Sam Friese (she/her/hers or they/them/theirs) is currently a graduate student pursuing a Ph.D. in Behavioral, Psychiatric, and Statistical Genetics in the Psychology department. I research the genetic and environmental underpinnings of executive functions and externalizing behavior. Additionally, I'm interested in scientific outreach on communicating behavioral genetic research with the general public.
Transcript
Arpi: Hi I’m Arpi.
Sam: Hi I’m Sam Friese. I use she and they pronouns and I’m a PhD student at the Institute for Behavioral Genetics at CU Boulder.
Arpi: So I talked to Sam about her research interests and the issues around properly representing LGBTQ people in social science genomic studies. So first tell us a little bit about your research interests.
Sam: So I’m predominantly interested in the genetic and environmental underpinnings of several behaviors throughout the lifespan particularly cognitive abilities and cognitive development but also externalizing behaviors, so things like substance use, rule-breaking, aggression. But I do also have some experience researching sexual behavior, not particularly sexuality, but just kind of the genetic and environmental influences on a range of sexual behaviors.
Arpi: And so there’s a lot of interesting intersections between LGBTQ identity and biology in general, especially behavioral sciences like social sciences, genetics. But there’s a lot of issues too with incorporating people who are LGBTQ identifying into these studies. Can you talk a little bit more about some of the problems that show up in these studies?
Sam: Absolutely. So for years and years the field of behavioral genetics or what’s now kind of going by social science genomics has been interested in a host of human behaviors including sexual behaviors like number of children someone has over the course of their lifespan, risky sexual behaviors like condom use. You know all sorts of things. So along with that there’s been an interest in what has been termed “same-sex sexual behavior” and I’m doing air quotes on that term because I don’t really love that term. But last year a genomic paper came out in science which is a big journal that looked at close to 500,000 people and they did what’s called a genome wide association study (GWAS) of one outcome that was a very binary outcome of whether or not a person in their sample had had sex with a partner of the same sex. So very binary. But basically they found some genetic variants that seemed to be associated with this “same-sex sexual behavior” but there were a lot of critiques of this paper because GWAS have some limitations that are especially relevant to LGBTQ people. So for example, GWAS are typically done is homogenous racial populations so it was done in all European ancestry people which is obviously problematic. Another issues is like I said it was very binary so these studies unfortunately just now need to be as big as possible and so they have to lose a lot of the nuance that comes with differentiating someone’s behavior versus their identity. So this paper that people were throwing around in the New York Times as the study of the gay gene you know was actually just not looking at identity at all but just looking at one behavior. Another issue with this paper and with studies like this is they tend to throw out people whose self-identified gender does not match their birth sex. So sometimes it’s because of genotyping error but a lot of the times that means that trans people in the study get tossed out of the sample. And then the last issue with this particular paper was it was in an older sample so they just had low endorsement rates which is pretty obviously an artifact of the fact that it was you know there were just less people who were able to be out who were born in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, versus people who were younger. So they were probably missing out on a huge chunk of people who maybe do identify as queer or maybe did engage in that behavior because they had an older sample. And so those are some of the challenges that researchers who are interested in researching sexuality or sexual behavior face if they want to incorporate genomic data in their research.
Arpi: Cool. So you’ve spoken a little bit about what’s it like being a queer identified person in the field of genomics. Can you talk a little bit more about your experiences there?
Sam: Yeah. So at CU Boulder in the IBG, the Institute for Behavioral Genetics, I’ve had an overwhelmingly positive experience. I have a very supportive mentor. We actually had an entire journal club dedicated to this paper where people were able to express their frustrations with this paper, what they thought they did right, what they thought they did wrong. And you know it was an overwhelmingly positive experience. But there are still definitely people who are a little bit kind of old school I guess you could say who maybe aren’t as sensitive or don’t know the right language to use. And I’ve also had some issues in terms of people just not being empathetic to concerns that are relevant to LGBTQ people like for example when you are picking a graduate school or are picking a college there are things about the location of those schools that might be really relevant to you if you are an LGBTQ person. Like you might feel much safer in a place like Colorado than you do in a place like Texas for example. So sometimes advisors or colleagues or whoever might not have the best advice for you when you’re pursuing a degree or looking for a school if that’s something you’re concerned about.
Arpi: Great. And what other advice do you have for LGBTQ students in high school who want to pursue STEM careers?
Sam: Well on my last kind of note, I would say first and foremost, if you are an LGBTQ+ person and you express “Hey I want to go to grad school but I don’t want to apply anywhere in a rural area because I’m worried about my safety,” and someone tells you that that is a superficial issue. They are wrong. That is not a superficial issue. It is totally valid to pick a graduate program you know partially based on just if you’re going to be comfortable in that place. You’re going to be at your undergrad school or graduate school for a pretty long time so it’s important to consider your identity when you’re picking a location and if anyone tells you that that’s superficial that is not true. The other thing I would say is that even if you haven’t found them yet there are so many LGBTQ+ and queer folks in STEM and you absolutely can find a mentor or colleague who is going to have similar experience to you who will be empathetic and will want to help you or support you in any way. So my overall advice would be to stay true to yourself and stick with it and don’t let anybody tell you that you can’t do something or that you’re being overly sensitive for example.
Arpi: All right well, thanks for speaking with us.
Sam: Yeah of course. Thank you.
Transcribed by Sophia Ulmer