Genetics are linked to sex, not fertility. And it’s not clear the LBGT is genetic (it might be biological, but that’s different).
Childlessness is swimming downstream because it means you have more money and freedom than those with children. You used to make children when you had sex, which everyone wants to do, but that isn’t relevant anymore.
I think that when people have the right incentives, they invent whatever ideology or worldview they need to support it.
People don’t forego kids because of climate change, they believe in climate change as an excuse for not having the kids they don’t want. And to justify not providing more resources to parents.
When parents have materially better lives than non-parents people will invent fertility cults.
for the current increase it's mostly social desireability bias, and young impressionable women who fall for whatever the hysteria/fashion of the day is (fainting in Victorian england, anorexia in the 90s, etc.)
"People don’t forego kids because of climate change, they believe in climate change as an excuse for not having the kids they don’t want." This is correct, and I'm sick of the obfuscation. You want 0 kids? Great. You want 8? Bully for you. Just say that's what you want and stop relying on some external belief system you don't really believe in.
It's true that birth control severing the connection between sex & children played a big role, but it's also the case that people are having less sex over time (linked to the decline in marriage, since married people have more sex).
They are probably having more sex then unmarried people had a long time ago.
But maybe sex isn't the metric. How many orgasms are they having? My guess is your average unmarried male is getting off way more in the age of pornography than he was before.
The idea that all of this is "self correcting" just doesn't jive for me. It's entirely possible to satisfy evolutionary programming with novel technology designed to do so, and entirely possible for demographics to enter a dependency death spiral from which they don't recover. If you want things to change, your going to have to actively change them, not hope they fix themselves.
I don't think there will be a global dependency death spiral -- the human race is too varied in its cultures and its genetics -- but there will probably be local ones. It will be an interesting, and grim, feature of the world of the future. I've only recently started thinking more about what this death spiral will look like. Of being a young person in a society where the median age is 60 and increasing a little bit every year. Until finally the lights go out and don't go back on again.
I wonder if the world will come to look like Middle Earth in the Third Age. Vast depopulated tracts of land, of empty ghost towns and ghost cities in places like the poorer parts of Europe, or less favored regions of China like Manchuria, or even the Korean Peninsula, as all the remaining working-age people huddle together in the places with still relatively vibrant economies.
One interesting question: would we, today, bother to settle a virgin new continent if we discovered one? Because this is related to the question of whether there is anything useful to do with a place like Ukraine after it is denuded of people.
If the US from the Pacific to the Appalachians suddenly popped into existence in the year 2024, would it make economic sense to go about settling and populating it? I'm not entirely sure, aside perhaps from rotating work camps of men (not families) established to exploit certain natural resources like oil and to build the relevant infrastructure. In that event it might be up to the Amish to settle the North American continent, out of motivations that are not entirely economic -- or at least operating out of cultural constraints that shape their economic considerations differently from the rest of us.
I don't know how since Popper some can believe something as simple as self-preservation is the drive behind evolution, but whatever. What I don't understand at all is how while the number of the LGBT population that admits to having been abused in childhood/teenage is almost 50%, there are people who still believe that everything can be explained by an undiscovered "gay gene"; It seems like mental laziness to me, sorry. Even if there are biological causes (like almost all passive homosexuals have high estrogen or low testosterone), it doesn't mean that those are genetically inherited.
This might be reinventing the wheel. I believe the most common days for people to become engaged to be married are Christmas and New Year’s Eve, with the days in between also being popular choices. The Christmas season, with its imagery glorifying a family welcoming a new baby even in less-than-ideal circumstances (in a manger), seems effective for a variety of reasons at getting people thinking about the importance of family and marriage and babies. From Hallmark Christmas movies leaning into the theme of wholesome courtship and family formation to all the traditions aimed at "tiny tots with their eyes all aglow," the Christmas season is extremely family-oriented. Further embracing the celebration of family during the winter holiday season might even result in more marriages and babies, who knows.
Celebrating fertility from Mother's Day to Father's Day is a great idea.
Or one could do it from Beltane (May 1) to the Summer Solstice (June 21ish). Beltane has historical and modern pagan fertility themes.
Or one could simply designate the month of May. This is easy to remember, and would not look as if it's competing with, or be attenuated by, LGBT Pride Month in June. This could also connect with the Catholic Month of Mary (I am not Catholic so I don't know if that would clash in some ways).
International Day of the Midwife is also May 5, so that would also match up well.
I found this really persuasive because I hadn't considered the marginal human who would be happily heterosexual in one enviroment or homosexual in another, but it strikes me as a sensible hypothesis. I also view the success of the LGBT movement as encouraging that we could achieve something similar with natalism.
My family is somewhat unusual, but I nevertheless am optimistic when I see how important having children is to me, my three brothers, and most of my cousins.
Seriously, there are multiple lines of evidence suggesting that the increase in trans identities is socially influenced. These include:
- The testimonies of both detransitioners and currently trans-identified youth indicate social influence.
- The sheer size of the trans wave, combined with the lack of signs of 'repressed trans identities' found by 20th century research, is _very_ difficult for the innate hypothesis to explain.
- Traditional cultures very rarely produce people who suffer gender dysphoria or want to medically transition.
- Emotional distress often seems to precipitate gender transition.
- The trans wave has occurred in concert with deteriorating youth mental health.
- The trans wave has striking similarities to other socially influenced conditions, like false 'recovered memories'.
I'm less convinced that people are being influenced into LGB sexual orientations.
I have never personally seen Pride events as celebrating being LGBT, any more than MLK Day is celebrating being black. Rather, both are celebration of people taking a stand against a monstrous evil, and of the people who endured against that evil's repeated assaults throughout history. It's joy in the fact that in both cases the preferences falsification bubble was popped and people were no longer so intimidated that they felt like they had to pretend to support evil.
I feel like one thing a pro-natalist movement could take from that is that movements need good villains. The various civil rights movements in America have had a lot of twisted psychos to serve as villains; there're been people like George Wallace and Bull Durham for the Civil Rights movement and people like Fred Phelps and Anita Bryant for the LGBT movement. Who could serve as a bad guy for a natalist movement? I can think of some foreign leaders like Indira Gandhi and Deng Xiaoping, and some academics like Paul Ehrlich. But in the USA natalism's main foe has been a "vibe" that having kids is just too hard. It's been perfectionism, the idea that you'll screw up your kids if you aren't a perfect parent. Is there a way to personify that vibe into a more concrete enemy?
The lack of same-sex partners for female bisexuals (the group that has grown the most) does indeed suggest this is more a matter of identification than behavior. You link to your post showing that bisexuals have fewer children than straights... but there's no reason to think that self-identification is random either. More religious women, for example, would be less likely to identify that way. And fertility is correlated with religion not because of the religion itself being pro-natalist, but more because it's correlated with traditionalism (which would also be anti-correlated with the bisexuality fad). https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/58/5/1793/178813/In-the-Name-of-the-Father-Fertility-Religion-and
There is pride month and black history month, but nobody celebrates anything for an entire month. We've already got mother's & father's day, but that's not enough to drive people to become parents.
Something else to consider is how many celebrity upper-middle-class same-sex partnerships often ARE leaning into fertility, via sperm donation or surrogacy (Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles; Dave Rubin and partner; Dan Savage and partner did this something like 20 years ago). Several same-sex couples in my friend group have done the same. Similar trends toward "tradition" wrt marriage and serving in the military. Curious how the stats on this will pan out?
Also: It was at least partially the baby bonus in Australia back in 2007 that dragged my dumb arse over the line into parenthood.
If that's abiological realtiy it'll remain that way. If it's a cultural norm it will change, particularly with high visibility examples of that change. The same is happening with straaight couple in the opposite direction at the moment, which makes me weight culture more highly. We'll find out, I guess...?
" If enthusiastic, durable public celebration changes sexual identity and behavior, why not start publicly celebrating straightness, the most fertile of all sexual identities?"
great idea - & great post! - however...society-or those who decide for it- have not just "generally switched from despising LGBT feelings to celebrating them"; but have now gone much further by despising - & even banning - any public celebrations of 'straightness'. Just try and organize a 'straight pride' parade in any major city or college campus, even in a 'red' state. Or post a social media meme or wear a T shirt in a public school with such a message, & watch what happens. It's more improbable every day.
I suspect it's because people suspect "straight pride" is cover for anti-gay bigotry, the same way people oppose "white pride" because they suspect it is cover for racism. The reason they suspect this, of course is that it often is
I think the best strategy would be to find some way somehow celebrate straight pride without mentioning the word "straight." Notice how people seem fine with "white pride" if you are more specific about what type of white you are proud of being, i.e., "Irish Pride" or "Polish Pride", because that isn't historically associated with racism.
Easiest way is probably to celebrate fertility itself, as he mentioned. Or celebrate children; this way even LGBT can celebrate too, if they've adopted children.
If sexual orientation is genetic, there's no particular reason to suspect that it's as simple as a single gene that produces homosexual orientation and therefore reduces reproduction. It could be (for example) a multi-gene phenomenon where all of the contributing genes, taken singly, contribute to survival/reproduction likelihood, but in particular combinations produce homosexual orientation. The individual genes do really well at reproducing, and occasionally show up in the requisite combination.
One idea I've seen is that heterosexuality is mildly maladaptive because some men and women have naturally androgynous features, but are fully capable of reproduction. Missing out on a mating opportunity because someone is repulsed by androgynous features would be selected against. Having a slightly more flexible sexuality would be more adaptive, even if it sometimes "backfires" by causing homosexual behavior.
I think it's plausible that social pressure turned some Gen Zs LGBT. But we've been told over and over that no amount of social pressure, cbt, or desire could possibly turn an LBTG kid into a straight kid. But that's obviously inconsistent. Either our sexual preferences are moldable or they aren't. What's your opinion?
There might be some people with more fixed orientations who will not change for any reason, and some people who have the potential to be either heterosexual or bisexual, depending on what kind of society they grow up in. That would explain the high prevalence of bisexuality in Ancient Greece and Medieval Japan.
Genetics are linked to sex, not fertility. And it’s not clear the LBGT is genetic (it might be biological, but that’s different).
Childlessness is swimming downstream because it means you have more money and freedom than those with children. You used to make children when you had sex, which everyone wants to do, but that isn’t relevant anymore.
I think that when people have the right incentives, they invent whatever ideology or worldview they need to support it.
People don’t forego kids because of climate change, they believe in climate change as an excuse for not having the kids they don’t want. And to justify not providing more resources to parents.
When parents have materially better lives than non-parents people will invent fertility cults.
for male obligate homosexuality it's likely a virus
https://jaymans.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/greg-cochrans-gay-germ-hypothesis-an-exercise-in-the-power-of-germs/
for the current increase it's mostly social desireability bias, and young impressionable women who fall for whatever the hysteria/fashion of the day is (fainting in Victorian england, anorexia in the 90s, etc.)
"People don’t forego kids because of climate change, they believe in climate change as an excuse for not having the kids they don’t want." This is correct, and I'm sick of the obfuscation. You want 0 kids? Great. You want 8? Bully for you. Just say that's what you want and stop relying on some external belief system you don't really believe in.
It's true that birth control severing the connection between sex & children played a big role, but it's also the case that people are having less sex over time (linked to the decline in marriage, since married people have more sex).
They are probably having more sex then unmarried people had a long time ago.
But maybe sex isn't the metric. How many orgasms are they having? My guess is your average unmarried male is getting off way more in the age of pornography than he was before.
The idea that all of this is "self correcting" just doesn't jive for me. It's entirely possible to satisfy evolutionary programming with novel technology designed to do so, and entirely possible for demographics to enter a dependency death spiral from which they don't recover. If you want things to change, your going to have to actively change them, not hope they fix themselves.
I don't think there will be a global dependency death spiral -- the human race is too varied in its cultures and its genetics -- but there will probably be local ones. It will be an interesting, and grim, feature of the world of the future. I've only recently started thinking more about what this death spiral will look like. Of being a young person in a society where the median age is 60 and increasing a little bit every year. Until finally the lights go out and don't go back on again.
I wonder if the world will come to look like Middle Earth in the Third Age. Vast depopulated tracts of land, of empty ghost towns and ghost cities in places like the poorer parts of Europe, or less favored regions of China like Manchuria, or even the Korean Peninsula, as all the remaining working-age people huddle together in the places with still relatively vibrant economies.
One interesting question: would we, today, bother to settle a virgin new continent if we discovered one? Because this is related to the question of whether there is anything useful to do with a place like Ukraine after it is denuded of people.
If the US from the Pacific to the Appalachians suddenly popped into existence in the year 2024, would it make economic sense to go about settling and populating it? I'm not entirely sure, aside perhaps from rotating work camps of men (not families) established to exploit certain natural resources like oil and to build the relevant infrastructure. In that event it might be up to the Amish to settle the North American continent, out of motivations that are not entirely economic -- or at least operating out of cultural constraints that shape their economic considerations differently from the rest of us.
“When we paint the crosswalks pink and baby blue.”
Uh… about those colors though….
😂
Happy Father's day, y'all!
I don't know how since Popper some can believe something as simple as self-preservation is the drive behind evolution, but whatever. What I don't understand at all is how while the number of the LGBT population that admits to having been abused in childhood/teenage is almost 50%, there are people who still believe that everything can be explained by an undiscovered "gay gene"; It seems like mental laziness to me, sorry. Even if there are biological causes (like almost all passive homosexuals have high estrogen or low testosterone), it doesn't mean that those are genetically inherited.
This might be reinventing the wheel. I believe the most common days for people to become engaged to be married are Christmas and New Year’s Eve, with the days in between also being popular choices. The Christmas season, with its imagery glorifying a family welcoming a new baby even in less-than-ideal circumstances (in a manger), seems effective for a variety of reasons at getting people thinking about the importance of family and marriage and babies. From Hallmark Christmas movies leaning into the theme of wholesome courtship and family formation to all the traditions aimed at "tiny tots with their eyes all aglow," the Christmas season is extremely family-oriented. Further embracing the celebration of family during the winter holiday season might even result in more marriages and babies, who knows.
Celebrating fertility from Mother's Day to Father's Day is a great idea.
Or one could do it from Beltane (May 1) to the Summer Solstice (June 21ish). Beltane has historical and modern pagan fertility themes.
Or one could simply designate the month of May. This is easy to remember, and would not look as if it's competing with, or be attenuated by, LGBT Pride Month in June. This could also connect with the Catholic Month of Mary (I am not Catholic so I don't know if that would clash in some ways).
International Day of the Midwife is also May 5, so that would also match up well.
Choosing May would come with an excellent theme song:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pljyjiIMH9o
I thought that was going to link to this:
https://youtu.be/WzZaJDg6E0A?si=wWayW1tJroMLbrN7
(contains swearing)
I found this really persuasive because I hadn't considered the marginal human who would be happily heterosexual in one enviroment or homosexual in another, but it strikes me as a sensible hypothesis. I also view the success of the LGBT movement as encouraging that we could achieve something similar with natalism.
My family is somewhat unusual, but I nevertheless am optimistic when I see how important having children is to me, my three brothers, and most of my cousins.
Thank you for your service, Bryan.
Seriously, there are multiple lines of evidence suggesting that the increase in trans identities is socially influenced. These include:
- The testimonies of both detransitioners and currently trans-identified youth indicate social influence.
- The sheer size of the trans wave, combined with the lack of signs of 'repressed trans identities' found by 20th century research, is _very_ difficult for the innate hypothesis to explain.
- Traditional cultures very rarely produce people who suffer gender dysphoria or want to medically transition.
- Emotional distress often seems to precipitate gender transition.
- The trans wave has occurred in concert with deteriorating youth mental health.
- The trans wave has striking similarities to other socially influenced conditions, like false 'recovered memories'.
I'm less convinced that people are being influenced into LGB sexual orientations.
See here for more:
https://argumentswithfriends.substack.com/p/trans-and-social-influence
I have never personally seen Pride events as celebrating being LGBT, any more than MLK Day is celebrating being black. Rather, both are celebration of people taking a stand against a monstrous evil, and of the people who endured against that evil's repeated assaults throughout history. It's joy in the fact that in both cases the preferences falsification bubble was popped and people were no longer so intimidated that they felt like they had to pretend to support evil.
I feel like one thing a pro-natalist movement could take from that is that movements need good villains. The various civil rights movements in America have had a lot of twisted psychos to serve as villains; there're been people like George Wallace and Bull Durham for the Civil Rights movement and people like Fred Phelps and Anita Bryant for the LGBT movement. Who could serve as a bad guy for a natalist movement? I can think of some foreign leaders like Indira Gandhi and Deng Xiaoping, and some academics like Paul Ehrlich. But in the USA natalism's main foe has been a "vibe" that having kids is just too hard. It's been perfectionism, the idea that you'll screw up your kids if you aren't a perfect parent. Is there a way to personify that vibe into a more concrete enemy?
The lack of same-sex partners for female bisexuals (the group that has grown the most) does indeed suggest this is more a matter of identification than behavior. You link to your post showing that bisexuals have fewer children than straights... but there's no reason to think that self-identification is random either. More religious women, for example, would be less likely to identify that way. And fertility is correlated with religion not because of the religion itself being pro-natalist, but more because it's correlated with traditionalism (which would also be anti-correlated with the bisexuality fad). https://read.dukeupress.edu/demography/article/58/5/1793/178813/In-the-Name-of-the-Father-Fertility-Religion-and
There is pride month and black history month, but nobody celebrates anything for an entire month. We've already got mother's & father's day, but that's not enough to drive people to become parents.
Yet another fertility post that misses the point
HTH
https://ishayirashashem.substack.com/p/look-at-cute-babies
Something else to consider is how many celebrity upper-middle-class same-sex partnerships often ARE leaning into fertility, via sperm donation or surrogacy (Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles; Dave Rubin and partner; Dan Savage and partner did this something like 20 years ago). Several same-sex couples in my friend group have done the same. Similar trends toward "tradition" wrt marriage and serving in the military. Curious how the stats on this will pan out?
Also: It was at least partially the baby bonus in Australia back in 2007 that dragged my dumb arse over the line into parenthood.
If that's abiological realtiy it'll remain that way. If it's a cultural norm it will change, particularly with high visibility examples of that change. The same is happening with straaight couple in the opposite direction at the moment, which makes me weight culture more highly. We'll find out, I guess...?
'
" If enthusiastic, durable public celebration changes sexual identity and behavior, why not start publicly celebrating straightness, the most fertile of all sexual identities?"
great idea - & great post! - however...society-or those who decide for it- have not just "generally switched from despising LGBT feelings to celebrating them"; but have now gone much further by despising - & even banning - any public celebrations of 'straightness'. Just try and organize a 'straight pride' parade in any major city or college campus, even in a 'red' state. Or post a social media meme or wear a T shirt in a public school with such a message, & watch what happens. It's more improbable every day.
I suspect it's because people suspect "straight pride" is cover for anti-gay bigotry, the same way people oppose "white pride" because they suspect it is cover for racism. The reason they suspect this, of course is that it often is
I think the best strategy would be to find some way somehow celebrate straight pride without mentioning the word "straight." Notice how people seem fine with "white pride" if you are more specific about what type of white you are proud of being, i.e., "Irish Pride" or "Polish Pride", because that isn't historically associated with racism.
Easiest way is probably to celebrate fertility itself, as he mentioned. Or celebrate children; this way even LGBT can celebrate too, if they've adopted children.
That’s the thing. If the pronatalists welcome LGBT couples into the fold, I am likely to support their pro-fertility policies
If sexual orientation is genetic, there's no particular reason to suspect that it's as simple as a single gene that produces homosexual orientation and therefore reduces reproduction. It could be (for example) a multi-gene phenomenon where all of the contributing genes, taken singly, contribute to survival/reproduction likelihood, but in particular combinations produce homosexual orientation. The individual genes do really well at reproducing, and occasionally show up in the requisite combination.
One idea I've seen is that heterosexuality is mildly maladaptive because some men and women have naturally androgynous features, but are fully capable of reproduction. Missing out on a mating opportunity because someone is repulsed by androgynous features would be selected against. Having a slightly more flexible sexuality would be more adaptive, even if it sometimes "backfires" by causing homosexual behavior.
I think it's plausible that social pressure turned some Gen Zs LGBT. But we've been told over and over that no amount of social pressure, cbt, or desire could possibly turn an LBTG kid into a straight kid. But that's obviously inconsistent. Either our sexual preferences are moldable or they aren't. What's your opinion?
There might be some people with more fixed orientations who will not change for any reason, and some people who have the potential to be either heterosexual or bisexual, depending on what kind of society they grow up in. That would explain the high prevalence of bisexuality in Ancient Greece and Medieval Japan.
This article is inspirational. 🥲