It's all in the....hormones

[andrewducker]

An article at Plastic pointed me in the direction of this piece on the whole "what makes people gay" research.

A few choice snippets:

Qazi Rahman and Glenn Wilson conducted a series of neurocognitive tests of spatial skill. They found that gay men performed less well than heterosexual men, but matched the ability of women.

But gay men performed better than heterosexuals and as well as women at remembering the locations of objects in an array.

In several language tests, traditionally a female strong point, gay men did as well as heterosexual women. Lesbians, on the other hand, performed the tests as poorly as “straight” men.

Dr Rahman said: “Because we know that performance on these cognitive tests depends on the integrity of specific brain regions, the differences implicate robust differences between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men and women and suggest that hormonal factors early in development (probably during the 1st trimester of pregnancy) produce these differences.”

The researchers also found that gay men and lesbians both had longer ring fingers relative to their index fingers than heterosexual men and women.

Relatively long ring fingers are a sign of exposure to elevated levels of the male hormone testosterone in the womb.

The findings supported the idea that high, not low, testosterone levels in men produce shifts in sexual preference.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I'm guessing the study is riddled with errors of finding what one expects to find due to unconscious bias. If the same people are doing the cognitive tests as did the pathetic finger-length experiments, I can't imagine that those tests are worth the paper they are printed out on.

I've seen articles going both ways wrt brain differences and know that at least wrt studies specifically on the brains of homosexuals, the biggest and most widely published study used the brains of people who died of AIDs as the pool of "homosexual brains", supposedly to "make certain" that the people were actually queer. Snce AIDs has provable degenerative effect on the brain (and since not every man who dies of AIDs is gay), this study was total and complete junk.

IIRC the above study found the corpus callosum to be smaller in gay men than in straight men and (like several other studies) alleged that women also had smaller corpus callosums (on average and adjusted for body weight) than men. Of course, there are an equal number of studies that "prove" that women have large corpus callosums and this is the origin of myths like "women's intuition". I'm assuming that this means that there is no difference in the size of corpus callosums in men and women.

My cynicism for such studies currently knows no bounds because so few are done well and so many are unworthy of a first year grad student.

One good book to look at is The Mismeasure of Woman by Carol Tavris, which deals with issues of bias, assumption, and similar issues in gender-based psych and medical studies.