Q&A with GSL Gender & Sociogenomics Team Leaders Mia and Alex
Led by population geneticist Mia Miyagi and sociomedical scientist Alex Borsa, a team of GenderSci Lab researchers has published a State of the Field review of sexual genetics research in the most recent issue of GLQ (the journal of Gay, Lesbian, and Queer Studies), called “The New Genetics of Sexuality.” Here we sit down with Mia and Alex to learn more about what they learned in the process of writing this piece, and their hopes for the conversations it will create across the genomic and social science fields.
GSL: How would you describe the main takeaway from the review?
MM: As the datasets and computing power available to human geneticists have rapidly expanded, so has their ability to apply genetics to look for biological origins of sexuality, using a rapidly changing and statistically sophisticated toolkit. However, the fundamental ethical and methodological issues with investigating a biological “cause” for sexuality remain, such as the risks of providing (even nonfunctional) genetic surveillance tools to bad actors and the need for static, well-delineated categories of sexuality in order to power the genetic correlation tools used.
GSL: What made you decide to write this piece for a gender and queer studies audience?
AB: At the GenderSci Lab, we have a history of speaking to a wide variety of audiences across disciplines, including biomedical and social scientists, cultural studies scholars, policymakers, activists, and beyond. As we have continued to track outputs in this area — sociogenomics and behavioral genetics research on gender/sex/sexuality — we’ve noticed a continual lack of engagement by genetics researchers with sociocultural, historical, and theoretical perspectives on these categories. We also have witnessed the widespread dissemination of crude and sometimes spurious findings from these studies, with limited attention to the more technical aspects by critical gender scholars. By writing this piece for a gender and queer studies audience, it is our hope to make the genetic methods and findings more accessible to those who may not have extensive training in the biological sciences, and to bolster attention to the pressing ethical, social, political, and epistemic dimensions of these research programs. So, while we hope to garner attention from genome scientists, we also hope to pique the interest of broader constituencies interested in methodological rigor and research ethics in this field.
MM: Right, in the queer studies community, there’s a wellspring of expertise and scholarly work on the ethics and social dimensions of doing scientific work like the type we critique in the piece, very little of which filters into the conversations between geneticists at the bench. One thing we wanted to accomplish with this review is giving people with extensive humanities training, whose perspectives are sorely needed in the lab, more tools to engage with geneticists in their domain. We also wanted to identify arenas we thought were ripe for deeper consideration, where the science is new enough that there hasn’t been a ton of critique yet, such as genetic correlation analyses on sex/gender/sexuality related traits run on these huge genome-wide association studies (GWAS) datasets.
GSL: Can you talk about how your interdisciplinary backgrounds in gender studies, sociomedical sciences, and population genetics informed the writing of the piece?
"DNA in motion" by Marc Samsom is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
AB: Despite having worked on a number of collaborative, interdisciplinary projects, I was particularly excited for this one! In addition to Mia’s brilliance in population genetics and my training in sociology and public health, the full authorship team hailed from backgrounds including philosophy, history, and science and technology studies (STS). All of this, of course, along with a shared expertise in gender and queer studies.
Using this epistemic scaffolding, we really wanted to provide a review that would address the methods and model-theoretic assumptions in the genetic science, as well as their intersections with market forces and finance capital; regulatory bioethics; and longer histories of bioessentialism around gender/sex/sexuality, race/ethnicity, and neurodivergences.
For myself, I am also invested in how sociology as a discipline has been approaching the availability and use of population-level genomic data. In most of sociology, I see extremely rich, theoretically informed, and empirically supported analyses about the social ontology of gender/sex/sexuality, and the historical and cultural contingencies undergirding them. Yet, when genomic data are extended to social traits or incorporated into sociological analyses, insights from this body of literature can be surprisingly scarce. For example, in the high-profile 2019 GWAS on same-sex sexual behavior completed by Ganna et al., findings from a solely Caucasian, transgender-exclusive dataset that does not account for historical selective pressures on the sample (decriminalization of homosexuality, the HIV/AIDS crisis, etc.) were essentially globalized to speak about the genetic influence on same-sex sexuality humans in all places and in all times.
Whatever one’s stance is towards this type of research, there is need for a reckoning within sociology — and outside it — with what, precisely, is being measured in social GWAS studies, and what it signifies on the level of social meaning.
MM: As for me, most of my training has been in theoretical population genetics, so I was excited to have the opportunity to work with, and especially learn from, other members of the GenderSci Lab with expertise profiles that more closely matched the audience of the piece. In addition to providing complementary knowledge bases, I think the exercise of communicating and teaching across disciplines that occurred during the writing process gave us experience that was directly useful for formulating the piece. More personally, while reviewing the technical background for this piece with other members of the GenderSci Lab, it was eye-opening and rewarding to have people around me with very different backgrounds challenging the assumptions and norms that are present in human genetics studies. That experience really reinforced for me how important it is to give experts outside of the sciences the technical background and tools to have these conversations throughout academia.
I think that humanities training helps scientists be aware of the ways in which their assumptions (about gender, sex, or sexuality, say) limit the scope of the hypotheses they can think to test, as well as the potential explanations and interpretations of their results they can imagine. I hope work like ours can help foster discussion that will lead to not only a more inclusive scientific community, but a more rigorous standard for studies of the type we critique.
“There is need for a reckoning . . . with what, precisely, is being measured in social GWAS studies, and what it signifies on the level of social meaning.”
GSL: What is next for this stream of inquiry?
AB: There are a couple initiatives underway! Currently, I am writing up findings from a qualitative interview study I conducted with Helen Zhao — a brilliant philosopher of science currently on sabbatical from GenderSci while she attends law school. In our study, we explore how people of diverse backgrounds think about genetics and sexuality, and how the seemingly inevitable availability of sexual genetic testing might influence sexual self-concepts, behaviors, and identities. Our findings indicate that even people who appear to have strong moral disagreements with this type of testing, or those who believe it would not tell them anything meaningful, may still be interested in taking such a test. I argue that this form of “play” has larger implications for how we conceive of the bioethics and dissemination of behavioral genetic science.
We also [*looks around, lowers voice*] have a larger vision for a research program in this area focusing on ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of sociogenomics. We’ve spent much of the past year building a vision for a broader, more intensive project within the lab to really document, map, and analyze all the different ways gender/sex/sexuality appear in GWAS and the ethical dimensions of these instances. We are keeping our fingers crossed that we will hear good news about these plans soon! But we are fully ready to forge onward, whatever funding we may or may not be granted.
MM: One thing I’m very excited about going forward is digging into the methods that are commonly used to assess correlations between traits. For example, in multiple of the papers we looked at, researchers studied the genetic correlation between sexuality and other social (self-assessed leadership ability, risk-taking behavior) as well as physical (digit ratio, body mass index) traits. We found that these analyses present unfortunate opportunities for researchers to reinforce their internally held stereotypes, and are inherently biased by what traits are even considered — you can’t find a correlation between traits that you don’t test! Beyond this, there are open questions about how exactly these methods behave in the face of external, non-genetic (say, environmental) factors which impact the analyzed traits. These sorts of factors are clearly important when dealing with such socially live variables like how people describe their sexuality on surveys.
Suggested CITATIOn
Borsa, A. and Miyagi, M. “Q&A with GSL Gender & Sociogenomics Team Leaders Mia and Alex.” GenderSci Lab Blog. 2024 January 30. genderscilab.org/blog/q-and-a-with-gsl-sociogenomic-team-leaders-mia-and-alex
StateMENT OF INTellectual Labor
Kelsey Ichikawa and Sarah Richardson generated the questions and Alex Borsa and Mia Miyagi provided their responses.