Thanks Mom...

[Chris James]

Finally, some scientific evidence that mom is responsible for my being gay. This will come as a shock to her strict Catholic sensibilities, but hey, she'll just have to get over it. The nice thing is that these researchers say gay men are strong epi-marks. Whatever that means it sounds good to me!

http://www.usnews.co...-people-are-gay

[Cole Parker]

Reading that, I get the idea it's more theory than science. And it sounds a whole lot like bunk. It certainly isn't framed in the language a scientist would use.

C

[Graeme]

Yeah, it's still theory, but it's plausible. As the article said, the genetic link is known from studies with twins (identical twins have a much higher chance of both being homosexual than fraternal twins), but it's not purely genetics because not all identical twins share the same sexuality. Another theory has been to do with exposure to hormones during gestation that triggered certain genes.

This idea seems fine, until I read the following:

"These epi-marks protect fathers and mothers from excess or underexposure to testosterone — when they carry over to opposite-sex offspring, it can cause the masculinization of females or the feminization of males," Rice says, which can lead to a child becoming gay. Rice notes that these markers are "highly variable" and that only strong epi-marks will result in a homosexual offspring.

Dr. Rice seems to have conflated male femininity and female masculinity with homosexuality. We believe there's a link between the two, but it's by no means a driver - there are a significant number of non-feminine gays and non-masculine lesbians, so that part of the theory isn't convincing.

[Merkin]

Hmmm. Since all of us appear to be more or less homosexual/heterosexual according to how we individually fall on Kinsey's famous scale, the study cited could be seen to suggest that Epi-marks may in fact always carry over from one generation to the next, fathers to daughters, mothers to sons, with differences only in degree.