Why are people gay science

In , the writer Jeremy Atherton Lin noticed a spate of media coverage mourning gay bars in London, more than half of which had closed within the last decade. From NBC News to the Guardian , nearly all the coverage contained a similar slant, which played into a popular narrative: gay bars as beacons of liberation, central to the formation of queer identity and community. Which caused Atherton Lin to wonder, For who? I walked around the corner because I couldn't bring myself to go in, but then the next night I did and everything was illuminated and the drag queen smiled at me and I was gay.

The reasons behind why people are gay, straight or bisexual have long been a source of public fascination. Indeed, research on the topic of sexual orientation offers a powerful window into understanding human sexuality. Among the indigenous Zapotec people in southern Mexico, individuals who are biologically male and sexually attracted to men are known as muxes. They are recognized as a third gender: Muxe nguiiu tend to be masculine in their appearance and behavior; muxe gunaa are feminine.

By Daniel Trotta. NEW YORK Reuters - While President Donald Trump has thrust transgender people back into the conflict between conservative and liberal values in the United States, geneticists are quietly working on a major research effort to unlock the secrets of gender identity. Two decades of brain research have provided hints of a biological origin to being transgender, but no irrefutable conclusions. Now scientists in the consortium have embarked on what they call the largest-ever study of its kind, searching for a genetic component to explain why people assigned one gender at birth so persistently identify as the other, often from very early childhood. Researchers have extracted DNA from the blood samples of 10, people, 3, of them transgender and the rest non-transgender, or cisgender.

A UCLA psychology study published online today in the journal Psychological Science concludes that many people believe gay men and women are more sexually promiscuous than heterosexuals, which they may fear could threaten their own marriages and their way of life. Such people often marry at a younger age, have more children and believe in traditional gender roles in which men are the breadwinners and women are housewives. People who feel their way of life is most threatened by sexual promiscuity tend to be socially conservative and strongly believe in traditional gender roles. The researchers surveyed men and women, 27 percent of whom oppose same-sex marriage.