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BREAKING: People gayer than previously thought!!! (www.erininthemorning.com)
submitted 3 days ago by to c/chapotraphouse@hexbear.net
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Actually pretty interesting. I think we're starting to creep up on the actual numbers, as far as you can measure such a thing. I think comphet keeps a lot of people who would otherwise fall somewhere on the bi/pan spectrum from ever experimenting and realizing it about themelves, and I bet that population is actually quite large. As far as transness goes, I would be willing to believe a number within the realm of ~3% to even 5%. I think further complicating this whole thing is that human sexuality and gender identity is a lot more nebulous than the very rigid, medically-originated terminology we use implies. A lot of the identity labels we use (homosexual, transsexual/transgender, etc) were originally medical diagnoses that were later transposed onto cultural identities, which carries a lot of baggage that I think has been left unaddressed, such as the rigidity of their definition, but that's probably for a post for another time. Anyway, just thought it was neat neat, especially the state queerness leaderboards.

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[–] 22 points 3 days ago (2 children)

His methodology is explained in Part II: "Homosexuality of Men & Women as a Social Occurrence", Chapter 24 "The Distribution of Male and Female Homosexuality. Statistical Foundations. Worth reading, to understand the historical context of the OP, which is that this knowledge is subject to continuous questioning and replication for over a century now. Being constantly made to re-prove ourselves is a component of repression; such research is not liberatory. Particular the fascist backlash to the original research itself (this was early 20th C Germany remember), which is described. I can post it, if anyone wants, but not now as I need to get somewhere. And maybe nobody read this long ass comment.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    This was easily the most interesting stuff I've read in a while. Had no idea this was so well understood so far back.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    Thanks! I hope you pursue it further. It's a lot easier now than 5, 15 or 50 years ago.

    Hirschfeld's activism was set in motion when he realized the gay bars of Chicago were very similar to the gay bars he knew back home in Germany. Which yes, does suggest way more questions than answers are available. From this, combined with his training in science, he derived a hypothesis of sameyness of humans when it came to sex. (There are gay people everywhere.) He soon extended this to trans people and to many others. After working for a while on reparative therapy, he gave it up as hopeless, falling back on the understanding of Darwinism as alluded to above. If beaks of Galapogos finches can be illustrated as this, it obviously follows sex/gender would be the same:

    All this hateful, bigot shit, all of it is man-made. It's not natural to be ignorant of, or to hate, any kind of person, just as a bird holds no hostility to a beak shaped one way or another. All the shit we deal with is downstream of (admittedly successful) interventions by fascists. They make their hatreds appear natural which is a total lie. GSM have always existed wherever on earth in every population. While understanding that all modern constructs are products of modern material conditions, we can also see ourselves: all kinds, every where, every time.

    Per Scientiam ad Justitiam = Through Science, To Justice

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  • [–] 1 point 23 hours ago

    I'm a big ol nerd so one of the ways I came around to accidentally understand humans was by really learning a lot about animals (your Galapagos finch example was one of my entry points into better understanding the fluidity of bodies). Another was by learning a lot about math and physics and how almost nothing is discrete, or absolute.

    I stopped short earlier of saying "so it's always just been hatred and rejection", didn't want to put words in your mouth, but yep that was my immediate conclusion.

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