smokingOhhhhhhh, so that’s what made us gay: our moms were all stressed-out chain-smoking meth addicts.

Okay, that’s an oversimplification. But Dick Swaab, a scientist at Amsterdam Biology, has just concluded a study that correlates stress with LGBT offspring.

That stress can take a variety of forms. It could be emotional stress, or it could be chemical. Smoking, drinking and drugs were all found to raise cortisol levels in pregnant women, as one might expect. And that, in turn, affected the fetus’ sex hormones. Then somehow — and this is the part that needs further study — that made the kids grow up to be gay.

In other words, it’s the mother’s heterosexual lifestyle that makes kids gay.

Of course nobody’s quite sure yet how this whole process works. And there’s no complete picture yet for how you get from elevated cortisol in a womb to a lifetime predilection for musical theater.

This study apparently isn’t going over too well with Ben Summerskill, head of the UK civil rights group Stonewall. “There does not seem to be a shred of evidence to support the idea that a mother’s lifestyle changes a child’s sexuality,” he said in response.

Well, there you have it. Scientist says one thing, civil rights guy says the opposite. Science!

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