The Children Are Fine

Since the first of January 2024, two men or two women can marry in Estonia. We were the first country that used to be part of the Soviet Union to do it,¹ and among the people I grew up around, the ones who speak Russian at home, the news landed hard. Less every year, but hard.²

What surprised me was that the loudest objection I heard wasn't really about two adults and a registry office. It was about children. And underneath the children, when you sat with it long enough, was one very specific fear, usually voiced by someone older, someone with grandchildren. It's on television now, in the schools, on the street, the children see it everywhere. And then the real sentence, the one all the rest was standing in front of: what if my grandson grows up and turns out that way too.

I want to take that fear seriously, because the people who hold it are not monsters. They are usually people who love a particular child very much and are frightened for him. So let me answer the thing they are actually afraid of first, and answer it as squarely as I can.

Will he catch it

He won't, because it doesn't work like that, and we've known so for a long time.

Start with the simplest fact, the one you can check against your own life. Almost every gay person you have ever heard of was raised by straight parents.³ They grew up in a world full of straight couples, straight films, straight weddings and straight expectations, with no one teaching them to be anything else, and they turned out gay anyway. If a child's surroundings decided this, that could not happen. It runs the other way just as cleanly: the large majority of children raised by two mothers or two fathers grow up straight. The thing simply does not pass from the people around a child into the child.

The research says the same in a colder voice. When scientists compared identical and non-identical twins across an entire national population, the share of orientation you could put down to the shared home, the same parents, the same upbringing, the same values at the same table, came out at essentially zero for men.⁴ Whatever is going on, it is not the home. The major medical and psychological bodies have spent a century looking for a cause in parenting and found none. The Royal College of Psychiatrists put it flatly: there is no evidence that the way a person is parented, or their early childhood, plays any part in whether they end up straight or gay.⁵

I don't want to sell you a slogan in the other direction, though. "Born this way" is tidier than the truth. What the evidence actually supports is narrower, and I think more convincing for being narrower: orientation is not a choice, it is not caused by how you were raised or what you were shown, it has some genetic component, and the full list of causes isn't settled. The largest genetic study ever run, nearly half a million people, found no "gay gene." It found many genes each nudging a little, together explaining only a minority of the difference between people.⁶ Nobody can yet tell you exactly why a person is gay. Everybody who has looked can tell you it isn't because they saw it on television.

There's one more piece, and it comes from the opposite side. For decades people tried very hard to turn adults from gay to straight, with therapy, with prayer, with pressure most of us would call cruel. It didn't work, and it hurt people, which is why every serious medical body now opposes it.⁷ Hold that next to the fear. If the most determined effort to push orientation in a chosen direction fails on a willing adult, the idea that a cartoon or a couple holding hands on the street will quietly install it in a child has very little left to stand on.

One clarification, because the fears often arrive bundled together. There's a separate argument you may have heard, that being transgender spreads among teenagers like a fashion. That's a different subject from the one I'm on. It's about gender identity, not about being gay or lesbian, and even there the science is thin and disputed.⁸ I'm answering the specific worry about orientation, and on that one the answer is clear.

But is it bad for them anyway

Suppose you grant all that. The child won't be turned gay. A second worry sits behind the first: even so, isn't a child worse off growing up around this, or being raised by a couple like that?

Here the evidence isn't thin at all. Children raised by same-sex parents have been studied for more than thirty years, and the finding is boring in the best way. They do about as well as anyone else on the things you'd actually worry about, mental health, school, friendships, behaviour.⁹ A review of seventy-nine studies found that conclusion in seventy-five of them. The four that reported harm had all made the same mistake: they measured children from families that fell apart, then blamed the outcome on a parent's orientation instead of on the breakup.¹⁰ The one contrarian study people still pass around did exactly that, comparing broken homes to intact ones and calling the difference sexual orientation. The field took it apart for it.¹¹

What actually decides how a child turns out, over and over, is the same set of unglamorous things it always was: whether he's loved, whether the adults are steady, whether there's enough money and enough attention. Not the shape of the couple at the top of the household.

There's a real distinction hiding inside "showing it to children," and it deserves two different answers. Telling a child that some families have two mothers, that some people are gay, that his classmate has two dads, is not sexual content. It's a fact about the world, the same kind of fact as telling him some families are divorced or some children live with their grandmother. Explicit material is a separate matter, and here almost everyone agrees, including me: it isn't for children. But that's true of explicit material of every kind, gay or straight.¹² The objection quietly swaps one for the other. It takes a boy learning that gay people exist and wraps it in the alarm that belongs to something nobody is actually proposing.

There is a genuine argument left in here, and I won't wave it away: what exactly a school should teach, at what age, and how much of that is the parents' call rather than the state's. That's a fair fight, and reasonable people land in different places on it. But it's an argument about curriculum and about who decides, not about whether a seven-year-old is harmed by knowing his friend has two mums. He isn't.

What's really underneath

So the checkable claim comes apart. The child won't catch it, and he isn't harmed by knowing it exists. If the objection were really about the children, that would more or less be the end of it.

It usually isn't the end of it, and I'd rather say that plainly than pretend the argument stops where the evidence does. When the worry about children is answered, two other things tend to be standing behind it. Neither is a fact you can check. Both deserve to be met on their own terms instead of smuggled in wearing the children's clothes.

It isn't natural

The first is that it's unnatural.

The crude version is simply false, and it's worth saying so before the interesting part. Same-sex behaviour is not an invention of modern cities. Biologists have recorded it in more than fifteen hundred species, from penguins to sheep to our nearest primate cousins.¹³ Whatever it is, "something that never happens in nature" is not it.

But I don't think that settles anything, and here I part company with people on my own side who wave the penguins around like a trump card. Nature is full of things we'd never accept as a guide to how people should live. That an animal does it tells you it's possible, not that it's good. The step from "this happens in nature" to "therefore it's fine," and the critic's step from "this is unnatural" to "therefore it's wrong," are the same step, and it fails in both directions.¹⁴ What's natural and what's good are two different questions, and the second one has to be argued on its own.

So argue it. The serious form of the "unnatural" claim isn't about penguins at all. It's the idea that sex has a purpose written into it, that the male and female body are made to fit toward children, and that a union built any other way is missing something essential.¹⁵ That's a real position, held by thoughtful people, and it isn't the same thing as disgust. I want to give it its due.

I just don't think it survives the test we'd apply to anything else. If what makes a union legitimate is that it's the kind of thing that produces children, we have a great many marriages to annul. The couple who marry at seventy. The woman who knows she can't conceive. The two people who simply never want children and say so at the altar. We marry all of them without blinking, and we'd be offended by anyone who called their marriages lesser for it. The criterion that's supposed to rule out same-sex couples turns out to be one almost nobody applies to anyone else. That doesn't make the underlying intuition contemptible. There's something in it, a sense that man and woman fit in a way that means something, and I don't think everyone who feels it is a bigot. But an intuition isn't an argument, and this one leans on a rule we don't apply to anyone but the people it's aimed at.

Religion forbids it

The second thing standing behind the children is faith, and this one I treat differently, because it's upfront about what it is.

If your objection is that your religion teaches this is wrong, then we've left the ground of evidence, and I'm not going to pretend a study can answer you. But I'd ask you to be accurate about one thing: "religion" doesn't speak with one voice here, and hasn't for a while. Whole Christian churches now marry same-sex couples and ordain gay clergy: the United Church of Christ, the Episcopalians, the ELCA Lutherans, the Church of Sweden. In 2024 the United Methodists, one of the largest Protestant bodies in the world, dropped fifty years of bans.¹⁶ The Church of England will bless a same-sex couple, though not yet marry one. In Judaism the Reform and Conservative movements ordain openly gay rabbis; Orthodoxy doesn't. There's a real argument among believers, and among scholars, over what the old texts actually say and how much rests on translation and context. I won't settle it here, and it isn't mine to settle.

I won't pretend about home, either, or I'd lose you. Here in Estonia the churches mostly lined up against the marriage law, and the Lutheran church, once it passed, stopped taking on new state marriages rather than be part of it.¹⁷ So I'm not telling you faith is on my side. I'm telling you that faith is not one thing, that sincere believers land on both sides of this, and that "God forbids it" is a statement about your convictions, not about your grandson's development. Those are different claims, and only one of them was ever going to be answered by looking at children.

Where I come down

Put it together and the picture is simple, even if living inside it isn't.

There's a factual question and a values question, and the argument mostly goes wrong by dressing the second as the first. On the facts, the fear for the children loses. Exposure doesn't set orientation. Children raised by same-sex couples do fine. Knowing that gay people exist harms no one. Those aren't my opinions, they're the findings, and they don't change for being unwelcome.

The values question is a different thing, and I won't insult you by pretending it has a scientific answer. Whether you can square any of this with your faith, whether it sits right with you, whether you'd have voted for the law, those are yours. You're allowed to be uneasy. You're allowed to believe, in your own life and your own church, that marriage is one man and one woman. What you're not entitled to do is take that private conviction and hand it to a child as a fact about his safety, because on that one point, the point about the children, there's an answer, and it isn't the frightening one.

And if you're that grandmother, worried about the boy: he is going to be who he was always going to be. You can't give him an orientation and you can't take one away, any more than your own parents could have with you. The only thing actually in your hands is whether, whoever he turns out to be, he'll still want to sit at your table and tell you about it. That part, unlike the rest, is up to you.