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Thursday, July 31, 2025

Scientific ignorance and homophobia

by

20130519

A few weeks ago my col­umn high­light­ed how the state crim­i­nalis­es cer­tain types of sex­u­al­i­ty. In his col­umn Kevin Baldeosingh took me to task for claim­ing that the iden­ti­ty cat­e­gories of ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty and het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty did not ex­ist pri­or to the mid-19th cen­tu­ry. I be­lieve some­how he thought I was im­ply­ing ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty is a sim­ple choice rather than im­pli­cat­ed in ge­net­ic and uter­ine hor­mon­al fac­tors.

What's more, from that one tak­en-out-of-con­text para­graph, he praised me for "sci­en­tif­ic ig­no­rance" and then ex­tend­ed it to the en­tire So­cial Sci­ence Fac­ul­ty at UWI.

His mis­in­ter­pre­ta­tion of my po­si­tion may have been a fail­ure in the clar­i­ty of my own writ­ing. Al­though that he chose to ig­nore every oth­er para­graph of the ar­ti­cle whose cen­tral point isn't in dis­pute–some hu­man be­ings are af­ford­ed less rights and pro­tec­tions than oth­ers–made me feel the at­tack was a cheap shot to dis­cred­it the cen­tral mes­sage of the ar­ti­cle. Maybe I'm too sen­si­tive.

The ac­cu­sa­tion of "sci­en­tif­ic ig­no­rance," how­ev­er, is a good op­por­tu­ni­ty to dis­cuss our un­der­stand­ing of the cul­tures and lived re­al­i­ties of peo­ple who prac­tise same-sex re­la­tions, and to clar­i­fy how ho­mo­pho­bia works.

Ac­cord­ing to the sci­en­tif­ic lit­er­a­ture–and not the so­cial sci­ence lit­er­a­ture but the nat­ur­al sci­ences–there is much on-go­ing re­search in­to the re­la­tion­ship be­tween bi­ol­o­gy and the de­vel­op­ment of sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion. This re­search sug­gests that bi­o­log­i­cal fac­tors such as pre­na­tal hor­mones, brain struc­ture, and genes are im­pli­cat­ed in het­ero­sex­u­al, bi­sex­u­al and ho­mo­sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion.

Among this peer-re­viewed lit­er­a­ture, the ma­jor­i­ty of stud­ies con­clude that while there are cer­tain­ly bi­o­log­i­cal fac­tors im­pli­cat­ed in one's sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion, no study has con­clu­sive­ly shown that there is on­ly one sin­gle fac­tor for sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion. Rather there is a com­bi­na­tion of ge­net­ic, hor­mon­al and en­vi­ron­men­tal fac­tors.

Sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion and sex­u­al­i­ty are not iden­ti­cal. What bi­ol­o­gy can­not ar­tic­u­late or un­der­stand are the nu­ances of peo­ple's every­day ex­pe­ri­ences of their sex­u­al­i­ty–that is what an­thro­pol­o­gists do. We de­scribe and doc­u­ment peo­ple's lives. We at­tempt not to make moral or judg­ment calls on the dif­fer­ent lives we all live and in­stead try to nar­rate those dif­fer­ences.

For an an­thro­pol­o­gist to say the iden­ti­ty cat­e­go­ry "ho­mo­sex­u­al" did not ex­ist pri­or to mid-19th cen­tu­ry is not to say ho­mo­sex­u­al be­hav­iour and ori­en­ta­tion did not ex­ist.As has been doc­u­ment­ed from the be­gin­ning of writ­ten his­to­ry, same sex-re­la­tions can be found in most so­ci­eties and at most times. From rit­u­al be­hav­iour in an­cient Greece and the Etero rite of pas­sage in Papua New Guinea to the berdache of Na­tive Amer­i­can cul­ture and the hi­jras and koth­is of South Asia.

Ho­mo­sex­u­al be­hav­iour and ori­en­ta­tion among Ho­mo sapi­ens, much like among oth­er non-hu­man species, had al­ways ex­ist­ed as an ex­ten­sion of or ad­junct to het­ero­sex­u­al­i­ty. To say the west­ern iden­ti­ty cat­e­go­ry of ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty on­ly ap­pears in the mid-19th cen­tu­ry–and there is a lot of ev­i­dence out there that sup­ports such a claim–is sim­ply to say that pri­or to this era sex was tied to pro­cre­ation and not iden­ti­ty.

To­day, for some peo­ple, ho­mo­sex­u­al­i­ty has be­come a bound­ed, mono­lith­ic iden­ti­ty. This is sim­plis­tic and a sim­i­lar prej­u­dice to say­ing all black peo­ple are the same be­cause they are black, or all women be­long in the kitchen; it de­nies the cul­tur­al dif­fer­ences among hu­man be­ings and stereo­types a wide breadth of ex­pe­ri­ences in­to a sin­gu­lar­i­ty.

This lets stereo­types flour­ish and stand in for the re­al ex­pe­ri­ence of in­di­vid­u­als. These ex­pe­ri­ences in­clude tran­gres­sive sex­u­al­i­ties that do not fit neat sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion cat­e­gories.Ho­mo­sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion is bi­o­log­i­cal­ly de­ter­mined but to re­duce all peo­ple who prac­tise same-sex re­la­tions to a sin­gu­lar ho­mo­sex­u­al iden­ti­ty and fix a group of peo­ple with iden­ti­cal traits (of­ten ridicu­lous prej­u­dices) is not a re­flec­tion of re­al ex­pe­ri­ences. It is the same with any group iden­ti­ty.

An­oth­er in­ter­est­ing point is how ho­mo­pho­bia ac­tu­al­ly works. Ho­mo­pho­bia is not al­ways vis­i­ble and bla­tant. It can al­so be sub­tle and un­ob­tru­sive. In this sense, ho­mo­pho­bia is struc­tur­al. It is built in­to our men­tal cat­e­gories, our sci­ence, laws, and the at­ti­tudes and val­ues that shape our lan­guage and world views.

In ho­mo­pho­bia there is a self-as­sured feel­ing on the part of the dom­i­nant het­ero­sex­u­al group of be­ing nat­u­ral­ly su­pe­ri­or or bet­ter. This per­haps con­nects to the im­por­tance of pro­cre­ation for the sur­vival of Ho­mo sapi­ens.Yet, as Mr Baldeosingh re­minds us, the sci­en­tif­ic ev­i­dence sup­ports the link be­tween bi­ol­o­gy and sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion. And, as has been said be­fore else­where, that means ho­mo­sex­u­al ori­en­ta­tion is nat­ur­al, while ho­mo­pho­bia is a so­cial con­struct built on mis­lead­ing, group stereo­types.

�2 Dr Dy­lan Ker­ri­g­an is an an­thro­pol­o­gist at UWI, St Au­gus­tine


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