GWAS and gender/sex/uality 1

Differences

Genomics erotics

Erotics of genomics

Perverse genomics

key words: queer curiosity, genomics, excess

About excess and what emerges from it or what it produces: in a natural scientist’s subjectivation via encountering not just Big Data but Ever Embiggening Data; in a human scientist’s subjectivation via encountering different, smaller, but no less excessive data; in an infant acquiring a psyche and thus a gender/sex/uality, 

Excess is a key figure in the pattern that connects

gender/sex/uality is a gangly construction but it would be misleading or self-defeating to write only the genomics of sexuality, their vocabulary and grammar blend and overlap, they are all part of an inherited semiotic system where they depend on and provision each other.

Lately I have been wondering about wondering, curious if it might be possible to be both curious about whether genomics could approach or broach questions of gender/sex/uality – utterly excessive – and at the same time merit a judgment of being an” ethical” and/or “responsible” scientist? The data, presented and analyzed below, suggests not. But this probable impossibility, and here may be the nub of the difficulty, only serves to whet my wonder, redoubles my curiosity, and again opens me to an excess.

“The hereditarians want to be seen as scientific so they aren’t seen as racists; the anti-hereditarians want to be scientific so they aren’t seen as frightened by socially difficult scientific findings.” (Turkheimer 2017)

I understand sexuality to be already at work in the Broad researchers’ genomic investigation of sexuality, a driven and perverse desire to know that they know is, by the norms of normal genomic desire, wrong. In that sense we can understand what unfolded through and around the Broad study as itself an effect of gender/sex/uality: ”The moment of violation of a taboo one believes in, ‘when the taboo still holds good and yet we are yielding to the impulsion it forbids’ (p. 5) is a moment of intense pleasure intertwined with anguish; it is a moment that follows a profound look into the abyss around and within us, a look that transcends usual limits.” (Stein 1998, quoting George Bataille)

Stein on Laplanche: “sexuality can be pictured as a tension arc, a bridge that never closes between bodily excitations around the gratification (and frustration) of self-preservative needs, and the curiosity and questioning evoked via the mother's unconscious sexuality.” (Stein 1998, 264)

The biomedical gender/sex/uality assemblage

There has been an enormous expenditure of talent, energy, and money in the last decade on sexcess, largely instigated by and channelled through the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH). One cause and effect of that expenditure was an expert panel convened under the auspices of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine that culminated in its 2020 report, Measuring Sex, Gender Identity, and Sexual Orientation (NASEM 2020) Its opening sentence is but the first indication of some of the difficulties in this territory: “Sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation are complex, interrelated constructs that are conceptually distinct.” Recognizing complexity is not equivalent to recognizing excess, but it’s good enough for government work. But even in the space of this sentence, it’s not at all clear why interrelatedness doesn’t immediately belie conceptual distinction.

And as we read on in the report there are repeated suggestions that each of these “multidimensional constructs” are not, in truth, conceptually distinct but are rather messily entangled. Try as they might–indeed, try as they must–to maintain the distinctions, the language of the report repeatedly emphasizes their “conflation,” although it’s practice that gets the usual blame for sullying the concept: “in practice, sex and gender are often conflated under the assumption that they are mutually determined,” and since “sexual orientation is conceptually linked to sex and gender,” researchers are “led to the conflation of gender (non)conformity and sexual orientation, even though gender and sexual orientation are separate concepts.” 

Transition sentence/graph:  (AFS almost has it but its all message, inscriptions that are legible even if difficult to measure or assess and only imperfectly at best, but the unconscious isn’t legible in this way, it has to be read but because its written.  There’s no way to operationalize, grapheme-icize the sexual. Is there?

The sexual for lapalanche is the unconscious

It’s the excess of the genome, compounded over 500,00 times and then written into data: the desire for it, the fantasies about it, the excess of it and the wanting of that excess. 

I feel this to be..not true, and as with gwas, not a causal story, not one of determinism, but one of association, and I have learned to associate pleasure with the excess of “the genomic”, and of “the sexual,” as written in a literature I do not know well but sends me, despite knowing the risks and the idiocies and the clunky concepts and methods– sends me off in pursuit: Laplanche, Saketopoulous, AFS, etc etc, and a slew of papers in literatures on “the genomic,” Neale, and im going to get not just criticized but attacked  and that’s not a deterrent. I really really really want to know…something? Readr read read and then even write write write, which has a much heavier dosage of pain in its pleasure

The association between “the genomic” and “the sexual”? As if that could be written? As if there’s something more than the enigmatic excess unconscious

Genomics and not 

BG as “misbehaving science”-- science that doesn’t actually ever do what science is supposed to do: behave. Settle down. Settle controversies. Every science’s fantasy, its objet a which doesn;t match the reality, a classic Freudian tension, and an unresolvable one at that. So bg, the hypothesis goes, has to repeat the

To pursue the genomics of gender/sex/uality

Iff there’s speculation and “assuming” here, well, it’s a whopper of an assumption in a territory dense with whoppering assumptions on all sides, all the thousands of them

Maybe I am excusing it or rationalizing it because I too am an elite privileged white dude who can entertain his own fantasies, who can’t get over his childhood science-fetishes and has no experience of actual marginality or threat or harm.  All the events have their origin – or at least can be traced back to Ganna going to Neale and saying, look there’s all this data newly available from the UKBB and somebody’s going to jump into that if we don’t and we can do it better and more ethically

Critical analysts want to contain the excess and tame its risks

For me, the thrill and ju9saance of writing this has been its excessiveness, the painful pleasure of reading more and more into the unknown, knowing my ignorance in more detail, knowing the risks I am running.  Its why i identify with the genomicists.

Genomes< -> scientists<->ethicists

id<- -> ego < -> superego

And the superego is, frankly, insufferable, demanding and restrictive

NHGRI apparatus is all about protection, 

Really a working out of what Avital and EFK have discovered, the role of the psyche science  the

We’ve gotten pretty good at analyzing ther historical dynamics of science, the cultural and social dynamics, the conceptual and political dynamics of science, but we have devoted fewer analytic hours to the psychodynamics of science and scientists

Need to understand science and its doing  as affective cognitive double bind

Signified crudely by Fuckiing thinking 

What are the consequences of such a way of reading sciences and scientists? 

-To think about curiosity again, the politics of curiosity

-to think about ethics of science, ethics of knowling, hermeneutical justice

To think about scientists and the limits of their knowing, what circumscribes it from within and from without. And how we assess responsibility, their merits, and what merits criticism or critique

– to think about success and failure

–to think about the possibility of an unconscious-driven genomics of the unconscious, where the unconscious = “the sexual”

Genomics is of the sexual, it is sexual, driven, “based on repression, the unconscious, and fantasy.  The fantasies are well documented because they allow us to belittle it Holy Grail!” Secret of Life!” u but as efk has taught us, these constitutive collective fantasies get realized albeit in “funny ways”

“how does a rudimentary division…participate in an expansive field of neurological and sexual ontologies? (Wilson 2000, 30)

“while rudimentary, is nonetheless generative” (Wilson 2000, 30)

It is clear enough that LeVay’s 1991 report seriously simplifies sexuality and does not provide data sufficiently robust to support the conclusions that LeVay draws there and in other contexts. It is also the case, however, that the data—generated through a conceptually awkward attempt to envisage the conjunction of neurology and sexuality—reveal a certain neurological complexity that LeVay has been able to register but not fully pursue. (Wilson 2000, 35)

research has shaken off two millennia of  Aristotelian sexism to arrive at an interactionist model of genetic sex modifiers  that destabilize a binary model of sex in favor of a polymorphic and multifactorial  model, which I call quantum sex. (Rosario 2009, 269)

the medical and sociopolitical challenge of intersexuality will hopefully prompt  a broader and more complex understanding of sex/gender/sexuality as a biological, psychological, and cultural phenomenon that is rich, diverse, and indefinitely  complex, resistant to all simplistic reductionism, whether biological or discursive. (Rosario 2009, 280)

Grzanka (who identifies as a psychologist) pays attention to affect, as I try to do. He says that he has engaged in an “ethnography of texts,” a characterization he borrows from Sara Ahmed. It’s not uncommon for non-certified anthropologists to claim to be doing ethnography; it’s an open and malleable term, and one I myself (educated as a historian of science, but who has worked his entire career under the professional sign of anthropology) have used from time to time. But always a little uneasily and reluctantly, well aware of how much dedicated practice ethnography demands, and well aware of how much my own scholarly work plays on the borders of its methodological and genre conventions. 

As an ethnogrammatologist, I read the same genomics texts read by Grzanka and others commenters, I read those commentary texts too, and I try to read my own unfolding text as well. I read deconstructively, for limits.

For example, Grzanka describes his ethnography of texts as “tracing the social lives of the GWAS,” following it around as it is communicated and interpreted in the media, organizations, etc. What I do is read the liveliness–social, rhetorical, psychodynamic–of the traces of the GWAS text, and the texts like Grzanka’s and others whose commentary constitutes part of its limited but indefinitely extensible context.  I read for structuring oppositions, I read for contradiction and impossibilities, I read for translational slips, I read for what remains, unwritten.

Genetic architecture

Genetic architecture refers to the landscape of genetic contributions to a given phenotype. It comprises the number of genetic variants that influence a phenotype, the size of their effects on the phenotype, the frequency of those variants in the population and their interactions with each other and the environment2. This is fundamentally different from the absolute amount of phenotypic variability that is accounted for by heritable factors (Fig. 1). We can illuminate this concept by comparing two extremely different heritable phenotypes: height and phenylketonuria. Height has a polygenic, or even omnigenic, architecture20, the latter of which is similar in concept to an infinitesimal architecture21. Height must be sufficiently distal from the genome and inclusive of many biological processes and causal genetic variants to have such a polygenic architecture. By contrast, phenylketonuria has a monogenic architecture: although heritability is high, the shape of this heritability is very different. In phenylketonuria, one 'inborn error' (Ref. 132) is responsible for the heritable phenotypic variability, and thus the trait measured must be proximal to that genetic change to guard it from other potential contributions.  (Timpson et al. 2018, 111)

Timpson, Nicholas J., Celia M. T. Greenwood, Nicole Soranzo, Daniel J. Lawson, and J. Brent Richards. 2018. “Genetic Architecture: The Shape of the Genetic Contribution to Human Traits and Disease.” Nature Reviews Genetics 19 (2): 110–24. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrg.2017.101.

re Saketopoulou and Pellegrini:

Certainly not born this way, but born some way. And without getting all hyped up about genomes as “the secret of life” – both genomics and its critics have taught us that – can;t we still acknowledge that at least one thing shared between an infant self and an adult self is a genome?

First opening

How many people is it appropriate and necessary to analyze to gain insight into gender/sex/uality: one, or 492,666? 

A psychoanalyst would undoubtedly answer with the former, for reasons of both expert practice and practicality; their unit is a case. Some genomicists in 2019 chose the latter, for reasons of both expert practice and analytic power; their unit is a population. In the first instance, this essay concerns these differences, the different insights into gender/sex/uality produced–and, of course, their accompanying blindnesses–and how we might make sense of those differences without doing too much violence to any of them.

A cultural anthropologist wanting to analyze gender/sex/uality would fall in places in between: one interlocutor would be just fine, several would be good, many may be better, more than that is asking for trouble. But if I am an anthropologist of the sciences, I am also a historian of the sciences, a science studies scholar, a critical theorist who knows his way around feminist and psychoanalytic theory, and most importantly, a deconstructivist reader of the sciences. And for the purposes of this essay I should also make clear that, as a deconstructivist reader of the sciences, scientists, and other scientific texts who sometimes fancies himself an ethnogrammatologist, gender/sex/uality has never been my research purview–genomics has. Like a boy climbing a tree, I am analytically confident and stable when I hug genomics closely; crawling out on this gender/sex/uality limb, I am keenly aware of my precarious position.

I grope my way forward.

Second opening

“Stop that fucking thinking!” (Britton 1989)

I wish.

I’ve come to think of Miss A’s injunction to her psychoanalyst Ronald Britton as pertinent in different ways to the different people, scientists and their non-psychoanalytic analysts, that I discuss below, but realized first as my own set of conflicts. I did not plan to write about gender/sex/uality and contemporary research in genomics, in critical feminist theory, and in psychoanalysis, to think and know it. I did not want, in my exceedingly vanilla cis het white male settler colonialist academic wanting way, to write about gender/sex/uality, I wanted to just fucking think about, genomicists analyzing “same-sex sexual behavior” and their numerous critics, even if…well, ok, precisely because I did not know why I wanted to fucking think about it but I couldn’t stop fucking thinking about it. But I could stop writing about it, having no lettered place among the LGBTQIA+ community of people who are most implicated and have the most at stake; if they are gender/sex atypical, I am as fucking typical as they come and should really, you know, STFU. I should return to writing what I did want to write about in a more fucking typical, comfortable, less risky privileged abstract white way about an epistemophilic drive, alongside a life and a death drive, were there such things as “drives” and were they enumerable–an epistemophilic drive that we could also designate with the non-hyphened, not-even-slashed injunctive conjunctive relationship “fucking thinking,” to sign for the invisibly bound relationship between a sexuality and a searching cognition, characteristic of every human but perhaps most readily evident in a genomicist or some other scientist.

But no. Yeah. I wish.

Introduction

Once again, matters of biology and (some forms of) sexuality have regained attention in the sciences, and in academic commentary on science, and in popular media. (And once again, the logics of the “once again” will need re-assessment.)

Drawing on their clinical practice, psychoanalysts are well positioned to provide nuanced, complex accounts of sexuality and the psychic, somatic, and social pleasures and difficulties that people experience as a result of its differences. Galit Atlas (2016, 38), for example, writes the case of Leo, “a highly intellectual man in his late twenties” who “cannot stop ruminating obsessively over his sexuality”:

Leo is worried about his relationship to sexual excitement, his preoccupations, which are too intense, excessive. He defines himself as heterosexual, but in the first years of treatment he is preoccupied with being thrilled by male pornography. In moments of distress, he logs on to male porn sites, masturbates, and comes into a towel. He has never had a serious relationship with either a man or a woman, and for him the sexual act is an amorphous conglomerate of unsolved questions and inhibitions.

I’ll hypothesize a parallel here to the scientific act of doing genetics research, also an amorphous conglomerate of inhibitions, excitement, intense preoccupations and unsolved questions. One such question that has returned (as these things do) to occupy contemporary geneticists is that of sexuality and its origins, sources, or causes–its nature, which is undoubtedly in no small part cultural. But how small or large? How much of sexuality’s nature, a geneticist seems to want to ask, is nature, or biological, or genomic?

Like Leo, contemporary geneticists have a few unsolved questions that drive them as well

Genomics, like an unconscious or two, has to be read, a non-non-violent event of selections, impositions, chance and reverie, to name but a few of the unruly elements that nevertheless involve and imply logics that, with careful attention, can be heard sensibly.

Atlas analyzes cases like Leo’s informed by Jean Laplanche’s concept of “the sexual,” a re-retranslation of Sigmund Freud’s Trieb, drive)

Given such intense, contradictory forces that exceed defined identities, and in their agglomeration produce multiple phenomena whose meanings are felt as indigestiible questions, experienced as irresolvable preoccupations, seeming to be so in need of the psychoanalyst’s occupation, the one-to-one mutual rumination that has no term other than the 50-minute billable hour–given the thrilling awful mess sexuality presents to any analyst, wouldn’t a geneticist be the last scientist you would expect to have anything of merit to say about it? Even if it presents itself as about interactions more than instructions, emergence more than code, populations and probabilities more than the individual fates, you would think that genetic science surely has no meaningful truths to offer the Leos of the world and their urgent confusions of desire. It’s methods and tools and binary categorizations are too crude and clumsy for something so unruly.

Long history of mostly unresolved controversy over what if anything genetics and geneticists can say about homosexuality. More recently, genetics has morphed into genomics which has branched out into sociogenomics, combining data from both sides of the nature/culture divide. Sociogenomics research since 2015 has advanced various claims about “same-sex sexual behavior,” reprising the attendant controversies of the earlier period. This research has now become the focus of some critical feminist theorists (better tag?). 

This essay unfolds in 4 not always distinct parts: 1) an overview of the current state of sociogenomics of affairs, and a discussion how these scientific texts and their contexts are analyzed by critical feminist theorists, and joined with an ethics and politics of identity and security; 2) a different reading of all of these texts, sociogenomic and critical feminist, undertaken from a more deconstructive and a more reparative analytic position, what I’ve elsewhere called “friendship with genomics;” 3) a close, affirmative  reading of one sociogenomic research article and the socio-ethical-communicative apparatus built around it by researchers; and 4) a case for how all concerned parties might advance their thinking and deepen rather than constrict conceptual exchange, through psychoanalytic theories of “the sexual,” new findings about sex/gender from an evolutionary-developmental biological sciences, and a rearticulation of wonder and a scientist’s desire around an ethico-politics of “queer curiosity.”

Reading “The New Genetics of Sexuality”

In 2023, members of the interdisciplinary GenderSci Lab at Harvard University, in their article “The New Genetics of Sexuality,” presented readers of Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ) with an overview of recent genomic research into, as named by one of the articles it critiques, “same-sex sexual behavior.” The NGS authors aim to “characterize the conceptual, methodological, social, and ethical questions opened by this new frontier for an interdisciplinary audience.” They write that they will “emphasiz[e] the gap between the sociogenomic imaginary and what the data can and do currently show,” and “build on existing critical perspectives…by translating and contextualizing highly technical developments in the new era of genetics research and to invite scholars to engage with the issues it raises.”

Rigorous, deep work on the underlying assumptions and social structures driving sociogenomics research, and on the ways in which social-cultural beliefs are naturalized or challenged by sociogenomics discourse, is vital in order to prevent harm to vulnerable populations and challenge underlying biases in scientific practice. Our hope is that this essay can catalyze, and serve as a resource for, critical interventions by gender and sexuality scholars, who have expertise directly relevant to this area of emerging scientific research. (Borsa et al. 2024, 119)

My research and writing, too, tries to analyze the dense amalgam of conceptual, methodological, social, and ethical forces present in contemporary genomics research. I share these authors’ desire to invite other scholars to engage with genomics and its issues. My own expertise, however, is not as a gender and sexuality scholar (a simple search of the internet will confirm that this is my first foray into this territory); educated as a historian of science, practicing as an anthropologist, I lately fancy myself an ethnogrammatologist who reads the writings and writing culture of genomicists deconstructively. “Translating” and “contextualizing” genomics is not my primary intent here; closely reading genomics, and critical readings of genomics, is. In parallel: to provide resources for critical intervention is one strategy for reading in the sociogenomics of sexuality; to find the textual openings and instabilities that could be places for more fruitful exchange between genomicists and other scholars of gender and sexuality is another.

How we read genomics and genomicists is crucial, then, with implications for understanding how science inevitably slants, through bias or otherwise, and diverges from the fantasies or ideals of the straight and direct, even if minimally, yet still manages to produce truth or, if your prefer, robust knowledge that is anything but useless. Reading genomics is no easy undertaking, especially in a cultural context where reading any kind of science–climate science, for example–remains an acknowledged challenge that any democracy has yet to adequately rise to. Still we try, as both democracy and science require a volatile combination of trust and skepticism that presents an urgent demand for greater literacy.  [[avital on America emptied of the will to know]]

It’s disappointing, then, and in my view a symptomatic mistake, that the GenderSci Lab authors cast their charge as “translating” a number of genomics articles in scientific journals, speaking for them without ever giving GLQ readers an opportunity to read any quoted text from the articles they critique, outside of a series of quoted terms or phrases where the quotation marks also serve as the scare quotes “we” in the critical humanities and social sciences so enjoy using: “males,” “females,” “same-sex sexual behavior,”  “ancestry groups,” “polygenic scores,” “complex genetic architecture,” “spurious,” “promising regions,” and, lastly, “true.” Phrases of any meaningful length are exceedingly rare, and there is only one block quote (page 126). And there is certainly no encouraging readers to find and read the numerous scientific texts cited, to see how their own translations might compare.

So before this text continues with its close reading of one of the genomics research publications (Ganna et al. 2019) translated and critiqued by the GenderSci Lab, let me first encourage readers to go read it and the other genomics articles cited below from what is often called, after all, “the scientific literature.” (Readers will also need to determine for themselves how to read those quotation marks.) Stop and read it now, or wait and read it later. I hope that my reading here would make a later reading easier, but I know it will be difficult either way because it was and remains difficult even for me, who has some practice. I read both the GenderSci Lab’s and the Broad Institute Lab’s articles closely and quote from them extensively as a professional responsibility and courtesy, and as part of a practice of bringing both the data and the analytic methods on which this text depends, more accessible, or at least closer to the reading surface, as all good scientists try to do.

And since, as this text will elaborate, scientists also are obligated to say something about the limits of their data and analytic methods, as all good deconstructionists would, I’ll point out that my close attention to only the Broad Institute Lab’s article limits or styles my analysis, accounting for at least some of the difference between it and the critical interpretation of the GenderSci Lab’s article. The GenderSci Lab analyzes a larger data set of genomics articles on sexual difference/behavior/identity, and deploys different reading methods on that larger sample to produce its critical analysis. What I write here about the Broad Institute research would be complicated and on some points contradicted by equally close attention to all of the articles analyzed by the GenderSci Lab. In other words, my basic assumption–a word important to the GenderSci Lab’s critique–is that an ethnogrammatological reading privileging one exemplary text can be as analytically careful and as productive of insight as an analysis that abstracts and translates more thematically from a larger and more varied data set, while still doing analytic justice of a different kind to that more encompassing set of phenomena. I gesture toward some of the blindnesses accompanying this text’s insights as it unfolds, but in what can only be a partially successful way.

Before moving on to GenderSci Lab’s more specific critiques of sociogenomics, I’ll provide a condensed summary of their more general critique, translating their translation of the sociogenomics of sexuality into an even tighter place.

Broadly…sociogenomics seeks to elucidate the genetic basis of social behaviors and to situate them in an evolutionary perspective. This project is not entirely new; in many ways, sociogenomics extends previous endeavors from classical behavioral genetics, neuropsychiatry, and racial eugenics to isolate the biological underpinnings of who people are and why they do what they do.

The “new genetics” of the title is here characterized as “not entirely new,” and this difficulty in distinguishing or disentangling new from old, established, or simply past will make an important return later in another form. However many ways there might be in which sociogenomics is only an extension of older structures and patterns, there are at least two developments that introduced enough difference to have made a difference in those old endeavors:

[R]ecent increases in the volume of data available for sociogenomics research, in combination with the development of new statistical methods, have ushered in a “paradigm shift” in these fields…Under this new paradigm, researchers conceptualize variation in complex human behaviors as resulting from the aggregate of many tiny, piecemeal contributions from  across the genome. By sequencing the DNA of populations and correlating allele variation with certain behaviors or life outcomes…geneticists can develop a polygenic risk score (PRS) value for every individual.

This shift has implications across multiple domains, with scientists applying similar large-scale genomic methods to traits ranging in social salience from heart disease or cancer (Arking and Chakravarti 2009; Sud, Kinnersley, and  Houlston 2017), to intelligence (Loo et al. 2012; Zabaneh et al. 2018), to risktaking (Clifton et al. 2018; Li et al. 2020), to sexual behavior (Ganna et al. 2019;  Polimanti, Wang, et al. 2017; Terracciano et al. 2011). These research programs have caused significant controversy, with proponents arguing they will unlock key  discoveries undergirding the human experience (Harden 2021) and detractors critiquing the ethics of applying these techniques to stigmatized behaviors and thereby treating them as biologically rooted.

[I]t is critical to attend to the tenuous nature of these essentialist claims, as they flatten and erase the variability of human sexuality and gender, and can be reappropriated by eliminationist or eugenic movements…[W]e provide an overview of the central methods, assumptions, and  epistemological limitations of sociogenomics and related genetic sciences…We believe queer studies scholars should be aware of how this new science is carving categories of sex, gender, and sexuality into a new frontier of predictive genetic science, which stands at the intersection of the long-standing search for the biological bases of human variation and recent profit-driven investment in genetic data science and in clinical and consumer genetic services. (120-121)

With that to frame the GenderSci Lab’s endeavor, let’s begin reading just one of those three studies on sexuality referenced there, the (Ganna 2019) one. They do not quote this article at all in their critique, yet in many ways it was the most significant of these scientific publications, in terms of the GenderSci Lab’s narrative quoted above. Andrea Ganna is the lead author of “Large-scale GWAS reveals insights into the genetic architecture of same-sex sexual behavior,” published in Science in 2019; the paper lists 19 other authors, plus a collective author referred to as “23andMe Research Team,” from diverse disciplines and institutions in the U.S. (a large majority), Denmark, Sweden, and Australia. I will refer to them here as “the Broad Institute Lab,” because the Broad Institute of MIT AND Harvard is the institutional home for many authors, and because the Broad Institute–one of the largest, most published and lauded, and richest of genomics research institutions–was central to the events surrounding the article’s publication, detailed below.

Again, I start with a summary translation. The Broad Institute Lab article begins:

Across human societies and in both sexes, some 2 to 10% of individuals report engaging in sex with same-sex partners, either exclusively or in addition to sex with opposite-sex partners (1–4). The biological factors that contribute to sexual preference are largely unknown (5), but genetic influences are suggested by the observation that same-sex sexual behavior appears to run in families (6) and is concordant more often in genetically identical (monozygotic) twin pairs than in fraternal twin pairs or siblings.

…Previous reports of genetic variants associated with sexual orientation (8–10) were based on relatively small samples and did not meet current standards of genome-wide significance. Identification of robustly associated variants could enable exploration of the biological pathways and processes involved in development of same-sex sexual behavior…To what extent are genetic influences the same or different for females and males; behavior, attraction, and identity; and heterosexuality and different same-sex sexual behaviors (such as bisexuality)?

In order to identify genetic variants associated with same-sex sexual behavior and explore its genetic architecture and underlying biology, we performed a genome-wide association study (GWAS) of same-sex sexual behavior. Analyses were conducted in the UK Biobank from the United Kingdom and a cohort of research participants from 23andMe, predominantly located in the United States, and replications were performed in three other smaller studies.

…Our primary phenotype of interest is a binary, self-reported measure of whether respondents had ever had sex with someone of the same sex (here termed “nonheterosexuals”) or had not (here termed “heterosexuals”) (Box 1)...To identify genetic variants [largely single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs)] associated with same-sex sexual behavior, we performed a GWAS in the UK Biobank study (n = 408,995 individuals) (14). To increase power and generalizability of our results, we also performed a GWAS in the cohort from 23andMe using an equivalent variable (individuals who reported having had sex with “Other sex only” versus the other options on a seven-point scale regarding participants’ sexual partners) (n = 68,527 individuals, of which 12,933 reported same-sex sexual behavior).  

How to read the differences between the Broad Institute Lab’s article and that of the Gender SciLab? The Broad Institute Lab article uses a language of “genetic influences” and “associated variants” to articulate the relationship between genes and, not sexuality writ large, but “same-sex sexual behavior.” The GenderSci Lab translates this into a language of “biologically based” and “biologically rooted,” “essentialist claims” concerning “human sexuality.” Have the genomicists simply learned to write and think in a whitewashed discourse of “new genetics” that only appears to be nuanced, but needs to be exposed as harboring, or extending into, the genetic essentialism of an older scientific and social order? 

As the Broad Institute Lab’s article proceeds, it further qualifies and complicates the notions of roots, grounds, and essences. To be sure, they are not beyond the metaphorics of grounds and roots: “Our study focused on the genetic basis of same-sex sexual behavior…”--but this extends into a discourse of interaction and variability:

…but several of our results point to the importance of sociocultural context as well. We observed changes in prevalence of reported same-sex sexual behavior across time, raising questions about how genetic and sociocultural influences on sexual behavior might interact. We also observed partly different genetic influences on same-sex sexual behavior in females and males; this could reflect sex differences in hormonal influences on sexual behavior (for example, importance of testosterone versus estrogen) but could also relate to different sociocultural contexts of female and male same-sex behavior and different demographics of gay, lesbian, and bisexual groups. 

In their conclusion, they use a similar mixture of “underpinnings” and less vertical and direct relationships, elaborated with notes of humility and caution:

Our findings provide insights into the biological underpinnings of same-sex sexual behavior but also underscore the importance of resisting simplistic conclusions (Box 2)—because the behavioral phenotypes are complex, because our genetic insights are rudimentary, and because there is a long history of misusing genetic results for social purposes.”

There are several translation protocols or frameworks analysts can use to relay these statements. Something like the new genetics is as essentialist as the old genetics with its (equally essential) relationship to eugenics follows a well-used convention in critical science studies, and provides a clear politics. But there are other translations that I think are more felicitous, and I think more just. 

These same translation conventions of critical theory that rely on the nature-culture opposition can also be seen in the first quote I pulled from the GenderSci Lab article above, in which “social-cultural beliefs,” the proper domain for understanding sexuality, are “naturalized” by sociogenomics discourse. Any reference to genes or genetics can and should be translated as essentialist. “It is critical to attend to the tenuous nature of these essentialist claims,” as another instance phrases it, “as they flatten and erase the variability of human sexuality and gender, and can be reappropriated  by eliminationist or eugenic movements.”

Genetic or biological essentialism, in the conventional frame of critical theory, is a product of reductionism, the flattening and erasing of variation and complexity. In a deconstructive reading, all translations are transformations, some more felicitous than others but all profoundly limited. In such reading, any analysis and any translation flattens and erases; it’s the nature [sic] of writing, a technological effect that styles even the most avowedly neutral analysis. 

I’ve already begun reading the Broad Institute Lab’s article to heighten the biological and social complexity that has been flattened out in the GenderSci Lab’s analysis, to give readers a different analysis of sociogenomics with denser detail, and more importantly, is styled by friendship. Let me continue to read the genomics article for what has been erased or flattened, staying close to these texts at hand, and then turn to matters of context, in particular the intricate socio-ethical machinery constructed by the Broad Institute researchers for conducting their study and for communicating its findings. Those events complicate everything.

The GenderSci Lab article has a good, detailed discussion of the complexities and limits of any genome-wide association study, but especially ones directed at complex behavioral traits “GWAS results can be cumbersome to interpret,” they note, determine only association between a trait and a region of a genome and not causation, and even after extensive statistical massaging and collating and calculating figures from tens and even hundreds of genes into what is called a polygenics score, the genomic factors “do not explain even close to the majority of  the phenotypic variance observed.” They use the Broad Institute study as an example:

In Ganna et al.’s 2019 study, claiming a “complex  genetic architecture” of sexuality, for example, only three of five initially identified SNPs were reproducible in a follow-up replication analysis, and each explained only approximately 1 percent of the variation in sexual behavior; overall, the  authors estimate the full contribution from genetics to the phenotype of “same-sex behavior” to be as low as 8 percent.

This is indeed a limitation of GWAS studies and their results, one that is important for critical theorists to know. It is also a critical perspective that was already there to be read in Ganna et al. 2019:

The SNPs that reached genome-wide significance had very small effects (odds ratios ~1.1) (table S7). For example, in the UK Biobank, males with a GT genotype at the rs34730029 locus had 0.4% higher prevalence of same-sex sexual behavior than those with a TT genotype (4.0 versus 3.6%). Nevertheless, the contribution of all measured common SNPs in aggregate (SNPbased heritability) was estimated to be 8 to 25% (95% CIs, 5 to 30%) of variation in female and male same-sex sexual behavior, in which the range reflects differing estimates by using different analysis methods or prevalence assumptions (table S11) (14). The discrepancy between the variance captured by the significant SNPs and all common SNPs suggests that same-sex sexual behavior, like most complex human traits, is influenced by the small, additive effects of very many genetic variants, most of which cannot be detected at the current sample size…In contrast to linkage studies that found substantial association of sexual orientation with variants on the X-chromosome (8, 23), we found no excess of signal (and no individual genome-wide significant loci) on the X-chromosome.

To test whether these aggregate estimates of genetic effects correlate with sexuality in other samples, we constructed polygenic scores for same-sex sexual behavior…In all cases, the variance explained by the polygenic scores was extremely low (<1%); these scores could not be used to accurately predict sexual behavior in an individual.

The Broad Institute Lab re-iterates these same points in a less technical vein in their “Discussion” at the end of the article:

We established that the underlying genetic architecture is highly complex; there is certainly no single genetic determinant (sometimes referred to as the “gay gene” in the media). Rather, many loci with individually small effects, spread across the whole genome and partly overlapping in females and males, additively contribute to individual differences in predisposition to samesex sexual behavior. All measured common variants together explain only part of the genetic heritability at the population level and do not allow meaningful prediction of an individual’s sexual preference.

Neither in these passages nor in a later part of the “Discussion” do these authors employ a language of “bases” or similar signs of “essentialism;” if there was “naturalization,” it was always in the context of culturalization:

Our study focused on the genetic basis of same-sex sexual behavior, but several of our results point to the importance of sociocultural context as well. We observed changes in prevalence of reported same-sex sexual behavior across time, raising questions about how genetic and sociocultural influences on sexual behavior might interact. We also observed partly different genetic influences on same-sex sexual behavior in females and males; this could reflect sex differences in hormonal influences on sexual behavior (for example, importance of testosterone versus estrogen) but could also relate to different sociocultural contexts of female and male same-sex behavior and different demographics of gay, lesbian, and bisexual groups (43). With these points in mind, we acknowledge the limitation that we only studied participants of European ancestry and from a few Western countries; research involving larger and more diverse samples will afford greater insight into how these findings fare across different sociocultural contexts.

But beyond the shared acknowledgment of the limitations of GWAS, there is an important difference between how those limitations are cast or interpreted at a higher level. For the GenderSci Lab, the fact that sociogenomic analyses posit such a large number of genetic associations to a behavior, with such small explanatory value, is a reason to be disappointed in sociogenomics, and even a sign of its failure. But for the Broad Institute Lab, these limitations are just part of the territory, and in the case of “same-sex sexual behavior,” their results are cause for interest and even excitement, and can be read not negatively as failure, but positively, as confirmation that a “gay gene” or even a “polygenic score” allowing for meaningful prediction are simplistic fantasies that will never be realized. The Broad Institute Lab was even more emphatic on this score in the public communication apparatus they built to accompany this study. But before we get to that, let’s turn to some of the more methodological and definitional issues that both labs 

Author-subjects can be swapped between texts. Take for example the paragraph quoted at the 

[

From NGS:

This research raises crucial questions ripe for analysis by scholars of gender and sexuality. Rigorous, deep work on the underlying assumptions and social structures driving sociogenomics research, and on the ways in which social-cultural beliefs are naturalized or challenged by sociogenomics discourse, is vital in order to prevent harm to vulnerable populations and challenge underlying biases in scientific practice. Our hope is that this essay can catalyze, and serve as a resource for, critical interventions by gender and sexuality scholars, who have expertise directly relevant to this area of emerging scientific research.

Inverted or perverted:

This research raises crucial questions ripe for analysis by scholars of genomics. Rigorous, deep work on the underlying assumptions and social structures driving WGSS research, and on the ways in which biological hypotheses are distorted or trivialized by WGSS discourse, is vital in order to relate more fully to vulnerable populations and challenge underlying biases in WGSS. Our hope is that this essay can catalyze, and serve as a resource for, critical interventions by genomicists and allied scholars, who have expertise directly relevant to this area of emerging cultural/gender/STS analysis.

The Broad Institute Ethicopolitical Apparatus

Like the GenderSci Lab, I want to provide resources to educate people on the limits and assumptions of sociogenomics. In that spirit, I do what they did not: point readers to the set of “opinion pieces” that the Broad Institute solicited from other researchers working there, a valuable resource accessible on their website rather than the pages of elite journals.

Virtually every criticism made by GenderSci Lab, plus some, is made on the pages of the Broad site

Broad research associate Brian Ferguson (2019; self-identified as “an out gay man passionate about developing new therapeutics for treating psychiatric disorders”) wrote a long and unsparing critique of the study, detailing the “higher ethical standards” that should have been in place and calling for more oversight mechanisms at multiple governance levels for this kind of research “to adequately protect historically marginalized populations from the negative impacts of genomics research…As it stands now, this research can be conducted without the researchers being required to be cognizant of or be held accountable for the potential impacts their findings could have. This is irresponsible.”  Bioinformatician Carino Gurjao (2019) assessed the findings as “tenuous at best,” and enumerated the reasons for his “fear that current and future structures — particularly powerful and oppressive nation-states, non-state actors and religious organizations — will use this study as scientific evidence for their ideologies of discrimination and oppression of LGBTQIA+ people. Such an unethical practice and manipulation of scientific findings could be weaponized once again to institutionalize homophobia.”

Postdoctoral fellow Steven Reilly presaged some of GenderSciLab’s methodological critique. “Ganna et al. stratify sexual behavior using the criterion of ‘having ever participated in non-heterosexual intercourse.’ In effect, a single one-off experience is conflated with a life-long identity.” The assumption here is that “life-long identity” is the proper benchmark, the singular Real that this study only apporximates.  “Claims of gender differences in sexual behavior or links to olfaction and hormones would require conjecture based upon three loci. While speculation might be harmless for other traits, it is too soon to spin stories about a marginalized population from a few small effect size “hits” that may have only peripheral biological importance.”

In a society without LGBTQIA+ discrimination, understanding the biology of sexual orientation would be a reasonable goal, and the stakes of those findings low. Scientists knew prior to this study that sexual behavior has a strong heritable component and is influenced by many genes. At best, our understanding remains essentially the same, despite the study’s publication in a top-tier journal. At worst, the public will be misinformed and confused about why scientists would study this trait over thousands of serious diseases, all while a historically marginalized group has been left more vulnerable.

Research associate Meagan Olive (2019) was the most ambivalent, “play[ing] advocate” for the authors as a way to “parse” her mixed feelings, trying to articulate “a few reasons why it might be important to do this work, despite the potential risks.” Since such studies were “inevitable,” better to have them done at the Broad, where good scientists had the “resources to conduct the most thorough and nuanced analysis possible.” She noted that “the authors met with numerous LGBTQIA+ advocacy groups in an effort to ensure the use of proper language and presentation of results in a way that would not harm the LGBTQIA+ community.” Yet in the end “these positive notes ring hollow in the face of possible outcomes.” Although she shared these scientist’s desire “to pursue knowledge and uncover the truth about the way the world works,” their findings circulated in “a media-based society with a short attention span and the full capacity to weaponize good science;” she pronounced herself “not satisfied with the authors’ justification for performing this study; they are ultimately jeopardizing the perception and safety of the LGBTQIA+ community.”  

Joseph Vitti, “a queer person and a geneticist,” “struggle[d] to understand the motivations behind a genome-wide association study on non-heterosexual behavior.” “Sexuality is interesting to biologists,” he acknowledged, and this line of research could provide “further evidence of the biological reality of queerness (i.e., the idea that LGBTQIA+ identity and behavior is not a 'lifestyle choice,' as ostensibly demonstrated by earlier heritability studies).”  And even though “such a project has the potential to open new avenues of inquiry,” Vitti maintained that “curiosity alone…seems insufficient justification to probe the genetic basis of a human behavioral trait — and, by extension, an identity — that demarcates a vulnerable population, let alone to do so in a high-impact scientific journal.” 

I have yet to see a compelling argument that the potential benefits of this study outweigh its potential harms. My strong intuition is that this study will be most enthusiastically touted by individuals unwilling to engage with the subtleties and limitations of its interpretation. I struggled to understand the motivations behind this particular study when I first learned about it …I have continued to struggle throughout ongoing conversations with the authors. I am disappointed in the Broad Institute’s choice to condone this study so-performed, and I am hopeful that this incident will catalyze a larger conversation about human behavioral genetics and about the regulation of research involving data from de-identified human subjects. 

Ganna et al.  erode that extension.  And yes, the culture sucks, and people are “unwilling to engage with the subtleties and limitations of…interpretation.” So shouldn’t we have a plan for changing that? And doesn’t this paper give us – me – an opportunity for that?  Even though anyone unwilling to engage with the subtleties and limitations of interpretation is also likely to be unwilling to read differences.  So who am I writing for here?

“The appeal to nature establishes sexuality as innate and fixed, despite most researchers’ agreeing that sexuality is a combination of social, biological, and environmental factors.” (132)

Context

GenderSci Lab places these developments in sociogenomics in a context with two…elements? Things? Forces?, at least one of which appears as a ghost.

But there are other forces or entitite that can and should count as context here, beginning with what I would old-fashionedly call progress in sciences of living systems, particularly those sciences which have produced new understandings of the development of sexual difference which, along with the increasing productivity of the doubled concept of “sex/gender,” has affected study and understanding of human sexuality.

New developments in another doubled science, evo-devo  theory, and in queer theory

They want to provide resources for intervention, I want to mark openings for conversation

Admittedly, a desire to teach people to read genomics closely and carefully – and indeed, in some sense to be taken up later, critically – is a niche if not somewhat perverse one. But it’s preoccupied me for decades now: I want and work to make my students and readers more interested in and more thoughtful about genomics, this 21st century science, business, and clinical technology that is what the 20th century science of genetics became, and continues to become, as scientists became able, through technological advances and increasingly generous state and corporate investment, to query, know, and begin to manipulate, across multiple species, first the hereditary transmission of individual genes and their actions in nested biological and (more slowly and haltingly) environmental systems, and then, with the turn of the century, the thousands of genes strung along all of the chromosomes of living organisms. For the human organism, this entailed a paradigmatic movement of attention from “simple” (actually quite complex) “single gene” conditions like sickle cell disease or cystic fibrosis, to even more complex conditions: diabetes, Crohn’s disease, Alzheimers, asthma, numerous cancers, schizophrenia, bipolar depression, and sexuality, this article’s focus of attention. This history of the sciences of genetic and genomics is, of course, deeply enmeshed in social, cultural, economic, and state institutional histories that are often gathered and referred to collectively under the sign of “eugenics.”

GLQ operates under or with “the confusion of a cultural dominant with history itself.” (Berlant 2022, 14). Maybe this is all they are gesturing toward with their conjuring of “the ghost of eugenics:” the cultural dominant of the production and exercise of biopower through genetics in the 20th century. In that light, what I am trying to do is to conjure up other specters to speak to, rather than invoking just the one that scares people –as it should–but thereby frighten them away from further analysis, hurriedly closes the lid on the openness of wonder?

As far as productive paranoid readings go, GLQ is a winner. It exposes the holes, slippages, exclusions, and similar epistemic shortfalls, wanting us to read genomics critically, exposing its shortcomings and exaggerations and similar epistemic oversteps for all to see and then… Then it’s not clear.

I would have preferred not to have written about sexuality at all. As a domain of scholarly literature, I feel that I have hardly dipped a toe into that deep and expansive lake of writing, swimming an entire career bracingly 

So much can go wrong here – not an ironic embrace of failure but recognition of the fragility of it, its trapping or freezing of an ongoing developing performative analysis

“Underpinnings” v architecture

Grzanka video (39:20) translates architecture as “the blueprint, or design, of same-sex sexual behavior”

(46:15) “They do not, in the end, take a strictly biological determinist account of their data, nor conclude that genetics predetermine sexual behavior…”

(51:20) “It may be a mistake” to  characterize the “GayWAS” as “exceptional.” 

“Instead of fundamentally different from the monocausal hypotheses of the 21st century, postgenomic research on gender, sex and sexuality activates many of the same beliefs about sexuality and gender/sex that inform how both experts and laypeople think about, and form their political opinions about, LGB and transgender individuals as well as their rights. We need to recognize that essentialism has diverse social and political motivations and consequences, and that investing scientific and political hope in biological explanations of sexual and gender diversity may be more fraught, and less political and scientifically transformative than we imagine.”

AF-S: Ganna et al separate sex and gender

“Darwinian paradox” only exists if you think the phenomenon (SSB) is strictly darwinian, i.e. solely relevant to or contingent upon reproduction.  

If only i knew…something, then it would all be good because I would be good because I knew and knowing makes you smarter and smarter is good. (If I have this right.) so subramaniam and willey, and richardson, misunderstand what is to want to know, to feel like you need to know and have to know.  It assumes that we get to choose – need to choose, to be responsible – we get to decide what we want, where the want comes first and then the superego has to decide if its a good want or not. Or that the choice is not an uncomplicated one

Everybody wants to know, every body has to first want, in order to know

The opening cautionary tale can also be read as a socioethical success story: they, the scientists, told the corporation that they were misusing science and got the app taken down

For Blanchot’s Nietzsche, ‘nihilism is the possibility of all going

beyond. . .the horizon upon which every particular science, as well as every exigency

of knowledge, opens—in order to hold themselves in the very movement

of this opening’ (Blanchot, 1993, pp. 145–6).

[S]cience cannot but be nihilist. . .knowing that the world is not to be

interpreted, science transforms it, and through this transformation

there passes the nihilistic exigency that is proper to it—the power of nothingness

that science has made into the most effective of tools, but with

which it plays a dangerous game. Knowledge is fundamentally dangerous.

Nietzsche has given the most brutal formulation of this danger:

‘We experiment on truth! Perhaps humanity will be destroyed by it! Well, so

be it!’ This is what the scientist is liable to say, and must say if he

renounces the hypocrisy of deploring catastrophe, which is one of

the results of science. For one cannot construct the universe without

the possibility of its being destroyed. (Blanchot, 1993, p. 146)

Blanchot (1993) outlines two possible scenarios. One might adopt the ‘conservative

attitude’, he suggests, ‘condemning knowledge in order to safeguard the

eternal in man (the man of his time)’.

But Nietzsche, in Blanchot’s reading, opted for something other than the ‘conservative

attitude’ of humanism toward science. He sided elsewhere, Blanchot

says, than with the humanist promise that anchors an uncertain future to

known politics and values: ‘Nietzsche sides with science and with the being of

exceeding, which is the becoming of humanity’ (Blanchot, 1993, p. 146).

Although I have restored or expanded the analytic contexts and frames here, I’ll state flatly that I have been reductive, as a matter of pragmatics and finitude. I harbor no fantasies of non-reductive let alone “holistic” analysis

Wonder is by its very nature irredeemably irresponsible.

The identification of multiple loci making multiple minuscule differences that don’t add up is read by GLQ as a sign of failure, of the disqualifying limit of genomic analysis, as a poor return on the massive investment. It can be, and I would, read as a sign of promise: the promise of an understanding sexualities that are distributed, disseminated, variable, mutable.   

Only “context” considered is expansion of DTC, genomic corporate sector.  But there is an expans=ding scientific literature as well.

This research raises crucial questions ripe for analysis by scholars of gender and sexuality. Rigorous, deep work on the underlying assumptions and social structures driving sociogenomics research, and on the ways in which social-cultural beliefs are naturalized or challenged by sociogenomics discourse, is vital in order to prevent harm to vulnerable populations and challenge underlying biases in scientific practice. Our hope is that this essay can catalyze, and serve as a resource for, critical interventions by gender and sexuality scholars, who have expertise directly relevant to this area of emerging scientific research.(131)

feminist and critical race STS scholars, such as Alondra Nelson (2016), Jenny Reardon (2009), and Kim TallBear (2013), who explore how the politics of genetics research is embedded within broader power structures. (131)

[we know how to analyze embeddedness, we know how to analyze situated knowledges and are rewarded in various (small) ways for doing so; we are less able to analyze the capacity of genomics and other technosciences to unsettle their embeddedness and maybe even sometimes escape it

Similar to racial genetic discourses, research on the genetics of genderand sexuality-related traits appeals to “the natural” to justify particular visions for classifying human identities and behaviors (132)

social groups will be increasingly emmeshed in financialized, biopolitical governance regimes predicated on modes of biological citizenship (132)

How to read genomics. We all need help. GLQ reads from a position of knowing - knowing genomics, knowing sexuality, knowing the politics of knowing. My reading is from a position of friendship, explicitly opting for genomics, which I know something about. Comparatively, i know more about genomics than i do about sexuality, or let’s say i am less secure in my knowing of sexuality than the GLQ readers are, and less secure in my knowing of the politics of knowing. But i know a thing or two about the politics of friendship, the first of which is probably: it’s risky. It’s ground is undermined. 

Ramírez-i-Ollé (2019) provides a rich presentation of friendship among scientists (dendroclimatologists), and between scientists and the social scientists who form research relationships with them – friendships. Among the multiple dimensions and qualities of friendship she describes, a sharing of curiosity is fundamental to the relationship and to each side’s ethos of inquiry. Curiosity and the related affect-method of wonder will return in this essay, btu for now I note only that curiosity in dendroclimatology and the sociology thereof enjoys a relatively trouble-free status and a relatively secure politics of knowing. A shared curiousity about sexuality, and a shared curiosity about the politics of knowing sexuality, feels to me like riskier if not more treacherous terrain. But friendship demands we go there.

One more note on friendship, which in the case of my friendship with genomicists is probably better named “the spirit of friendship.” One way I differ from Ramírez-i-Ollé is that I have not shared the same – material presence? Same with Amber Benezra’s friendship with genomicists of the microbiome. I have never spoken with, let alone breathed the same air with, the genomicists written of here. Whether that makes for a more degraded or a nobler form of friendship, I can’t say. But I can say that friendship in the sense I have learned to think it and use it is fundamentally a question of one’s comportment toward an other, who need not be present, who may not have ever been present, and indeed, who may be more of a what than a who.

Ghost of eugenics

The “ghost of eugenics” is the equivalent of a polygenic risk score: it sums up, in a single value, a large set of probabilities, contingencies, possibilities. It accumulates or gathers a series of small risks, any single one of which may not be particularly significant but collectively, in sum, they become significant as one sign: eugenics, or its ghost

So I’ll begin reading by noting that the “new” of the title is re-emphasized twice in this opening paragraph (it occurs 14 more times in the body of the article). And genomics is indeed new, the name itself invented in the mid-1990s to designate an emergent capacity to study heredity and development in living systems, not trait-by-trait or gene-by-gene or disease-by-disease through the identification and analysis of individual genes in individual members of a pedigree or family, but a more encompassing analysis striving to comprehend all genes on all chromosomes in a given living system–humans, mice, fruit flies, bacteria, et omnia–and not only in a population, but through analysis and comparison among and across populations. This “era” of genomics research critiqued by NGS has been marked by extensive technological, methodological, analytic, and organizational changes in the sciences and marketplaces of genomics. More specifically, the “sociogenomics” research in question here rides the most recent wave of Genome-Wide Association Studies (GWAS) research that started around 2007, enabled by faster and cheaper DNA technologies, rapidly growing genomic biobanks and databases in which “Europeans” aka settler colonialists are overrepresented, and generous (some would say overly generous) state and corporate investment, among other factors and forces. And very new is a “sociogenomics” research capacity able to produce scientific claims, by integrating genomic data and analysis with “environmental,” social data and analysis concerning things like “educational achievement” or, in the case here, sexuality or sexual difference–and to make those claims convincing (or at least promising) to many researchers even if they are simultaneously controversial if not straight-out not-scientific to many others. So there’s lots that is new with genomics, asking us to invent new ways of reading and doing

What we are told to work on are assumptions and social structures; we’re not urged to read and learn about genomic sciences and biology   in the role of preventing harm, a har, caused by scientists in the context of capital

Isn’t learning to read genomics and sexualities differently, to read outside in the nature-culture binary without just jamming them carelessly together into natureculture, part of a “critique” of capitalism, some attempt to get around or athwart it?  Because doesn’t that giant market exist because of the fantasies people have about “genetic essentialism” and ANY reading otherwise is?  The GLQ argument is: because genomics (unlike, say, molecular evolutionary theory)

We now know that any sexuality is genomically complex; we know there are no gay genes.  Isn’t that a noteworthy “finding”?  Shouldn;t that at least be given more attention here?

All of its knowledge is secure

What is said to “develop” in each of these articles?  

“Same-sex sexual behavior in Drosophila is clearly not comparable to that in bonobos, but studies of the neurophysiological control of sexual preferences in one organism can help to identify common mechanisms in other species, such as alteration in olfactory sex recognition or the importance of social experience in shaping subsequent mating behaviors.” (Bailey and Zuk 2009: 442)

Laplanche, Jean. 2011. Freud and the Sexual : Essays 2000-2006. [U.S.] : International Psychoanalytic Books. http://archive.org/details/freudsexualessay0000lapl.

“Prior to the specific experimental controls and interventions, the causal independence of the gene being manipulated does not exist. The ‘measurement’ of a genetic effect requires controlling the inherently variable natural systems in precisely the ways that are required to create the opportunity for an observed effect and the ability to assign a cause. These cause-and-effect relationships are not independent features of the world itself, but designed opportunities created by the experimental apparatus.” (Prum, 110)

The recalibration of genetic causality that is required to bring developmental biology in line with the developmental processes of real organisms does not constitute an abandonment of causality itself, but a recognition that the cause of the organismal phenotype is the entire process of organismal becoming, its genetic actions, its hierarchy of multiple agencies, its environmental contexts and interactions, its random perturbations, (111) its individuality, and (in some organisms) its cultural context–in short, the organism’s enactment of itself. The long tradition of experimentally dissecting developmental process with controlled interventions has been highly productive…but this progress cannot change the fundamental fact that these tools only work at describing the world by altering it, flattening its complexity, and eliminating its rich individualized differences. As a result, the sum of all these reductive interventions fails to explain the process of individual organismal development.” (Prum, 110-11)

“A performative model of the phenotype addresses specific weaknesses in current population genetic tools for understanding the genotype-phentoype relation: the abstraction away of the numerous, hierarchical agencies that intervene between the genotype and the phenotype. In contrast, the performative views frames more broadly than a simple genotype-by-environment (GxE) interactions to include all of the many molecular, cellular, and anatomic agencies that intra-act in the performance of the complex phenotype. The absence of consideration of- the abstraction away from- these agencies contributes to the failure of GWAS studies to explain the vast majoriity of heritable contributions to complex phenoytpes. (296)

“A performative model of phenotype development productively addresses the many challenges of DST, and provides a more ample and productive outline for future research programs in the development of complex phenotypes.” 297

But these are DST sciences to come, as Prum well knows, and we are currently experiencing the limits of the present one, limits that have always been there but have become felt with growing intensity and anxiety. It’s great! And here at the limit, the Broad Institute seems to me more intent on, and more practiced at soliciting those limits than the NGS paper is, gives us more better tools to think than the NGS text does.

NGS doesn’t hold out hope, or even give its readers any encouragement or  for a genomics of sexuality  its about “challenging biases”, its about critique 

Unless there is something perverse about this will to know, this test drive.  Willey and Subramaniam – and maybe all i can say is that maybe that’s one good solicitation

Eurocentrism of GWAS data; the NGS “data” is likewise limited and skews the analysis. At least the former acknowledge it.

Is NGS still in doer and done to mode?

NGS discusses a number of scientific publications on same-sex sexuality. In reading only one of these here, Ganna 2019, I may be unduly emphasizing the differences here and exaggerating how NGS misreads and mischaracterizes or makes questionable claims about “the new genetics.” But part of the problem her is that NGS hardly ever provides extensive quotes; the longest of these is a six-line block quote from Sanders et al 2017 on p 128.  It does not quote even a word from Ganna 2019. NGS does not even encourage readers to read any of these articles for themselves. And in the case of Ganna 2019, the NGS article does not even refer readers to, let alone read the extensive textual machinery that Ganna et al. produced as part of their study: the rich paper, a website to communicate the article, its findings, and its limits, and a series of opinion pieces written by other scientists at the Broad Institute – all of which were critical, and many of which anticipated most elements of the NGS critique. This remains up on the Broad Institute’s web site as an educational archive.

A primary target of the critique is of the “assumptions” in sociogenomics and its “epistemological limitations”, exposing them so as to situate the scientific knowledge making practice through a “rigorous” and “deep” contextualization.  But this analysis proceeds from an un-situated place, operates as its own “view from nowhere” that never even tried to interrogate its own epistemological and methodological (i.e. reading) limitations. The genomics genre at least allows and in fact demands some statement of, some wrangling with, its limits, its assumptions, and its possibilities of error. There’s more rigor and depth here than in NGS, or at the very least a different kind of rigor and depth that NGS can only read as “erasing” and “flattening” (which everyone knows is bad) while they bring the rigor and depth (no playing or skating here!)

So ok: let’s do the prescribed work of exposing their assumptions, accompanied by a deeper, more rigorous elucidation of the biological and methodological dimensions – and variations – in genomics and genomicists that these authors “flatten and erase” to secure and bring depth to their “critical” perspective

Sigh. Just a flat-out mischaracterization and misreading, cut and pasted from the old script. For starters:

Other traits

NGS: “it is clear that the preselection of variables for genetic correlation analyses implies unstated background assumptions about the quality or value of the traits of interest, restricting the space of possible outcomes and shaping the narrative of genetic relationships between traits to match the preconceptions of the researchers conducting these studies. In this way, rather than uncovering a true genetic correlation between highly social traits, researchers are reinscribing harmful, socially produced assumptions about those with vulnerable or stigmatized identities and experiences.” (127)

GWAS: “In particular, we included mental health traits because they are substantially heritable (34), and previous population surveys have shown elevated risk of adverse mental health outcomes (such as depression, anxiety, or substance use) in sexual minority populations, including individuals engaging in same-sex sexual behavior.” (4)

We found several personality traits (loneliness and openness to experience), risky behaviors (smoking and cannabis use) and mental health disorders, but not physical traits, to be significantly genetically correlated with same-sex sexual behavior. We found in both sexes that same-sex sexual behavior was positively genetically correlated with several psychiatric or mental health traits…We emphasize that the causal processes underlying these genetic correlations are unclear and could be generated by environmental factors relating to prejudice against individuals engaging in same-sex sexual behavior, among other possibilities, which we discuss in (14). Some associations were sex specific. In particular, the genetic correlations with bipolar disorder, cannabis use, and number of sexual partners were significantly higher in females than in males

RESTRICTED CONTEXTS

“The generation of polygenic scores for sexual- and gender-identity-related traits is occurring within a context permeated by commercial market incentives and a vision, underwritten by major private and public medical research funders, of personalized medicine grounded in routine bedside genomic testing.” (129)

True. But why is this effectively the only context, the only one worth considering, the only one that should factor into our analyses and critical literacy projects?

It’s a very restricted contextual economy we’re charged with thinking within. What about the context of science itself? Might not changes in other parts of the life sciences at least seep into if not permeate the context of the new genetics of sexuality?

Here NGS switches briefly to a discussion not of sexual behavior but of “educational achievement,” which translates to IQ – or close enough for government work, as the good enough technocrats’ saying goes. And the work of governance and governing policy comes to the foreground in these kinds of GWAS; even same-sex sexual behavior is more of an abstraction. 

I can feel comfortable wondering about the genomics of sexuality, even if it makes me a little uneasy. I register as a marker of my own analytic limits, one of the things that I encourage readers to question and take into consideration: that I am less comfortable wondering about the genomics of educational achievement than I am of a GWAS of SSSB. I started writing a friendly reading of Paige Harden’s book, after she and her work as a behavioral geneticist analyzing educational achievement had been subjected to the New Yorker profile treatment given to “high profile” (an indicator of my research methods: I do not rigorously follow genomics and genomic journals)

“The ultimate endpoint of PGS studies is explicitly imagined as a set of tests available to consumers on the market or in the clinic, allowing the estimation of individualized risk scores in furtherance of precision medicine.” (129)  I might feel better if that “the” were an “an,” but that would entail a less restricted economy than the market of precision medicine. In addition, the GLQ article opens with a cautionary tale, in which an app based on the Ganna GWAS was released before quickly being retracted, in no small part because of the voiced objections of the GWAS  authors. It’s a story in which the “ultimate endpoint” central to the GLQ critique is in fact not ultimate, but another point along a way that remains open to other forces.

In addition, Ganna never really posits this particular ultimate endpoint. To the extent that it states its ends, another endpoint would be the furtherance of experimentation and biological questioning including but also beyond genomics. “Insight” is one of their stated endpoints, as they state at the end of their “Discussion:”

Our findings provide insights into the biological underpinnings of same-sex sexual behavior but also underscore the importance of resisting simplistic conclusions (Box 2)—because the behavioral phenotypes are complex, because our genetic insights are rudimentary, and because there is a long history of misusing genetic results for social purposes.

No doubt, other GWAS studies may very well invoke the (imagined) markets of (imagined) precision medicine (they cite Polimanti and Wang, and Wang). But they still need to be read, to work against the limits of the analyst’s inevitable selections.

Here’s a reading: the Broad seeks and stages an encounter with the excess of sexual/ity, not knowing what they will find, not knowing what they want to know, what they will have known.  There’s an openness and experimentalism

Paranoid reading exposes that genomic truth is “tenuous” Yes, but I would go farther and call it spectral?  Frum describes those spectral, between-worldly forms that  do we dissolve it or strengthen the hold?

In short, investigations in clinical genetics and sociogenomics together form a pipeline for claims about the etiology of complex behavioral phenotypes, as well as a possible future in which nonnormative genders and sexualities can be predicted, anticipated, and “treated” accordingly. (130)

Another sign of a restricted economy, where the pipeline doesn’t leak. Its not that we shouldn’t consider and develop this criticism. Its that we already know how to do it, and it provides us with the satisfaction of already knowing.

evolutionary context

By assuming that the Ganna GWAS can only be about its subject, SSSB, GLQ can’t read how the Ganna data also opens out, in a set of questions and possibilities, into a more encompassing “sexuality.” In particular, it opens onto and gives support to one of Freud’s most controversial insistences, “polymorphous perversity” of infantile sexuality, or what Laplanche names “the sexual”. The sexual precedes any kind of organized, identifiable sexuality while exceeding the logics of natural/cultural and operating at their limit, the place of “drive”

Or the place where a drive will have been emplaced

Thinking with Laplanche would do both sides some good.

 “the sphere of excess that is sexuality.” (Benjamin and Atlas 2015, 39)

“In Laplanche’s view, the enigmatic message is constitutive of the child’s unconscious in the broadest sense. The enigmatic message about sexuality, too much for the child to encompass in its psyche, creates the excessive quality of sexuality. Insofar as sexuality is conveyed through an unconscious component of adult love of the child, inherently too big for the child, necessarily enigmatic, it stamps human sexuality with excess.” (Benjamin and Atlas 2015, 41)

“the meaning of excess shifts in Stein’s work, or rather it is partly refigured as the idea of ‘otherness:’ it is the incommensurability of sexuality with other modes of interaction, what we might call its inevitable dissociation from other psychic processes, that places it in a separate realm of either transcendence or debasement.” (Benjamin and Atlas 2015, 41)

“In a sense, for Stein excess becomes a function of sexuality’s otherness, and otherness becomes the explanation for excess. This idea of otherness implicates the social ordering of sexuality and interpersonal relations as opposed to Laplanche’s narrower focus on the immaturity of the human psyche in reaction to unconscious transmission of the sexual message.” (Benjamin and Atlas 2015, 41)

“If, then, we agree with the proposition that sexuality is bound to exceed what the relational dimension can contain (Benjamin, 2004b), it is nonetheless evident that the capacity to hold and process this excess through mental and physical action varies considerably. Our contention is that such processing depends on the individual’s early developing an overall capacity for holding excitement, a capacity that begins with interactive experiences of affect arousal in the early attachment to mother or other caregivers.” (Benjamin and Atlas 2015, 42)

“Here, then, is the paradox of sexual excess: sexuality itself is founded in excess and otherness, creating experiences of stimulation and tension that must be tolerated, while alternately serving as a regulatory function. The latter occurs both through bodily discharge of tension and the containment via fantasy of otherwise unrepresented experiences with significant others (Benjamin, 2004b; Atlas, 2011a). We consider many forms of sexuality to be actions the individual takes to soothe or regulate the self, rather than primarily to engage or elicit responses from the other. In this context, sexual discharge means using the body to solve the problem of mental excess. That is, emotional content which cannot be held in the dialogically created mental space is experienced as physiological arousal and resolved at that level (Benjamin, 2004b).” (Benjamin and Atlas 2015, 46)

“But for now, we want to stress the following: to say that gender arises through such intricate processes means that gender is something we all acquire and, consequently, that all genders have a constitution we can probe, examine, and theorize.” (Saketopoulou and Pellegrini 2023, 16)

Wel then: what kind of an organism is able to, capable of, “constituted” in such a way that it can acquire gender?

This privilege–of never having to think about your gender or sexuality as such–is also sutured to whiteness. (Saketopoulou and Pellegrini 2023, 15)

“Instead of revisiting and revising its own foundations, psychoanalysis too easily falls into a search for origins, asking what “causes” transness, gender beyond the binary, and sexual queerness. This etiological quest to explain queer childhood has struck some analysts as just part of the ordinary purview of psychoanalysis. According to this way of proceeding, we ask “why” of all other psychics formations, so why would we exempt gender from the analyst’s etiological search?” (Saketopoulou and Pellegrini 2023, 13)

“etiological quests are never neutral…[they] function as stealthy starting points for the motoring of conversion therapies.”(Saketopoulou and Pellegrini 2023, 13)

“To assume that the analyst knows best embroils the analyst’s omniscient and omnipotent fantasizing, and that needs serious countertransference analysis.” (Saketopoulou and Pellegrini 2023, 14)

“While we strongly oppose the search for etiological factors (as if the “why” can ever be pinned down) we still advocate for thinking about in a dynamic way, which is to say in a way that considers the unconscious and the sexual. More on how that stance differs from both etiology and developmentalism will follow shortly. For now, we want to emphasize that we are critical of “born-this-way” approaches to all genders and all sexualities. (Saketopoulou and Pellegrini 2023, 16-17)

“this binary choice (acquired-and-therefore-possible-to-eliminate versus immutable-and-therefore-fixed)...

We want to offer a way around this impasse: it is possible to retrospectively discuss what factors may have played a role in someone becoming gender nonconforming or sexually queer without this meaning that their difference is a problem to be ‘fixed.’ We believe that the field is in dire need of analytic ideas that don’t capitulate to the notion that the only way to counter the pathologizing of sexual and gender non-normativities is by imagining them to be innate. Nor is it humane to regard variant genders and sexualities without the resource of psychic complexity that psychoanalysis routinely affords to normative subjects.  (Saketopoulou and Pellegrini 2023, 21-22)

This may be read as a defense of elites (gay) genomicists to wonder about sexuality and, more importantly and problematically, to know sexual difference through science, even one shaped by a genealogy of privilege, injustice, and sometimes violence. I don’t suppose I can negate that. But it should also be read as an affirmation of what Chanda Prescod-Weinstein names sometimes as “the right to be curious” and at other times as “the right to know.“ What she is curious to know about are cosmological truths and their realities which, while she acknowledges the deep entanglements with histories of militarism and racism that produced them, are more removed from realities like homophobia, transphobia, violence, etc. than the sciences of sexualities are. Still, her plea for something more than “diversity” in science achieved through selection is compelling:

Let us demand human rights for all, including the right to know and understand the night sky, not as the context of desperate and dangerous searches for freedom, but as the beautiful place that holds the answers to how we came to exist at all. (Prescod-Weinstein)

The Broad Institute scientists may run afoul of PC science, but they did more to make their science and its limits known to a wider public than the GLQ, and thereby to help open or at least point the way toward a place where all can wonder about sexuality, and come to know something about “how we came to exist.”  I hope I’ve added a place inside that place, where we all also wonder about who gets to wonder about the sexual, and perhaps come to know something about who gets to know the sexual.

Queering Curiosity

There’s no place for biology in thinking about sexuality, no language other than base or foundation or essence, and no logic other than determinism, even when its a complex one

Ironically, GLQ essentialize science; their argument amounts to “the genomic coding of science can only be expressed as a reductionist phenotype which omits or excludes complexity.”  I.e., genomics is essentially essentialist, genomics only produces essentialism. Similarly, genomics can only produce, only codes for reductionism is a reductive conceptualization of genomics

There’s no need to be curious about genomics because they already know it. There’s no need to be curious about curiosity as a driver of genomics, because they already know that only capital and the biopower structures that it infrastructures drive genomics.

Taking pleasure in the ambivalence and indeterminacy of erotic experimentation, queer curiosity, I ultimately suggest, puts pressure on the taxonomizing (and often homonormalizing) tendencies of gay and lesbian identity politics. (Kindig 2024, 52)

differences of data-sharing and method-exposing and truth-producing practices

“When it comes to gender, ‘there’s no way to make a mistake, and there’s no way to get it right. Meaning that you get it right enough. That’s what we’re all aiming for.’”  Saketopoulou, quoted in Polgreen 2023

Works cited

Bailey, Nathan W., and Marlene Zuk. 2009. “Same-Sex Sexual Behavior and Evolution.” Trends in Ecology & Evolution 24 (8): 439–46. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tree.2009.03.014.

Ferguson, Brian. 2019. “Opinion: Seeking Justice in the Age of Genomics and a Call for Higher Ethical Standards for Research Involving Human Populations.” Broad Institute. August 29, 2019. https://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/opinion-seeking-justice-age-genomics-and-call-higher-ethical-standards-research-involving-human.

Gurjao, Carino. 2019. “Opinion: Unintended, but Not Unanticipated: The Consequences of Human Behavioral Genetics.” Broad Institute. August 29, 2019. https://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/opinion-unintended-not-unanticipated-consequences-human-behavioral-genetics.

Olive, Meagan. 2019. “Opinion: Discovery or Discrimination? Starting the Conversation about the Potential Outcomes of a LGBTQIA+ Targeted Study.” Broad Institute. August 29, 2019. https://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/opinion-discovery-or-discrimination-starting-conversation-about-potential-outcomes-lgbtqia.

Polgreen, Lydia. 2023. “Opinion | Born This Way? Born Which Way?” The New York Times, December 1, 2023, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/01/opinion/politics/life-without-regret.html.

Prescod-Weinstein, Chanda. 2019. “The Right to Know and Understand the Night Sky.” Medium. March 23, 2019. https://medium.com/@chanda/the-right-to-know-and-understand-the-night-sky-3a9fb4e04d92.

Ramírez-i-Ollé, Meritxell. 2019. “Friendship as a Scientific Method.” The Sociological Review 67 (2): 299–317. https://doi.org/10.1177/0038026119829760.

Reilly, Steven. 2019. “Opinion: For All This Science, What Did We Learn?” Broad Institute. August 29, 2019. https://www.broadinstitute.org/blog/opinion-all-science-what-did-we-learn.

Turkheimer, Eric. 2017. “Origin of Race Differences in Intelligence Is Not a Scientific Question.” Substack newsletter. Eric Turkheimer - Gloomy Prospect Blog (blog). June 2, 2017. https://ericturkheimer.substack.com/p/origin-of-race-differences-in-intelligence.

Edits

But why is  “new” here almost always linked immediately to the old, “genetics”? Genetics is probably the more intuitively familiar term, and genomicists themselves, in both their professional and popular writings, will regularly revert to “genetics” to name their pursuit. Good reasons notwithstanding, I read “new genetics” as a sign of a time and a science out of joint, the new is never free of the old and genomics is somehow still just good old genetics.  

Or rather, bad old genetics.

When we return to this frequently use more easily invoked than it is grasped, and the analytic-discursive capacities that humanists (a condensation) use to “characterize” events are themselves characterized by all manner of habits and attachments, and may have a hard time keeping pace with our technoprosthetically outfitted scientist friends (another condensation).

A first marker of time out of joint: beginning with their title, the NGS authors consistently refer to “the new genetics” as their object of concern. It’s a defensible choice, more preferable in my view to the no less accurate “the new postgenomics,” perhaps the most popular one in the campus sectors inhabited by readers of differences but probably not to readers of Nature. I would have liked to just let this word choice of “genetics” go by unremarked, but I also can’t help but read it as a sign of NGS’s difficulty being open to what might in fact be genuinely new in and about genomics. I detail below some of the indications that, for NGS, genomics mostly if not entirely continues to be genetics, and the present mostly if not entirely reproduces the past.

GLQ authors repeatedly describe the research and researchers as “high profile,” emphasizing the “headline-making” quality of the publication.  The obvious intent is to indicate popular and media interest in the topic; I also read some resentment, that of the humanist nerds (although two? GLQ authors are scientists) toward the cool kids scientists.