a reply to:
sapien82
Interesting, but coming from a Queer studies perspective a lot of our common concepts about gender are far more complex than we often think.
We should be careful to think that one culture fits all, and the Western nuclear family also has a lot to do with keeping the patriarchal line pure
for the sake of inheritance and keeping property within the family.
Arguably it has curtailed, rather than extended procreation.
Will Roscoe's study
The Zuni Man Woman describes a Native American basket-weaver (to them gender was pretty much defined by talents, or
productive labor) whom some might call transgender nowadays.
www.goodreads.com...
While some men would sneak to her hogan at night, "she" also fathered several children.
However in the Native American communal "long-house" tradition all children were partly raised communally anyway, so this wasn't a problem.
Her gender identity as a "two-spirit" person was based more on her basket-weaving skills, rather than on her sexuality (she appears to have been
bisexual).
The Europeans saw her as female (she visited the White House), and it was quite a shock to them at the time that she was actually a biological
male!
With gay and lesbian partnerships and marriage many lgbt people are having kids.
And in Queer studies we realize that the heterosexual/lgbt divide is a constructed divide.
It is a strategic essentialism from both sides, or indeed, so many gay and trans (Caitlyn Jenner, for example) wouldn't have biological kids.
A for psychopaths, we tend to think of a few serial killers (and as "The Celluloid Closet" documentary shows, the serial killer was often conflated
with transvestites and the "gay peril" during cinematic history).
But more common are sociopaths (the "snakes in suits") who have a high sex-drive and don't care whom they seduce, rape, manipulate or impregnate. One
documentary I recall mentions the Inuit. The Inuit men would go on hunting trips and leave one man behind to protect the women. But sometimes the men
returned and their wives complained that this man had raped and impregnated them all in their absence. Needless to say they would make that sociopath
disappear.
War is another instance where sociopaths and psychopaths find a powerful niche.
And there is massive rape during war.
Despite the obvious presence of the resulting "war children" (often discriminated against after the war, sometimes forced into labor camps and even
killed when the armies came home), the UN only admitted in the 1980s that rape was a major war crime.
Some studies suggest that violent rape has a higher chance of conception than consenting sex - which would be a rather uncomfortable fact for those
who say procreation is the only point of sex.
www.politico.com...
Even their own UN "peace-keeping" troops are implicated.
And the rape of men and boys by war-lords and soldiers is only fractionally less than that of women.
Something the UN won't look at even today - because all the countries say, "Our armies don't do that".
But they do, since war is also about torture and power.
(A lot of documentary material up to now to sort through - it's no longer a secret).
But anyway, if it's all about procreation, it fails to explain why celibate nuns, priests and spinsters (or even infertile heterosexuals, at least in
the West) fail to attract the same judgements as gays, lesbians and trans people.
Of course I'm talking here about lgbt people whose reproductive organs are intact, or who transition later in life.
They may very well produce children sometime during a life-span.
Even in India, where a group of transgender "men" known as the hijras sometimes keep their tradition of castration, it has hardly impacted wider
population trends.
However, if we're going to start categorizing kids and giving them drugs to avoid puberty, and even transitioning them before their sexuality or
gender identity is actually set, that's a different story.
But that never happened in the past.
But I think some traditions are more prone to procreation due to to habits anathema to Western family concepts.
There may be polygamy, wife borrowing, very young marriage and an applauding of teen pregnancies (while we treat it as a social disease).
And of course radical feminism, which makes many younger Western men think they rather shouldn't touch a woman with a barge pole.
Stay home and drink and watch some porn, or stick to your mates until you're over thirty.
That's a powerful message Western men are given every day with trial by media and hearsay allegations (sometimes years after the "fact", and without
any formal trials, which did exist for decades in the West).
I don't blame young Western men (masses of young male migrants can seemingly do what they like, without ever being held to account by the mainstream
media) for wanting little to nothing more to do with women.
Be that as it may (from a masculinity perspective), just saying there are factors influencing pro-creation and birth-rates much more powerfully then
the lgbt minority.
edit on 17-2-2018 by halfoldman because: (no reason given)