“Unfortunately, scientific results do not determine their own political interpretations, nor do the investigators.”

Does human sexuality have a genetic component? In an era of genomics that allows parents to select for traits such as the skin color or eye color of their baby, and of continued discrimination, imprisonment, and even death penalities for LGBTQ+ people globally, questions around the genetic determinacy of sexuality require close ethical consideration.

“The HIV/AIDS epidemic, along with the milieu of social, legal, and political factors that have shaped the entwined experiences of LGBT oppression and liberation over the 20th and 21st centuries, has generated challenges to estimating uniform conditions for self-reporting same-sex sexual behavior across space and time.”