The things you don't think about and then are surprised when you do.

I just came across a fact which has surprised me in two ways.

I have a friend from another country whom I first met fifty-two years ago.  He was one of four siblings.  I recently came across his father's obituary and in reading that discovered that one of the daughters is in a lesbian marriage and one of the sons in a gay marriage.  The marriages are not a particular surprise.  

The daughter is not a particular surprise.  She was sporty and not susceptible to feminine stereotypes.  The son sort of does surprise me but after the last few decades a clear lesson is that you never know.

I am surprised because I did not know these outcomes.  I have been in reasonably consistent, though very intermittent, contact with the family over the years.  Somehow I had just never picked up on these two relationships.

But mostly the surprise is in the numbers.  3.4% of the adult US population are lesbian or gay.  The chance of two children in a four child family being lesbian/gay is, if I am doing the math correctly, 0.034 X 0.034 = 0.00116 or 0.12%.  Though now that I think of it, I think that is the calculation for the first two children being LG.  For four children it would be 0.034(4) which would be 0.000013% which seems so improbably rare that I might be calculating wrong.  

But whether 0.12% or 0.000013%, that it is exceptionally rare feels right.  I cannot think of another family I know, no matter how large, where there is more than one LG child.  I do know of a small handful of instances where there are more than one in an extended family (aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces/nephews) but no other instances I know of among siblings.

And I don't think I had ever even thought about it.  

It is not not a big deal, just a statistical and social oddity owing to its seeming rarity.