FIGHTING THE HATE

Earlier this month, Stanford University researchers released a study that showed artificial intelligence can be used to predict whether a person is gay. Given a single image, computers used an algorithm to correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81 per cent of cases, and in 71 per cent of cases for women. Humans could also pick out gay people more often then not: 61 per cent for men, and 54 per cent for women.

The researchers said their results offer support for the theory that prenatal hormones, which influence how we look, also influence sexual orientation.

For gay people like me, the study simply seemed to confirm what we already know: sexual orientation is fixed at birth.

You might think that LGBT activists would embrace this new study as yet more evidence that could be used to persuade religious conservatives or other skeptics that being gay isn't a moral failing. Their response was, in fact, the opposite.

The Human Rights Campaign (HRC), a huge lobby group in the U.S., called the study “junk science.” The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation (GLAAD) chided the few media outlets who dared to write about it, criticizing the methodology, including the researchers' decision to use all Caucasian photos (which they presumably did to ensure the computers were detecting facial differences related to sexuality rather than race), and their exclusion of transgender and bisexual people (a flaw, but not a huge one).

A couple of professors joined the pile on, suggesting that it is unethical to so much as study whether machines can predict a person's sexuality, because it could be used by anti-gay governments to further target and oppress people. That is a frightening concern in a world where being gay is illegal in more than 70 countries, but it ignores the possibility that this kind of research might actually change how oppressive regimes think about these issues in the long term. As University of Lethbridge sexuality researcher Paul Vasey points out, “the more people think homosexuality is biological the more tolerant they are.”

And intolerance persists, even here in North America. Roy Moore, the man who just won a primary runoff to become the Republican nominee for senator in Alabama, wrote in 2002 (when he was the chief justice of that state's Supreme Court) that “homosexual behaviour is a crime against nature, an inherent evil, and an act so heinous that it defies one's ability to describe it.” In 2005, he said that “homosexuality should be illegal.” Today, he continues to oppose same-sex marriage. we're taught sexism, racism and homophobia, as opposed to it being in any way driven by our biology.

That ideology produces a general hostility towards people seeking out biological explanations for group differences, he says. After all, if gay activists admit sexual orientation is biologically based rather than a social construct, it makes it harder for one's feminist or anti-racist allies to argue that gender and race differences are social constructs.

This hostility has a long history. In 1981, when Alan P. Bell, Martin S. Weinberg and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith laid out their case that same-sex attraction was prenatal, Bell told the New York Times that they expected to be attacked, not just by the psychoanalysts who argued that parenting caused sexuality, but from “radical gays for even looking into the subject.” about. That's a shame, because CGN is also the type of evidence teachers might use to convince a parent that their ninth grader's biology — as opposed to bad parenting or punishment from God — is what made him gay.

It's also a shame because this opposition might make granting agencies even less likely to fund biological sexuality research. Sexual orientation researchers already have to compete for limited dollars with everything from schizophrenia to HIV/AIDS research and, in the U.S., to fend off attacks from religious conservatives.

Blanchard has seen some evidence of this potential chilling effect in his own career. He theorized in the early 1990s that the more older brothers a male has, the more likely he is to be gay. This Fraternal Birth Order effect may be the result of older brothers triggering an immune response in a mother, leading her immune system to attack subsequent male fetuses in utero and rendering them partially feminized. The effect doesn't explain all gay men, but it could explain a significant minority.

Despite it looking like a breakthrough, Blanchard was rejected by agencies like the U.S. National Institutes for Health when he tried to get research funding to test the theory, a fact he blames on politically correct grant reviewers fearing a backlash from gay activists. While he cobbled together enough money to get a small study published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1996, it wasn't until 2010 that he finally got some Canadian government funding to begin testing his theory in the lab.

Some young researchers are bound to look at that kind of struggle and decide to pursue more politically correct research instead. That would be unfortunate, because the more we know about homosexuality's biological origins, the easier it will be to fight the hate.