Monday, August 04, 2008

Is Being Gay in Your Biology?

Last week's All in the Mind looked at the issue of homosexuality and biology. Surprisingly, this is still a highly debated issue.

It was an interesting discussion, to me, even though I have long believed sexual orientation to be biological -- and that it is a spectrum with few people embodying either extreme, no matter what they might think. They talked about some of the correlations between handedness, birth order, gender conformity, and other factors that might be associated with sexual orientation.

Is being gay in your biology?

What makes someone gay? The quest for the biological roots of sexual orientation remains rife with controversy. Is it in your genes, handedness, or the hormonal soup of the early foetus? Or, is the answer hidden deep inside the brain? Homo or hetero - the science of sexual attraction captures everyone's attention.

Show Transcript

Guests

Simon LeVay
Neuroscientist and neuroanatomist
Author

Richard Lippa
Professor of Psychology
California State University
Fullerton
http://hss.fullerton.edu/psychology/

Sven Bocklandt
Post-doctoral researcher
Department of Human Genetics
David Geffen School of Medicine
University of California
Los Angeles
http://www.uclatwins.com/

Further Information

The All in the Mind blog with Natasha Mitchell - read, comment, discuss. A chance to comment on each week's show or read other titbits about the mind
The blog relevant post to this specific edition of All in the Mind can be found here.

The Real Story on Gay Genes by Michael Abrams
Article in Discover magazine, 2007

BBC Test on how the mind works
Based on the BBC Series, Secrets of the Sexes

81 Words: the inside story of psychiatry and homosexuality [Part 1 of 2]
Broadcast on All in the Mind in 2007. Produced by Alix Spiegel, originally for Chicago Public Radio's This American Life.

81 Words: the inside story of psychiatry and homosexuality (Part 2 of 2)
Broadcast on All in the Mind in 2007. Produced by Alix Spiegel, originally for Chicago Public Radio's This American Life.

Publications

Title: Are 2D:4D Finger-Length Ratios Related to Sexual Orientation?
Author: Richard A. Lippa
Publisher: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 2003, Vol. 85, No. 1, 179-188
URL: http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=search.displayRecord&uid=2003-05568-017

Title: Handedness, Sexual Orientation, and Gender-Related
Author: Richard A. Lippa
Publisher: Archives of Sexual Behavior, Vol. 32, No. 2, April 2003, pp. 103-114
URL: http://www.springerlink.com/content/gm28031548u408q1/

Title: A difference in hypothalamic structure between heterosexual and homosexual men
Author: Simon LeVay
Publisher: Science 253(5023): 1034-7 1991
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?Db=pubmed&Cmd=ShowDetailView&TermToSearch=1887219

Title: The science of desire: the search for the gay gene and the biology of behavior
Author: Hamer D and P Copeland
Publisher: Simon and Schuster, 1994
ISDN 0-671-88724-6

Title: Sexual Orientation and Personality
Author: Richard A Lippa
Publisher: Annual Review of Sex Research, 2005;16:119-53
URL: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16913290

Title: Extreme skewing of X chromosone inactivation in mothers of homosexual men
Author: S Bocklandt, S Horvath, E Vilain, D Hamer
Publisher: Human Genetics 2005 Dec 21; :1-4 16369763 (P,S,E,B,D)
URL: http://lib.bioinfo.pl/pmid:16369763

Title: PET and MRI show differences in cerebral asymmetry and functional connectivity between homo- and heterosexual subjects
Author: Ivanka Savic & Per Lindström
Publisher: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2008
URL: http://www.pnas.org/content/105/27/9403

Title: The Man Who Would Be Queen: The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism
Author: J. Michael Bailey
Publisher: Joseph Henry Press 2003
URL: http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=10530
ISBN-10: 0309084180


No comments: