Scientific American has basically fired all of its online columnists and seems to want to emulate Scienceblogs.com (without the pesky ethical angst - they are part of a multi-billion dollar company) so this sort of controversy-for-its-own sake is what their audience can look forward to - legitimizing superstitious, irrational nonsense and claiming it is a discussion point. In reality, it is whoring-for-pageviews, though it will certainly work.
Does your son like musicals? Daughter a tomboy?
And, curiously enough, the age-old homophobic fears of parents seem to have some genuine predictive currency.
Well, in the apocryphal sense, perhaps. But psychologists are in a grey area of science so it is often the case that they map data to their chosen topology. However, he seems to be ducking an issue.
It is fashionable these days to say that one is “born gay,” of course, but if we think about it a bit more critically, it’s a bit odd, and probably nonsensical, to refer to a newborn infant, swaddled in blankets and still suckling on its mother’s teats, as being homosexual. I appreciate the anti-discriminatory motives, but if we insist on using such politically correct parlance without consideration of more complex, postnatal developmental factors, are we really prepared to label newborns as being LGBT?
Are we prepared to label newborns as sexual objects of any kind? It's not for me to decide but Michael Bailey here is arguably one of the foremost authorities on the topic so I wrote to him to see if he has any thoughts.
