Over the past decade the idea that we are “born this way” — or that our sexuality is genetic — has become increasingly important. The mantra has become a political strategy, in particular for gay and lesbian communities, who see it as a way to protect themselves from discrimination. The movement has spawned blogs where people show pictures of their childhood to highlight the innate nature of their sexuality, and attacks on those who have questioned the theory.

But do the politics match the science?

People have been searching for biological explanations for sexual desires for centuries — primarily as a way to try and find a “cure” for “perverted desires”. In the most horrible of examples, the Nazi regime in Germany invested significant resources in attempts to find the reasons for homosexuality in attempt to cure it.

In recent decades the search for a “gay gene” has intensified. In 1991, for example, Simon LeVay released a study that suggested small differences in the size of certain cells in the brain could influence sexual orientation in men. In 1993 this research turned to genetics, when Dean Hamer claimed that markers on the X chromosome could influence the development of same-sex orientation in men. The issue hit the headlines again last year after the release of a study from Dr. Alan Sanders. Sanders studied the genes on 409 pairs of gay brothers, finding they may share genetic markers on the X chromosome and chromosome 8.

With each study, confidence in the gay community about a genetic link to our sexuality has become stronger. It has become generally assumed that a gay gene must exist. But take look at the actual science, and the history of sexuality, and you will find serious problems with the theory.

First, all of the recent studies searching for a gay gene have significant issues. For example, as Samantha Allen notes, biologist Anne Fausto-Sterling “tore LeVay’s original study to shreds, noting that there is substantial overlap between the cell cluster size ranges of gay men and straight men in his sample.” There has been significant criticism in scientific fields over Sanders’ study as well, with many scientists arguing the results were not “statistically significant” (while that may sound like a mild criticism that’s a big deal in the science community). While news headlines promote each study as a “confirmation of the gay gene”, the reality is very different.

These issues highlight a fundamental problem that goes well beyond the peculiarities of these particular studies. Scientists are asking whether homosexuality is natural when we can’t even agree exactly what homosexuality is. Homosexuality, as with all sexualities, is a social construction.

What does that mean? In his book The History of Sexuality Michel Foucault charted a major shift in our construction of sexual desires over the past few centuries. There are two important changes. First, we have developed the idea that our sexual desires reveal a fundamental truth about who we are, and second we have created a conviction that we have an obligation to seek out that truth and express it. As Jesi Egan argues, “within this framework, sex isn’t just something you do. Instead, the kind of sex you have (or want to have) becomes a symptom of something else: your sexuality.”

Instead of just being a thing we do, therefore, sex has become an essential part of our identity. Hence the creation of the terms “homosexuality” and “heterosexuality” — terms which were never related to physical truths, but instead to social truths. This picture of sexuality is where we stand today: our sexual desires help construct our social identity, one which we believe tells a fundamental truth about who we are.

To understand this a bit more it is worth looking at past expressions of sexual desire.

Ancient Greece is usually noted as one of the most open societies when it came to male homosexual acts, which were seen by some as “the most praise-worthy, substantive and Godly forms of love.” Greece’s ancient culture is known to include a form of relationship called pederasty, a socially acknowledged and acceptable form of erotic love between an adult male and a younger man.

Or what about the Sambia in Papua New Guinea? Believing it possesses “masculine spirit”, boys in the Sambia are required to ingest semen as part of a ritual to allow them to mature to men. All boys go through a period in their life where they are required to perform regular oral sex on older members of society. When they become men themselves they then repay the favour by offering their semen to boys wishing to become men.

These sorts of examples are not just related to homosexual acts either. Look at the different perceptions of female beauty throughout the ages. In the Renaissance period for example more voluptuous women who had large breasts and hips were portrayed as beautiful, whereas in Victorian England women’s beauty was based around an hourglass figure created by corsets designed to cinch a waste as tightly as possible. These are both very different to mainstream perceptions of female beauty today, which are (controversially) based heavily on an ideal of model-type thinness.

This is the major problem that advocates of a gay gene face. Our sexual desires and ideals change based on our society at any given time. Do proponents of the gay gene believe that those in Ancient Greece or in the Sambia had/have a greater prevalence of a gay gene than we do today? Do our perceptions of female beauty change over the times because of shifts in the genes of straight men?

Of course this still doesn’t answer the question of where our sexuality comes from. When faced with this criticism, proponents of the gay gene ask the question, “why would people be choose to be gay in a world where homosexuality is so persecuted?” We live in a society where non-heterosexual sex is still highly discriminated against, so why are there homosexuals in this world?

The answer is complex, and we don’t really know all the factors involved. But look at the current research and you can see that social conditions still play a major role.

For example, whilst almost all of the focus of research into the gay gene has focused on gay men, research into female sexual desires has continued as well. In 2006 for example, Linda Garnets and Anne Peplau presented research they described as a “paradigm shift” into female sexuality. Their research found that women’s sexual orientation is potentially fluid, shaped by life experiences and can change over the course of a life span. Of particular importance they found that female sexual orientation is “shaped by such social and cultural factors as women’s education, social status and power, economic opportunities, and attitudes about women’s roles.”

Sexual desire is due to a range of different factors — including biology, a person’s upbringing and education and social constructions at the time. Whilst female sexual “fluidity”, for example, can be linked to social acceptance of that idea (based on male desires) that one social construction does not tell the story for everyone. Our sexuality is due to a range of factors we not fully understand.

Where does this leave us? Clearly we do not know how sexuality is created and why some people end up with different sexual desires than others. But if we look at our history it is clear that it is not due to some inherent genetic marker. Jenny Graves at La Trobe University in Australia suggests that what is likely is that both men and women will inherit genetic varients leading to them being “somewhere between very male-loving and very female-loving”. Or, as I would describe it, we have human-loving genes. Homosexuality therefore is not due to genes, but develops, as Julie Bindel says, due to “a mix of opportunity, luck, chance, and, quite frankly, bravery.”

That doesn’t mean that gays and lesbians are less deserving of political rights. Queer relationships should be embraced, not because homosexuality is genetic, but simply because there is nothing wrong with them. While gay gene arguments may seem like a way to push the rights agenda forward it can actually have the opposite effect — limiting the debate solely to those traits and behaviours seen as genetic. There is no genetic evidence for much of our behaviour. Does that mean, even when we are not creating harm, we have less of a right to engage in those acts than others?

On the other side of the coin, does it signal support for those who conduct ‘aversion therapy’ in order to cure people of their homosexuality? Those practices are wrong, particularly when used against those who are under the age of 18, not because they don’t work (which they normally don’t), but because they perpetuate a homophobic ideology that causes significant harm to queer people. We’d be much better off fighting that ideology than trying to use “born this way” arguments to convince people to stop these practices.

When it comes to our sexuality it is very unlikely we are “born this way”. While biology obviously has a role it is our social conditioning that seems to be largely behind our sexual desires. And just like any other social conditioning, this is one that, if we really want to, we can break. If that is what we want to do, why not?