Gregory Cochran is an American anthropologist and anti-transgender activist. Cochran was a member of the Human Biodiversity Institute, an anti-trans eugenics group founded by white nationalist Steve Sailer.
Cochran proposes a “gay germ” hypothesis for the development of sexual orientation, claiming that bacteria or other pathogens are responsible for sexual orientation.
Background
Gregory Mark “Greg” Cochran was born in June 1953. Cochran attended University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1975 and a doctorate in 1981.
Cochran has been a consultant since 1994 and owns New Mexico-based business Reconstruction Concepts, founded in 1995. From 2004 to 2015, Cochran was an adjunct professor of anthropology at University of Utah, collaborating with eugenicist Henry Harpending on evolutionary hypotheses.
Cochran founded the nonprofit West Hunter Incorporated in 2014.
Anti-trans posts
In 2013 Cochran wrote: “Transsexuals, people that believe their psychological gender conflicts with their physical gender, are not a particular evolutionary paradox, because they’re far rarer than homosexual men. One in tens of thousands of men seek sex reassignment surgery – that is, pay good money to have someone slice off their willy. At that kind of prevalence, the syndrome could be explained by mutational pressure or some rare environmental insult. Maybe they’re from Transylvania. The question is why anyone – let alone society as a whole – takes the whole idea seriously – acts as if they are in some sense really women. Deirdre McCloskey isn’t a woman: wishing can’t make it so, not even wishing and flashing scalpels. Neither is Joan Roughgarden. What they are is crazy.”
In 2016 Cochran wrote: “’transgender’ people aren’t: they’re just crazy. Whittling doesn’t change the wiring of the brain, or the chromosomes. But in principle, such a transformation is possible. It would be an example of real, deep biological change – not the the tinkering at the margins we’re actually on the verge of.”
American Eugenics (2003)
Nancy Ordover mentioned Cochran’s work in the 2003 book American Eugenics:
In February 1999, the Atlantic Monthly ran an article on the work of Paul Ewald and Gregory Cochran, a biologist-physicist team who have theorized that homosexuality, along with heart disease, cervical cancer, and mental illness, may be caused by a germ rather than a gene. This assertion is in direct opposition to a host of recent claims on the cause of homosexuality and gender “deviance”: Simon LeVay’s 1991 announcement that a cell group in one portion of the brain’s hypothalamus is twice as large in straight men than in gay men; J. Michael Bailey and Richard Pillard’s 1992 contention that lesbianism or bisexuality in the identical twins they examined points to genetic determinants in the brain in utero; Dean Hamer’s 1993 declaration that a not yet isolated gene on the X chromosome influences male sexual orientation; and Dick Swaab’s 1995 report that a region in the hypothalamus is 60 percent larger in men than in male-to-female transsexuals.
There’s nothing new about all this conjecture. Speculation on the causes and symptoms of homosexuality has been both a professional and a popular preoccupation for over one hundred years: prenatal stress results in gay offspring; lesbians don’t menstruate; lesbians have asymmetrical faces; gay men can’t whistle; lesbians are proficient whistlers; fluoride in the drinking water causes homosexuality; and, ripped from the headlines of the Oakland Tribune, “Crash Made Him Gay, Jury Made Him Rich.”
References
Staff report (June 4, 2018). In letter to Amazon, Alliance Defending Freedom cited white nationalist writer who once promoted “gay germ” theory. Southern Poverty Law Center https://www.splcenter.org/resources/hatewatch/letter-amazon-alliance-defending-freedom-cited-white-nationalist-writer-who-once-promoted/
Kaplan, Karen (April 18, 2009). Jewish legacy inscribed on genes? Los Angeles Times https://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-jewish-iq18-2009apr18-story.html
“Thrasymachus” (February 2005). Cause of Homosexuality: Gene or Virus? http://thrasymachus.typepad.com/thras/2005/02/cochran_intervi.html [archive]
Bower, Bruce (January 15, 2002). The gene that came to stay. ScienceNews https://www.sciencenews.org/article/gene-came-stay
Hopper, Judith (February 1999). A New Germ Theory (Part Two). The Atlantic. pp. 41–53. [archive] https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99feb/germ2.htm https://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/99feb/germs.htm
Crain, Caleb (1999). Did a germ make you gay? Out Magazine. pp. 46–49 https://books.google.com/books?id=imIEAAAAMBAJ&q=gay%20germ&pg=PA46
Selected writing by Cochran
Cochran, Gregory (April 21, 2016). Metamorphosis. West Hunter https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2016/04/21/metamorphosis/
Cochran, Gregory (May 8, 2013). Transsexuals. West Hunter https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2013/05/08/transsexuals/
Cochran, Gregory (~2007). An Evolutionary Look at Human Homosexuality. http://zero.poynt.zero.googlepages.com/home [archive]
Harpending, H., & Cochran, G. (2002). In our genes. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 99(1), 10–12. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.012612799
Cochran, G. M., Ewald, P. W., & Cochran, K. D. (2000). Infectious Causation of Disease: An Evolutionary Perspective. Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, 43(3), 406–448. https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.2000.0016
Resources
West Hunter Incorporated
- US nonprofit EIN: 46-3239218)
West Hunter (westhunt.wordpress.com)
Wikipedia (en.wikipedia.org)
Grokipedia (grokipedia.com)
X/Twitter (x.com)
LinkedIn (linkedin.com)