Is it possible there won't be homosexuals in the future?

[sunnyside]

Something just sort of clicked in my head. Now there are a lot of birth issues that can come about due to the environment in a womans womb. So it would make sense as tech improves that we'd increasingly try to regulate that. They do it already to varying degrees today.

What clicked was that from what I've read the environment in a womans womb is considered the most likely determining factor in sexual orientation. This from studies that find birth order of males to be strongly correlated with the probability they are gay (later sons being more likely to be gay). Also certainly some people don't choose to be gay. And I believe they haven't found purely genetic correlations, certainly homosexuality isn't bred out the way you would expect.

Anyway so a by product of regulating the womb environment for medical reasons might be that nearly all children are eventauly born straight.

The possibly worse social aspect would be if womb regulation was expensive so that only poor people or people in third world countries were gay, which would probably get a stigma associated with it. But by trek times it would seem everyone would have access to regulation possibly as an expected routine part of checkups.

[Aaron]

If it was possible, there would still be individuals out there that would choose not to do it. That said, we see very little of actual life for Joe Average in the Federation so I find it more likely that SF has a policy against admitting homosexual recruits or that the majority of homosexuals in ST don't have any interest in serving in the military.

If we want to be extreme we could create a theory where the Federation government uses a "gay vaccine" (you know the kind that nutbars wish they had) on kids after their born to help increase the Federations population, they being spread pretty thin.

[Mikey]

Not to get to deep into the field of developmental biochemistry, but the theory doesn't make sense to me. We certainly see plenty of males in the 'Trek universe - enough to casually assume a similar split to our modern 51/49 if not more - so anything that interferes with our natural course of preferential female differentiation doesn't appear to have taken effect.

In other words, a human embryo will naturally develop into a female in the absence of any mitigating factors. The biggest mitigating factor is the presence of an androgen, like testosterone. An embryo NEEDS androgens to become male, but DOESN'T need female hormones to become female. If any biological or chemical treatment were to be used like this discussion suggests, it would tilt the scales the other way - even if not eliminating testosterone altogether, it would advance breakdown, and testosterone naturally decays into estrogen and progesterone.

[sunnyside]

@Kendall This wouldn't be a decision an indavidual would make for themselves. If it works like this it would be the parents deciding if they want to risk birth defects for their kid. With a side effect being if they say yes the kid will also come out straight.

@Mikey Being male or female is suppose to be determined by the presence or lack of a Y chromisome. Hormones produced are suppose to corrispond to that. So the hormone schedule should correspond to that.

If sexual orientation development occurs before you can tell the sex of the child obviously it won't be affected as you couldn't start messing with hormones prior to that.

However certainly by Trek times they should be able to figure that out from the start.

[Captain Seafort]

@seafort

Eh? Where did I post in this thread?

[Mikey]

Yes, presence or absence of a Y chromosome determines the type of hormones that would normally be present. If, for example, there is a problem with early embryonic testicular development and they produce little or no testosterone, the embryo will develop as a female no matter the chromosome composition.

I'm at work right now, but when I get a chance (if ever ) I will cite my developmental psychobiology text.

Ah, here it is: The Psychobiology of Behavioral Development, Ronald Gandelman, Oxford University Press, 1992.

[Aaron]

@seafort This wouldn't be a decision an indavidual would make for themselves. If it works like this it would be the parents deciding if they want to risk birth defects for their kid. With a side effect being if they say yes the kid will also come out straight.

Hey dude, I'm Kendall (the guy with the witch as an AV). I was trying to say that it would be the parents deciding for the children, for obvious reasons a child in the womb can't make this choice.

However certainly by Trek times they should be able to figure that out from the start.

We've seen that Trek doesn't have a very good handle on these things. Bashiar was born mentally disabled IIRC.

[Reliant121]

frankly, I wouldn't want to have this...'gay vaccine' if it was avaliable. I'm quite happy with who i am.

[sunnyside]

Heh. I was even thinking Kendall when I wrote that (edited above for clarity).

Maybe my subconscious was trying to summon Seafort in a Beetlejuician way.

Bashir wasn't supposed to be retarded or anything, just not that bright while his parents wanted him to be top of the class instead of a future fast food worker.

I don't think a gay vaccine or anything would even work. It seems like that stuff gets set and ingrained.

This is just that a hormone treatment that prevents the issues Mikey is talking about could also prevent homosexuality. It seems reasonable that sexual orientation would be developed during or after sexual development. If that occurs, as Mikey seems to indicate, after testicular formation has started it would probably be pretty easy to tell what hormones to apply when as appropriate to the sex of the child.

[Mikey]

Then we get into a "nature vs. nurture" debate. I'm not convinced by anything out there yet that sexual orientation is based on wither strictly congenital, biological factors or by socialization factors - rather, I'd tend to think that there is predisposition to environmental factors, like most such cases... a combination of nature and nurture, as it were.

[Captain Seafort]

Bashir wasn't supposed to be retarded or anything, just not that bright while his parents wanted him to be top of the class instead of a future fast food worker.

He was definately retarded. From the script:

I was six. Small for my age. A
bit awkward physically. And...
not very bright. In the first
grade, while the other children
were learning how to read and
write and use a computer... I was
still trying to tell a dog from a
cat and a tree from a house.

If I six-year-old is struggling to distinguish trees and houses, I'd say he's got problems.

[Mikey]

Yep. Maybe not Down's Syndrome, but definitely a learning or cognitive disability there.

[Aaron]

Heh. I was even thinking Kendall when I wrote that (edited above for clarity).

Maybe my subconscious was trying to summon Seafort in a Beetlejuician way.

It worked too!

Bashir wasn't supposed to be retarded or anything, just not that bright while his parents wanted him to be top of the class instead of a future fast food worker.

Seafort posted the relevant script quote, he was definitely disabled. Like FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) disabled, he was even underdevolped physically.

I don't think a gay vaccine or anything would even work. It seems like that stuff gets set and ingrained.

I'm sure that a portion of it is nature and a portion of it nuture. The nuture portion I would imagine is something along the lines of "daddy issues" that woman have.

This is just that a hormone treatment that prevents the issues Mikey is talking about could also prevent homosexuality. It seems reasonable that sexual orientation would be developed during or after sexual development. If that occurs, as Mikey seems to indicate, after testicular formation has started it would probably be pretty easy to tell what hormones to apply when as appropriate to the sex of the child.

Wouldn't this be illegal in the Federation? They clearly have the means to fix Bashiar as a young child in the Trekverse but it's illegal (insert dumbass reason here), this seems to fall within the same sphere.

[sunnyside]

In the Federation it seems they'll fix you using things they have if you're really messed up but not if you're just somewhat messed up. For example the VISOR supposedly lets Geordi see all sorts of extra stuff. Presumably they'd be popular with other engineers, but only he gets one.

They're probably especially finiky with biological mods after the augment wars (and the return of Khan).

And there isn't anything they can really do if a mother wants to go on a bender, so FAS is a possibility. They also wouldn't do anything about purely genetic issues.

As for Nature vs Nurture. I dunno. While you do get bisexuals who could go either way based on the culture they're in, it seems some people are just gay despite extreme efforts by parents and community to bring them up straight. I'm saying that it seems to be that you wind up on a spectrum of sexual orientation biologically and then can be nurtured from there to some degree.

[Monroe]

I actually made a thread on this awhile back. I just think its been 'cured' in Star Trek.