« on: June 20, 2007, 10:18:56 AM »
That’s what we mean by gaydar—not the skill of the viewer so much as the telltale signs most gay people project, the set of traits that make us unmistakably one.
At first read, their findings seem like a string of unlinked, esoteric observations. Statistically, for instance, gay men and lesbians have about a 50 percent greater chance of being left-handed or ambidextrous than straight men or women. The relative lengths of our fingers offer another hint: The index fingers of most straight men are shorter than their ring fingers, while for most women they are closer in length, or even reversed in ratio. But some researchers have noted that gay men are likely to have finger-length ratios more in line with those of straight women, and a study of self-described “butch” lesbians showed significantly masculinized ratios. The same goes for the way we hear, the way we process spatial reasoning, and even the ring of our voices. One study, involving tape-recordings of gay and straight men, found that 75 percent of gay men sounded gay to a general audience. It’s unclear what the listeners responded to, whether there is a recognized gay “accent” or vocal quality. And there is no hint as to whether this idiosyncrasy is owed to biology or cultural influences—only that it’s unmistakable. What is there in Rufus Wainwright’s “uninhibited, yearning, ugly-duckling voice,” as the Los Angeles Times wrote a few weeks ago, that we recognize as uniquely gay? Does biology account for Rosie O’Donnell’s crisp trumpet and Charles Nelson Reilly’s gnyuck-gnyuck-gnyuck?
A string of other studies, most of them conducted quietly and with small budgets, has offered up a number of other biological indicators. According to this research, for instance, gay men, like straight women, have an increased density of fingerprint ridges on the thumb and the pinkie of the left hand; and overall their arms, legs, and hands are smaller relative to stature (among whites but not blacks). There are technical differences in the way most men and most women hear, except among lesbians, whose ears function more like men’s. And there are gender-based cognitive differences in which gay men appear more like women. One involves mentally rotating a 3-D object, something males tend to do better than females—except gay men score more like straight women and lesbians function more like straight men. In navigational tasks and verbal-fluency tests, gay men and lesbians tend to have sex-atypical scores.
Some of this work has been derided as modern-day phrenology, and obviously possessing one trait or another—a counterclockwise hair whorl here, an elongated ring finger there—doesn’t necessarily make a person gay or straight. But researchers point out that these are statistical averages from the community as a whole. And the cumulative findings support the belief now widely held in the scientific community that sexual orientation—perhaps along with the characteristics we typically associate with gayness—is biological. “We’re reaching a consensus on a broad question,” says J. Michael Bailey, a psychologist at Northwestern University. Is sexual orientation “something we’re born with or something we largely acquire through social experience? The answer is clear. It’s something we’re born with.”
Because many of these newly identified “gay” traits and characteristics are known to be influenced in utero, researchers think they may be narrowing in on when gayness is set—and identifying its possible triggers. They believe that homosexuality may be the result of some interaction between a pregnant mother and her fetus. Several hypothetical mechanisms have been identified, most pointing to an alteration in the flow of male hormones in the formation of boys and female hormones in the gestation of girls. What causes this? Nobody has any direct evidence one way or another, but a list of suspects includes germs, genes, maternal stress, and even allergy—maybe the mother mounts some immunological response to the fetal hormones. Immunological response is the ascendant theory, in fact. We know from a string of surveys that in any family, the second-born son is 33 percent more likely than the first to be gay, and the third is 33 percent more likely than the second, and so on, as though there is some sort of “maternal memory,” similar to the way antibodies are memories of an infection. Perhaps she mounts a more effective immunological response to fetal hormones with each new male fetus. To determine whether the fraternal birth order might also suggest that baby brothers are treated differently in a way that impacts their sexual expression, researchers have studied boys who weren’t raised in their biological families, or who may have been firstborn but grew up as the youngest in Brady Bunch–type homes. In every permutation, the results were the same: What mattered was only how many boys had occupied your mother’s uterus before you.
Full article here
http://nymag.com/news/features/33520/
« Last Edit: June 20, 2007, 10:23:49 AM by Malek: King of Kings »
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