It’s that applying broadly drawn conclusions to specific children doesn’t work and can be harmful.Įssentially, the attempt to figure out if young kids are gay is a stereotype-fueled fool’s errand at best and a stigmatizing act of insecurity at worst. The problem with the premise of “ prehomosexuality,” an outdated field of inquiry popular in the 1980s and 1990s, isn’t that correlations are impossible to understand.

While some research has found that gender-nonconforming behavior in kids may mean they’re more likely to grow up gay or trans, it’s not quite that simple.Īny findings on the subject invariably come with the caveat that this data represents averages and isn’t ultimately applicable on the individual level. And questions about the sexuality of sons were far more common than more generic searches about having a gay child or queries about having a gay daughter.īridges, who studies gender identity and coauthored the book Exploring Masculinities: Identity, Inequality, Continuity and Change, was surprised by his findings. Bridges discovered that parents were Googling “Is my son gay?” 28 times more often than “Is my son a genius?” - accounting for thousands of searches a month (including variants). When sociologist Tristan Bridges read a New York Times story about how often parents ask Google if their kids are geniuses - 2.5 times more often if their kids are male - he had another question: How often do parents ask Google if their kids are gay? A lot, as it turns out.