DNA's Dirty Secrets

Technically, DNA kits were starting to be sold two years before I turned eighteen, two years before it was my legal right to inquire after my biological parentage, ask the state if they could pretty please give me some information (although the state was not obligated to provide me with much), and, in general, go about my life as an adult adoptee free to look into the story of myself. But I didn’t go down that path. What I did do was ask the state for my information every couple of years (usually around a mental break, whee!) and then at the first sign of hoops to be hopped through, take everything back and try to convince myself that it didn’t matter, that I had to be my own person. I came to DNA later, in desperation. With no other options. 

And you’d think that DNA kits would be pretty revolutionary to the adoption community, people whose families are defined by separation, secrets, and missing pieces. In a way, you’d be right, but there’s been some nasty side effects to DNA discoveries that we weren’t prepared for. 

Spit in the tube, they said. It'll be fun, they said. 

So, yes, DNA kits do help connect biologically related people to family members they’ve been separated from. Sometimes. Assuming that enough of the family members have participated and/or there’s enough extra information to triangulate who’s who. This gets complicated quick, though, because of secrets that, socially, we’ve been keeping without too much fear of consequences. Secret children, secret affairs, secret donor-conceived children born of a really gross doctor who’s now featured in the documentary Our Father. You get the picture. 

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. DNA kits are run by private corporations. Private corporations focused on profit. Handling our most sensitive data we will ever own, strands of our DNA supposedly decoded to link us to not only our biological relatives, but our ethnicities, the lands where our ancestors came from. I probably don’t need to tell you how problematic it is to have capitalism right smack in the middle of what, for many, is a tool they need to unravel the mysteries of their families which is, even in the “best” of families, something that can be fraught and complicated. 23&Me had a huge data breach with people’s personal information. I mean how much more personal can it get than your DNA? 

Well, besides your browser history, I guess

And worse, you may have noticed that racism is alive and well? DNA isn’t really helping on that front. In fact, in many ways, it inspires people to double down on their racist ideologies by giving them the information they “need” to make claims about their ethnic and cultural ancestral histories. This can obviously go very wrong very quickly. And as Jonathan Marks explains in an NPR piece from 2017, the calculations that these DNA companies are making from the strands of saliva sent in the mail are one part science, the other part complete corporate secret. You wouldn’t expect a corporation to give out their secret sauce, right? But so much of the ethnicities denoted in your results don’t account for the culture, migration, “history, language, politics, or religion.” We can’t trace things like that accurately. Not with strands of DNA. But nevertheless, people insist on trying to integrate their newfound information from their results into their identities. It’s hard not to, I get it. But 23&Me has a disclaimer that reads: 

These results are not intended to be used to seek, confirm, or deny Tribal membership or any other form of citizenship or belonging within Indigenous groups. 

That disclaimer is there because 1) indigeneity is more than blood quantum and 2) thanks to the Pocahontas Exception, we kinda knew that people would be lining up to claim indigenous heritage because that's a thing that people have been doing for a long time and a corporate lawyer was smart enough to cover the company’s ass. 

My advice? If you’re able, do research on your genealogy without DNA. No private corporation should have that kind of personal data in their hands, especially if there aren’t legal structures of accountability to rely on. And if, like me, there are no other options than to spit into that tube, take your results with a grain of salt and remember, we all share about 99% of our genetics. The diversity among us is less about our genes and more about our social structures. Those histories must be recorded and passed down in other ways.