff and thought about it a fair amount. This is the idea that makes sense to me, that sexuality, that desire, sexuality is shaped by this whole swirl of factors. Like that really makes sense to me. It pretty much lines up with my experience. Right. And I think for me as a cis straight man, um, like I, my identity always felt very SPEAKER_17: consistent and I just never really had to think about it. And in part, you know, maybe embarrassingly, like I never had to think about it. It was just like, I grew up in a world where born this way, the born this way idea was the thing. It was the thing that I thought you were supposed to believe if you were a good ally to gay rights. It was the thing that you use as an argument against the idea of conversion therapy that you can just take a kid and like change their environment and make them into something. And it was the thing that I always just like vaguely understood to be something rooted in science. You had SPEAKER_04: a sense you'd been told like, this was how it works in the science. Yeah. They're like SPEAKER_17: the science is at the root of this. And I think, I think I should underline that this is just like the born this way idea was a thing that millions and millions of people believe. How do you know that? Well, so I went Googling because I was just like, am I alone now on an island, an old man on an island? And there's a Gallup poll from 2018 that shows that 50%, half of all Americans believe that somebody is born that way. And so I felt like I was witnessing all the ways in which this born this way idea was maybe unraveling. And I just started wondering, like, why is this even an idea that I believe? SPEAKER_04: Like okay, so why do I believe where did this belief come from? Why do I believe it so certainly? And why do so many other people believe it? Yeah, because like, it's clearly like, it's SPEAKER_17: clearly an idea. It's an idea constructed by human beings that must have some sort of like history. And I just didn't know what the history was. And I didn't know how this thing became as pervasive as it did. But yeah, like, for me personally, like, why do I believe this? What is the truth to this? And is it like, is it true? And if it's not true, what does it mean for it not to be true? Because if you have a right wing front that is making these environmental arguments trying to like annihilate certain types of identities, like what argument do you then make in the face of that? SPEAKER_04: Yeah, no, I wonder that like, I feel that I worry about that. And I don't know. I mean, is this because of that, like, I am interested in this story. But is this the moment to look into this history to talk about this unraveling if there is so much real harm at stake? Yeah, I think, you know, talking to a lot of different people, the point is like, it's SPEAKER_17: unraveling whether or not we talk about it. And some of the people I talked to, what they said is, it doesn't have to be so frightening, or it doesn't have to be so scary or that like, the unraveling itself, like staring at it and understanding why it's happening is actually possibly the path towards a greater and like more durable protection. Huh. Okay. Okay. Well, I don't understand how that could be. But I am curious to find SPEAKER_04: out. So where do you where does this where do you where do you want to start? SPEAKER_17: Well, okay, so I started trying to figure out where this idea actually came from, like the birth of it, almost everything I came across the research team's leader, everything I read Dean Hamer, Dean Hamer, everybody I was talking to Dean's motivations are what SPEAKER_11: Dean's motivations are, but that rightly or wrongly, we talked about the Dean Hamer paper SPEAKER_17: from 93. That's it. Yep. That's him. Oh, interesting. People kept pointing to this one all Dean is saying is guy nothing in science is a fact with a capital F. But he was essentially this SPEAKER_17: sort of linchpin. I think that Dean Hamer is to the idea that you were born this way SPEAKER_17: kind of the culmination of a particular project, a several decades long process origins of SPEAKER_08: homosexuality. Hello. Yeah. Oh, shoot. Can you hear me? I can hear you very well. How is my mic? Your SPEAKER_17: mic sounds pretty good. Good. So last summer 2022 I began interviewing Dean, how are things over there? Things are wonderful here. As always, he's 72 lives in Hawaii. It's, you SPEAKER_16: know, 85 degrees and blue skies and the trade winds are blind. Well, that's lovely. So not too bad. And actually the first thing I ever came across of Dean was an oral history that SPEAKER_17: he did. And the thing that grabbed me about it is how there are these moments from his life that are almost like these little precursors to the born this way idea. Okay. And I think like well, it's I think like one of the things is kind of like one of his earliest memories. So I was in preschool. This is in Montclair, New Jersey, just outside New York. And every SPEAKER_16: day they would make us take a nap and they would give us little mats and we'd lay down and I would lie on my stomach and then I would start sort of rubbing around and having fantasies. And I always fantasized about the Lone Ranger, the Lone Ranger, that mythical lawman from SPEAKER_17: TV with the black mask, which I thought was very sexy, Chris boy cowboy hat and had a SPEAKER_16: nice pouch in his Levi's. And in this little fantasy, Dean would hop up on the Rangers SPEAKER_17: horse, wrap his arms around him and ride around the range with him. The way he said it was SPEAKER_17: like, I just knew I wanted to be his friend. And so there he'd be face down in his preschool on his nap mat. And I would gyrate into the mat and get a little tiny boner. And he's SPEAKER_04: like three, five years old, five, five, five. But eventually one of the preschool teachers SPEAKER_17: would come over and be like, Dean, you were definitely not supposed to do that. But he SPEAKER_17: says over the next few years, when he'd be on something like a school field trip, I would SPEAKER_16: fantasize about guys that I was rooming with or that we were on the bus with. And still SPEAKER_17: it wasn't sexual. It's more about friendship. It was just like those first little inklings SPEAKER_17: of desire. You know what we might call puppy love that thing that just sort of bubbles up attraction. And during any of this, are you confused by it at all? Does it? No, I SPEAKER_16: never questioned the direction of my attraction. It just swelled up in me. It was just there. SPEAKER_17: But this is the suburbs 1950s, middle class heteronormative type of environment. So Dean SPEAKER_16: in middle school would like make out with girls because that's what everybody was doing. Had girlfriends in high school, including the queen of the prom. We went to the prom together, but I felt like I wanted to be with boys and I knew I wanted to be with boys, but just had no way to realize that. But then one night Dean's at home, he's 15. And I saw SPEAKER_16: a TV program called the homosexuals, the homosexuals with CBS news correspondent Mike Wallace. SPEAKER_17: It's this hour long TV news report from 1967. Most Americans are repelled by the mere notion SPEAKER_00: of homosexuality. And in it, there are gay men lit indirectly so that you couldn't see SPEAKER_16: their face. This man is 27 college educated talking about how horrible it was to be a homosexual. I had one friend who was beaten savagely by his father about violence they SPEAKER_17: endured. And he beat him in fact with bricks, but how they couldn't maintain relationships about how they felt like they had to hide that it was a sickness. I know that inside SPEAKER_00: now I'm sick and I'm sick in a lot of ways. I looked at that and thought, oh gosh, that's SPEAKER_16: who I am that they're talking about. And it was truly frightening. Did it make you feel SPEAKER_17: some sort of shame or like I would think I'm ill or something? I didn't feel that. I felt SPEAKER_16: really angry because it wasn't right. And it was who I was, but I couldn't think of any way around it whatsoever. And I knew I better keep my trap shut. But then 1969 Dean SPEAKER_17: graduates from high school smoking a lot of pot. Once he finishes undergrad, he applies to Harvard Medical School to my surprise, get in there. So I head off to Boston and SPEAKER_16: it's in Boston that Dean encounters these two very, very important things. The first SPEAKER_17: gay liberation. This very new part of the gay rights movement that is about being out, that is about gay pride. My sort of first taste of activism. And it's not as though SPEAKER_16: Dean would become an activist, but I went to my first gay pride parade, literally scary, people throwing beer cans and the like. In Boston, he sort of swept up in a sea of a SPEAKER_17: movement where you can, and I was like, whoa, go to gay bars. This is pretty good. You can SPEAKER_16: have a boyfriend. At one point I fell in love. And how was it? It was amazing and fantastic. SPEAKER_17: But the other thing Dean would encounter in Boston was something that for better, for worse, a part of this very gay rights movement would come to rely on him for. Genetics. He basically stumbled into it at Harvard, fell in love with it. Because you're studying the SPEAKER_16: blueprint of life. It explains everything. I mean, when you start, you're nothing but a little spool of DNA surrounded by a coat. That's all that you are. So all of the instructions for everything that we develop into is hidden in that piece of DNA. That was the promise SPEAKER_17: of it. And that promise would end up entwining Dean and the gay rights movement. So I decided SPEAKER_16: to go work with him. So mid-seventies Dean gets his PhD from Harvard. He goes down to SPEAKER_17: DC, the National Institutes of Health, to do genetics work there. It was all very basic SPEAKER_16: science. Figuring out how genes turn on and off. How your blood carries oxygen. Really technical stuff. How copper islands induce the metallothionein gene in saccharomyces cerevisiae. Why are you laughing? It sounds very boring. Very boring. And he was actually SPEAKER_17: like it was kind of big and important work, but the details of it were horrendous. And uninteresting. But he does the boring stuff. For a good 10 years. And so cut to... I'm SPEAKER_17: 40 years old. It's now 1991. I have a stable career at the National Institutes of Health, SPEAKER_16: but I don't really want to spend the rest of my life working on something that fewer than a dozen people in the world appreciate. And that I want to do something that's bigger than that and that's more important than that. I mean, it's the whole reason he got into SPEAKER_17: this to uncover something fundamental about nature. At the same time... So far tonight, SPEAKER_07: we've been bringing you news of the world around us. There's this revolution happening. SPEAKER_07: Now we have news of the incredible world inside us. The very beginnings of what is called SPEAKER_17: the Human Genome Project. The Human Genome Project. A vast effort to map man's entire SPEAKER_17: genetic system. Scientists begin mapping out and identifying every single gene. The very SPEAKER_07: building blocks of life. And our chromosomes. It's essentially like having an encyclopedia SPEAKER_18: of man. The principal will know the complete set of instructions which make people. And SPEAKER_17: for people like Dean, it was new and exciting. The belief was this is the thing that is actually going to unlock all of that mystery hidden in that piece of DNA. And not just the basic SPEAKER_17: stuff. From hair color to height. But personality traits. Shyness. Aggression. Empathy. Thrill-seeking. SPEAKER_16: Alcoholism. Intelligence. Mental illness. Depression. Everything about life. And so I started thinking about, you know, what are big questions? And it just occurs to me that, wow. Attraction. Desire. Sex. It's so important. To Dean, it has to be encoded in us. Because SPEAKER_17: the driving force of evolution is to make organisms that can have more organisms. In SPEAKER_16: other words, sex drives everything. What could I learn about that? And so is he immediately SPEAKER_04: like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, is there a genetic component to homosexuality? Well, actually Dean says, like, no. Dean says he really just wanted to learn about genes and sexuality. SPEAKER_17: And the first thought he said wasn't even about himself. It was, hmm, you know, because SPEAKER_16: I'm gay, I know where I can get subjects. Other gay people. Because whenever you're interested in a trait, the only powerful way to study it is to study the minor version of the trait. Because if you study something that everybody has, it's almost impossible through genetics to figure out how it works. So the hope is by studying gay people, like SPEAKER_17: that's actually the path into understanding the genetics of sexuality more broadly. So SPEAKER_04: the really, he says it wasn't at all about like homosexuality or trying to figure out what makes him the way he is. No, I mean, everything I read of or from Dean, everything SPEAKER_17: I've seen him say publicly and what he told me is, no, like it was just trying to understand sexuality and this being kind of the only way to do it. And so he and his team, they decided they're going to start with gay men. Okay, so dudes, just dudes first. Right. So SPEAKER_17: basically he pitches this to his bosses at the NIH. I got the green light. And he began. SPEAKER_16: So we started placing advertisements in gay papers, went to the HIV clinic right at the NIH, went to a group called PFLAG, parents and friends of lesbians and gays. Dean said when he would interview these gay men right off the bat, almost all of them would say SPEAKER_17: it was just there. Like Dean, they'd always just felt this way. But if you're going to show that that has anything to actually do with genetics, what you need are families. And so he's like, okay, do you have any brothers? Do you have any sisters? Are they gay? What about mom? What about dad, cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents? Do you think any of them are gay? And I started traveling all over the country, California, Pennsylvania, SPEAKER_16: to the deep south, to the great heartland. He would sit down with these family members and ask them all these questions, basic information about their age and their birth. Then I would ask about their own sexuality. You know, when was your first sexual fantasy? What did you SPEAKER_17: fantasize about? For example, if you masturbate, who do you think about? Is it another guy SPEAKER_16: or is it a woman or both? How many different people have you had sex with? How many men? How many women? How frequently? How do you have sex? Do you do oral? Do you do anal? Do you do masturbation? Do you do rubbing? Yeah, that's the basic of a sex interview right there. And it was easy with a gay guy to ask, how often do you have sex and do you have anal or oral? It was a little bit tricky doing that with their great aunt in Duluth. SPEAKER_17: But so Dean does all these interviews. He collects blood from everybody, eventually goes back to DC. Mid 1992 or so. This takes him like a whole year. By that time, I have SPEAKER_16: about 100 or so families a little bit over that. He starts drawing out by hand these SPEAKER_17: family trees with squares for men and circles for a woman. Fill in the circle or the square SPEAKER_16: if definitely gay, blank if definitely heterosexual or thought to be heterosexual and a big question mark if we're not sure. When he's looking at him, he notices this thing, which is that SPEAKER_17: the gay men in a family, there's virtually none on the father side of the family. They're SPEAKER_17: on the mom's side of the family. And it was like a light bulb went off because for geneticists, SPEAKER_16: if you see something coming down the mother's side of the family, it means it could be on the X chromosome. So oftentimes, not always, but oftentimes a man has an X and Y chromosome. SPEAKER_17: The Y comes from the dad. The X comes from the mom. So anything on the X chromosome tends SPEAKER_16: to come down the mother's side. To get DNA, you just take a little blood. They do a bunch of fancy science. Add a couple of reagents, shake it, pass it through a filter. And he SPEAKER_17: starts combing through many of these gay men's X chromosome, the entire chromosome. When he finds this tiny little rainbow. No Lulu, no. Tomorrow's issue of Science magazine contains SPEAKER_18: the results of a National Institutes of Health study. He finds this little genetic tweak, SPEAKER_18: which shows that male homosexuality may be genetically determined. And it was this evidence SPEAKER_09: today about what causes a man to be homosexual. A little bit of DNA, the origins of homosexuality SPEAKER_17: that would become to some a source of comfort or a confirmation, to some a misstep towards greater injustice. But maybe most importantly to some, it would become this very powerful weapon. SPEAKER_18: Is it something that happens at birth? Or is it a lifestyle? SPEAKER_09: 58% are against legalizing gay marriages. It is a cultural war. This war is for the soul SPEAKER_24: of America. It is an abomination for a man to lie with a man. We are going to fight back. SPEAKER_20: This is not a moral issue. This is a human rights issue. We will be free. All that in SPEAKER_04: just a moment. Lulu here. If you ever heard the classic Radiolab episode, sometimes behave so strangely, you know that speech can suddenly leap into music and really how strange and magic sound itself can be. We at Radiolab take sound seriously and use it to make our journalism as impactful as it can be. And we need your help to keep doing it. The best way to support us is to join our membership program, the lab. 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Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA member FDIC terms apply. After, but her emails became shorthand in 2016 for the media's deep focus on Hillary SPEAKER_28: Clinton's server hygiene at the expense of policy issues, is history repeating itself? SPEAKER_12: You can almost see an equation again, I would say led by the times in Biden being old with Donald Trump being under dozens of felony indictments. Listen to On the Media from WNYC. SPEAKER_28: Find On the Media wherever you get your podcasts. SPEAKER_04: Radiolab, Lulu, Matt. SPEAKER_05: Uh-huh. Okay. That feels like a bit of a short shrift. SPEAKER_04: Matt Kielty. Thank you. Straight reporter. Okay. All right. So we are here talking about the birth of the Born This Way idea, where it came from, how true it is, all that. And we left off, Dean had found some genes, like genes that he thought, what exactly? Like, did he think that these genes fully predetermined a sexuality, a person's sexuality? Okay. So actually, I mean, well, technically what he found is like a little region that SPEAKER_17: maybe contained a gene, some genes. That's sort of the question. Like, what are the results actually show? And I spent a long time looking into this, into the science of this. Dean's science, other science. But then I stumbled across this paper that made me realize how the science like isn't just the thing here. And in fact, to understand why the Born This Way idea really took off, you have to understand the world outside of the science. So exciting for me to talk to you truly. And that the Born This Way idea is kind of the culmination SPEAKER_11: of a particular project, a several decades long process. Oh, two things before we really SPEAKER_17: jump in one, because I always forget this. If I could just have you say your first last name and then however you want to ID yourself, like title at work or whatever. SPEAKER_11: Oh, sure. So it's pronounced Joanna Wiest. Wiest. Wiest. Great. I'm Joanna Wiest. I am an assistant professor of politics at Mount Holyoke. SPEAKER_17: So Joanna wrote a dissertation, which is the thing that I saw, about how the true origins of Born This Way go back to much earlier than Dean. Exactly. Yeah. OK, so where would you want to start? SPEAKER_11: So I think that the natural place that I would begin is in the 1950s, because that's when we see the founding of the Madison Society. SPEAKER_17: One of the first nationwide gay rights organizations. SPEAKER_11: Also the Daughters of Bilitis, a lesbian organization. Both of which were predominantly white, middle class. SPEAKER_17: They had dress codes on the books. Men had to wear ties. Women couldn't wear jeans. SPEAKER_02: It's hard in terms of today to really understand what was going on in the 50s. SPEAKER_17: This is from an oral history of Del Martin, who was one of the co-founders of the Daughters of Bilitis. SPEAKER_02: I mean, the fear and the paranoia was just something fierce. SPEAKER_17: Thousands of suspected gay people were being kicked out of the government. There was, you know, fear of losing your job. SPEAKER_02: He's been in jail three times for committing homosexual acts. SPEAKER_17: Of being arrested, thrown into jail. Or thrown into a mental institution. Because at the time... Homosexuality is in fact a mental illness. SPEAKER_17: The argument was that homosexuality was a psychological defect. Which has reached epidemiological proportions. That was literally the American Psychiatric Association's definition. Homosexuality was a mental illness. With all the parents' fault. SPEAKER_17: The idea was... That it was a relationship to the father and the mother. That it was caused by the environment at home. And having a profound effect on the final pattern of the individual's sexual behavior. SPEAKER_02: And so at that point we needed validation. SPEAKER_17: Del says that she and most of the gay people she knew were like, we know we aren't mentally ill. We still have to deal with the rest of society. And Joanna says that these early gay rights organizations decided that the way to deal with the rest of society, to fight off the argument that homosexuality was a mental illness in the minds of the public, was to turn to science. SPEAKER_11: And start collaborating with... I feel from the many years of work... SPEAKER_11: Psychologists and psychiatrists... That a homosexual is first of all a human being. SPEAKER_02: We were guinea pigs for researchers. Research being a way to get rid of the sickness label. SPEAKER_17: And so they start going to psychiatric conferences. Sitting on panels. Making inroads with more researchers. To say that these people aren't sick. SPEAKER_11: And I do not look upon homosexuality as a neurotic problem. SPEAKER_11: That being gay is not a mental illness. That being gay... Flies deep in the individual's nature. SPEAKER_17: That it has nothing to do with your parents. That it's essentially natural. SPEAKER_17: And then you would hear this idea... Well I was going to add that... From somebody like Hal Call, who was the president of the Madison Society. This whole business of homosexualism is just one of the things that exists in nature. SPEAKER_17: That it's essentially a natural variation of the natural world. Which no one's saying that a homosexual person is born that way in a strict sense. But it's that word nature. It's that word nature showing up and starting to put some sort of boundary between the environment and something else that's going on inside of a person. And what happens is over the next 20 years, psychiatry and psychology starts to undergo this really big shift. So when we get to 1973... It's huge. It's so pivotal. The American Psychiatric Association drops the definition of homosexuality as a mental illness. SPEAKER_11: And those prominent gay rights activists who had made these relationships with folks in psychology and psychiatry... They would lean on those allies to start trying to make bigger changes. SPEAKER_17: Exactly. And so Joanna says all throughout the 70s... SPEAKER_11: Gay rights litigators are bringing all of these scientific experts into court to serve as expert witnesses. SPEAKER_17: Now what you see on the other side, like the anti-gay conservative side, is that their rhetoric in these court cases also starts shifting. SPEAKER_09: He was relieved of his classroom duties because he is a homosexual. SPEAKER_17: So like a teacher would be fired for being gay. SPEAKER_19: We are modeling behavior all the time by what we do as well as by what we say or teach in the classroom. SPEAKER_17: Because they're homosexuality. It's kind of seen as a contagion. But that's the rhetoric, which feels very much like... One word, groomer. SPEAKER_03: The grooming seven-year rule. SPEAKER_17: What you see from conservatives today... This is propaganda for grooming. SPEAKER_04: It's groomers pre-groomers. Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER_17: This idea that... SPEAKER_19: There are definite overtones that children will catch. Yes, particularly children of today. SPEAKER_17: Sexual orientation is modeled, it is learned. And in response to that... SPEAKER_11: Pioneering scholars and clinicians... SPEAKER_17: Would come into the court as expert witnesses... SPEAKER_11: To say things like, this high school teacher couldn't change the identities of these students because whatever is causing those identities, those ideas are already going to be set in stone within the first few years of a child's life. SPEAKER_17: Which doesn't mean that the environment still couldn't be playing a role here, but it is pushing the origins of sexual orientation to something much closer to like birth. Implying that homosexuality or even heterosexuality is essentially... Innate. That you're saying in the context of these court battles that like... SPEAKER_04: Yeah, but it's not just like court cases. SPEAKER_17: Like these scientists are coming to annual conferences held by gay rights organizations... To teach them about the science of sexual orientation. SPEAKER_17: And that the origin of sexual orientation might not be rooted in psychology, but rather biology. SPEAKER_04: That's interesting. So you're saying there's almost like this gradient. It's like a gradient. Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER_17: It's like this shift from psychology to biology and not just biology of like the natural world of nature, but like human biology. SPEAKER_11: Which is the beginning of what we eventually will see as a Born This Way rhetoric. SPEAKER_17: Also did you come across Carl Bean during your research? SPEAKER_11: The disco song? Yeah. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. SPEAKER_17: Okay, Carl Bean. Have you heard of Carl Bean? No, I have not. SPEAKER_04: I'm not familiar with Mr. Bean. Okay, so Carl Bean, Mr. Bean. SPEAKER_17: Gay black man, activist, disco singer. 1977 puts out a song called I Was Born This Way. SPEAKER_04: What? No. Uh-huh. SPEAKER_17: And... It's very good. Ooh, come out onto the dance floor. SPEAKER_04: I would dance to this. SPEAKER_17: It's amazing. SPEAKER_04: Oh my God. Listen to the words. SPEAKER_17: Okay. SPEAKER_04: You laugh at me and you criticize because I'm happy. SPEAKER_17: Yes. SPEAKER_04: Carefree. SPEAKER_17: Uh-huh. SPEAKER_04: And gay. Oh my God. SPEAKER_17: It ain't a fault. It's a fact. SPEAKER_04: Right. So Gaga ripped off Carl Bean? SPEAKER_17: Well, that's a loaded question. But no, I mean, she said multiple, like she said in many interviews, the song was inspired by Carl Bean. The album was inspired by Carl Bean. I guess what we can say is Carl Bean is in the Vanguard here. SPEAKER_11: Okay, Joanna's point is that... The ingredients are there. It just feels really early. SPEAKER_17: Born This Way was still not there as like a full throated message yet. Because like the science wasn't really there. But then once you get into like the mid late 80s, you have somebody like Judd Marmore, who was the former president of the American Psychiatric Association. He was an advocate and collaborator with gay rights groups. He's beginning to place extra emphasis on biological factors. SPEAKER_17: These were studies that were done by the mid 80s that were looking at sexual orientation and like hormones and brain development. SPEAKER_11: That perhaps something happened in utero. And so the idea is like, if you are a male fetus, you are being kind of bathed with estrogen in utero and that's going to influence your brain development, which is then going to feminize you and to make you into a gay man. And as you can hear there, there's a lot of assumptions about what it means to be a gay man there. It's estrogen, which is a female hormone allegedly, which is going to give you feminine qualities that are baked into your brain structures. SPEAKER_17: And that's where you start to see biology really take hold. So you can see how like there's these mainstream cultural assumptions of what homosexuality is that are a part of this work in the 80s. But what happens and what I guess the same thing that's been happening going back through the 70s, the 60s, into the 50s, when this all started, is gay rights activists are going to take this work and fold it into their civil rights campaign, into their public messaging. But that's not like a monolith, right? SPEAKER_04: I mean, were there, it sounds like we're hearing about some of the gay activists, but like were there other, I mean, were there people who are just like, eh, don't grab onto this? Yeah, no, for sure. SPEAKER_17: There were people like Martha Shelley. SPEAKER_29: My feeling was why do you need some psychiatrist to tell you you're okay? SPEAKER_17: A co-founder of the Gay Liberation Front. SPEAKER_11: Which has all these arguments that we want to refuse help from expertise. Here we were trying to supposedly climb the ladder to respectability step by step. SPEAKER_29: And I would feel like, well, hell, the right thing to do is to say, screw it to the system. SPEAKER_17: And the Liberation Front was active in the late 60s, early 70s, basically being like Who said that clinicians get to say anything about our sexualities one way or the other? SPEAKER_11: Word liberation means change, openness to something new. SPEAKER_29: Seeing yourself as a person who can be fluid, who can do other things than whatever somebody prescribes for you. SPEAKER_17: And by the late 80s, early 90s, there were also people in academia like Judith Butler arguing that the environment, culture, social interactions, fluidity, all these things were essential to understanding human sexuality and also gender identity. So you're saying there was like, there's a cauldron of ideas here, of course, like there's SPEAKER_04: nuance. Yes. SPEAKER_17: But those ideas are more fringe, they're more radical. And the mainstream of the movement, the most powerful part of the movement is going to continue to hitch itself to this developing biological point of view. SPEAKER_09: And then There is some new evidence today about what causes a man to be homosexual. Two years before Dean's study, December 1991, A new study suggests that the answer to a very large degree may be found in a person's genetic inheritance. SPEAKER_17: Genetics, which in the 90s was like biological determinism on steroids. That shows up. SPEAKER_24: Researchers at Northwestern examined 167 gay men and their brothers. SPEAKER_17: So basically there's a twin study that comes out. A twin study is like a shorthand way for scientists to measure the potential genetic influence on a trait. And so these researchers look at adopted brothers all the way up to identical twins. And found the more similar the brothers were genetically, the more likely both would be SPEAKER_17: gay. Which leads one of the researchers to say A substantial proportion of the causes of male sexual orientation are genetic. SPEAKER_24: Some scientists criticize this latest report as simplistic. Indeed, many predict the roles of environment and heredity will continue to be debated unless scientists can actually identify genes responsible for homosexuality. SPEAKER_17: Again, so that's 91. Okay. SPEAKER_04: And that is where Dean comes back? SPEAKER_17: Yeah, exactly. 91, he's pitching the NIH. That's a green light. Starts doing his interviews. To get DNA, you just take a little blood. Combing through these X chromosomes. When eureka. They find the little genetic tweak. And the tweak, they found it in pairs of gay brothers. They were looking at gay brothers because gay brothers reduces the amount of just like randomness and chance that could be involved here. And they find this little tweak in almost all of the pairs of gay brothers. And I think it was it was about like 80 men were involved in this study. SPEAKER_04: It is weird though, just to say that for one sec, like that's less than 100 people. Yeah, no, it's small. So what does that mean in terms of, you know, what does that mean? SPEAKER_17: So to Dean, what it means is that this little region of DNA is playing some sort of role in determining these brothers' sexual orientation. But how strong a role it's playing is difficult to estimate. SPEAKER_17: Like if it were potentially completely determinative, every gay brother would have had this gene, but they don't. SPEAKER_16: It was more like tilting the scales a bit. It was like a little nudge. Yeah, that's all we said. Yeah. SPEAKER_04: A little bit, perhaps. Right. SPEAKER_16: But a week before the paper gets published, July 1993, my phone just starts ringing off the hook. Word got out about the study. And I get called by the New York Times and the Washington Post, the LA Times, major magazines, pretty much every major TV network. And what exactly are they asking you? I think the first question was just, what did you find? And Dean would say, a statistically significant correlation between markers on XQ28 and male sexual orientation. And then everybody sort of crossed their eyes. SPEAKER_17: But he says the very next question you get from these reporters was, well, what does SPEAKER_16: this mean for gay rights? SPEAKER_17: Because this was 1993, that was like the question. The first presidential campaign in which gays and lesbians have begun voting in a block SPEAKER_21: in their own self-interest. SPEAKER_17: Earlier that year, Bill Clinton had taken office. I have a vision and you're a part of it. SPEAKER_17: He'd run a campaign that was responding to the gay rights movement. The first time in the history of this country, our issues are being discussed. SPEAKER_17: And so leading up to Dean's research, all over the news, you've got things like the SPEAKER_29: ban on homosexuals in the military, Don't Ask, Don't Tell, the Gay and Lesbian March. SPEAKER_01: One of the largest demonstrations ever in the nation's capital. SPEAKER_17: There's also the beginnings of marriage equality, debates about homosexuality and sex education. Some on the religious right are running a TV ad campaign. SPEAKER_17: And so people wanted to know in the midst of this whole conversation, if genetics are a part of it, what does that mean for gay rights? And Dean would be like, well, I don't know. SPEAKER_16: That's not a scientific question. That's a social question. It's a political question, but it's not about the science. Dean Hamer, a senior researcher. SPEAKER_17: But then Dean gets a call to come on a very popular show, Nightline, to talk about his work. SPEAKER_16: I was like, no, because that's not, that's a discussion show. It's not really a science show. And they're like, well, we're going to talk about it anyway. So I was like, oh, okay. I should point out that Dr. Hamer wants only to refer and to comment on the scientific SPEAKER_18: aspects of the story. SPEAKER_17: But then Ted Koppel leads in with this question. SPEAKER_18: If the findings of the study, Dr. Hamer, are confirmed, will it then be accurate to say that homosexuality is not optional behavior? And Dean, what we found is that basically just sticks to his science. SPEAKER_15: One specific region of one chromosome is linked to homosexuality, at least in some men. SPEAKER_17: But Koppel pushes it a little bit further. SPEAKER_18: Will it then be possible at least to say that it is not a purely behavioral thing, that there are inherited traits? SPEAKER_15: There are definitely inherited characteristics, which are very important. That's correct. But... And how important? SPEAKER_16: Well, previous... I am unwilling to go to the lengths he wants me to go to. SPEAKER_18: I'm just trying to get you to put it in as commonplace a language as you can so that we all understand it. SPEAKER_15: From Deans like Look, homosexuality is not simply determined by some single gene. What's important today is that we clearly demonstrated that genes are involved. SPEAKER_17: And really, it's nearly at the end of this 30-minute long episode that Koppel just finally asks the thing. SPEAKER_18: Back to the science of this, Dr. Hamer, and ask you to what degree is it appropriate, based on the findings that you have reached, that gays can say, look, it's not a matter of choice. It is predetermined, in a sense, genetically. SPEAKER_17: Basically, are you born this way? And it was almost as if like that word choice unlocks something in Dean. SPEAKER_15: I think all scientists that have studied sexual orientation already agree that there's very little element of choice in whether or not people choose to be gay or heterosexual. Wait, wait, all scientists say there's no choice? SPEAKER_17: Well, there's very little choice. SPEAKER_04: Is that even true? Did all scientists think that? SPEAKER_15: Well, okay, so— Well, previous studies have suggested that— SPEAKER_17: Dean is referencing all of the stuff that we talked about, the child development studies, the hormone studies, the twin studies, all that stuff, plus his work that he believes tells him that there's very little choice involved in sexual orientation. SPEAKER_04: Have they heard of bisexuality? Did bisexuality not exist in people's minds then? Wait, hang on, I'm sending you something, I'm sending you something. SPEAKER_17: Okay. Ooh. The cover of Newsweek with the headline— Not gay, not straight, a new sexual identity emerges. SPEAKER_17: Okay, thank you. Yeah, so that's 1995. That's two years after Dean's work. Okay, but anyway, well, just the only reason I'm bringing that up is I guess you could— SPEAKER_04: just it's like it's just like there's choice in every aspect of it, which is part of what makes it so darn fun. SPEAKER_17: Right. I think what's tricky about it is there's like this question of what are we talking about when we're talking about choice? And I talked about this a lot with Dean. So you think because there's some sort of genetic basis, that means what? That we don't have any control? No, it's within our control to do what you do, including who you have sex with. SPEAKER_17: But Dean believed that what he found showed that when it comes to sexuality— You can no longer make the argument that it's purely a matter of choice. SPEAKER_16: It's something much deeper than that. It's like the thing that strikes you about somebody, like the way they laugh or like SPEAKER_17: the shape of their mouth or whatever, like those flickers of desire that just emerge from within you. SPEAKER_04: Sure. I get that it feels bodily. It feels that it's just like intuitively that you're not controlling it. But that doesn't necessarily mean it's genetic or like biological. I mean, plenty of things that feel deep, really rooted come from our environment, our culture. Like that's how it works. It gets in there. SPEAKER_17: Right. SPEAKER_16: I mean, Dean— There could be environmental factors. Will say, sure. It could also be very specific things that happen to you during life. There could be an environmental influence on something like sexual orientation. SPEAKER_17: But to him— Because the gay brothers— Have that little genetic tweak that at least to some degree— Genes are involved. SPEAKER_04: Okay, well, maybe this is what I'm struggling with. This is taking one study that is only on gay men, no women looked at, no other genders, and then this one other pretty small twin study, again, only about gay men, and to make a claim about genetics being involved in sexuality as a whole, like that just feels—that feels like a pretty big leap. SPEAKER_17: Right. And I do think that this is important, which is like, if we set genetics aside, in some way, obviously, this was something that Dean had always felt about himself. That for me personally, sexual orientation wasn't something I chose. SPEAKER_16: It just had something that developed in me. SPEAKER_17: Going back to being five and feeling feelings about the Lone Ranger, like— It was just there. And Dean says those feelings, how would he have modeled them? How would he have learned them? Because, you know, who would be the teachers? It was Montclair, New Jersey in the 50s. And if anything— I know that inside now I'm sick. The environment was telling them— I'm sick in a lot of ways. Don't have this desire. SPEAKER_16: Get rid of it. But I couldn't think of any way around it whatsoever. And sure, Dean had girlfriends in high school, even in college. SPEAKER_17: Just like an unbelievable hottie. SPEAKER_16: I mean, she is really good at sex. He has this three-week affair with a woman. And then I'm just like, but it's just not what I want. It's just not. There's just this persistent desire he has. SPEAKER_17: And so to have that experience, to become a geneticist, to find this tweak in gay brothers, it's a confirmation of something that he felt all along and that he believes to be true that there are probably genes in all of us that are playing a role, even if that role— Like tilting the scales a bit? It's just like a tiny little nudge. But it being 1993— The Human Genome Project— And the way that the media— You'll know the complete set of instructions— Talked about genetics— Which made people— And Dean's work in particular— He found a portion of DNA— SPEAKER_17: Was basically like— That appears to determine sexual orientation. SPEAKER_02: Right here— This is a picture of the entire X chromosome— Is the proof— And this is the area believed to be associated with determining human sexuality— SPEAKER_09: But you are indeed— Which points strongly to— Born this way— Between homosexuality and heredity— And in fact— Think about it for just a moment— SPEAKER_18: This oversimplification— Think only about the legal implication— SPEAKER_17: Suddenly created this new, very powerful legal tool for the gay rights movement to use— SPEAKER_18: While it is constitutional, for example, to prohibit certain behavior, it is not constitutional to make status such as race illegal. SPEAKER_17: In other words, you can make laws that target certain types of behaviors or actions that people take, but you can't make laws that simply target somebody for their identity. This is the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment that we're all treated equally under the law. But the thing about equal protection and the thing about identity under the law is that there's this weird catch. Yes. SPEAKER_11: So, and I think we're starting to get into this idea of immutability here. Yes. Yeah. So this requires getting just a little bit into the weeds to really get, but so— That's right. Let's get into it. SPEAKER_17: We'll just see where we go. SPEAKER_11: I'll do it quickly. SPEAKER_17: So Joanna explained that going back to the 1950s, the Supreme Court started making these rulings saying that certain types of identities get special protections. Yes. Race, sex— Being foreign-born is another. And the court said one of the reasons why these identities get special protection is because they are— Immutable. Meaning that identity is something that is deeply held through chance, luck, or, quote, an accident of birth. SPEAKER_04: Something like you didn't choose this identity, you have no control over it, and therefore— Therefore legally you shouldn't be held culpable for anything pertaining to your identity. SPEAKER_11: It's seen as the gold standard of civil rights protections. And so many in the gay rights movement, many gay rights litigators, look at Dean's work— SPEAKER_11: And think, this is a really powerful thing that we can use. And so whenever they can, they're going to bring biologists into court to say gays and lesbians are immutable. And so the Born This Way idea shows up in— Military exclusion cases. Autonomy cases. Marriage equality cases. SPEAKER_16: And I get called up— Anti-discrimination cases. And asked to testify in Denver, Colorado. Stunned and angry with voters who said no to homosexual rights laws here— SPEAKER_17: In 1992, voters in Colorado had overwhelmingly voted for an amendment to the state constitution that said if you were fired for being gay, if you were denied health insurance for being gay, you had no legal recourse. You couldn't claim discrimination. I mean, hate is okay, you know, they just made it okay. SPEAKER_19: A bunch of other cities and states put forward similar ballot initiatives, and this anti-gay SPEAKER_17: front— Their argument was— It's a choice and— Being gay— SPEAKER_16: People aren't born that way, they just become that way or they choose to be that way. And because it could be changed, so they thought— This was the lead attorney, Jean Debofsky— SPEAKER_13: It would mean that they weren't entitled to equal protection under the law. SPEAKER_17: So Jean started grabbing experts— Psychiatrists, medical doctors— SPEAKER_13: To come testify in court— That, wait a minute. Sexual orientation has a biological or genetic basis. SPEAKER_17: And Dean did come and testify about his work— Which tells us that there is at least a substantial SPEAKER_16: genetic component. It's not purely a choice. And all of this was kind of what Joanna was referring to— SPEAKER_17: Kind of the culmination of a particular project, a several decades-long process— SPEAKER_17: To use science in the courts to argue for civil rights, but also to define the nature of homosexuality— That it's fixed. That it's immutable. SPEAKER_07: We'll hear argument next— Now, whenever these cases— SPEAKER_17: Lawrence and Tyrone Garner versus Texas— Ended up making it to— Obergefell versus Hodges— The Supreme Court— The intimate and committed relationships of same-sex couples— SPEAKER_17: The justices use legal principles like privacy and due process— SPEAKER_11: To give gays and lesbians more civil rights than they previously had. SPEAKER_17: But they don't touch immutability. Exactly. They refuse to give gays and lesbians this special protection under the 14th Amendment. Which I think is a good thing. But I'm a little confused because, I mean, you testified in court. SPEAKER_16: Well, I think I felt right from the beginning that the naturalness of sexual orientation was something that was really important. And I do think it's important to have correct and true information. But for me, immutability is not a requirement for human rights. It just doesn't enter into the argument at all. But I think that the argument of immutability affects people's perceptions and affects people's beliefs in a very deep way. And ultimately, what is decided legally depends on what people think about things. We think that we have these laws that are somehow abstract, but really they're based on people's opinions about things. What's good and what's bad? What's moral and what's immoral? And that information that sexuality is something innate, that affects people's opinions, and that in turn has a big effect on the law. SPEAKER_05: And do you know? Do we know if there was like a sea change just in what your average Joe believed? Well, let me take way too long to answer that question. SPEAKER_17: Joanna says Dean's work definitely impacted public opinion and actually right after it came out. SPEAKER_11: The born gay narrative, you could see it everywhere in press releases from national gay rights organizations during the time. Quotes and papers from gay leaders saying that homosexuality is in fact innate. SPEAKER_17: The human rights campaign starts passing out pamphlets and essays to its members and members of Congress. With the born this way idea of homosexuality. It becomes explicitly a way to change the minds of the mainstream straight public. SPEAKER_11: PFLAG, for instance, Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays, hires a consulting group SPEAKER_11: to ask, among other things, how we should use the biology of sexual orientation in our activism. SPEAKER_27: I knew it. I just knew it. SPEAKER_11: It's a very powerful narrative to tell parents that they did nothing wrong. It's confirming of what I've always felt in my heart. SPEAKER_27: And even when he was little, I would have I would think I couldn't be doing this many things wrong. SPEAKER_04: That tape is that's like, it's in her relief. You can you can hear she still so clearly thinks it's a defect. SPEAKER_17: Yeah. And actually, in fact, in the report that the consulting group wrote for PFLAG, they write, quote, explaining the source of homosexuality allows straight people to reassure themselves that sexuality is a given. If sexuality were a matter of choice or even contain some degree of choice and ambiguity, people would have to think about a volatile and complex dimension of human experience, unquote. SPEAKER_05: Keep that keep that trap door shut. SPEAKER_17: Don't look at it at all. Don't think about it. Wow. SPEAKER_04: It's like it's like explicitly being used in that instance to like comfort a straight. SPEAKER_17: Yes, a majority straight public. And join us is by the time you get to 2003, the ACLU will tell canvassers doing door to SPEAKER_11: door knocking in support of marriage equality to emphasize biology and immutability when they talk about why queer people should be able to get married. It was actually in that year. SPEAKER_17: Oh, three day it was gay rights and the law of the land will never be the same. SPEAKER_17: The Supreme Court rules sodomy bans to be unconstitutional. Homosexual conduct is no longer a crime. SPEAKER_17: In 2004, do you believe homosexuality is a choice? SPEAKER_17: In a presidential debate, Democratic hopeful John Kerry, I think if you talk to anybody, it's not choice, even says Vice President Dick Cheney's daughter, who was a lesbian. And she's being who she was. She's being who she was born as. A 2010 town hall. I don't think it's a choice. Then President Barack Obama. I think that people are born with a certain makeup. Also in 2010, it's called Born This Way. SPEAKER_20: I'm beautiful in my way, cause God makes no mistakes. I'm on the right track, baby. I was born this way. SPEAKER_05: That's where it really got its wings. Yeah. SPEAKER_17: I mean, like Born This Way around here really starts to like move through the culture. And Joanna points out actually that when Gaga put that song out, she's actually overtly SPEAKER_11: campaigning for a repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell. SPEAKER_17: The continued ban on openly gay people in the military. Thank you, thank you, thank you. And on the heels of that song, Obama overturns Don't Ask, Don't Tell. And then 2015, you've probably got one of the most incredible moments of Born This Way, which is when the Supreme Court overturns the ban on same-sex marriage. And even though the court doesn't rule on the immutability question, in the court's majority opinion written by Justice Anthony Kennedy, he writes, quote, sexual orientation is both a normal expression of human sexuality and immutable, unquote. SPEAKER_04: So that moment you see as just like full belief has permeated. Yeah. Mind. Yeah, that it's everywhere. SPEAKER_17: That feeling where you... She was born as. SPEAKER_14: Will you know that you were born this way? And I can't change. Born with. SPEAKER_20: There ain't no other way. Even if I try. Baby, I was born this way. SPEAKER_17: And now. Okay. I will finally answer your question, which is if you remember. Okay, so the 2018 Gallup poll about Born This Way. SPEAKER_04: Yes. Yep. Okay. The one you were part of. The sea of 50% of people who think that people. I'm not on an island. I'm floating in a sea of half of America. SPEAKER_17: Who thinks that a person is born that way? Born this way. Okay. So it turns out Gallup has actually been asking about this all the way back since 1977. And in 1977, that number was at 13%. 13% of Americans believed that somebody was born that way. SPEAKER_04: Wow. Okay. So that's like a really big leap in just a couple. Yeah. SPEAKER_17: It's a total transformation. And actually, if you look at it on a graph, which I'm going to do. Okay. Can I see? Because I had it. Do you want to look at it? SPEAKER_04: Yeah. Okay, here. Okay, what am I looking at? SPEAKER_17: A green line and a green line. Okay, yeah. Just look at the dark green line, which is Born This Way. SPEAKER_04: And it's going vzzzzzoop, and it's spookity spikes in the 90s. Yeah, exactly. SPEAKER_17: You see it's like a very slow climb through the 80s and then boop. And that's like. Right after, like, right after teens work, it just starts shooting up. SPEAKER_16: Wow. So there's this nice correlation. SPEAKER_17: Between growing acceptance of homosexuality and the belief that a homosexual person is born that way. But what's really cool is in those surveys, you can then go in and ask people, what do SPEAKER_16: you think about gay rights? What do you think about gay marriage? And there's been some research that shows that the number one shared characteristic SPEAKER_17: of somebody who supports something like gay marriage is that they believe a person was born that way. So that trumps political affiliation, geographic location. SPEAKER_16: And it was even stronger than your religious affiliation, which is quite remarkable. SPEAKER_04: Wow. So, so it's like, regardless of how accurate or not it is, this belief, they think, is the thing changing minds politically? Right. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, it's fascinating. But we don't have any way of saying that Born This Way is what led those folks to be supportive. And there have been some experimental public opinion research papers published in the last few years that kind of throw some cold water on that idea. And they argue that Born This Way is more of the way that a person who already supports gay civil rights expresses that support for gay civil rights. SPEAKER_17: So rather than Born This Way being the thing that causes you to change your opinion on homosexuality, it's just something that allows you to express an opinion that you already held. Yeah. SPEAKER_11: And I think it's a little bit of both. I mean, I think I've read that like media representation has also been a big thing in SPEAKER_17: acceptance and... SPEAKER_11: Yeah, I could give you one other thing that maybe might help. Sure. So there are a lot of recent public opinion scholars who have looked, Jeremiah Garretson in particular, he has this book where he looks at the importance of the HIV AIDS crisis in kind of making gay and lesbians visible. And visible in the media, but also visible to their family members and their social networks. And one way to think about what's happening here is as people are coming out and being forced to come out, this is precisely at the moment that the gay brain and the gay gene and all these kinds of studies are being published and there's the media reaction and, oh, gosh, now everyone's talking about Born This Way. And so we can definitely think of a lot of congruence there. People are coming out. Here's the story that the national organizations are giving to people. And if you look at NBC Nightly News, you might see someone like Dean Hammer talking about the implications of the gay gene study for your son or daughter. SPEAKER_17: Okay. Before we go further, I just want to take like a tiny break. SPEAKER_04: Okay, I can stay here. That was a lot of info. SPEAKER_17: It was. So just like short little break, refresh, come back. And when we come back? Yeah, we'll get into the unraveling. SPEAKER_04: Okay. So, Radiolab, we'll be back in a moment. Radiolab is supported by Capital One with no fees or minimums. Banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions. Even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply. See Capital One dot com slash bank Capital One N A member FDIC. Radiolab is supported by Apple Card. Apple Card has a cash back rewards program. Unlike other credit cards, you earn unlimited daily cash on every purchase, receive it daily and can grow it at 4.15 annual percentage yield when you open a savings account. Apply for Apple Card in the wallet app on iPhone. Apple Card subject to credit approval. Savings is available to Apple Card owners subject to eligibility requirements. Savings accounts provided by Goldman Sachs Bank USA. Member FDIC. Terms apply. SPEAKER_20: Radio Lab Lulu back with Matt. SPEAKER_04: Okay, so the unraveling. SPEAKER_17: So that idea Joanna mentioned about AIDS, that was a part of a book. The book put forward the idea that AIDS might be the actual like thing that changed American attitudes regarding homosexuality, which meant maybe Born This Way wasn't as much of a driver. SPEAKER_04: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. SPEAKER_17: Um, and so that book, that book came out in 2018. And that same year, researcher and professor Lisa Diamond, true or false out of the University of Utah. SPEAKER_06: Sexual orientation is something you're born with. SPEAKER_17: In 2018, she gives this TEDx talk that has like over half a million views at this point. Chances are that if you support LGBT rights, you said true. SPEAKER_17: Which is essentially about the fact that Born This Way. There are three problems with the Born That Way argument. SPEAKER_17: Shouldn't exist anymore. SPEAKER_06: First, it's not scientifically accurate. SPEAKER_17: So as you pointed out, a lot of the early research that became a part of Born This Way was very male focused. And its own work, over 20 years ago, I started a study, focuses on women tracking over time SPEAKER_06: 100 women with different sexual identities. SPEAKER_17: And her work shows how there's a lot of fluidity and plasticity in female sexuality. Some individuals start out exclusively attracted to one gender, and over time, they find themselves SPEAKER_06: attracted to both genders, or vice versa. And that it's not just women that many people experience these changing desires or orientations SPEAKER_17: over time. SPEAKER_04: So basically, clearly, it's not said at birth. SPEAKER_17: Right, there can be fluidity throughout a lifetime. SPEAKER_06: Now let's move on to the second problem with the Born That Way argument. That it's not legally necessary. SPEAKER_17: She points out that the Supreme Court never ruled on immutability. It never actually hitched its wagon to it. SPEAKER_04: So although we keep shouting, we're born this way, the courts have been saying, we don't care. SPEAKER_06: Now for the third and most important problem with the Born That Way argument. That it's unjust. SPEAKER_17: Diamond says, look, it creates a narrow definition of a lived sexual orientation, which excludes all sorts of people, but also as an argument in and of itself. We were born this way. SPEAKER_06: You can't punish us for something that is not our fault. Now, do you see how that argument just goes along with the notion that being LGBT is a fault? That it's inherently sad and tragic. It's like we have this terrible disease and we need to be pitied instead of punished. Thankfully, times have changed. And if there's one thing that LGBT individuals want now, it is certainly not pity. What we want, what we deserve is dignity, autonomy, self-determination. And that is our strongest argument for equality. SPEAKER_17: That was 2018. And then 2019. A new study found there is no single gene that can determine a person's sexual orientation. SPEAKER_01: Genetics, all grown up. SPEAKER_17: There's this huge paper, hundreds of thousands of people's genomes are sequenced, both men and women. SPEAKER_01: What is being considered the largest genetic study on sexual behavior. And the researchers claim that unlike where Dean expected there would maybe be a dozen SPEAKER_17: genes associated with sexual orientation, now we know that there are thousands of genes SPEAKER_16: involved. And we've identified a few. SPEAKER_14: Complex human behaviors all work like this. SPEAKER_17: And I talked to one of the co-authors of the big paper, Robbie Weido, who was like, all SPEAKER_14: human traits have a lot more to do with probability and statistics. If you look at complex traits like depression or risk-taking behavior, there are thousands SPEAKER_17: upon thousands of genes that might have this like little bit of an influence on what you SPEAKER_14: become. And instead of deterministic, it really just has a lot more to do with probability. SPEAKER_17: The sort of likelihood of what your genes might lead you to become in an environment. And the way this study got reported on a lot and the way it even got messaged was that when it comes to sexual behavior, genetics plays a very, very limited role. And that a lot of this does indeed have to do with the environment. And what you start to see after all this, is this sort of explosion of people, especially SPEAKER_17: in Gen Z, identifying as gay, bi, trans, queer. And what you see is a reaction to that. SPEAKER_03: As the right starts making all these arguments, the one thing we were told about the environment SPEAKER_03: is that none of this has anything to do with culture. None of this has anything to do with nurture. None of this has anything to do with education. And so in Florida… SPEAKER_17: So this is where you get the Florida bill. This is where you get the whole groomer thing. SPEAKER_01: And all of a sudden with her group of friends, they all decided they're trans. SPEAKER_17: Quote, trans trenders. And she went on hormones. Social contagion theories and this rise of anti-LGBTQ legislation. SPEAKER_11: It says we're going to try to eliminate a lot of these kind of ways of being able to live one's life. And Joanna says even though it seems like Born This Way is maybe unraveling… SPEAKER_11: It's that anxiety, it's that real threat… SPEAKER_17: That has kept the idea very much here in the world today. She says you see it in trans rights cases where lawyers bring in… Brain scans. Twin studies. You see it in the way that people talk about the fact that there's this jump in LGBTQ identity. That people are much more likely to be out. SPEAKER_10: Now that the world is more tolerant… In an environment that accepts them, a community that accepts them, a family that accepts them, a country that accepts them… People can actually just be… We didn't just wake up one day and decide to be gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Who they always intrinsically were. SPEAKER_10: It was never a choice. It was something we were born with. SPEAKER_17: Of course we are born that way. And this is the thing is if you believe that there's some sort of genetic basis for something like sexual orientation, it's almost like the Born This Way idea still kind of holds true. And when Dean and I would talk about this and talk about genes… SPEAKER_16: I think they influence what you particularly desire. He would emphasize the role he believes they play. And that's really important. That's what you're going to pursue in your life, most likely. And we would spend hours… Genes are having… Debating that role. …a big influence. And that being the case… We might have a disagreement though on big influence. SPEAKER_17: And Dean would cite studies that claim that if you look at sexual orientation, like 25% to 50% of that has to come from genetics. It's hard to get below. Although some would argue lower. Oh yes, OK, great. 8%. Fine. And I told Dean about this thing that Joanna had said that always stuck with me. SPEAKER_11: That what may be happening is something that conservatives have always feared and that liberals could never bear to admit, which is that it might not be all about biology. That yes, we are biological beings, but we are a part of a very complex environment. SPEAKER_11: And organisms change their environment and environments change organisms. SPEAKER_16: Well there's no evidence for any environmental effect, at least in men. Zero. There's never been any study that showed any effect of the environment. It's important to recognize that. The environment meaning the shared environment, schools, language, religion, stuff like that. Stuff that's shared within the household. Does that mean in women there have been studies? SPEAKER_17: No, I mean none that I could find. I mean, like there's studies that show that sexual behavior is malleable, that like environmental circumstances will change how people have sex with one another, but there's nothing that shows like this thing here is what leads to a sense of orientation. And because of that, for Dean, I think that at the time of birth, your orientation, gay, straight, or bi, that that is very, very strongly influenced by these innate factors that we SPEAKER_16: have right from the very beginning. And we know what the effect is of saying, you know, we don't know how this happens. It's not good. It's not good at all. So I'm not saying at all that that should be the basis of our arguments or our moral arguments or our law, but I think it's a pity if we, if people don't know what's known. Yeah, but I just don't know if much of anything is known. SPEAKER_17: And if we do want to say that there are things that we know about sexual orientation or something, that like what we know to me still feels so, so small. SPEAKER_16: I agree. We know about as much about sexual orientation as we know about depression or schizophrenia, which is not much. And I guess what I would just be wary of is confusing the idea that we don't know everything with the idea that there's nothing to know. SPEAKER_11: I don't know why I'm trans. I just know that I am. But I think by the time I was transitioning, I knew too much about some of these biological stories and I knew I could start probing the past and that I could tell a story about why I did something when I was five years old. But kids are gender nonconforming in many different ways. I've known many kids who played with dolls, cis boys who played with dolls for a period of their life and then don't. And it's not this kind of story that you would hear like, if your little boy is playing with dolls, you can't give him a football because he's going to be gay at the end of the day and you should just accept the fact. I mean, that was the narrative. I think these stories are too easy. I don't think they explain everyone's experience, but they are neat and tidy stories that tell us the way the world is is the way the world was always meant to be. And it also that the Born This Way thing, that narrative doesn't protect us from conservatives who talk about, you know, trans trending because the fact of the matter is there is much, much more identification with gender diverse identities and living sexuality out in different ways and I think we're backing ourselves up into a corner if we don't kind of correct course a little bit. Well, so what is the correct course if it's not making these sorts of scientific arguments SPEAKER_17: about biology, Born This Way, immutability? Well, yeah, I think that I wrote the book in part because I've grown a little bit kind SPEAKER_11: of wary of the kind of queer theory accounts that say, oh, we should just get rid of any kind of involvement with scientific or medical expertise when we're fighting for political equality. SPEAKER_17: Oh, is that a thing that people are talking about? Yeah, I think it's a thing you hear in academia. SPEAKER_11: And you might hear it in some kind of more left-leaning queer smaller activist groups. Which is like, get rid of science, we don't need science anymore. SPEAKER_11: Yeah, but I would not be so willing to say that I don't want a gender identity clinician coming to court and saying that trans kids should have access to gender-affirming healthcare because if you don't give it to them, they might experience trauma, they could even die. And you don't need a biological story to explain why that's the case because those studies that prove that don't investigate the sources of identity. They just say that if you punch someone, it's going to hurt. And I'm okay with that kind of scientific authority. And it seems to have a lot more credibility than an assertion that we know of a gay gene or that we're so close to finding a gay gene, which is just, we're nowhere near that. And I don't think we ever will be. SPEAKER_04: True, true. Matthew Kielty. This episode was reported and produced by Matt Kielty with original music by Matt as well, dialogue with mixing help from Arianne Wack fact checking by Diane Kelly. And some news, Joanna's dissertation is coming out as a book in mere days. It's called Born This Way Science, citizenship and inequality in the American LGBTQ plus movement, Born This Way by Joanna weist. it out. Also huge special thanks a ton of very smart people weighed in with edits to help us navigate through this thorny complex history. Big thanks to Sean McKeithin, Joe Osmunson, Jennifer Brier, Maddie Sophia, Daniel Levine Spound, Heather Radke and Elie Mistahl. Additional special thanks to Angela Pichuli, Carl Zimmer, Eric Turkheimer, Andrea Gana, Chandler Burr, Jacques Baltazar, Mike's breakfast sandwiches and a huge thank you to the lesbian Herstory archives for letting us use some of their oral histories of founders and members of the Daughters of Bilitis. The Herstory archives are so cool. I highly recommend you check them out. That'll do it for today. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being. Catch you next week. SPEAKER_23: Radiolab was created by Jad Abumrad and is edited by Soren Wheeler. Lulu Miller and Latif Nasser are our co-hosts. Dylan Keefe is our director of sound design. Our staff includes Simon Adler, Jeremy Blum, Becca Bressler, Rachel Cusick, McKetty Foster-Keys, W Harry Fortuna, David Gable, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Sindhu Nyana Sambadam, Matt Kielty, Annie McEwen, Alex Neeson, Sara Khare, Anna Raskiwit Paz, Alyssa Jong Perry, Sarah Sambach, Arian Wack, Pat Walters and Molly Webster. With help from Timmy Broderick. Our fact checkers are Diane Kelly, Emily Krieger and Natalie Middleton. Hi, I'm Erica Inyankers. Leadership support for Radiolab science programming is provided SPEAKER_25: by the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation, Science Sandbox, a Simons Foundation initiative, and the John Templeton Foundation. 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