The GenderSci lab has a new article out this week in Social Science and Medicine entitled “A Gender Hypothesis of sex disparities in adverse drug events,” which builds on findings from an article released in JAMA Network Open earlier this fall: “Adverse Drug Events by Sex After Adjusting for Baseline Rates of Drug Use.” 

In her recent sociogenomics manifesto The Genetic Lottery, Kathryn Paige Harden sets out to rescue behavior genetics from the spectres of racism and eugenics. Harden portrays eugenics much like a trait in a pedigree chart: passed on from eugenicist to eugenicist, predictably uniform, easily traceable, and unchanging over time. To promote her monolithic portrayal of eugenics, Harden’s narrative is simple and obfuscates the complexities that have allowed eugenics to survive - even flourish - within the field of genetics.

“Unfortunately, scientific results do not determine their own political interpretations, nor do the investigators.”

Does human sexuality have a genetic component? In an era of genomics that allows parents to select for traits such as the skin color or eye color of their baby, and of continued discrimination, imprisonment, and even death penalities for LGBTQ+ people globally, questions around the genetic determinacy of sexuality require close ethical consideration.

“The HIV/AIDS epidemic, along with the milieu of social, legal, and political factors that have shaped the entwined experiences of LGBT oppression and liberation over the 20th and 21st centuries, has generated challenges to estimating uniform conditions for self-reporting same-sex sexual behavior across space and time.”

In a recent Science Letter, “Genome Studies Must Account for History”, and in this short blog series, the GenderSci Lab investigates the social and historical context of the biobank data used for a recent genetic study of same-sex sexuality, and explores the political and ethical implications of these projects.