Born This Way?

Just after Minnesota became the next state to legalize gay marriage, a story about a child who was born with two sets of genitalia appeared that puts another spin on the same-sex marriage debate:

A South Carolina couple is suing the state's Department of Social Services, a hospital, a medical school and individual hospital employees, alleging that a "medically unnecessary" genital removal surgery violated their adopted intersex child's constitutional rights.

Mark and Pam Crawford say that their child, identified as M.C., is now 8 years old and chooses to identify as a boy, despite doctors deciding that M.C. should be a girl at 16 months old. The couple say that they chose to adopt M.C., who was in state custody at the time of adoption, knowing about the intersex condition.

Intersex conditions occur about one percent of the time according to the Intersex Society of North America. There is a spectrum of intersex conditions, usually caused by genetic errors or minuscule imbalances in hormone levels during fetal development..

This begs the question: are gays and lesbians simply on the subtlest end of the intersex spectrum, in which only the brain is affected?

There's been a good deal of research that shows the brains of gay men more closely resemble straight women, and the brains of lesbians resemble straight men. All fetuses start out essentially neuter (but to all appearances are female) and are differentiated by increasing levels of either testosterone and estrogen. If those levels are out of kilter at specific times during gestation, genital and fetal brain development will be affected. That may result in an intersex or a gay/lesbian child depending on what stage the hormone imbalance occurs at.

Opponents of same-sex marriage insist being gay is a choice and a moral and religious issue. But if people are "born gay" or intersex because of hormone levels in the uterus, they will be hard-wired for a certain sexual orientation. It makes no sense to stigmatize and punish them for a genetic condition that is no more under their control than being nearsighted, being genetically predisposed to breast cancer, having blue eyes -- or dark skin.

Disallowing same-sex marriage is no different than the genetic logic embraced by miscegenation laws that used to prevent blacks and whites from marrying. It's tantamount to racism.

Opponents of gay marriage will immediately object to this. They will insist that this condition is an error and not a badge of honor. Maybe so. But once someone is born this way, there's no way to "fix" it.

The question opponents of gay marriage might ask is what's causing these developmental errors, and if there's anything we can do to prevent them from occurring.

There are many common chemicals, such as BPA, that break down into synthetic estrogens. These have been shown to cause feminization in fish and amphibians, which has raised a great deal of speculation about whether BPA is contributing to the feminization of male humans and shrinking their penises. And maybe making them gay?

BPA is in thousands of products, from plastic bottles, to linings of Coke cans, to cash-register receipts. Perhaps the best thing we can do to stop the "gay plague" is to force companies to prove that the chemicals they use are safe, and to remove them from the market when they're shown to affect fetal development.

Damn. Nothing is worse than having to choose between two firmly held dogmas...