Radiolab - Born This Way?

Today, the story of an idea. An idea that some people need, others reject, and one that will, ultimately, be hard to let go of. Special Thanks to Carl Zimmer, Eric Turkheimer, Andrea Ganna, Chandler Burr, Jacques Balthazart, Sean Mckeithan, Joe Osmundson, Jennifer Brier, Daniel Levine-Spound, Maddie Sofia, Elie Mystal, Heather Radke EPISODE CREDITS: Reported by - Matt KieltyProduced by - Matt KieltyOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Matt Kieltywith mixing help from - Arianne WackFact-checking by - Diane Kelly EPISODE CITATIONS: Videos: Lisa Diamond - Born This Way, TEDx (https://zpr.io/WJedDGLVkTNF) Books: Joanna Wuest - Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (https://zpr.io/rYPwyhNHtgXe) Dean Hamer - The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (https://zpr.io/3FuKZyu2bgwE) Lisa Diamond - Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Desire and Love (https://zpr.io/cj3ZSLC2xccJ) Edward Stein - The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (https://zpr.io/UQfdNtyE3RtQ) Chandler Burr - A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation (https://zpr.io/GKUDhyfNacUf) Jacques Balthazart - The Biology of Homosexuality (https://zpr.io/um6XMmpfkmQS) Anne Fausto-Sterling - Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (https://zpr.io/rWNrTYLeLZ3s) Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)! Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today. Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

Duration: 1h 13m
Broadcast on: 08 Sep 2023
Audio Format: other

EPISODE CREDITS:

Reported by - Matt KieltyProduced by - Matt KieltyOriginal music and sound design contributed by - Matt Kieltywith mixing help from - Arianne WackFact-checking by - Diane Kelly

EPISODE CITATIONS:

Videos:

Lisa Diamond - Born This Way, TEDx (https://zpr.io/WJedDGLVkTNF)

Books:

Joanna Wuest - Born This Way: Science, Citizenship, and Inequality in the American LGBTQ+ Movement (https://zpr.io/rYPwyhNHtgXe)

Dean Hamer - The Science of Desire: The Search for the Gay Gene and the Biology of Behavior (https://zpr.io/3FuKZyu2bgwE)

Lisa Diamond - Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Desire and Love (https://zpr.io/cj3ZSLC2xccJ)

Edward Stein - The Mismeasure of Desire: The Science, Theory, and Ethics of Sexual Orientation (https://zpr.io/UQfdNtyE3RtQ)

Chandler Burr - A Separate Creation: The Search for the Biological Origins of Sexual Orientation (https://zpr.io/GKUDhyfNacUf)

Jacques Balthazart - The Biology of Homosexuality (https://zpr.io/um6XMmpfkmQS)

Anne Fausto-Sterling - Sexing the Body: Gender Politics and the Construction of Sexuality (https://zpr.io/rWNrTYLeLZ3s)

Our newsletter comes out every Wednesday. It includes short essays, recommendations, and details about other ways to interact with the show. Sign up (https://radiolab.org/newsletter)!

Radiolab is supported by listeners like you. Support Radiolab by becoming a member of The Lab (https://members.radiolab.org/) today.

Follow our show on Instagram, Twitter and Facebook @radiolab, and share your thoughts with us by emailing [email protected].

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RIDILEB is supported by AT&T. We all love to connect via video calls or texts. Right now, at AT&T, you can get the new iPhone 18 Pro for $0 with iPhone trade-in. Any condition. It has the ultimate pro camera system and big leap in battery life, so you can turn this deal into a long-lasting connection. Learn how you can trade in your iPhone for the new iPhone 18 Pro requires trade-in of iPhone 14 or higher, excluding iPhone 16E, an eligible plan. Terms and restrictions apply, subject to change, visit an AT&T store for details. Hey, I'm Lulu Miller, this is RadioLab, and a little while ago, our reporter Matthew Kelsey came to me with the story of an idea. Yeah, the idea that you were born into a sexual orientation. This is like the born this way idea? Yeah, the born this way idea, which I always believed to be true for much of my life, but in the past few years, that idea felt essentially under assault in these pretty public ways and ways that were happening on both the right and the left. So it's like, on one hand, you have something like the bill in Florida, the parents rights and education bill. The don't say gay bill, the bill prohibits classroom instruction, where you can't teach kids third grade and below anything about sexual orientation or gender identity because the logic there is that by talking about sexuality and gender or reading a book about it or whatever, we will make sure that parents can send their kids to school, that those things will change a kid's identity. To get an education, not an indoctrination. Yeah. And the foundation of the thing is just this idea that tiny little things in a kid's school environment is going to change them radically. So that's going on on the right, on the left. So there are many different theories of gender and mine is just one. In the past several years, you've had these ideas that become much more mainstream, ideas like how social norms and cultural values and politics and history, how all these things are maybe the most important thing in shaping your own sense of self and your own sexual preferences. But again, that it's the environment outside you that is really the thing that is making you. Yeah. I don't know if this matters, but I will just say here that as a queer lady, a married to a lady, someone who identifies as bi, and someone who's read about this stuff and thought about it a fair amount, this is the idea that makes sense to me that sexuality, that desire, sexuality is shaped by this whole swirl of factors. That really makes sense to me, it pretty much lines up with my experience. Right. And I think for me as a cis straight man, my identity always felt very consistent and I just never really had to think about it. And in part, you know, maybe embarrassing me, like I never had to think about it. It was just like I grew up in a world where born this way, the born this way idea was the thing. It was the thing that I thought you were supposed to believe if you were a good ally to gay rights. It was the thing that you use as an argument against the idea of conversion therapy that you can just take a kid and like change their environment and make them into something.

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