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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5396 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

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Fascinating stuff. A lot of what informs me was reading Different by Frans de Waal, which is a biological look into sexuality/gender and compares the human experience with chimps and bonobos, as well as this excellent page about the science of gender and sexuality. Quoting one part:

To study childhood gender nonconformity, researchers have conducted retrospective studies, which interview large numbers of gay and straight adults about their childhood. UCLA psychologists interviewed gay men, lesbians, straight men and straight women (198 in each group), recruited from the general population; and they found that those adults who remembered playing baseball between the ages of 5–8 included 57% of the straight men, 49% of the lesbians, 28% of the straight women, and 19% of the gay men (Grellert et al., 1982).49 A more recent study looked at how consistently pre-gay boys differ from pre-straight boys in Turkey, Brazil, and Thailand; and researchers here found that pre-gay boys were less likely to be interested in sports and more likely to associate with girls and girls’ activities than pre-straight boys (Cardoso, 2009).50 More ideal (but harder to do) are prospective studies, which begin with children as children and then follow them into adulthood. The best-known study of this kind was done by UCLA psychiatrist Richard Green (1987) between the late 1960s and early 1980s, which included 66 feminine boys and 56 other boys, matched for other variables. Most of the feminine boys would have preferred to have been girls, some even appearing transsexual, while the control group was generally selected (i.e., not necessarily for being “masculine”). Green interviewed the children and their parents during the boys’ childhood and adolescence periods. At the end, he found in the “other” group (the 35 whom he was able to follow to the end) all turned out heterosexual. However, among the 44 markedly effeminate boys (whom he was able to follow to the end), 33 became homosexual or bisexual, and 11 heterosexual. Although some of the feminine boys did turn out to be heterosexual, still in 75 percent of these boys a marked femininity in childhood was a predictor of homosexual or bisexual interest in adulthood.51

All of the homosexuals already being effeminate in childhood strongly makes me think men being exclusively attracted to other men is caused by some early biological process, possibly genetic but likely because of low testosterone during certain stages of pregnancy. There is also research into domestic sheep showing that about 8% of males will exclusively mount other males, they aren't interested in females, and that this may also be caused by a certain brain region not developing properly because of lack of testosterone during a certain stage of pregnancy.

But what you've said has given me a lot to think about. I think it's obvious the full reality of human sexuality is very complex and far from solved.

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