McHugh is here referring to “sexual identity” as it would be sensibly understood pre -gay activism: Male and female, not homosexual and heterosexuality. It is ironic that in the worldview of the modern left, significant differences between homosexuals and heterosexuals (which science shows to be extraordinarily difficult to characterize and wholly unstable) are argued to be innate, while significant differences between men and women (which are enormous, self-evident and permanent) are argued to be at once trivial and socially constructed.

This statement does not contradict the presence of “indirect genetic factors” influencing homosexuality. Most people mistakenly presume that an indirect genetic influence refers to a mere technical distinction. In fact, the distinction is crucial. Basketball playing shows a very strong, argu ably stronger than homosexuality, indirect genetic influence, but there are no genes for basketball playing —it is a wholly “environmentally” influenced behavior subject to a high degree of choice —much higher than same-sex attraction. The crucial point is that genes that indirectly influence a trait have nothing at all to do with the trait itself and therefore can’t possibly “cause” it. The genes that influence the likelihood someone will become a basketball player are self -evident: Those that code for height, athleticism, muscle refresh rate. There are, at present, even strong racial genetic associations to basketball playing. These associations are almost entirely socially-determined while the genes themselves are biological (and evolved in an era before basketball playing even existed), and the associational degree (i.e., with race) fluctuates over time as basketball spreads across the globe.


This phenomenon was actually first recognized not by sociologists, epidemiologists, psychiatrists, psychiatrists or any other kind of “ist,” but by savvy Smith College students who first called themselves SLUGs: Smith Lesbians Until Graduation. Elsewhere, the eponym mutated into Selectively Lesbian Until Graduation.