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(Meanwhile, other studies have found the relationship to be weak or nonexistent.) As psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams writes in an accompanying commentary, the outcome for any given baby boy might depend on the timing of the immune response and the fetus’s susceptibility to the antibodies.Īverage prevalence in 2013 (Savin-Williams and Vrangalova)Īccording to the report, Blanchard now plans to test mothers of gay and straight men for the presence of these antibodies. Studies have found that a man without older brothers has about a 2 percent chance of being gay, but one with four older brothers has a 6 percent chance. With the H-Y antigens not functioning, it could be that the “be straight” signal in the fetus’s brain never flicks on.īlanchard believes that this phenomenon grows stronger with each boy a woman bears. These antibodies bind to the H-Y antigens and prevent them from functioning. Blanchard hypothesized that some of these antigens promote the development of heterosexual orientation in males … Because these H-Y antigens are not present in the mother’s body, they trigger the production of maternal antibodies. Male fetuses carry male-specific proteins on their Y chromosome, called H-Y antigens.
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The effect doesn’t hold for older or younger sisters, younger brothers, or even for adoptive brothers or stepbrothers.Īccording to Ray Blanchard, a psychiatry professor at the University of Toronto, the reason could be that the mother’s body mounts an immune attack on the fetus of her unborn son. One of the most consistent environmental explanations for homosexuality is called the “fraternal birth order effect.” Essentially, the more older brothers a man has, the more likely he is to be gay. (When Atlantic contributor Chandler Burr proposed in his 1996 book, A Separate Creation, that people are born gay, Southern Baptists called to boycott Disney films and parks in protest against the publisher, Disney subsidiary Hyperion.) It shouldn’t matter whether people “choose” to be gay, but politically, it does-at least for now. Specifically, people who believe sexual orientation is biological are more likely to favor equal rights for sexual minorities. The “why” question is important because “there is a strong correlation between beliefs about the origins of sexual orientation and tolerance of non-heterosexuality,” according to the report authors, who are from seven universities spanning the globe. Part of the explanation is genetic, but because most identical twins of gay people are straight, heredity doesn’t explain everything.
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Here’s what we don’t know: What, specifically, causes someone to become gay, straight, or something in between. Female Japanese macaques will even compete intersexually with males for exclusive access to female sexual partners. In certain populations, female Japanese macaques will sometimes choose other females as sexual partners despite the presence of sexually motivated male mates.