Welcome to the least fun game in the world: the genetic blame game. It has become fashionable to blame our genetic makeup for everything, from laziness and obesity to poor decision making,

Biological determinism, also known as genetic determinism, is the belief that human behavior is directly controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiological makeup. This belief fosters a sort of learned helplessness, a refusal to believe that an individual can affect the environment he or she finds themselves in. Just like we have the power to affect our immediate environment, our immediate environment has the power to affect us--often in the most profound of ways.

This brings us back to homosexuality. In 2019, scientists from MIT and Harvard explored whether or not a genetic basis for sexual orientation actually existed. The study, extensive in nature, saw the scientists perform a genome-wide association study on close to 500,000 participants from the U.S., the UK, and Sweden. In short, the 'gay gene' hypothesis was disproved. As the researcher Paul Sullins noted at the time, the study "definitively refutes the idea that being gay is an innate condition that is controlled or largely compelled by one's genetic makeup." The dominant cultural narrative regarding sexual orientation (the "genes made me do it"), insisted Sullins, "simply cannot be true." One of the authors of the study, Andrea Ganna, echoed his remarks, telling the New York Times that it was "basically impossible to predict one's sexual activity or orientation just from genetics."