Guest post: The whole of a woman takes part
Originally a comment by Artymorty on Out of place but possible.
I’m skeptical that a male could carry a fetus to term at all. Ectopic pregnancies in women are still in women. Male and female hormone systems, and even the basic composition of their blood, are fundamentally different to each other. I know very little about the biology of pregnancy, but I don’t have to know much to know that hormones, bloodstream, metabolism, even antibodies… pretty much every system of the female body plays some kind of role throughout gestation. I just can’t see an embryo, even one inside a uterus, plopped into a male body somehow coming out remotely okay, because I’m highly skeptical that male bodies have evolved to have these same kinds of complex reactions to a fetus showing up inside them. It’s just nuts.
This stuff jumps readily to mind, because I’ve been reading a lot about the biology of homosexuality, which is a good example of the sensitive nature of the interaction between mother and embryo/fetus. Same-sex preference in humans is caused in part by subtle shifts in hormone exposure in the early stages of gestation, which can be influenced by antibodies present in women. (E.g., the famous “birth order effect”, in which each subsequent male fetus pregnancy is more likely to become a homosexual in adulthood, because of subtle changes in the immune system of the mother.) It’s all a very elaborate and finely calibrated physical process, and the whole of a woman takes part in the creation of a child inside her. The idea that we should just assume men can probably do this, too, based on nothing but their desire to be able to, is even more bonkers than allowing men in women’s sports.
There really is no bottom to the craziness of gender identity ideology.
My husband and I are both first-born males in our respective families, followed by strings of brothers, all of whom are heterosexual, thus falsifyng the “birth order effect” to oblivion.
There was this article (which links back to the Telegraph behind a paywall)…
https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/wellbeing/parenting/300956165/womb-transplants-mean-pregnancy-for-people-assigned-male-at-birth-in-next-10-years
tl;dr
Yes, womb transplants between women have occurred and successful pregnancy has resulted.
It’s all incredibly complex and poorly understood, so no immediate application to males.
As the lead surgeon in this case noted
While some doctors consider there is no ethical question involved, I struggle to take that view. There’s always an ethical question involved in taking body parts from one human or animal and using them for the benefit of another. in this case surely a potential donor would have to specify whether they would consent to donate the womb (and tubes/ovaries?), and. whether they would consent to implantation in a male? given the social, political, and legal struggles that are ongoing at present, that seems like a minimum.
Wait wait wait wait lead surgeon said WHAT? Equal treatment can’t mean the same treatment because that would be IMPOSSIBLE. “equal treatment for cisgender and transgender women” can’t mean identical treatment because men have bodies that are different from women’s bodies. Are doctors really having to apologize for not pretending they have identical bodies???
Mike B, I assume you’re joking? A joke along the lines of, “My husband and I have been cigarette smokers for decades and we don’t have cancer, thus falsifying the myth that cigarettes cause cancer to oblivion.”
To anyone interested, the birth order effect is a very real thing, readily confirmed. But it’s not a large order effect. I’m a first-born son and I couldn’t be gayer if I tried, so in a sense I’m living proof that the birth order effect doesn’t account for all homosexual males, or even a majority of them. (Although I am a product of the second male fetus from my mother’s womb, as the first resulted in a miscarriage about midway through the gestation period. So although I am a first-born son, I’m not a first-gestated male.) And the whole thing says nothing whatsoever of homosexual females. So birth order by no means, even remotely, offers a simple explanation for the strange phenomenon of exclusive or extreme same-sex sexual preference in humans, who are the only species on Earth besides domestic sheep who exhibit such an evolutionarily detrimental trait.*
But it does reinforce the hypothesis that the majority of homosexual males are gay in large part due to the hormonal environment they were in while certain parts of the brain were developing — specific parts that control very base-level, “primitive” things like sexual instincts — specifically, the hypothalamus and the amygdala. And that, in turn, is a good example, if you ask me, of how delicate the hormonal environment of an incubating fetus is, and how risky and unethical it would be to try to gestate a human inside a male body. All the more unethical given the motives for such a project in the first place ultimately boil down to vanity, delusion, and self-obsession.
(And, a total aside: Isn’t it extreeeeemely interesting that, of all the millions and millions and millions of species on earth, many of whom dabble in same-sex socio-sexual hanky-panky now and then, the only two species we could ever find who truly exhibit total gayness in the sexual preference of a subset of their populations are BOTH among the teeny-tiny handful of domesticated species? To date there are, what, 41 domesticated animal species, ever? Humans “self-domesticated” in a sense when our cerebral cortexes got big enough that “natural selection” was arguably overridden by the “artificial selection” of our own human conscious decisions in mate selection, about 200,000 years ago. And then came dogs of course, 15,000 years ago — our oldest besties, who we started “artificially” breeding. Then goats. Then pigs. Then sheep. It can’t be a coincidence! Of the five first domesticated species on Earth, two of them exhibit natural homosexuality in a subset. Innnnteresting…)
How odd that you’d compare the phenomenon of homosexuality to a disease like cancer.
Well, that pretty much answers my question.
Some people can discuss scientifically and rationally the biology of homosexuality, calmly, respectfully, but with an open mind, while others seem to go into threat-mode, in which their minds go into something parallel to a Windows computer rebooting in Safe Mode: they get stuck in extremely limited functionality mode until the threat is resolved or goes away.
It irks me because I very much like to talk about things like biology and sexuality without having to worry about tripping people’s shut-down-reboot-in-panic-mode settings. I’m sorry that I keep doing that. But I can’t stop talking rationally about stuff. And I don’t think anything I say merits hostility or censorship.
Don’t be sorry! Don’t worry about tripping people’s shut-down-reboot-in-panic-mode settings. Don’t stop talking rationally about stuff. The more talk the better!
One of my thoughts experiments is to imagine that a fertilized egg becomes somehow implanted in the male partner, say, in the penis. It could be anywhere inside the male, I suppose. But I wonder just how many “pro-life” men who don’t want women to terminate a pregnancy, ever, under any circumstances, no exceptions allowed, would adhere to that stance if the body endangered were their own.
#5 Mike,
The comparison Arty is making is not between homosexuality and cancer. Rather, he is comparing the arguments being made. Reminder, you are arguing that your situation stands as a refutation of a claimed statistical association, just as others argue that they stand as a refutation of a different claimed statistical association. With the particulars removed, we can see that the logic being employed is the same, and erroneous in both cases: single examples do not refute statistical associations.
A much better argument against the claimed birth order effect is the inconsistency with which it is seen in studies, and the tiny numbers proposed in those studies that see any association at all. To me, this suggests that the claimed tendency is at best so weak it is difficult to tease out of the noise, or worse, simply does not exist.
And note that even if it does exist, it is not necessarily due solely to the gestational environment; there is the possibility that social differences experienced by successive sons might contribute.
Finally, Arty, which is the animal you have in mind when you suggest there is only one other than humanity to exhibit ‘total gayness’? I’m pretty sure black swans (Cygnus atratus) qualifies, as it forms monogamous homosexual lifelong pairings, but being non-domesticated it rather spoils your apparent musing.
…It may look like that comment is entirely directed at Mike’s #5, but the middle is directed at both he and Artymorty, and the last is directed specifically at Arty.
@Artymorty:
Agreeing with you, it is indeed notable how many people have a defensive “panic-mode” reaction to any suggestion that biology affects behaviour. It’s also notable that many people seem to lack any feel for statistics and probability distributions, instead supposing that either no effect exists, or that it has to be determinative in every case.
It’s worth asking what causes of homosexuality “progressives” would allow themselves:
They can dislike it being genetic or biological (because they tend to disallow such factors on principle, and if they allow that being biological, then maybe many other behaviours are also largely biological).
And they won’t allow it being a “free choice” (because right-wing people might then ask whether it’s a “moral” choice) and nor will they accept it being social influences (because that’s akin to right-wing talk about gays “recruiting” and concern about what schools teach to young kids).
And that only leaves it being some sort of immaterial, dualistic soul that is set at birth. But they won’t say that out loud, because they also think of themselves as rational people who “follow the science”. So it has to be just an “identity” that is not further examined.
@Holms:
The literature on this suggests that it is a secure effect. E.g. this 2022 paper evaluates data on 9 million Dutch people and seems pretty state of the art.
The upshot is that second-born sons in two-son families are 28% more likely to enter same-sex unions than first-born sons in two-son families (with a probability of this being a chance effect ruled out at p 1.00 in 20 instances, >1.00 although not significantly in nine instances, and nonsignificantly <1.00 in 1 instance.", with the overall significance of the effect being very high (p < .00001).
Sorry, that last paragraph seems to have been screwed up, it should have been:
The upshot is that second-born sons in two-son families are 28% more likely to enter same-sex unions than first-born sons in two-son families (with a probability of this being a chance effect ruled out at p 1.00 in 20 instances, >1.00 although not significantly in nine instances, and nonsignificantly <1.00 in 1 instance", with the overall significance of the effect being very high (p < .00001).
Triple sorry about this, something about my cut-and-paste seems to be screwing up the formatting. Another attempt with no special characters:
The upshot is that second-born sons in two-son families are 28 per cent more likely to enter same-sex unions than first-born sons in two-son families (with a proability of this being a chance effect ruled out as having a less-than 0.001 chance).
A meta-review by Blanchard in 2018 of multiple studies found a positive and significant older-brother effect in 20 studies, a positive but not-significant effect in 9 studies, and a non-significant negative effect in 1 study. The overall chance of there being no effect was given as less than 0.00001.
So for some reason (procrastination, but also an interest in data, I suppose) I went looking through the tables of the paper that Coel linked to in @11, and found some interesting nuggets that, if I were in that field, I might be inclined to pursue. First, it’s true that the results were statistically significant (it helps to have a dataset of 9 million; I’m jealous). But looking through their tables and figures, in no case did the rate of people in a same-sex marriage reach 1%. So whatever effect birth order has, it seems to be small. There must be a lot more going on.
But then I noticed something even curiouser. Way down toward the end of the article, in Figure S3, they have a box-and-whisker plot showing the rate of same sex marriage by number of siblings and number of younger brothers. And what I noticed is that, based on that figure, it seems that the more siblings you have, the more likely you are to end up in a same-sex marriage. People with no siblings have a higher rate of same-sex marriage than any other group.
Now I don’t know if that result is statistically significant, and to be fair to the authors I didn’t read the whole article so I don’t know if they discuss it, but if this were my data, this is the sort of result that would make me say, “Huh.”
Just realized I misread that figure. It’s organized by number of younger siblings, not total number of siblings.
@Holms,
The other species (besides humans) who exhibit exclusive same-sex preference is domestic sheep. It’s exhibited in up to 8% of males (rams), but isn’t present at all in females (ewes). I’ve heard this is a hush-hush problem in livestock circles, presumably because many rams are meant for breeding to make lambs, and if they won’t breed with ewes, they’re not good for much else (unless it’s a wool farm) because they’re too old to become lamb meat themselves, and they don’t make milk. I’ve heard the sheep industry worry they could be accused of “sheep homophobia” if word gets out the don’t like gay rams. (This will never stop being funny to me. Rams are livestock! Do they expect a parade?)
Lots of animals can be observed mating & pairing up with the same sex here and there, but that’s always a product of circumstance: lack of availability of the other sex, or boredom, or perhaps even accidentially mis-sexing a mate, as in penguins, who don’t seem to be able to distingush between male and female very well, and who (perhaps accidentally) form pair bonds with the same sex from time to time. (“Wait, you thought I was the female? I thought you were the female! Oh well, nobody’s perfect.”)
It’s easier to measure mate “preference” in animals that mate frequently with different partners than it is with, say, birds, who have pair-bonding instincts that cause them to form long-term pairings. There are lots of examples of birds who are in same-sex pair bonds but observers invariably conclude that it’s more to do with circumstance than deliberate, lifelong preference for the same sex over the opposite sex.
As for the possibility of socialization playing a role in homosexual development, it’s possible that it plays a small role in males and perhaps a larger one in females (female homosexuality & bisexuality is different from male homosexuality & bisexuality in some ways), but the evidence for brain regions being hard-wired in utero for *most* (though not all) homosexuals is very solid by now. We can even predict future homosexuality based on infant/toddler behaviour patterns, with pretty good accuracy, and we’ve done so in studies more than once. This is, in fact, why I’m so alarmed by the “trans kids” narrative, because the behavious they are attributing to “trans”-ness are typically signs of future homosexuality. It’s for this reason that I think it’s more urgent than ever that we stop hesitating when it comes to scientifically understanding sexual orientation, because we need that scientific evidence to protect us from harm.