Greg Egan, Cocoon, brought to light.

[elfs]

Warning: Spoilers for Greg Egan's short story, Cocoon, follow.

One of SF writer Greg Egan's better stories, at least when he's wearing his writer's hat and not his lecturer's, is Cocoon, which can be found in the short story collection Luminous as well as for sale at FictionWise. The story surrounds a terrorist attack on a biopharma company that has discovered a way to immunize the placenta, preventing the transfer of maternal exogenetic materials to a developing foetus and therefore prevent several known developmental problems. Unintentionally, in the course of their research the company discovers that one of the exogenetic influences they can "cure" is homosexuality.

Egan meant his story primarily as parable: a "what if" story about the curability of homosexuality. His short story has a much stronger impact than that of X-Men: The Last Stand, which attempts to analogize the "cure that isn't necessary" and shows how some people, by their isolation, might want it. Egan asks a much more important question: what if your parents made that decision for you? They make many other important decisions on your behalf: whether you'll get any number of horrible diseases, whether you'll have teeth by the time you're 20, whether you'll have the tools needed to survive or not, and so on.

solarbird found a lovely little Christian "pro-life" site which proposes research to create Egan's cocoon. This site tries to classify homosexuality as a disease and talks about the way exogenetic influence "damages the male sexual differentiation." It uses pejoratives like "abnormal," which leads me to wonder when they're going to agitate for a cure for left-handedness.

On the other hand, they're right about one thing: etiologies of homosexuality-- and fundamentalism-- are going to emerge in the next fifty years. Cells are not black boxes (no matter what Michael Behe might think), and nature has never bitten back when we've looked. (Humans, now that's another story.) There will, at any rate, be potential therapies for these conditions. What are we going to do with that knowledge?

Egan, in his book Distress, has a moment where one of the characters warns another, "Never let anyone else define for you what is 'healthy'. It gives them the authority to label you 'sick,' and the power to do something about your sickness." More and more, his stories are coming true. And that makes me very nervous.

Comments

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

This is exactly why I've never been comfortable with the, 'We're born that way, we can't help it, don't piss on us' line of argument for queer rights. Someday, we will be able to help it and quite possibly won't be born that way. What happens then?

Screw it. Being queer is just as damn good as being straight and I'll take my rights just as the Constitution says they are; inalienable and self-evident, thank you just the same.

[sherm.livejournal.com]

The Constitution does not say that :).

[elfs.livejournal.com]

In fact, no law of the land says that. :-)

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

Point. The Declaration of Independence works just as well rhetorically, so substitute that and grade me down in Civics.

Actually....

[nbarnes.livejournal.com]

That's a point I won't conceed. I wasn't making a legal point. I was making a philosophical and moral point, and the Dec of Indep is a totally valid source in that context.

Moreover, you're debatably not even technically correct on the merits. Under fundamental assumptions of unenumerated rights as well as the plain language of the Ninth Amendment, I certainly do have legal, technical right to 'be' queer, and more practically I have the technical right to all the queer sex I care to have (with other consenting adults). Contrary legal opinions, frankly, are uniformly so poorly reasoned that I tend to regard the entire opposing camp as thoroughly intellectually bankrupt.

Social disease

[(Anonymous)]

Niven & Pournelle also brought up the problem with authorities labeling undesirables as "sick" in their 1991 book _Fallen Angels_. The targets there were science-fiction fans. :-)

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[pteryxx.livejournal.com]

While they're at it, let's hope they also find the biochemical basis for human tendencies to religiosity, bigotry, and bias, so we can go about 'curing' those too. They're a lot more dangerous than mere homosexuality.

On a calmer note, it's worth looking at the efforts of two groups to maintain their identities in the face of medicine: dwarfs or little people, and the congenitally deaf. Both see the advent of new prenatal tests, and sometimes treatments, as threatening the future of their communities.


http://www.pbs.org/pov/pov2005/bigenough/special_normal.html

http://www.deaftoday.com/news/archives/005454.html