visualizing whorled gays

As if we needed any further proof that left-wing gay activists hate gay privacy, a friend just sent me a link to a story about the gay whorled, and the gay indexed. Activists are desperate to discover some sort of identifying feature which they can use to confirm their rather ridiculous notion that all gays are born gay, and that therefore sexual preference is akin to race and not a matter of personal freedom. Accordingly, they assert that there are certain gay physical characteristics, and provide the following list (presumably for use as a home “gay test”kit):

1. Gay men are more likely than straight men to have a counterclockwise hair whorl on the back of their heads.
2. Gay men and straight women have an increased density of fingerprint ridges on the thumb and pinkie of the left hand.
3. The index fingers of most straight men are shorter than their ring fingers, and for most women they are the same length or longer. Gay men and lesbians tend to have reversed ratios.
4. Gay men and lesbians have a 50 percent greater chance of being left-handed or ambidextrous than their straight counterparts.

“Honey, I tested the kids, and they’re all gay!”
(Larry Craig, I guess, should consider himself lucky he’s bald.)
I’m not sure whether to dignify this with serious comment, or leave it as a joke for peope to play with, but when I read the underlying “scientific data” in New York Magazine, I saw much speculation, and not a lot of proof:

Richard Lippa, a psychologist from California State University at Fullerton, is one of the leading cataloguers of the many ways in which gay people are different. I caught up with him a few weeks ago at a booth at the Long Beach Pride Festival in Southern California, where he was researching another hypothesis–that the hair-whorl patterns on gay heads are more likely to go counterclockwise. If true, it will be one more clue to our biological uniqueness.
[…]
By the end of the two-day festival, Lippa had gathered survey data from more than 50 short-haired men and photographed their pates (women were excluded because their hairstyles, even at the pride festival, were too long for simple determination; crewcuts are the ideal Rorschach, he explains). About 23 percent had counterclockwise hair whorls. In the general population, that figure is 8 percent.

Hair whorling to the left (counterclockwise) is generally associated with left-handedness, which is also associated with homosexuality. The problem is that the vast majority of gays are right-handed, and right whorled — and the heterosexual left-whorled men outnumber the homosexual left-whorled men by a huge ratio. (Meaning that looking at someone’s whorl will reveal nearly nothing.) Even assuming that some unbiased group of scientists somewhere used the proper methodology, there is nothing about a higher percentage of left whorls which suggests gays are all born that way. The problem with most of the studies and most of the arguments I’ve seen is that they’re assuming that “born that way” or “not born that way” is an argument which applies to an entire population. I think it’s quite likely that some gays are born gay, but the shrill insistence that all are on one side versus none are on the other is just silly, as well as completely unscientific. This remark by another psychologist is typical:

“We’re reaching a consensus on a broad question,” says J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University. Is sexual orientation “something we’re born with or something we largely acquire through social experience? The answer is clear. It’s something we’re born with.”

It’s obvious that to Bailey “we” means not some, but all. Maybe he thinks that “consensus” can be achieved by whoever screams the loudest that theories to the contrary are “homophobic.”
Regarding the fingers, the evidence is inconclusive. A study cited by CNN found that while there appeared to be a correlation with lesbian fingers, “the pattern for men was more complicated. There did not appear to be a direct relationship between finger length and sexual orientation.” A UC Davis pscyhologist calls even the lesbian finger ratios an oversimplifcation:

….University of California Davis psychologist Gregory Herick says using finger ratios as a biological explanation for lesbianism is an over simplification.
“We’re going to find there are many different ways people become heterosexual, homosexual or bisexual as an adult,” Herick said. “I think one of the problems with interpreting findings of this sort, people have a tendency to say, ‘Here’s the answer. Now we know.’ And they’re eventually proven wrong.”

That’s what I keep saying. They may find what appears to be correlation here and there, with this detail or that detail, but isn’t it entirely possible that any such findings might only apply to the “born that way” group?
I have never doubted for a moment that there is a “born that way” group. But if we assume that there is, does that invest them with any particular moral authority over the rest of the so-called “gay community”? I put it in quotes because isn’t a community at all, but a diverse collection of people with nothing in common except a sexual interest in members of the same sex. For that crime, they were once persecuted and had their privacy invaded; now they’re having their privacy invaded for the crassest political reasons by people who are contaminating science with identity politics.
DISCLOSURE: In the interest of science, I guess I should point out that my whorl runs to the right, and my ring finger is longer than my index finger.
This puts me in with the straight majority, the gay majority, and probably the bi majority — although psychologist Michael Bailey says there is no such thing as male bisexuality. (It would not surprise me if he thinks bisexuals are gays who live “in the closet.” Most of them are, because they can’t “come out.” At least, not as bisexuals, for if they did that, they’d still be “in the closet” according to him, wouldn’t they? Anything that negates his theories indicates the presence of a “closet” — which is an emergent form of immorality. Who knows? Maybe there’s a “closet gene” which hides itself from researchers.)