I did not know that we had fa'afine experts in the audience. The readers of this site surprise me every day.

I was thinking along those lines too, but not that they're really "transgender," "gay," or anything else. Maybe this is a place to recognize that those categories don't always translate neatly across cultural boundaries.

But I'm not too sure I agree with the premise here, that there has to be an evolutionarily advantageous reason to homosexuality existing. There are lots of features that exist that aren't advantageous. And some are advantageous in un-obvious ways. And some are advantageous for different reasons in different populations.

I mean, our society in 2008 in the US operates differently from traditional Somoan society, so maybe the answer isn't there.

Hmmm.. don't know about these conclusions.

The Fa'afines (also spelled Fafafini) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fafafini have been desccribed as a third sex in Samoa with the strict gender roles in the society playing a strong part in their social and cultural role. They dress as women and take many of the womens roles even to the point of being considered better at some of those tasks than many women.

Determining them only as a homosexual phenomenon ignores the clear gender aspects.

While they may indeed make a strong argument for kin selection in behavioural evolution or even in cultural evolution whether its selecting for homosexuality or for a specific form of transgenderism or both would be an interesting topic.

I'd be interested as to how/why the possibility of transgender catagorisation was excluded in favour of homosexuality in this.

Certainly leaving out the strong gender aspects of Fafafini seems dubious at best.

Is Vasey's article online anywhere?

Great post Zoe. Makes a lot of mine redundant lol.

"Traditionally, while fa'afahine have a female social role, they have not always worn female clothing. Nowadays, most do."

Thats interesting. I hadn't heard that. Was the previous gender-clothing flexible or did they wear male clothing in the past or was their clothing specific to them? Also around what time did this change?

Zoe,
I am so glad that we get information and a viewpoint from an intelligent trans activist from "Down Under." You are helping me expand my horizons and knowledge that gives me more "ammunition" in my fight for transgender veterans' issues.

If you think about it, I would like to E-mail some Australian transgender veterans and find out what they face in Australia and in your part of the world. Thanks for everything. TAVA's web site is www.tavausa.org

The readers suprise me too, Alex. Who knew?

It's an interesting theory that I think has some worth. Almost all of our peculiar quirks and oddities (and like it or not, as a minority group we are a "quirk" in the system), have some evolutionary reason.

I've often wondered if the whole "genetics" reasoning behind homosexuality wasn't slightly flawed in their reason for being. I think a lot of the background is probably more anthropological than genetics.

I'd like to see this explanation and example more fully fleshed out.

It's worth remembering that the more societies force LGBT people into the closet (as many but certainly not all "traditional" societies did), the more likely it is they'll have children. Similarly, even today, there's a number of LGBT people who don't come out until after they've become parents.

Consequently, at a minimum being LGBT may simply be a "random but natural variation" that poses no particular disadvantage when it came to passing along genes.

To make an analogy to a somewhat different example, scientists recently discovered that cats lack the gene to taste sweetness -- apparently the result of a random genetic mutation, but one that's not particularly important a cat's diet, so it didn't get bred out of the species.

It's important to note that kin selection does indeed exist and it does indeed lead to genes which can render some individuals incapable of reproducing yet able to further the success and spread of the genes in their siblings.

This is how ants and bees and termites and similar social insects work!

In ants for example the males exist to mate with queens then die. The queens are the only fertile female ants producing a small number of male and fertile queen ofspring and she produces a large number of offspring that are essentially nutered female ants who exist to improve the survival of the reproducing queens and males genes.

As we know it exists and can produce far more extreme variations the question is only does kin selection cause or contribute to homosexuality in humans.

I'm an anthropologist, but more of an ethnographer, so I'm hesitant to go dabbling in a culture I really don't know in any detail in the hope of finding an answer that looks universal enough to try applying to my home culture. (Complex sentence there, huh.)

That said, let me think about my own situation in the US:

I live about a 20 hour drive from where most of my relatives live. I am "uncle" to about a dozen children who are kids of my colleagues. I buy them books, read to them, babysit them, go to their bar and bat mitzvahs... I'm actively involved in their lives... but we share NO DNA... but they *are* kids of friends who have similar world views, aspirations, etc.

Why limit the concept of the "selfish gene" to genetics? Isn't what I'm doing another kind of social reproduction?

Um-- sorry for that 4-fold answer. The site was telling me there were errors and that the posts didn't go though.... but they *did*. Sorry.