When Neuroscience Interjects Itself into Debates on Sexuality

“The concept is called ‘reverse inference.’ It’s both neuroscience’s greatest ambition, and the origin of its most frustratingly breathless overstatements.”

Every so often, a person is unexpectedly thrust into a defining wedge-issue of an era. This time, I was asked rhetorically, “Is being gay a choice”? Well, my friend answered their own question; according to a series of studies, including one published in Scientific Reports in 2018, scientists have discovered neurological differences between gay and straight people. When subjects were shown a series of pornographic pictures, depending on the content of the images, people with different sexual orientations had different brain activity. In other words, there is a concrete biological origin of sexuality; there is such a thing as a “gay” or “straight” brain—rather, a biologically-inevitably gay or straight brain.

As my friend concluded from this development, this proves that being gay is not simply psychological; there’s an actual biology to it. Those in right-wing chatrooms trying to mock gay people by saying things to the effect of, “I want to be a frog, therefore, I’m a frog” are now, scientifically verifiably, jerks. Just as one can’t just decide to be a frog, one cannot simply claim to be gay and then, poof, become gay.

Without science, if someone states his or her sexual preference, either he or she is telling the truth or making it up. Either a person is gay or they’re pretending to be. With science, however, maybe this debate can be resolved for good.

Personally, I do not have a strong position on when—in the course of one’s development—a person starts ‘being gay.’ I’ve seen scientific arguments for genetic destiny, but I’m also drawn to the idea that sexual preference is slowly shaped by an interplay of genetic and social factors throughout adolescence and even into adulthood.