#regnerus study

SPLC Hatewatch:

On Jan. 28, the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Them Before Us led the announcement of the “Greater Than” campaign, an effort to repeal marriage equality. The campaign represents an alliance of at least a dozen anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups and other allied organizations to promote the debunked claim that “gay marriage resulted in child victimization.”1 In recent months, Katy Faust, president and founder of Them Before Us, has pushed a rhetorical strategy to reinvigorate discredited social scientists and anti-LGBTQ+ ideologues that were rejected by courts during the 2010s legal fights over marriage equality. The Greater Than campaign’s reliance on falsehoods derived from anti-LGBTQ+ pseudoscience and conspiracy theories undermines its claims to represent what’s best for children and families. “We need to change public opinion,” Faust said in a video posted to the campaign website. “No longer are people going to think about marriage just as a vehicle of adult fulfillment or a tool of adult validation. No, natural marriage is about child protection, and gay marriage resulted in child victimization. And we’re going to make sure that everybody understands that those two things go hand in hand.”2

[...]

A marketing strategy to reframe marriage equality

The Greater Than campaign implies that LGBTQ+ people have created a situation in which they are legally treated “greater than” children. On its campaign website, Them Before Us states: “If you are tired of seeing children ignored, victimized, and treated as ‘less than’, it is time to join us in taking a stand.”3 The campaign is a new way to inject the dangerous myth that LGBTQ+ people are harmful to children back into the public consciousness, after opponents of marriage equality lost the public policy fight in 2015 with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Obergefell v. Hodges decision. In a video posted to the Them Before Us Substack, Faust says, “Whatever you want to do in your private life — fine. Don’t touch the kids. But we will not be able to achieve that until we overturn Obergefell.”4 In a Feb. 10 interview with anti-LGBTQ+ speaker and activist Frank Turek, Faust suggested that the campaign was a marketing strategy to shift public opinion. “If we have learned anything from the demise of Roe, it is not enough to overturn bad Supreme Court decisions,” Faust said. “We have to change public opinion.”5

To that end, Faust indicated that she was using hard-right influencers to help shape the narrative. “I have these amazing conservative spokesmen, influencers who are on board with me,” she told Turek. “They’ve been in working group meetings, Steve Deace and Delano Squires and Jack Posobiec and Heidi St. John, among a variety of others. And what are we going to do? […] We are going to train America to help them understand the direct connection between gay marriage and child victimization, and natural marriage and child protection.”6 [...] The three reports were the discredited 2012 “New Family Structures Study” authored by University of Texas sociologist Mark Regnerus; a 2015 study authored by anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Ruth Institute researcher Paul Sullins; and a 2013 study by Canadian economist Douglas Allen, who testified in court in 2014 that “without repentance,” LGBTQ+ people would go to hell.14

Selective amplification of social science that fits the anti-LGBTQ+ ideology while discounting or denying contradictory evidence has been a common strategy of anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups for decades. The SPLC has previously reported how anti-LGBTQ+ hate groups use pseudoscience, including studies with faulty or questionable methodologies, to promote public policies and litigation that restrict LGBTQ+ people’s freedoms, access to healthcare and protections from discrimination. Faust wasn’t the first to attempt to revitalize these debunked claims about gay families. In 2024, the anti-LGBTQ+ hate group Focus on the Family claimed Regnerus provided “reliable data” that lesbian and gay families “are shown to markedly hinder” child development.15 Contrary to hate groups’ claims, a robust body of scientifically sound literature “consistently shows that LGBQ adults are just as capable and efficient at parenting children as their cisgender heterosexual counterparts” and that “children of sexual minority parents, though exposed to unique experiences, perform and develop at similar rates as children with heterosexual parents,” according to the American Psychological Association.16

The New Atlantis, a so-called Journal of Technology and Society, released the results of a new, anti-LGBT “study” today. The study, which is over 140 pages and analyzed data from over 200 peer-reviewed studies, is said to show that there is no evidence that people are born gay, or that transgender kids are more successful in life when treated with compassionate and inclusive care.

Among their "findings":

The understanding of sexual orientation as an innate, biologically fixed property of human beings — the idea that people are “born that way” — is not supported by scientific evidence.

Compared to heterosexuals, non-heterosexuals are about two to three times as likely to have experienced childhood sexual abuse.

The hypothesis that gender identity is an innate, fixed property of human beings that is independent of biological sex — that a person might be “a man trapped in a woman’s body” or “a woman trapped in a man’s body” — is not supported by scientific evidence.

Compared to the general population, adults who have undergone sex-reassignment surgery continue to have a higher risk of experiencing poor mental health outcomes. One study found that, compared to controls, sex-reassigned individuals were about 5 times more likely to attempt suicide and about 19 times more likely to die by suicide.

Children are a special case when addressing transgender issues. Only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.

To be fair, most modern scholars do agree that we don’t know nearly enough about sexual orientation or gender to determine what its root causes are. (And the "trapped in someone else's body" hasn't been a pro-trans argument for decades now.) However, the anti-LGBT right has turned this study into a battle cry for a renewed push against rights for transgender children, a return to fighting marriage equality, and – this seems to be one of their most important goals – a reason as to why they need not treat LGBT people with care and respect.

To fully understand where this study came from and what’s really going on, let’s take a look at its authors and who’s funding it.

The New Atlantis is published by the Center for the Study of Technology and Society in partnership with the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

The Ethics and Public Policy Center has been at the center of anti-LGBT activism for years. They’ve spoken out in favor of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), in favor of keeping Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, and in favor of using religion as a weapon to discriminate.

In their own words, the EPCC describes itself as an "institute dedicated to applying the Judeo-Christian moral tradition to critical issues of public policy. From the Cold War to the war on terrorism, from disputes over the role of religion in public life to battles over the nature of the family, EPPC and its scholars have consistently sought to defend and promote our nation’s founding principles—respect for the inherent dignity of the human person, individual freedom and responsibility, justice, the rule of law, and limited government."

On their “About” page, The New Atlantis says,

We also seek to stir things up — to challenge the general public and policymakers who know too little about science, and to push scientists who often fail to think seriously or deeply about the ethical and social implications of their work.

Paul McHugh (photo), one of the authors of the study, has dedicated his life to anti-LGBT scholarship. His work has been debunked time and time again. McHugh has a distinguished track record of anti-LGBT bigotry and harm. He fully believes homosexuality is a choice and has compared hormone therapy for transgender children to "liposuction on an anorexic child." Simply, there is no possible way anyone can argue that his "scholarship" is unbiased and objective.

Lawrence Mayer focuses on interpretation of experimental and observational data and is the primary author of the study, which analyzed existing research - and reinterpreted it to fit the outcomes they desired. By incorporating many different studies, they had the freedom to pick and choose which pieces of data to use and how to spin them. Mayer also believes that McHugh is "one of the leading psychiatrists in the world."

In the preface to the study, Mayer writes, without any irony:

As citizens, scholars, and clinicians concerned with the problems facing LGBT people, we should not be dogmatically committed to any particular views about the nature of sexuality or gender identity; rather, we should be guided first and foremost by the needs of struggling patients, and we should seek with open minds for ways to help them lead meaningful, dignified lives.

Perhaps he should listen to actual LGBT people, get to know us, learn from us, and realize just how harmful his own “science” can be.

Unlike almost any other nonpartisan real scientific study, this new "study" comes complete with a slick, well-produced video from The New Atlantis, further suggesting far right wing monied interests are behind it:

Conservatives have long squawked that the studies showing positive outcomes for the children of same-sex couples are lacking methodologically, instead offering their own flawed studies to claim negative consequences. A new study, however, uses their preferred methods — minus the flaws — and proves what the medical community has already long known: same-sex couples make great parents.

The primary accusation against the plentiful research supporting same-sex parenting is that the samples are skewed. Because researchers have to advertise and search for same-sex couples willing to participate, the families self-select to join the studies, and thus may be not be representative of all same-sex families. Conservatives like Mark Regnerus have insisted that their studies, which are skeptical of same-sex parenting, are more valid because they use data from broad population-based surveys, which are more representative and generalizable.

So the Williams Institute, an LGBT think tank at the UCLA School of Law, decided to call Regnerus’ bluff. Using data from the National Survey of Children’s Health, researchers were able to identify same-sex couples who were raising children and compare them to demographically similar different-sex parents. Because few male same-sex parent households were included in the study, they focused on female couples, identifying 95 that they then matched against similar different-sex households.

The study found only one difference between the families: same-sex couples had more stress than their different-sex peers. But even with that distinction, there was no difference in the outcomes for their children, including their general health, emotional difficulties, coping behavior, or learning behavior.

This juxtaposition actually lends more credence to same-sex parenting. The higher stress rate should have correlated with less favorable outcomes for the children, but it didn’t. This suggests, the researchers reason, that the lesbian mothers might be using additional support systems like parenting groups or counseling services, and likewise, their kids may also develop greater resilience skills having to defend against the stigma of having same-sex parents.

There is an obvious explanation as to why the new study found affirming results while conservatives found negative outcomes in their population-based studies. The new study controls for committed couples; it compares same-sex families who have raised their children from birth with different-sex families who had done the same. None of the same-sex parents who had broken up or divorced were analyzed in the study.

Regnerus — seemingly intentionally — didn’t account for family structure. In his study, he counted any child whose parent had had any kind of same-sex relationship at any point. As a result, most of the children he counted had experienced a parent’s separation or divorce, but they were still compared against children from stable different-sex families. The resulting negative outcomes for those children, he concluded, proved that same-sex couples make inferior parents. Regnerus’ data only included two children who had been raised from birth by committed same-sex couples, and their outcomes were just fine.

Similar population-based surveys from Donald Paul Sullins and Douglas Allen used the same trick of comparing unstable same-sex families to stable different-sex families. Sullins, for example, used data from the National Health Interview Survey, and admitted, “Almost all opposite-sex parents who are raising joint biological offspring are in intact marriages, but very few, if any, same-sex parents were married during the period under observation.” Sullins, like Regnerus and Allen, was comparing apples to oranges.

In some ways, the new study isn’t groundbreaking. There has already been scientific consensus in support of same-sex families for decades. With the Supreme Court’s marriage equality decision last year and the recent conclusion of the challenge to Mississippi adoption ban, same-sex adoption is now legal in all 50 states.

Nevertheless, some states are still figuring out some legal questions about same-sex parenting. Several lesbian couples in Indiana, for example, are fighting to make sure that both moms can have their names on their children’s birth certificates, a fight that has played out in other states as well. With courts continuing to weigh these important protections for same-sex families, it certainly doesn’t hurt to have another study showing that their children turn out just as great as in other families.

(HT: Mombian.)