FWIW, I don’t think it’s a homophobic viewpoint, but it seems like a somewhat bitter perspective, of the sort generally associated with, but not implying, homophobia. Anyway, it’s tangential to the main point.
Left-handed acceptance culture led to people living more childhood experiences that subtly influenced them in ways that made them turn out left-handed more often.
People who got beat by their teacher when they wrote with their left hand learned to tough it out and use their right hand, and started to identify as right-handed. As teachers stopped beating kids, populations reverted to the baseline rate of left-handed people.
Occam’s razor suggests the latter. People got strongly pressured into appearing right-handed, so they appeared right-handed.
If we accept the second explanation, then we accept that social pressure can account for about 8 points of people-identify-as-X-but-are-actually-Y. With that in mind, people going from 1.8% to 20% seems a bit surprising, but not completely outlandish.
Anyway, all of the above is still tangential to the main point. Even if we assume all of the difference is due to childhood imprinting, we still have rates of LGBT-ness going from 5.8% to 20.8% (depending on how you count). No matter where that change comes from, it’s going to impact how much people have sex with opposite-sex people, and any study that doesn’t account for that impact and reports a less-than-20% change in the rate-of-having-sex is, I believe, close to worthless.
FWIW, I don’t think it’s a homophobic viewpoint, but it seems like a somewhat bitter perspective, of the sort generally associated with, but not implying, homophobia. Anyway, it’s tangential to the main point.
Re: social pressure: I was thinking of the “lefthandedness over time” graphs than got viral last year (of course the graphs could be false; the one fact-checker I found seems to think it’s true):
The two obvious explanations are:
Left-handed acceptance culture led to people living more childhood experiences that subtly influenced them in ways that made them turn out left-handed more often.
People who got beat by their teacher when they wrote with their left hand learned to tough it out and use their right hand, and started to identify as right-handed. As teachers stopped beating kids, populations reverted to the baseline rate of left-handed people.
Occam’s razor suggests the latter. People got strongly pressured into appearing right-handed, so they appeared right-handed.
If we accept the second explanation, then we accept that social pressure can account for about 8 points of people-identify-as-X-but-are-actually-Y. With that in mind, people going from 1.8% to 20% seems a bit surprising, but not completely outlandish.
Anyway, all of the above is still tangential to the main point. Even if we assume all of the difference is due to childhood imprinting, we still have rates of LGBT-ness going from 5.8% to 20.8% (depending on how you count). No matter where that change comes from, it’s going to impact how much people have sex with opposite-sex people, and any study that doesn’t account for that impact and reports a less-than-20% change in the rate-of-having-sex is, I believe, close to worthless.