NHH02: Born That Way

In this session:
Research into homosexuality has generally been divided among the Nature vs Nurture
schools of thought. Most looked for differences between groups of men labelled
homosexual and heterosexual. Until now, none of this research has come up with a
definitive answer, including several studies of identical twins which one researcher
described as more trouble than they are worth. More conclusive have been studies of
androgenising hormes and their effect upon brain development. These, however, appear
to have more to do with gender than with sexual orientation. Other studies, including those
of brain anatomy and the famous Gay Gene although producing interesting results, have
failed to be replicated. One of the serious methodological problems underlying most of the
studies done to date is that they divide the men studied according to the
homosexual/heterosexual dichotomy, terms which are artefacts of language and not
biological divisions.

The Biological Basis for Homosexuality

There has been a debate going on almost
since the word homosexual was invented
as to whether some people are born that
way or is homosexuality more a matter of
upbringing. This is commonly referred to as
the Nature or Nurture debate, but the
catchy title disguises a rather messy can of
worms. Neither the Nature nor the
Nurture camps have so far been able to
find proof that they are right. Indeed, there
is precious little proof of anything when we
try to find a cause of homosexuality.
Identical twins1

Twin Studies
One of the lines of investigation has been
the study of twins. Such studies so far have
not favoured either the Nature or Nurture camps. Fairly consistently they show
that about twice as many identical (monozygotic) as fraternal (dizogotic) twins are
both homosexual but not in such numbers which would say either genes or
upbringing was responsible. Fairly typical of such studies was one by Bailey and

http://www.operations.mod.uk/telic/images/misc/raf_regt_twins.jpg

Pillard 2 in 1991 in which 52% of identical twins of men described as

nonheterosexual were also non-heterosexual3. If Nature were to be the
cause, one would have expected many more identical twins to be both homosexual
than the meager 52% demonstrated.4
Although in general studies of twins have proved to be inconclusive (one
geneticist even claiming they were more trouble than they were worth), they have
at least suggested some genetic influence, enough to inspire further research using
other methods into the possible biological origins of homosexuality in men.
Androgenising Hormones
There have also been studies of the effects of testosterone and other so-called
androgenising hormones which are released by the mothers body at different
times during the development of the foetus in the womb. Back in 1990, French
scientists who were trying to help four infertile men discovered that they were
actually biologically female, each having two normal XX chromosomes as women
do. However, attached to one of the X chromosomes was the gene called SRY
which is crucial in turning the foetus
physically into a male. In the case of
these four infertile men, however,
although their SRY genes had turned
them into perfect specimens of Gallic
manhood, unhappily for them they had
not inherited the other genes which were
essential to the production of sperm.5
Human foetus at 6-7 weeks6

Jill Neimark7 in her web page The Contours of Gender sums up thus:
Biologically, SRY is clearly the first sculptor of gender: It kicks into
gear at about seven weeks, when the fetus is as small as a thumbnail,
triggering development of a testis and the lifelong supply of
testosterone that turns the tiny embryo into a male. Without SRY, the
embryo waits another six weeks, develops an ovary, and begins to
2

Bailey and Pillard (1991); also Buhrich, Bailey, and Martin (1991)
The numbers themselves are not greatly reliable: the number of men studied were not high (Identical twins, n = 56
and Non-identical, n= 57 with n = 142 for non-twin brothers) and they did involved twins who were raised apart..
4
For a discussion of concordance rates see Sykes, B.: Adams Curse a future without men, Bantam Press, 2003,
pp 259-260.
5
Since then, other sex-determining genes have been discovered, including WNT4, which if it occurs twice, converts
an embryo from male to female who will probably have ambiguous genitalia.
6
http://www.i-am-pregnant.com/images/6weeks.jpg
7
http://members.tgforum.com/bobbyg/contours.html

2
3

pump out estrogen, leading to the cascade of events that creates a

female. From these early weeks onward, hormones shape the brain
and body. The first stage of puberty begins at age five or six and is
characterized by an outpouring of hormones from the maturing
adrenal glands. These hormones are thought to prime children for
what is known as gonadal puberty, and may explain differences in the
way young children play: Boys are more aggressive than girls
(although girls exposed in the womb to high levels of androgens tend
to play like boys).
It is not only the genitals (and other secondary sex characteristics) which can be
affected: these hormones released during inter-uterine life change the foetus brain
from the default female to the male. If this occurs when the potential baby is
genetically female, then a woman who thinks more like a man is the result. If it
does not occur or too little hormone is released for a genetically male foetus, a
feminised male that is, a man who thinks more like a woman is produced.
Popular book on the theme of gender differences8

These differences have recently received

quite a lot of public attention both in
popular books and TV series. Perhaps the
best-publicized differences were, for
example, women orient road maps to the
direction they are travelling, men are better
at finding directions but cannot multi-task
as well as women; women have more word
centres in their brains than men do and the
connections between the left and right
brains are more numerous in women.
Women too are said to be hard-wired to be
better able to sense social and emotional
situations, men better at the kind of skills
once needed by hunters.
One of the things we have to remember, however, is that these differences are of
degree. There are undoubtedly many men feminised sufficiently to give them
more verbal fluency than many androgenised females and there are certainly
women who can read maps upside-down..
At this stage the effect of such hormones during inter-uterine life are thought to
have more to do with gender than with sexuality. This line of enquiry is probably
8

http://www.mobileddl.com/files/image/Men-are-from-Mars-Women-are-from-Venus-by-John-Gray-PhD-201001-15.jpg

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pointing strongly to the conclusion that extremely feminised males, on the one
hand, are indeed those men who feel they are women trapped in mens bodies and
so often seek gender re-assignment. On the other hand, females who have received
excessive hormones while in utero also often seek re-assignment because they
have grown up feeling they are boys in girls clothing. But these transgender
people are the extremes of what is undoubtedly a long continuum. At this stage,
gender effects aside, it seems that pre-natal hormonal experiences have little to do
with later sexual orientation even if there have been longitudinal studies which
demonstrate that children who are what is labeled gender-atypical ie.,
effeminate boys, tomboy girls sometimes grow up to be homosexual.
Fairly recent research has also suggested that there may be differences in brain
morphology between heterosexuals and homosexuals of both genders, but these
differences once again have proved quite small and more worrying, they over-lap
each other9. Again, we will look at one of these studies in greater detail soon. In
summing up the past research, the physical anthropologist R. C. Kirkpatrick10
suggests that there is possibly a very complex relationship between sexual
orientation and gender identity in which pre-natal hormones play a part so that
some characteristics of gender are also associated with homosexual behaviour. He
warns however, the Gender nonconformity is neither necessary nor sufficient for
homosexual behavior.
Brain Anatomy and Simon LeVay
Hypothalamus11

One of the most important studies of

differences in brain anatomy between for
the sake of convenience, shall be just say
homosexuals and heterosexuals was
published by the neuroscientist Simon
LeVay in the magazine Science in
September 199112. When LeVay studied the
brains of 19 gay men who had died from
AIDS and compared their interstitial nucleus
of the anterior hypothalamus he found them
to be significantly smaller than those of 16
9

reviewed in LeVay 1996, Sanders and Wright 1997

R. C. Kirkpatrick: The Evolution of Human Homosexual Behavior,Current Anthropology Volume 41, Number 3,
June 2000.
11
My labelling. From http://www.vivo.colostate.edu/hbooks/pathphys/endocrine/hypopit/anatomy.html The
hypothalamus is a region of the brain that controls an immense number of bodily functions. It is located in the
middle of the base of the brain, and encapsulates the ventral portion of the third ventricle. From the Visible
Woman, Visible Human Project (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html).
12
7 See Simon LeVay, "A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men,"
Science (August 30, 1991), pp. 1034-1037.

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heterosexual men. The INAH as this part of our anatomy is commonly called is a
very small region in the centre of the brain. The hypothalamus itself, which lies at
the base of the brain, has long been thought to play a part in sexual behaviour.
This study narrowed the region down and strengthened the evidence in favour of
this location13.
Richard Horton, Editor of The Lancet.14

In 1995 Richard Horton15, editor of

respected British medical journal The
Lancet, wrote an article to defend what he
saw as a promising, but under-funded line of
research into human sexuality which had
come under an over-dramatized attack and
which had received quite serious political
opposition. With scientists in his sights who
were keen to make a name for themselves by
publishing unwarranted conclusions, he
wrote:
And now we have the much
publicized spectacle--Time
magazine has taken up the story
in a dramatic feature entitled "Search for a Gay Gene"16 of
homosexuality's origins being revealed in the lowly fruit fly,
Drosophila. Males and females of this, one has to admit, rather
distant relation adopt courtship behavior that has led two researchers
at the US National Institutes of Health to draw extravagant parallels
with human beings.Shang-Ding Zhang and Ward F.
Odenwald17 found that what they took to be homosexual behavior
among male fruit flies touching male partners with forelegs,
licking their genitalia, and curling their bodies to allow genital
contact could be induced by techniques that abnormally activated
a gene called w (for "white," so called because of its effect on eye
color).
Zhang and Odenwald go on to speculate that the expression of w
could lead to severe shortages of serotonin, an important chemical
13

The suprachiasmatic nucleus, also located in the hypothalamus, is larger in homosexual men than in either
heterosexual men or women. The anterior commissure of the corpus callosum (a band of tissue that connects the
right and left hemispheres of the brain) is also larger in gay men.
14
15

www.nuffieldtrust.org.uk/aboutus/index.aspx?id=64

Richard Horton, Is Homosexuality Inherited?, New York Review of Books, July, 1995,
Larry Thompson, "Search for a Gay Gene," Time (June 12, 1995), pp. 60-61.
17
Shang-Ding Zhang and Ward F. Odenwald, "Misexpression of the White (w) Gene Triggers Male-male Courtship
in Drosophila," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, USA, Vol. 92 (June 6, 1995), pp. 5525-5529.

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signal that enables nerve cells to communicate with one another. The
authors conjecture that mass activation of w diminishes brain
serotonin by promoting its use elsewhere in the body. Indeed, cats,
rabbits, and rats all show some elements of "gay" behavior when
their brain serotonin concentrations fall. Intriguing and, you might
think, convincing evidence.
Yet, although w is found in modified form in human beings, it is a
huge (and, it seems to me, a dangerous) leap to extrapolate
observations from fruit flies to humans. In truth, when the recent data
are interpreted literally we find that (a) the w gene induces male
group sex behavior in highly ritualized linear or circular
configurations, and (b) while these tend more toward homosexual
than straight preferences, they are truly bisexual (as pointed out by
Larry Thompson in Time). Zhang and Odenwald force their
experimental results with fruit flies to fit their preconceived notions of
homosexuality. How simplistic it seems to equate genital licking in
Drosophila with complex individual and social homosexual behavior
patterns in humans. Can notions of homosexuality apply uniformly
across the biological gulf that divides human beings and insects?
Such arguments by analogy seem hopelessly inadequate.
Dean Hamer and the Gay Gene
Closer to the nitty-gritty of the Nature case is a study by Hamer18 and his
colleagues published in 1994 in which famously, they found what was described
as a marker for a so-called gay gene but this has been controversial,
particularly since other scientists
have not been able to replicate the
study.19
Dean Hamer after receiving the news the Rice
et al. study did not support his findings.20

As I remember it, Dean Hamers

paper21 on what came to be mislabeled The Gay Gene hit the
headlines too late for it to inspire a
18 Hamer et al. 1993.
19 This summary is based on the introduction to: R. C. Kirkpatrick: The Evolution of Human Homosexual
Behavior, Current Anthropology Volume 41, Number 3, June 2000. The references are those listed in the
Bibliography to the above study.
20
http://www.bio.davidson.edu/Courses/genomics/2002/Pierce/gaygene.htm. Rice et al. abstract at
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10213693?dopt=Abstract
21 See Dean H. Hamer et al., "A Linkage Between DNA Markers on the X Chromosome and Male Sexual
Orientation," Science (July 16, 1993), pp. 321-327.

float in the 1994 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras although the ABC Four
Corners program on the subject aired at about the right time. Certainly, within the
local gay community, the news and the program caused quite a stir.
Reflecting the divided opinion elsewhere in the world, many welcomed the idea as
both making sense and validating
what had been felt all along, that
gays were born that way.
Dean Hamer and marriage partner Joseph Wilson,
maker of film Out in the Silence22

However, others argued, sometimes

quite angrily, against it. It seemed
they felt this reduced their right to
choose their sexual behaviour, indeed
their identity. Many, from both sides
of the argument, feared genetic tests
would be developed which would
result in the eradication of
homosexuality in the world. No one
seemed prepared to examine the
study critically and understand what
its authors really said.
Hamer and his colleagues at the US
National Cancer Institute studied the
rates of homosexuality among male
relatives of 76 gay men. At 13.5 percent, the rate among family members was
obviously higher than the 2% for the over-all sample. The other finding which
stood out was that there were significantly more relatives on the mothers side of
the family who were gay than on the fathers side. It seems the logical conclusion
that homosexuality is inherited, if it is inherited, through the mother.
If this were so, then there would have to be a gene affecting sexual orientation on
the X chromosome which, in the case of males, is inherited from the mother. The
other, the Y chromosome, is inherited from the father.
Human beings normally have 46 chromosomes, two of which are the sex
chromosomes. In the female, this is XX, in the male XY. The gene which
determines the sex of the baby, the SRY, is found on the Y chromosome only.
This, as we have already seen, both turns on the gene which prevents female
development and also initiates the production of the male hormone, testosterone

22

See http://glaadblog.org/author/sarah/
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which, depending on the timing and the amount produced, appears to affect the
kind of brain which develops.
If there is a gene for homosexuality, according to Hamers study, it would have to
be what we might designate Xh and follow patterns of inheritance something like
the following:
If the child inherits

X+Y
Xh + Y
X+X

heterosexual male
homosexual male
female heterosexual

A problem arises in the case of lesbians, however: some argue that the Xh is
recessive and therefore the following is the pattern we might expect:

X+X
Xh + X
X + Xh
Xh+ Xh

female heterosexual
female heterosexual carrier of the Xh gene
female heterosexual carrier of the Xh gene
lesbian.

If a lesbian had children, and most do, then we might expect that they are carriers
and all their female children would also be carriers of the Xh recessive
In favour of this suggestion is the lower frequency of lesbianism in the population.
Since lesbians would have to inherit an Xh gene from both parents, the chances of
them doing so is significantly reduced and the finding by some researchers that
lesbians number only about 1/3 the number of gay men more or less fits this
probability.
Hamer and his team studied 40 pairs of homosexual brothers, looking for
associations between the DNA on the mens X chromosome and their known
homosexuality. Out of the 40 pairs, they found 35 shared the same 5 genetic
signatures, commonly known in the trade as markers, near the end of the long
arm of the X chromosome. This is designated Xq28. The probability that this was
a chance occurrence was significant at the level of 1 in 10,000.
One important methodological fault in this study was Hamers failure to measure
the incidence of Xq28 markers among the heterosexual brothers of the gay men he
studied. After all, they might have shown the same pattern. Without excluding this
possibility, the connection between genes at Xq28 and the sexuality of the men in
question remains up in the air.

Summing up, Richard Horton in the same paper in The Lancet23 recognized that:
Taken together, the scientific papers of both LeVay and Hamer and
the books that their first reports have now spawned make a forceful
but by no means definitive case for the view that biological and
genetic influences have an important perhaps even decisive part
in determining sexual preference among males. LeVay writes, for
example, that "...the scientific evidence presently available points to a
strong influence of nature, and only a modest influence of nurture."
But there is no broad scientific agreement on these findings. They
have become mired in a quasi-scientific debate that threatens to let
obscurantism triumph over inquiry.
But, as he concludes:
Finally, neither study has been replicated by other
researchers, the necessary standard of scientific proof. Indeed, there
is every reason to suppose that the INAH 3 data will be extremely
difficult to confirm. Only a few years ago INAH 1 (located close to
INAH 3) was also thought to be larger in men than in women. Two
groups, including LeVay's, have failed to reproduce this result.
In short, the question of whether or not sexual orientation is genetically
determined remains up in the air. It seems important to recall what Robert Plomin
wrote several years before Hamers research was published and which still seems
to hold true: he said 24
..genetic influence on behavior appears to involve multiple genes
rather than one or two major genes, and nongenetic sources of
variance are at least as important as genetic factors....This should not
be interpreted to mean that genes do not affect human behavior; it
only demonstrates that genetic influence on behavior is not due to
major-gene effects.
Sexual categorization: You begin to see the difficulty in using words such as
homosexuality when you look at much of this biological research. How do you
talk about whatever it is you want to study if you dont use the h word? Yet, if
you do, you fall into the trap of maybe falsely categorizing human sexuality. Even
Hamer and his associates said in their Science article of 1993 :

23
24

Op. cit.
Robert Plomin, "The Role of Inheritance in Behavior," Science (April 13, 1990), pp. 183-188.

In truth, I don't think that there is such a thing as "the" rate of

homosexuality in the population at large. It all depends on the
definition, how it's measured, and who is measured.
Homosexuality is a convenient hypothetical construct which does not
necessarily exist outside scientific theories and popular speech. It does not
refer to a single and definable event but to a whole host of behaviours which,
for the individual, might change
from moment to moment, year to
year.25
Michel Foucault26.

As we will see later in the section

devoted to Social Construction, the
French philosopher Michel Foucault
showed that we can be mislead into
believing that social constructs and
conventions which evolve over time
are in reality inborn, immutable
biological characteristics. For
example, he criticized Freud27 for
assuming, at least in psychoanalysis,
that heterosexuality is the norm..
the psychological, psychiatric, medical category of
homosexuality was constituted from the moment it was
characterized.... The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the
homosexual was now a species.
Foucault adds, commenting that in Platos day,
People did not have the notion of two distinct appetites allotted
to different individuals or at odds with each other in the same soul;
rather, they saw two ways of enjoying one's pleasure...
It might have been almost unavoidably convenient for both Hamer and LeVay
to categorize the men in their research groups as homosexual and
heterosexual (or the apparently more precise non-heterosexual and
25

See Stephen B Levine, Sexual Life: A Clinician's Guide (Plenum, 1992). The Kinsey scale has seven levels
ranging from exclusively heterosexual (0) to exclusively gay (6). Hamer applied this scale to four aspects of
sexuality: self-identification, attraction, fantasy, and behavior.
26
From http://www.maisonpop.fr/image/philo/2004-2005/foucault.jpg.
27
I am not sure about this Freud seems to have implied that bi-sexuality (polymorpous-perverse) was the norm
but that it is more comfortable in this society being heterosexual.

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heterosexual). After all, we are all the children, researchers included, of our
cultures and our times, and how else could the research parameters be
described? Even so, perhaps they were researching something that simply did
not exist outside our Western belief system. The cultural historian Jonathan
Katz28, in a wide-ranging history of the belief that heterosexuality is the norm,
concludes that heterosexuality is an invented tradition and predicts
albeit flying more by the seat of his pants than basing this on any solid
research evidence that the notion of sexual orientation is already declining
in significance.
Biological influence
The essential question which must be addressed in all of this kind of research but
which is largely ignored, is one of levels of analysis. Epistemologists talk of
microscopic and macroscopic levels of analysis. Thus, the study of how
certain biochemicals interact in our bodies is a microscopic analysis; how
communities react to the darkness during a total eclipse of the sun is
macroscopic So, in the case of LeVays and Hamers research, the question
posed by Richard Hordon is thus:
How do genes get you from a biochemical program that instructs
cells to make proteins to an unpredictable interplay of behavioral
impulses fantasy, courtship, arousal, sexual selection that
constitutes "sexuality"?
Horton concludes that the question remains unresolved and asks whether we are
asking the wrong question when we set out to discover if there is a gene for sexual
orientation?
The Search Continues
Several years later, the saga of the Gay Gene continues. The next episode hit the
headlines on 23rd. April, 1999 when Steve Connor in an article in The
Independent announced Scientists cast doubt on 'gay gene' theory.29
"One of the biggest studies to investigate the genetic cause of
homosexuality has failed to support research published six years ago
suggesting the existence of a 'gay gene'." "The Canadian
group reports in the journal Science that it failed to find a link
between this marker and homosexuality, which would have emerged
because their study was bigger than Dr Hamer's."

28

29

Jonathan Ned Katz, The Invention of Heterosexuality (Dutton, 1995).

The Independent, 23rd. April, 1999, page 5.

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After this last flurry of reportage in the media, public interest in the so-called
Gay Gene virtually disappeared. Most of us, as far as I could see, had come to
think of it as a bit like the search for the Holy Grail where a lot of true-
believers galloped all over the country-side, upsetting the locals, looking for
something that either did not exist or, if it did, as the da Vinci Code suggests,
was actually something different from what they thought.

Then in March 2004 Dean Hamer and his colleagues published another paper,
this time in Human Genetics. This was reported on January 28, 2005, by
Jennifer Warner writing for WebMD30 under the headline New Genetic Regions
Associated With Male Sexual Orientation Found. Reporting the new findings
rather more responsibly than previous journalists were wont, she wrote

The goal of this study was not to replicate the findings of previous
research but to search for new genetic markers associated with male
sexual orientation. Those previous studies looked only at the genes
located on the X chromosome. Genes on this chromosome are only
passed to a son from his mother. But this study examined genetic
information on all chromosomes, including genes from the father
In the study, researchers analyzed the genetic makeup of 456
men from 146 families with two or more gay brothers.
The genetic scans showed a clustering of the same genetic pattern
among the gay men on three chromosomes chromosomes 7, 8, and
10. These common genetic patterns were shared by 60% of the gay
men in the study. This is slightly more than the 50% expected by
chance alone.
The regions on chromosome 7 and 8 were associated with male sexual
orientation regardless of whether the man got them from his mother or
father. The regions on chromosome 10 were only associated with male
sexual orientation if they were inherited from the mother.Researchers say
the next step is to verify these results in a different group of men to see if the
same genetic regions are associated with sexual orientation. If the findings
hold up, then they could start to look for the individual genes within
these regions linked to sexual orientation.
A Personal Conclusion
After reading and researching many more articles than I have had time to talk
about here, I would have to say it seems to me that at this stage of scientific
knowledge, we have to conclude that there is a biological basis for sexual
orientation, but that this is only a small part of whatever constitutes the
predisposition. It seems fairly certain that there is not just a single gene
30

http://www.webmd.com/content/Article/100/105486.htm
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responsible for turning us on more to one or other sex, but that there must be
several, if not many, and none of them necessarily act alone. Whatever these genes
are, they are probably responsible for the way our bodies produce chemical
substances, such as serotonin and dopamine, which in turn affect sexual identity,
orientation and drive,31 in similar ways our genes also help create our proclivity
for characteristics such as anxiety, depression, risk taking, even aging and weight
control, and perhaps as our old friend Kroly Mria Kertbeny might add our
responsiveness to the body odours of our fellow human beings.
___________________________

31

Characteristics indicated by Hamer and Copeland in their Telmah Hypothesis in Hamer,

DH. and Copeland, P: Living With Our Genes: Why They Matter More Than You Think, 1998.
Quoted in a review and comparison by John Turner of four books in The Times Higher
Education Supplement, 4th. February, 2000, pages 24-25.

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