Gay people not ‘born that way,’ sexual orientation not fixed – US study, by Lucy Nicholson.
A cross-discipline study has challenged the belief that human sexuality and gender identity are determined by biology and remain fixed, saying that there is no scientific proof of this. The study cautioned against drastic medical treatment for transgender children.
The notion that sexual orientation is predetermined by biology is an important part of the current LGBT discourse. If a person has no choice over whether to be gay or not, society cannot demand that he or she be straight, so the argument goes. …
The study does not claim that being gay is a choice, merely that stating the opposite may be wrong.
Activists are pushing the idea that the “science is settled” and gay people are born that way, but the truth is far from clear.
Naturally the PC media is now busying discrediting anyone with any connection to the study, starting with pointing out it is not “peer reviewed”. As we know well from climate, nowadays peer review is merely a gate-keeping device for blocking unwanted results — this study’s findings are obviously thermonuclear on the blasphemy scale. From an upcoming book:
Peer review used to be rare in science, as did government funding of science. Government funding of science and peer review grew together, becoming the norm only after WWII. Prior to WWII science was mainly funded by private companies, individuals, and philanthropists.
But during WWII big research efforts like the successful Manhattan Project seemed to be the way to go, and in the Cold War that followed government increasingly took over most science funding. The prestigious science journal Nature published some papers without peer review up until 1973.
To drop some illustrious names, Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, and Albert Einstein were not peer-reviewed. Nature’s former editor John Maddox was fond of saying that the groundbreaking 1953 DNA paper by Watson and Crick, which was not peer-reviewed, would never have made it past modern peer review because it was too speculative.
hat-tip Stephen Neil
