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This has the same "Republicans pounce!" energy as those people arguing "the only reason people are aware of trans is because of anti-trans people talking about it!"
I read an article recently arguing that this claim is essentially a myth invented by LGBT activists, must see if I can dig it out.
This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the argument from cultural evolution. Joseph Henrich et al. argue that cultures which survive will be those that develop memes optimised for survival. The cultures may have explanatory hypotheses for why these memes are effective, those hypotheses may be dead wrong, and yet the memes themselves still work. Cultures organically converged on the idea that gay sex is dangerous centuries prior to the discovery of germ theory or the invention of reliable latex condoms. Their explanations for why gay sex is a bad idea may have been in error, but "gay sex is bad because Allah does not will it" and "gay sex is bad because you will catch a disease which will kill you in a matter of years" both suggest the same course of action: don't have gay sex.
Gay men in the 1970s might well have asked "well, why shouldn't I have unprotected sex with dozens of men who are all doing the same thing?" Most likely their family and friends wouldn't have been able to articulate a specific casual mechanism by which this was a bad idea. That doesn't mean their family and friends were wrong about it being a bad idea.
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