Are Men and Women Born Gay Research Paper

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Homosexual Activity as a Function of Biochemistry

Introduction

Homosexuality is one of the most controversial topics among people today precisely because so few actually understand it and what prompts some to pursue a homosexual lifestyle. Some view it as sinful, others are very accepting of it because they view it as natural even if it deviates from traditional sexual norms. There are various reasons for why individuals engage in homosexual activity and many of them are personal or environmental, though some are distinctly biological. In fact, while not everyone may be born gay and may come to adopting a homosexual lifestyle as a result of some experience in their younger life (such as rape or negative experiences with the opposite sex), researchers like Dr. Wesley Muhammad, Dr. Marc Breedlove and Dr. Gunter Dorner have shown that the biology of homosexuality is in fact established during fetal development. Thus, in some cases, people actually are born gay. This paper will show that people can be born gay, not because of God or genetics, but that they can also engage in a homosexual lifestyle by choice.

Personal Experience and Environment

Coming from a position of personal experience, which many people can attest to no matter what sort of background they have, one is likely to be able to identify numerous acquaintances, friends, or family members who have “become” gay by choice or by some environmental or experiential impact that has shaped their sexual orientation. For example, I have people in my family who were raped and are currently gay. A coworker of mine once told me how his older brother started raping him when he was 7 and that lasted for three whole years until it finally stopped and he told me he’s gay today because of what his brother did to him. These kinds of situations are environmental issues that impact the individual experientially and end up orienting the individual’s sexuality in a way that might not have occurred had the environment or experiences been different. Many readers are likely to confirm that this type of behavior occurs: some people were raped and molested as children and that lead to them living a homosexual lifestyle.

Some people have become gay just from propaganda and its normalization in recent years. I have heard girls in high school and even from my family members who once dated men say things such as, “It’s just easier being with a woman,” or, “Men are no good,” thus indicating that homosexual activity can stem from an individual making a choice to try something different. This choice is made easier in today’s day and age because homosexuality is promoted in the mainstream media and by celebrities as being a positive experience and part of the natural course and function of human sexuality (Ayoub & Garretson, 2017; Halperin, 2003; Seidman, Meeks & Traschen, 1999).

Environment plays a huge role in how one’s sexuality is shaped. For example, heterosexual men in prison may engage in homosexual behavior, but that does not mean that they are homosexual because, given a choice, they would choose to have sexual relations with the opposite sex. Given their circumstances, however, they are limited in terms of choosing a partner: their environment places a restriction on their choice, and thus they engage in homosexual activity because there is no other viable option with respect to having sexual intercourse (Ruggero, 2016).

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Whether one is moved to engage in homosexual activity as a result of prior past experiences or environment, the common feature of this engagement is that the individual had no prior inclination towards homosexuality. In other words, for these individuals, homosexual orientation was not a feature that they acknowledged within themselves from birth or from an early age. It was something that developed within them as a result of their environment or personal experience. For other people, homosexual orientation is something that they identify within themselves as being there from the very beginning of their lives.

Born Gay

Some individuals are in fact born gay—not because of genetics (scientists have known since the 1970s that there is no gay gene) or because God made them that way (Conrad, 2016). On the contrary, individuals who are born gay simply develop their sexual inclinations and orientation as a result of hormonal stimulants during their growth stages in their mother’s womb (Gavrilets, Friberg & Rice, 2018). A person’s sexual orientation is initially programmed in them during the fetal stage: a male fetus is subjected to two surges or bursts of testosterone during this period. These surges are independent of each other and happen at two different times (Buoli & Croci, 2015). During this developmental stage, testosterone levels can alter the brain of the fetus, which can also impact the way in which the individual views sexuality later in life. Hormones create stimuli and triggers—chemical signals in the blood—that also orient the person sexually, so to speak (Hines, Constantinescu & Spencer, 2015). Male hormones and female hormones (androgens and estrogens, respectively) shape the fetus from this early stage and, thus, when a baby is born, it may be more sexually stimulated to respond in a sexual way towards individuals of the same sex than of the opposite sex, according to what researchers have found (Hines et al., 2015). In other words, testosterone levels actually do have an impact on sexual orientation during the fetal stage of development, which means some homosexual individuals are born that way.

What this means is that homosexuality can be a function of biochemistry (i.e., of the hormones produced during fetal development). If, for instance, an androgen deficiency occurs, the male can lack testosterone and other male sex hormones that cause his sexual orientation to be more like that of a female. Brain development and the development of the testes can be impacted this biochemical makeup. A male fetus may thus have more in common with a female fetus, biochemically speaking, even though it is still a male that is developing.

Male and female brains are different, though that might not be politically correct to say so. Experience tells us that men and women think, react, and feel differently. However, if the biochemical development of the fetus deviates from the norm in that a male fetus is feminized as a result of an androgen….....

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