The only really interesting analysis is the prevalence rates (OK source, not a volunteer biased activist survey). They could have done many interesting interaction or even just correlation analyses: is mental health worse in less tolerant countries? Better yet, is the non-heterosexual burden greater (an interaction effect). I think they didn't include them because they found nothing, I'll try to check.
Excellent post. Note also that the DID methodology was also used to make ridiculous stupid claims about the putative effect of COVID masking which did nothing to prevent COVID spread.
2-I believe one genetic factor that could in part explain the disparity between gays and heteros is what's called "childhood gender non-conformity" or CGNC. It is defined as femenine beahviour in boy and masculinity in girls ("Effeminacy" and "butchness"):
"Using childhood gender conforming heterosexual peers as reference, childhood gender conforming homosexual participants generally did not exhibit statistically significantly increased odds of mental health problems. In contrast, childhood gender non-conforming homosexual participants had elevated odds of most mental health problems, with particularly high odds for suicidal thoughts/attempts."
Before thinking I am woke or something, this behaviour has shown to be significantly heritable:
"As part of an ongoing longitudinal study of the Netherlands Twin Registry, mothers were asked to complete the CBCL for their twins when they were 7 (n∼14,000 twins) and 10 years old (n∼8,500 twins)." - " At both ages, the similarity for cross-gender behavior was greater in monozygotic than in dizygotic twins pairs. Genetic structural equation modeling showed that 70% of the variance in the liability of cross-gender behavior could be explained by genetic factors, at both ages and for both sexes."
In this study by doctor Michael Bailey he recruited twins from the Australian Twin Registry, Childhood Gender non-conformity was significantly heritable (around 50%).
I'd say it would be useful to replicate this study with a in within family model.
There is also this study with an interestic premise but unfortunately it has a minuscule sample, do you think it would be worthwile to try to replicate it with a bigger sample?
What does this article say? let's read the introduction first shall we "anon":
"One of my main takes were that non-heterosexuality and poor mental health are genetically confounded (they are caused by similar genes)."
In my comment I present a genetic confounding effect caused by CGNC, which I demonstrated is related to worst mental health and is more common among non-heterosexuals (only 20%-15% of exclusive homosexuals are gender conforming, so 4/5 present some form of CGNC). So my intention was to support one of the takes of the author.
Quoting the GWAS study of CGNC I posted:
"At the 5p13 SNP cluster, the nearest gene is SLC1A3, a brain expressed glutamate transporter which has been implicated in some behavioral phenotypes, e.g., attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mood disorders, cortico-limbic connectivity during affective regulation"
" The 10q23 SNP cluster overlaps with GRID1, which encodes a glutamate receptor channel subunit, and has also been implicated in various behavioral phenotypes (e.g., mood disorders; Fallin et al., 2005; Zhang et al., 2018) and when deleted in the mouse leads to changes in emotional and social behaviors (Yadav et al., 2012)"
"The SNPs in the 7q32 cluster fall within (3’UTR, synonymous coding) and near LRRC4, which has been implicated in autism spectrum disorders (Du et al., 2020; Um et al., 2018)."
"When deleted (Lrrc4−/−) in the mouse, N-Methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR, an ionotropic glutamate receptor)-dependent synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus was decreased, and these mice displayed mild social interaction deficits, increased self-grooming, and modest anxiety-like behaviors, which were reversed by pharmacological NMDAR activation (Um et al., 2018)."
So you still think I'm coping "Anon"? Or have you realized I'm agreeing with one of the proposed causes of the article? Besides Bailey agrees with me on CGNC genetic effect on the worst mental health of non-heterosexuals.
You’re repeating a point the article already acknowledges (genetic confounding like CGNC), but the whole point is that genetic factors alone don't explain the full mental health gap.
The twin study cited shows that even within monozygotic (identical) twins, the non-heterosexual twin has higher rates of self-harm. That means something beyond shared genetics, including CGNC, is contributing to the difference.
Also, CGNC is by definition a childhood trait, while the article focuses on adolescents and adults so while it may play an early role, it's not sufficient to explain why mental health disparities persist into adulthood, or why they show up within genetically identical pairs.
So, to answer your question: yes, you are still coping, because the explanation you provided is already addressed. It looks like you are trying to be a smart ass and asking Hunter all these questions just so can find stuff to debunk him, hence why you are doing the whole "I'm just asking questions" approach in your reply, and saying stuff like "Before thinking I am woke or something" to try to mask your intentions, when in fact it does the opposite. Nice try.
-"asking Hunter all these questions just so can find stuff to debunk him"
Really? Never did my intention was to debunk him. The evidence I show demostrates CGNC can moderate the mental health gap of homosexuals (with the expention of bisexuals, who have different genetics related to way higher risk taking) and heterosexuals to near non-sigficanse. This seems like a contradiction so, epitemologically, it is obvious and of common sense to ask OP why is this the case and if possible find an explanation.
-"CGNC is by definition a childhood trait, while the article focuses on adolescents and adults so while it may play an early role, it's not sufficient to explain why mental health disparities persist into adulthood"
Incorrect. It's not a trait only existing inheritantly in childhood it's a trait that FIRST manifests early in childhood but PERSISTS to the adult age. It's like when a disease manifests in childhood (like let's say childhood onset schizophrenia for example), they don't stop having schizophrenia when they reach adulthood lol.
It is a super common finding in both the scientific literature and in everyday observations that gay adults keep being effeminate and lesbian adults masculine. Why do you thing that GNC is a great predictor of non-heterosexuality in adulthood? Or why do you think most gay males keep being effeminate in adulthood and lesbians keep being butch in adulthood? If you have doubts, ask michael Bailey about it.
-"The twin study cited shows that even within monozygotic (identical) twins, the non-heterosexual twin has higher rates of self-harm."
Well, what did east-hunter said about the co-twin analysis? he said "The co-twin analysis in this sample was either sloppily done, p-hacked or both." Doesn't sound very reliable or is it?
The study also said: “At age 26, twins self-reported their sexual orientation, with the following options: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, fluid, prefer to self-define, unsure/I don’t know, and prefer not to answer. These were used for the descriptive statistics, but for the inferential analyses, the scores were dichotomised into “heterosexual” and “sexual minority”.”
So they coupled a bunch of homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, asexuals and "fluids" groups together instead of separately despite them being genetically non-identical and enviromentally distincy groups (they have "different kinds of life" as said by easthunter)?
"Analyzing the UK Biobank (UKB) (36), which harbors the genotypic and phenotypic information from approximately 0.5 million British participants, we provide evidence that BSB and eSSB are genetically nonidentical, justifying a separate analysis of these two traits."
The authors of the study definitively didn't think of that, did they? Given their choice to merge them all together they didn't have a large enough sample size to study each group with it's respective twins separately.
To study each group independently (like exclusively homosexuals with their heterosexual twins, or asexuals with their heterosexual twins, etc) they’d need enough pairs in each of those specific combinations but the sample sizes for these individual groups here are too small to detect reliable differences or relationships with self-harm in each (hence they choose to clench them all together to avoid low power).
-"That means something beyond shared genetics, including CGNC, is contributing to the difference."
But CGNC is NOT entirely genetic (it's around half genetic and half enviromental) and there are disparities in CGNC even between identical twins!
The study says: "Childhood gender nonconformity (femininity in males, masculinity in females) predicts a nonstraight (gay, lesbian, or bisexual) sexual orientation in adulthood. In previous work, non-straight twins reported more childhood gender nonconformity than their genetically identical, but straight, co-twins."
and: "Identical twins with discordant sexual orientations visibly differed in their gendernonconformity, starting in childhood. Moreover, the method used - the evaluation of gender related characteristics seen in photographs - pointed to subtle similarities of these twins, possibly because of shared influences."
Since CGNC has been proved to be something beyond just shared genetics, it cannot be discarted as an explaination.
So finally:
-"I'm just asking questions" approach in your reply, and saying stuff like "Before thinking I am woke or something" to try to mask your intentions, when in fact it does the opposite. Nice try."
At this point you are just being unreasonable and you are not cooperating in the conversation.
In any case it is @easthunter to whom I wan't to talk in a civil way, thanks.
CGNC is as much a possible explanation for worse mental health than anything else non-heterosexuals are statistically more likely to do. Technically it is a "different lifeways" theory. The genetic angle is unnecessary because the disparity is there in MZs and your theory proposes a causal effect (it is being CGNC, not having the genes fro it, that matters). The obvious study design to test this hypothesis would be to measure, ideally in a longitudinal study, CNGC and check if controlling for it makes the mental health discrepancy go away. This may have already been done in some studies I reviewed here but I can't remember off the top of my head. A good question is why CNGC would cause poor mental health. Is it because it invites bullying? Then it's just a version of the minority stress hypothesis.
Do a review of Baby Reindeer. The really interesting part everyone avoided covering - a young straight guy being groomed, drugged, raped and descends into drugs and the gay lifestyle.
Another study here which I think you should review. Thoughts? https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00148-025-01077-4
Interesting paper, will keep in mind
The only really interesting analysis is the prevalence rates (OK source, not a volunteer biased activist survey). They could have done many interesting interaction or even just correlation analyses: is mental health worse in less tolerant countries? Better yet, is the non-heterosexual burden greater (an interaction effect). I think they didn't include them because they found nothing, I'll try to check.
Excellent post. Note also that the DID methodology was also used to make ridiculous stupid claims about the putative effect of COVID masking which did nothing to prevent COVID spread.
1-Wasn't it found the risk taking association is mostly because of bisexuals and not exclussive homosexuals? Both are genetically non-identical:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj6958
2-I believe one genetic factor that could in part explain the disparity between gays and heteros is what's called "childhood gender non-conformity" or CGNC. It is defined as femenine beahviour in boy and masculinity in girls ("Effeminacy" and "butchness"):
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/wps.21096
"Using childhood gender conforming heterosexual peers as reference, childhood gender conforming homosexual participants generally did not exhibit statistically significantly increased odds of mental health problems. In contrast, childhood gender non-conforming homosexual participants had elevated odds of most mental health problems, with particularly high odds for suicidal thoughts/attempts."
Before thinking I am woke or something, this behaviour has shown to be significantly heritable:
"As part of an ongoing longitudinal study of the Netherlands Twin Registry, mothers were asked to complete the CBCL for their twins when they were 7 (n∼14,000 twins) and 10 years old (n∼8,500 twins)." - " At both ages, the similarity for cross-gender behavior was greater in monozygotic than in dizygotic twins pairs. Genetic structural equation modeling showed that 70% of the variance in the liability of cross-gender behavior could be explained by genetic factors, at both ages and for both sexes."
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-006-9072-0
In this study by doctor Michael Bailey he recruited twins from the Australian Twin Registry, Childhood Gender non-conformity was significantly heritable (around 50%).
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/12572213_Genetics_and_Environmental_Influences_on_Sexual_Orientation_and_Its_Correlates_in_an_Australian_Twin_Sample
And there is even a GWAS study about it:
"Genome-Wide Linkage and Association Study of Childhood Gender Nonconformity in Males."
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8604823/
I'd say it would be useful to replicate this study with a in within family model.
There is also this study with an interestic premise but unfortunately it has a minuscule sample, do you think it would be worthwile to try to replicate it with a bigger sample?
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-023-02761-w
Hi and good day!
This is mostly cope, Michael Bailey, who you cite agrees with all the criticism on these articles.
What does this article say? let's read the introduction first shall we "anon":
"One of my main takes were that non-heterosexuality and poor mental health are genetically confounded (they are caused by similar genes)."
In my comment I present a genetic confounding effect caused by CGNC, which I demonstrated is related to worst mental health and is more common among non-heterosexuals (only 20%-15% of exclusive homosexuals are gender conforming, so 4/5 present some form of CGNC). So my intention was to support one of the takes of the author.
Quoting the GWAS study of CGNC I posted:
"At the 5p13 SNP cluster, the nearest gene is SLC1A3, a brain expressed glutamate transporter which has been implicated in some behavioral phenotypes, e.g., attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, mood disorders, cortico-limbic connectivity during affective regulation"
" The 10q23 SNP cluster overlaps with GRID1, which encodes a glutamate receptor channel subunit, and has also been implicated in various behavioral phenotypes (e.g., mood disorders; Fallin et al., 2005; Zhang et al., 2018) and when deleted in the mouse leads to changes in emotional and social behaviors (Yadav et al., 2012)"
"The SNPs in the 7q32 cluster fall within (3’UTR, synonymous coding) and near LRRC4, which has been implicated in autism spectrum disorders (Du et al., 2020; Um et al., 2018)."
"When deleted (Lrrc4−/−) in the mouse, N-Methyl-D-aspartate receptor (NMDAR, an ionotropic glutamate receptor)-dependent synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus was decreased, and these mice displayed mild social interaction deficits, increased self-grooming, and modest anxiety-like behaviors, which were reversed by pharmacological NMDAR activation (Um et al., 2018)."
So you still think I'm coping "Anon"? Or have you realized I'm agreeing with one of the proposed causes of the article? Besides Bailey agrees with me on CGNC genetic effect on the worst mental health of non-heterosexuals.
Alright "Chase", let's go over this:
You’re repeating a point the article already acknowledges (genetic confounding like CGNC), but the whole point is that genetic factors alone don't explain the full mental health gap.
The twin study cited shows that even within monozygotic (identical) twins, the non-heterosexual twin has higher rates of self-harm. That means something beyond shared genetics, including CGNC, is contributing to the difference.
Also, CGNC is by definition a childhood trait, while the article focuses on adolescents and adults so while it may play an early role, it's not sufficient to explain why mental health disparities persist into adulthood, or why they show up within genetically identical pairs.
So, to answer your question: yes, you are still coping, because the explanation you provided is already addressed. It looks like you are trying to be a smart ass and asking Hunter all these questions just so can find stuff to debunk him, hence why you are doing the whole "I'm just asking questions" approach in your reply, and saying stuff like "Before thinking I am woke or something" to try to mask your intentions, when in fact it does the opposite. Nice try.
-"asking Hunter all these questions just so can find stuff to debunk him"
Really? Never did my intention was to debunk him. The evidence I show demostrates CGNC can moderate the mental health gap of homosexuals (with the expention of bisexuals, who have different genetics related to way higher risk taking) and heterosexuals to near non-sigficanse. This seems like a contradiction so, epitemologically, it is obvious and of common sense to ask OP why is this the case and if possible find an explanation.
-"CGNC is by definition a childhood trait, while the article focuses on adolescents and adults so while it may play an early role, it's not sufficient to explain why mental health disparities persist into adulthood"
Incorrect. It's not a trait only existing inheritantly in childhood it's a trait that FIRST manifests early in childhood but PERSISTS to the adult age. It's like when a disease manifests in childhood (like let's say childhood onset schizophrenia for example), they don't stop having schizophrenia when they reach adulthood lol.
It is a super common finding in both the scientific literature and in everyday observations that gay adults keep being effeminate and lesbian adults masculine. Why do you thing that GNC is a great predictor of non-heterosexuality in adulthood? Or why do you think most gay males keep being effeminate in adulthood and lesbians keep being butch in adulthood? If you have doubts, ask michael Bailey about it.
-"The twin study cited shows that even within monozygotic (identical) twins, the non-heterosexual twin has higher rates of self-harm."
Well, what did east-hunter said about the co-twin analysis? he said "The co-twin analysis in this sample was either sloppily done, p-hacked or both." Doesn't sound very reliable or is it?
The study also said: “At age 26, twins self-reported their sexual orientation, with the following options: heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, fluid, prefer to self-define, unsure/I don’t know, and prefer not to answer. These were used for the descriptive statistics, but for the inferential analyses, the scores were dichotomised into “heterosexual” and “sexual minority”.”
So they coupled a bunch of homosexuals, bisexuals, pansexuals, asexuals and "fluids" groups together instead of separately despite them being genetically non-identical and enviromentally distincy groups (they have "different kinds of life" as said by easthunter)?
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adj6958
"Analyzing the UK Biobank (UKB) (36), which harbors the genotypic and phenotypic information from approximately 0.5 million British participants, we provide evidence that BSB and eSSB are genetically nonidentical, justifying a separate analysis of these two traits."
The authors of the study definitively didn't think of that, did they? Given their choice to merge them all together they didn't have a large enough sample size to study each group with it's respective twins separately.
To study each group independently (like exclusively homosexuals with their heterosexual twins, or asexuals with their heterosexual twins, etc) they’d need enough pairs in each of those specific combinations but the sample sizes for these individual groups here are too small to detect reliable differences or relationships with self-harm in each (hence they choose to clench them all together to avoid low power).
-"That means something beyond shared genetics, including CGNC, is contributing to the difference."
But CGNC is NOT entirely genetic (it's around half genetic and half enviromental) and there are disparities in CGNC even between identical twins!
https://repository.uel.ac.uk/download/c9bdd7fdd6ab87a0c9737c8f6a7463f19f1a38707cd54a5024a1d6ce19c9a8a2/393334/Gender%20nonconformity%20of%20identical%20twins.pdf
The study says: "Childhood gender nonconformity (femininity in males, masculinity in females) predicts a nonstraight (gay, lesbian, or bisexual) sexual orientation in adulthood. In previous work, non-straight twins reported more childhood gender nonconformity than their genetically identical, but straight, co-twins."
and: "Identical twins with discordant sexual orientations visibly differed in their gendernonconformity, starting in childhood. Moreover, the method used - the evaluation of gender related characteristics seen in photographs - pointed to subtle similarities of these twins, possibly because of shared influences."
Since CGNC has been proved to be something beyond just shared genetics, it cannot be discarted as an explaination.
So finally:
-"I'm just asking questions" approach in your reply, and saying stuff like "Before thinking I am woke or something" to try to mask your intentions, when in fact it does the opposite. Nice try."
At this point you are just being unreasonable and you are not cooperating in the conversation.
In any case it is @easthunter to whom I wan't to talk in a civil way, thanks.
CGNC is as much a possible explanation for worse mental health than anything else non-heterosexuals are statistically more likely to do. Technically it is a "different lifeways" theory. The genetic angle is unnecessary because the disparity is there in MZs and your theory proposes a causal effect (it is being CGNC, not having the genes fro it, that matters). The obvious study design to test this hypothesis would be to measure, ideally in a longitudinal study, CNGC and check if controlling for it makes the mental health discrepancy go away. This may have already been done in some studies I reviewed here but I can't remember off the top of my head. A good question is why CNGC would cause poor mental health. Is it because it invites bullying? Then it's just a version of the minority stress hypothesis.
Do a review of Baby Reindeer. The really interesting part everyone avoided covering - a young straight guy being groomed, drugged, raped and descends into drugs and the gay lifestyle.