Actually pretty interesting. I think we're starting to creep up on the actual numbers, as far as you can measure such a thing. I think comphet keeps a lot of people who would otherwise fall somewhere on the bi/pan spectrum from ever experimenting and realizing it about themelves, and I bet that population is actually quite large. As far as transness goes, I would be willing to believe a number within the realm of ~3% to even 5%. I think further complicating this whole thing is that human sexuality and gender identity is a lot more nebulous than the very rigid, medically-originated terminology we use implies. A lot of the identity labels we use (homosexual, transsexual/transgender, etc) were originally medical diagnoses that were later transposed onto cultural identities, which carries a lot of baggage that I think has been left unaddressed, such as the rigidity of their definition, but that's probably for a post for another time. Anyway, just thought it was neat neat, especially the state queerness leaderboards.
His methodology is explained in Part II: "Homosexuality of Men & Women as a Social Occurrence", Chapter 24 "The Distribution of Male and Female Homosexuality. Statistical Foundations. Worth reading, to understand the historical context of the OP, which is that this knowledge is subject to continuous questioning and replication for over a century now. Being constantly made to re-prove ourselves is a component of repression; such research is not liberatory. Particular the fascist backlash to the original research itself (this was early 20th C Germany remember), which is described. I can post it, if anyone wants, but not now as I need to get somewhere. And maybe nobody read this long ass comment.
I read it all the way
This was easily the most interesting stuff I've read in a while. Had no idea this was so well understood so far back.
Thanks! I hope you pursue it further. It's a lot easier now than 5, 15 or 50 years ago.
Hirschfeld's activism was set in motion when he realized the gay bars of Chicago were very similar to the gay bars he knew back home in Germany. Which yes, does suggest way more questions than answers are available. From this, combined with his training in science, he derived a hypothesis of sameyness of humans when it came to sex. (There are gay people everywhere.) He soon extended this to trans people and to many others. After working for a while on reparative therapy, he gave it up as hopeless, falling back on the understanding of Darwinism as alluded to above. If beaks of Galapogos finches can be illustrated as this, it obviously follows sex/gender would be the same:
All this hateful, bigot shit, all of it is man-made. It's not natural to be ignorant of, or to hate, any kind of person, just as a bird holds no hostility to a beak shaped one way or another. All the shit we deal with is downstream of (admittedly successful) interventions by fascists. They make their hatreds appear natural which is a total lie. GSM have always existed wherever on earth in every population. While understanding that all modern constructs are products of modern material conditions, we can also see ourselves: all kinds, every where, every time.
Per Scientiam ad Justitiam = Through Science, To Justice
I'm a big ol nerd so one of the ways I came around to accidentally understand humans was by really learning a lot about animals (your Galapagos finch example was one of my entry points into better understanding the fluidity of bodies). Another was by learning a lot about math and physics and how almost nothing is discrete, or absolute.
I stopped short earlier of saying "so it's always just been hatred and rejection", didn't want to put words in your mouth, but yep that was my immediate conclusion.
I don't agree with that at all. What I'm saying is that the bigotry was constructed along with the new identities and they were devised to serve the purpose of fascism. Which can't really be reduced to "hatred and rejection" even though those are tools which it can employ.
Part of the propaganda against GSM is the idea that there is some "natural" reason these people will be subject to universal oppression. Like sex and gender variation are inherently viewed by others as dirty, bad, anti-social, plain icky and other humans will recognize that and react negatively.
Actually it seems that left to their own devices, people react in a variety of ways just as they do to any other uncommon characteristic. Which can be suspicion to adulation to disinterest or anything else. The wide-spread anti-gay/trans sentiments have to be artificially created, by people with power.
Well, it sounds like I may have rubbed you the wrong way, but I was never meaning to exclude manufactured hatred and rejection. I didn't highlight it specifically cuz I don't really know and again, want to limit my assumptions, especially in the presence of someone who knows better than myself.
In my experience in life (contrasting that epistemically with the stronger wisdom available from reading the right people), I find that a portion of folks are simply afraid of things they haven't experienced, and that fear can manifest in lots of different ways, generally depending on external factors more than internal.
And I've spent enough time around kids to understand very clearly that hatred is a thing that takes time to learn (must be taught), it doesn't really seem to arise naturally (though it is very effective at spreading - infectious).
What I was aiming to highlight, was new information to me, regarding the lie around the assertion that "people just didn't know any better". And saying, no, according to what you shared, that's not accurate, hatred and rejection (by motivated powerful people) did this, not pure ignorance. The fact of its only recent translation seems damning, and really struck me as "wow ideas were just locked away like that, pre-tech". I think I'm saying and thinking the same things as you, but maybe not?
At any rate, apologies if I am still missing something you find crucial.
[Edit: apologies I've edited this like 19 times in the few minutes since I posted to flesh it out better lol, I should really exercise better discipline and just collect my thoughts prior to submit. But anyway I'm done now]
you don't have to agree with me! I am not offended in any case. I am sorry my writing is poor in that I can come across as hostile or upset when I am only trying to be clear. I have tried to improve but it is ongoing problem for me. So I am sorry I was bothering you, I just find the subject interesting and it's hard for me to resist adding more.
I didn't see any of the prior iterations of your comment so whatever was said there is between you and god (and possibly a cache somewhere). I also iterated a lot on what I said. I guess we both did that out of mutual care and respect for the subject.
I worried that I'd misunderstood something and subsequently misstepped, is all. Regarding edits, I've been trying to experiment with being more concise. It usually ends up with either misunderstandings or my own hand-wringing followed by at least as many words, so. Plenty of room for improvement and lots to learn is territory I'm familiar with and comfortable within, lol.
I appreciate your approach to clarity, I find your POV easy to locate and worth listening to, two things not all that common and valuable to me :)
To bring it back to the original point, you shared info that scratched an itch that has been bothering me since I learned to think, basically. I've slowly grown dimly aware of how many other peoples and cultures have understood and integrated these basic facts as fundamental parts of being communities of people.
And that process has produced this growing sense of "it makes no sense, the claim that we're just late to the party and finally learning a whole lot of stuff all at once".
I've long had plenty of small explanations for that, but this feels bigger. As soon as I read it, it intuitively felt like "ah ha, this exactly fills in this gap of curiosity and obvious answers that I knew had to be in there (whatever diet of info and history of such I was raised on, or could even later find!*) somewhere".
Cheers. This will dwell in my thinking for a long time, probably just forever, as I grow my understanding of the world, and I really appreciate it.