What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [150]
6. J. Money and J. Dalery, “Iatrogenic Homosexuality: Gender Identity in Seven 46XX Chromosomal Females with Hyperadrenocortical Hermaphroditism Born with a Penis, Three Reared as Boys, Four Reared as Girls,” Journal of Homosexuality 1 (1976): 357–71; J. Money, M. Schwartz, and V. Lewis, “Adult Heterosexual Status and Fetal Hormonal Masculinization and Demasculinization: 46XX Congenital Virilizing Adrenal Hyperplasia and 46XY Androgen-Insensitivity Syndrome Compared,” Psychoneuroendocrinology 9 (1984): 405–14; J. Money, “Sin, Sickness, or Status?” American Psychologist 42 (1987): 384–99.
7. V. Lewis and J. Money, “Gender Identity/Role: GI/R Part A: XY (Androgen-Insensitivity) Syndrome and XX (Rokitansky) Syndrome of Vaginal Atresia Compared,” in L. Dennerstein and G. Burrows, eds., Handbook of Psychosomatic Obstetrics and Gynecology (New York: Elsevier, 1983), 51–60.
8. Sexologists lump the homosexual-versus-heterosexual “choice” into the same category (“sexual-object choice”) as the “choice” of body parts, fetishistic objects, and erotic situations (S-M, pedophilia, flashing, etc.). I break these into two separate categories, sexual orientation and sexual preferences, because I think they are different processes. The homosexual/heterosexual “choice” is deeper, dictated earlier in life, and more inflexible than the sexual preferences for body parts, inanimate objects, and arousing situations.
9. S. Levay, “A Difference in Hypothalamic Structure Between Heterosexual and Homosexual Men,” Science 253 (1991): 1034–37. Further evidence for differing brain structures in a nonreproductively related area was found by L. Allen and R. Gorski, “Sexual Orientation and the Size of the Anterior Commissure in the Human Brain,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 89 (1992): 7199–7202. Here the anterior commissure was significantly larger in homosexual men than in heterosexual women, who in turn had more tissue here than heterosexual men had.
10. The examples that follow are not intended to be hormonally or anatomically accurate; they are merely schemata to illustrate what the architecture underlying separate processes for identity, sexual organs, and orientation would have to be like.
11. The breakthrough article speculating roughly in this way is L. Ellis and M. Ames, “Prenatal Neurohormonal Functioning and Sexual Orientation: A Theory of Homosexuality-Heterosexuality,” Psychological Bulletin 101 (1987): 233–58. So provocative was this piece that I was forced to change an entire course in midstream to discuss it at length when it came out in 1987.
For the literature on twins and homosexuality, see E. Eckert, T. Bouchard, J. Bohlen, and L. Heston, “Homosexuality in Monozygotic Twins Reared Apart,” British Journal of Psychiatry 148 (1986): 421–25. M. Bailey and R. Pillard, “A Genetic Study of Male Sexual Orientation,” Archives of General Psychiatry 48 (1991): 1089–96, is the landmark study in this area. While this points directly to a genetic in addition to a fetal-hormone mechanism, homosexuality still might be entirely fetal in origin. Identical twins do not have identical intrauterine environments. One twin is often bigger than the other. Could it be that identical twins do not get identical hormonal baths? No one knows yet.
It is possible that bisexuality—or, strictly speaking, the capacity for bisexuality—has as its substratum just a bit of androgen insufficiency in utero. Future research will tell. But it is important that most of the development of bisexuality is in adolescence and adulthood, not in utero. People not infrequently become actively bisexual when exposed to homosexuality during their teens and twenties. For this reason I include bisexuality as a sexual preference, and exclusive homosexuality as a sexual orientation.
12. Evidence is not completely lacking. A. Ehrhardt, H. Meyer-Bahlburg, L. Rosen, et al., “Sexual Orientation After Prenatal Exposure to Exogenous Estrogen,” Archives