Let’s have a SCIENCE-based debate about LGBT issues
by Michael Cook, MercatorNet:
If you all you know about gender and sexuality comes from reading headlines, it’s an open and shut case. “‘Gay genes’: science is on the right track, we’re born this way. Let’s deal with it.” “Science Just Proved That Being Transgender Is Not a Phase”. “The DNA test ‘that reveals if you’re gay’” “Check the science: being trans is not a ‘choice’”. “Transgender Identity Is Not a Mental Health Disorder, Study Finds.” “Born This Way? Scientists may have found a biological basis for homosexuality.”
So the nature of homosexuality and transsexualism is settled, incontrovertible, and beyond dispute? Yes, but only in newspapers, not in academia.
A landmark survey of decades of research by two eminent scholars working in the United States claims that many of these assertions are simply not supported by the weight of evidence in scholarly journals. The report was released today by The New Atlantis, a well-known journal of science, technology, and ethics based in Washington DC. The editors have organised what is probably the best single summary of the scientific evidence on LGBT issues published to date. (Click here for a PDF.)
“Sexual orientation and gender identity resist explanation by simple theories,” write psychiatrist Paul R. McHugh and epidemiologist Lawrence S. Mayer. “There is a large gap between the certainty with which beliefs are held about these matters and what a sober assessment of the science reveals. In the face of this complexity and uncertainty, we need to be humble about what we know and do not know.”
The two authors have impressive credentials. Mayer is a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University and has held professorial appointments at eight universities, including Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania, and Stanford. McHugh was psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins Hospital from 1975 to 2001 and served on a national bioethics commission during the Bush Administration.
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