Thanks for such a high quality comment. I’ve heard that the termination rate for Down Syndrome pregnancies varies by country. For example, I’ve heard it’s higher in most European countries than in America.
And that makes me wonder how many other conditions that would be true for. How many people would still select the embryo that is gay? I fear only very few. And would choosing against them make the world a better place? I doubt it.
I don’t think everyone is going to make the same choice here. I suspect some parents would select for greater chance of same-sex attraction and some will select against it. Though I suspect that in most cases parents are just going to care much more about other traits so it won’t be selected very strongly either way.
I am reasonably certain that most conservatives and religious people would select against queer kids. Look at the effort they go to to make sure kids do not know that being trans or gay is even an option, stopping teachers from mentioning their gay partners. The attempts to pray, or electrocute, the gay away. The search for a cause of gayness so it can be prevented.
Yet very few gay people want to know the gay gene(s) (if there are any) so they can have more gay kids. There are a lot of hetero cis people trying to make their kids hetero and cis, but I have yet to encounter a queer person who is actively trying to make their kid queer. Give them options, yes. Raise them open-minded and informed, yes. But make them queer? Discourage them from being cis and hetero when they actually are? Have never seen it. Many queer people, despite being happy and proud, remember the pain discrimination caused them, the times they were beaten up, the fight for medical care, the flats where they were denied, the things thrown against their door. They don’t want to force queer kids into the closet, they want them to be out and proud. But they are often relieved when the kids are straight. If they could make their kids gay, I still highly doubt they would. If they could make them not be, I think a few would take that offer.
Amongst the liberals, I’d expect it to not to go either way that much—I think that would mostly play out like you imagine, with them caring primarily about other things, though I suspect there would still be a slight bias against. My mom is very liberal, and very accepting of me now, and adores my partner, speaks of us proudly, is perfectly happy with it now. But her initial reaction when I told her I was queer was very negative. She was very upset. She tried to talk me out of it, bizarrely. She said she was upset because she thought this meant my life would be harder. Despite living in one of the most liberal countries in the world, in a city with a huge queer scene, with queer people in politics and art everywhere. Similarly, when as a young person assigned female, I would not stop growing, my mum put me on hormones to stop that. She said I was getting too big for a girl, that I would not find a husband that way. She wanted to help, I am sure. I resent it massively. I’m borderline inter, I identify as non-binary, my partner specifically loves me being tall, being tall has been advantageous for me in my hobbies, and the hormonal intervention messed up my hormones, and may well have contributed to life-long problems. We also have a long history in my country of blatantly intersex children being born, and then assigned a binary gender at birth, and being surgically modified to look like it, undergoing unnecessary and non-consensual surgery that goes so freaking far beyond what I experienced, and not being told later. Because the parents wanted to save their kids the pain of not being normal. For the inter people involved, this is awful, because they have healthy tissue that would have given them pleasure cut away to fit a norm, while failing to give them any reproductive function; they are just made to fit a mould.
So I do not think queer people would disappear in the first generation.
But I do think they would be fewer, not equal or more.
And that raises an interesting question for future generations.
After a while, some trans clinics will increasingly close for lack of need, leaving the remaining trans kids having to travel far and deal with loopholes and lost forms and unclear rules and secondary jobs for doctors. There will be increasingly less need to cover queer topics in school if none of the kids are queer, it will seem pointless for so few people. Fewer people will want to organise or attend a pride parade. The gay bars will go broke. The gay dating pool will shrink. People who are bi will have less chance to discover it. More people will stay in the closet. Fewer people will be potential queer partners, period.
I mentioned the case of Down syndrome going extinct in Iceland above—mostly because I have been very touched by stories of parents with disabled children saying that it feels like the world is increasingly hostile to them, with support facilities closing, people not being educated, them being stared at more, people questioning why these kids are there.
I am haunted by a text I read by a mother of a disabled child. She said people kept seeing her kid and saying “oh how tragic, didn’t you know before?” And she would say, before the birth? Yes, she had known. The people would then go “Oh, but it couldn’t be fixed?” She would answer in confusion, well, no, it could not be operated on in the womb yet, only post-birth, and by then, parts of the results of the oxygen deprivation were irreversible; that the child was getting lots of therapy now and getting better and was happy, but would likely never entirely catch up. Then there would be an awkward silence. She eventually realised they weren’t asking why the kid had not been fixed. They were asking why the kid had not been aborted. Why she had allowed her daughter into the world. Her daughter, happily smiling, beloved, just existing and bringing joy, oblivious to the debate as to why her existence had been permitted at all.
There is nothing inherently bad about being queer, and queer people in accepting, supportive societies in which they are seen as normal and not alone and they have a thriving subculture are very happy.
But would a queer person be as happy if they are a rarity noone understands, with no structures for them, no subculture community, no partners? I doubt it.
Similarly, would a deaf person be happy in a society that has no sign language, no mandatory subtitles, no deaf community and culture, in which they are the only one? I doubt it, and yet think of Beethoven still composing while deaf, stranded alone; Stephen Colbert filling our homes with laughter while deaf on one ear.
Would a wheelchair bound person be happy in a world without ramps and accessible toilets? If the disability would have been known before birth, and yet the mother kept it, are they going to bill the mother and child for building a ramp into the school, which noone else needs? And yet I think of the beautiful physics Stephen Hawking has written while wheelchair bound.
I suspect the process of reducing unusual people with unusual needs would be self-accelerating. Queer people will have an increasingly bad time, and wanting to save their kids from an issue so big and systematic that they do not know how to fix it, would want to spare them from it.
Like I said—I do not think the individuals making choices in such systems mean to do a bad thing at all. Yet the changes to society that results are very scary, and I do not want them.
Thanks for such a high quality comment. I’ve heard that the termination rate for Down Syndrome pregnancies varies by country. For example, I’ve heard it’s higher in most European countries than in America.
I don’t think everyone is going to make the same choice here. I suspect some parents would select for greater chance of same-sex attraction and some will select against it. Though I suspect that in most cases parents are just going to care much more about other traits so it won’t be selected very strongly either way.
I am reasonably certain that most conservatives and religious people would select against queer kids. Look at the effort they go to to make sure kids do not know that being trans or gay is even an option, stopping teachers from mentioning their gay partners. The attempts to pray, or electrocute, the gay away. The search for a cause of gayness so it can be prevented.
Yet very few gay people want to know the gay gene(s) (if there are any) so they can have more gay kids. There are a lot of hetero cis people trying to make their kids hetero and cis, but I have yet to encounter a queer person who is actively trying to make their kid queer. Give them options, yes. Raise them open-minded and informed, yes. But make them queer? Discourage them from being cis and hetero when they actually are? Have never seen it. Many queer people, despite being happy and proud, remember the pain discrimination caused them, the times they were beaten up, the fight for medical care, the flats where they were denied, the things thrown against their door. They don’t want to force queer kids into the closet, they want them to be out and proud. But they are often relieved when the kids are straight. If they could make their kids gay, I still highly doubt they would. If they could make them not be, I think a few would take that offer.
Amongst the liberals, I’d expect it to not to go either way that much—I think that would mostly play out like you imagine, with them caring primarily about other things, though I suspect there would still be a slight bias against. My mom is very liberal, and very accepting of me now, and adores my partner, speaks of us proudly, is perfectly happy with it now. But her initial reaction when I told her I was queer was very negative. She was very upset. She tried to talk me out of it, bizarrely. She said she was upset because she thought this meant my life would be harder. Despite living in one of the most liberal countries in the world, in a city with a huge queer scene, with queer people in politics and art everywhere. Similarly, when as a young person assigned female, I would not stop growing, my mum put me on hormones to stop that. She said I was getting too big for a girl, that I would not find a husband that way. She wanted to help, I am sure. I resent it massively. I’m borderline inter, I identify as non-binary, my partner specifically loves me being tall, being tall has been advantageous for me in my hobbies, and the hormonal intervention messed up my hormones, and may well have contributed to life-long problems. We also have a long history in my country of blatantly intersex children being born, and then assigned a binary gender at birth, and being surgically modified to look like it, undergoing unnecessary and non-consensual surgery that goes so freaking far beyond what I experienced, and not being told later. Because the parents wanted to save their kids the pain of not being normal. For the inter people involved, this is awful, because they have healthy tissue that would have given them pleasure cut away to fit a norm, while failing to give them any reproductive function; they are just made to fit a mould.
So I do not think queer people would disappear in the first generation.
But I do think they would be fewer, not equal or more.
And that raises an interesting question for future generations.
After a while, some trans clinics will increasingly close for lack of need, leaving the remaining trans kids having to travel far and deal with loopholes and lost forms and unclear rules and secondary jobs for doctors. There will be increasingly less need to cover queer topics in school if none of the kids are queer, it will seem pointless for so few people. Fewer people will want to organise or attend a pride parade. The gay bars will go broke. The gay dating pool will shrink. People who are bi will have less chance to discover it. More people will stay in the closet. Fewer people will be potential queer partners, period.
I mentioned the case of Down syndrome going extinct in Iceland above—mostly because I have been very touched by stories of parents with disabled children saying that it feels like the world is increasingly hostile to them, with support facilities closing, people not being educated, them being stared at more, people questioning why these kids are there.
I am haunted by a text I read by a mother of a disabled child. She said people kept seeing her kid and saying “oh how tragic, didn’t you know before?” And she would say, before the birth? Yes, she had known. The people would then go “Oh, but it couldn’t be fixed?” She would answer in confusion, well, no, it could not be operated on in the womb yet, only post-birth, and by then, parts of the results of the oxygen deprivation were irreversible; that the child was getting lots of therapy now and getting better and was happy, but would likely never entirely catch up. Then there would be an awkward silence. She eventually realised they weren’t asking why the kid had not been fixed. They were asking why the kid had not been aborted. Why she had allowed her daughter into the world. Her daughter, happily smiling, beloved, just existing and bringing joy, oblivious to the debate as to why her existence had been permitted at all.
There is nothing inherently bad about being queer, and queer people in accepting, supportive societies in which they are seen as normal and not alone and they have a thriving subculture are very happy.
But would a queer person be as happy if they are a rarity noone understands, with no structures for them, no subculture community, no partners? I doubt it.
Similarly, would a deaf person be happy in a society that has no sign language, no mandatory subtitles, no deaf community and culture, in which they are the only one? I doubt it, and yet think of Beethoven still composing while deaf, stranded alone; Stephen Colbert filling our homes with laughter while deaf on one ear.
Would a wheelchair bound person be happy in a world without ramps and accessible toilets? If the disability would have been known before birth, and yet the mother kept it, are they going to bill the mother and child for building a ramp into the school, which noone else needs? And yet I think of the beautiful physics Stephen Hawking has written while wheelchair bound.
I suspect the process of reducing unusual people with unusual needs would be self-accelerating. Queer people will have an increasingly bad time, and wanting to save their kids from an issue so big and systematic that they do not know how to fix it, would want to spare them from it.
Like I said—I do not think the individuals making choices in such systems mean to do a bad thing at all. Yet the changes to society that results are very scary, and I do not want them.