Reparative therapists consider the 1962 Bieber study to be a landmark investigation of the psychodynamics of male homosexuality. The study authors claimed to find evidence for the role of weak, distant fathers and overly protective mothers in the development of homosexuality in their patients. They also claimed that 27% of the patients in the study were cured of their homosexuality.
Four years later, in 1967, a companion study on lesbians was published in the Archives of General Psychiatry. Using the same methodology and one of the same co-authors (Cornelia Wilbur), the Society for Medical Psychoanalysis sought to explore the factors involved in the causing and curing lesbians. The lead author of that study was psychoanalyst Harvey Kaye.
Today, I talked to Dr. Kaye and asked him about his study and what he thought about his findings now. At the time, Kaye’s team reported that the fathers of lesbians were puritanical and discouraged sex play with boys (sounds like evangelical dads). Generally, Kaye’s team put the spotlight on the fathers rather than mothers. Kaye’s group also reported that 50% of the lesbian clients were significantly changed via psychoanalysis.
Today, in conversation with me, Dr. Kaye discredited his results.
“I disavow the validity of the study,” Kaye said. “I don’t agree now with what we wrote.”
He added, “Frankly, I haven’t the vaguest idea what causes homosexuality in men or women, although I lean toward intrauterine events.”
Kaye explained that he has treated numerous gays and lesbians and that his experiences had influenced his current views.
About Irving Bieber’s views on the origins of male homosexuality, Kaye said, “I disagree with Bieber’s views violently. He was one of the last ones to hold on to the idea of the role of the mother and father.” Referring to Bieber’s methodology of relying on the reports of psychoanalysts, Kaye said, “He knew what he wanted to find before he did his study.”
The Kaye study is one of the psychoanalytic reports referenced in NARTH’s review of past research on change of orientation. The introduction to the review says:
In the clinical and scholarly literature over the past 125 years, mental health professionals document many different ways to assist men and women to successfully change from a homosexual to a heterosexual orientation. (NARTH, 2009, p. 19)
The NARTH report then briefly describes Kaye’s 1967 article:
Kaye et al. (1967) sent 26-page surveys to more than 150 psychoanalysts who saw homosexual women in their practice, and received back 24 completed surveys. Eight of the 15 cases that were reported to be in the “homosexual range” (Kinsey scores of 4-6) at the onset of treatment had shifted to a Kinsey score of 0 (exclusively heterosexual) either at termination of treatment or when the analyst filled out the survey. Kaye et al. concluded, “Apparently at least 50% of them can be helped by psychoanalytic treatment” (p. 633). (NARTH, 2009, 23)
Or not.
Dr. Kaye’s current evaluation throws more doubt on NARTH’s methodology of reporting old research as “historically state of the art” (NARTH, 2009, 37). There is reason to question that allowing psychoanalysts to fulfill their own prophecies was ever state of the art. In any case, Dr. Kaye’s candor is one of many reasons to remain skeptical of the 125 years of research trusted by NARTH.
That’s something I have to be careful of too. We all do.
It’s a trap for those with highly developed senses of morality: we see what we think should be, rather than what’s actually there.
I think the best we can do is try to guard against it, and to be prepared to change our minds when exposed to new evidence. There has to be some hysteresis, some resistance, but not very much.
I’ve taken a very firm stand on the biological basis of gender identity. Far firmer than most (a danger sign). I’ve tried my hardest to post what articles and evidence I can find refuting or limiting my position, and indeed have changed my opinions on the boundaries of what we know, always on the side of less clearly defined categories. Yet the mountain of evidence suggesting my analysis is accurate grows higher at an accelerating rate. I may still be out in Left Field, but at least now I’m well within the accepted ballpark.
Sexual orientation is another matter; my opinions there are nowhere near as well-formed. I’m not even sure what “sexual orientation” means – what characteristics define androphilia from gynephilia. Are we dealing with sex characteristics or gender characteristics, or both? How much is a matter of biology – instinctive recognition of someone else’s sex based on appearance, texture, smell, taste, (behaviour?) and how much is socially conditioned?
So much I don’t know. So many over-simplifications that can impede understanding. So much I “know” that’s quite probably wrong.
I can easily imagine Dr Zucker (who I think is deeply mistaken) having similar thoughts. But Nicolosi? Not so much.
Dr. Kaye seems to be the kind of guy who always goes for the popular and fashionable. In the sixties, blaming parents was fashionable. Nowadays “intrauterine events” are fashionable.
But in the sixties there were at least studies which drafted a model in which way parents influenced sexual orientation – a model which was plausible in itself, even if not proved against strong objections.
This intrauterine thing has not even arrived at that point.
Warren, in the Dark Age of Psychiatry, it was the norm. Drapetomania. Hysteria.
Psychonanalysis was never evidence-based. We knew it did some good, in a minority of situations, sometimes. Well, we thought so, no-one ever actually checked, this belief was based on singleton case-studies, not double-blind experiments with controls.
Here’s McHugh on the subject of Transsexuality:
It’s difficult to see how anyone could be unaware of a history 50 years long to find an environmental, rather than biological, cause. And the death-toll from failed “talking cures” along the way is staggering.
Ideology drives a belief, and facts that contradict that belief have to be ignored in order to maintain ideological purity. I find McHugh’s words to be a classic case of projection. One thing though – in the 60’s, there really was a “:follow your own bliss” Zeitgeist. He had evidence for his original beliefs. But that article was written in 1992. 19 years later, he’s still of his original belief, he’s learnt nothing since then.
I hope I never let my ideas become ossified like that.
Part 1:
Actually, here people are pretty good. No-one’s taught this stuff at school. I’ve been called in by professors of psychology and medicine to give remedial lectures to their students, not in first year, but to third-year and post-grad students, as they weren’t taught it in med school either.
I have an advantage there. They don’t realise that they’re being taught by one of those anomalous cases. So when I drop that piece of information as the tail of the lecture, the sheer shock of that is a “teachable moment”. Like the traditional old Buddhist technique of unexpectedly whacking the student with a stick “and thus they became enlightened”.
I’m sure Warren can tell you more about the mechanism at work there than I can, in a way it induces very mild psychic trauma to make sure the message that has been conveyed immediately before is laid down in permanent memory more strongly.
Anyway, if third year med and psych students at top Universities don’t know this stuff, how can lay people be expected to?
Exactly correct, yes (and keep those compliments coming!). Right now we’re at the stage of determining the limits of our simplifications and categories. Basically, a lot of things we assumed just “were” turn out not to be so clear-cut.
In the past, experiments were performed using subjects as stereotypically male as possible, or stereotypically female as possible. We wanted to highlight any differences that there may or may not have been between them neurologically, so we could determine whether differences existed or not. We didn’t know. So we had to exclude possible sources of noise and uncertainty, and of course that means we were experimenting using an atypical cohort.
Once we found differences – or, in many cases, determined that no differences existed, we could start using cohorts that better matched reality.
Now we’re extending the bounds even further, though there’s still a lot we don’t know. We get tantalising hints suggesting directions of future research, but it’s likely many of these are false trails because sample sizes are too small.
Here’s an example of one such, quite possibly false, trail:
One person we studied had untreated male gender dysphoria (S7), took no hormones and kept his transsexual feelings under wraps. He appeared to have a large INAH3 volume – in the male range – but a female INAH3 number of neurons (68) and a female BSTc somatostatin neuron number (95). Hence, this individual’s hypothalamic characteristics were mid-way between male and female values
That’s from Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation D.Swaab & A.Garcia-Fulgaras Functional Neurology, Jan-Mar 2009:
Here’s another, showing that things are not so clear-cut as we’d thought they might be:
We analyzed MRI data of 24 male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals not yet treated with cross-sex hormones in order to determine whether gray matter volumes in MTF transsexuals more closely resemble people who share their biological sex (30 control men), or people who share their gender identity (30 control women). Results revealed that regional gray matter variation in MTF transsexuals is more similar to the pattern found in men than in women. However, MTF transsexuals show a significantly larger volume of regional gray matter in the right putamen compared to men. These findings provide new evidence that transsexualism is associated with distinct cerebral pattern, which supports the assumption that brain anatomy plays a role in gender identity.
From Regional gray matter variation in male-to-female transsexualism. by Luders et al Neuroimage. 2009 Jul 15;46(4):904-7.
Finally, another one showing that things aren’t as neat as we might expect, but that we’re now studying subtle, rather than gross differences:
This study investigated the functional brain organization of 68 male-to-female (MtF) transwomen and 26 female-to-male (FtM) transmen by comparing their performance with 36 typical male and 28 typical female controls on two indicators of cerebral lateralization: dichotic listening and handedness. A sex-differentiating dichotic test and a handedness questionnaire were administered. It was hypothesized that the MtF participants’ dichotic performance would be significantly different from the control males and resemble the control female pattern. This hypothesis was supported. It was also hypothesized that the FtM dichotic pattern would be significantly different from the control females and would resemble the control male pattern. This hypothesis was not supported. Finally, it was hypothesized that there would be significantly more nonexclusive right-handers in both trans-groups. This hypothesis was supported. Taken together, the dichotic and handedness data reported here indicate that the MtF and FtM conditions are not mirror images in terms of the verbal-auditory aspects of their brain organization and neurobiology plays an important role, particularly in the development of the male-to-female trans-condition.
From Dichotic Listening, Handedness, Brain Organization and Transsexuality Govier et al International Journal of Transgenderism, 12:144–154, 2010
Zoe=
Do I hope that my son is straight rather than gay? Yes.
StraightGrandmother= I would not care either way, but it would be really really nice if the parents knew that their baby was gay, lesbian or heterosexual. I think not knowing until they are juveniles or young adults can be a problem. If parents knew right at birth that their child was gay or lesbian I think they would, well they should, be more in tune with their child.
Zoe=
Do I hope that my son is straight rather than gay? Yes.
StraightGrandmother= I would not care either way, but it would be really really nice if the parents knew that their baby was gay, lesbian or heterosexual. I think not knowing until they are juveniles or young adults can be a problem. If parents knew right at birth that their child was gay or lesbian I think they would, well they should, be more in tune with their child.
There’s a really good presentation, a summary of hundreds of papers on the Biology, available via
http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2011/10/biology-of-sexual-orientation.html
Teresa, all I can give is a personal opinion.
I’d encourage the parents not to intervene to make a straight baby gay, or a gay baby straight (I consider the two situations to be morally equivalent), or to have any intervention for non-medical reasons. Too much can go wrong.
There’s no “bright line”. Parents, for very good reasons, are allowed considerable latitude in upbringing after birth. Probably too much, but where to draw the line? I don’t know. I don’t possess the surety, the arrogance, to say that one size will fit all. I can say “female genital mutilation is wrong”, based on really good evidence. Same for Intersex genital mutilation. Circumcision I’m against based solely on the rate of complications, including child mortality, but when it’s an integral part of religious practice that will be performed regardless of legality, not making it illegal probably does the least harm.
Do I hope that my son is straight rather than gay? Yes. But regardless, I want him to be a decent human being, and happy. If that requires that he has a boyfriend not a girlfriend, so be it, it’s not a big issue to me compared with the rest.
I would like grandchildren, but that’s not my decision to make, is it?
There’s a really good presentation, a summary of hundreds of papers on the Biology, available via
http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2011/10/biology-of-sexual-orientation.html
Teresa, all I can give is a personal opinion.
I’d encourage the parents not to intervene to make a straight baby gay, or a gay baby straight (I consider the two situations to be morally equivalent), or to have any intervention for non-medical reasons. Too much can go wrong.
There’s no “bright line”. Parents, for very good reasons, are allowed considerable latitude in upbringing after birth. Probably too much, but where to draw the line? I don’t know. I don’t possess the surety, the arrogance, to say that one size will fit all. I can say “female genital mutilation is wrong”, based on really good evidence. Same for Intersex genital mutilation. Circumcision I’m against based solely on the rate of complications, including child mortality, but when it’s an integral part of religious practice that will be performed regardless of legality, not making it illegal probably does the least harm.
Do I hope that my son is straight rather than gay? Yes. But regardless, I want him to be a decent human being, and happy. If that requires that he has a boyfriend not a girlfriend, so be it, it’s not a big issue to me compared with the rest.
I would like grandchildren, but that’s not my decision to make, is it?
Zoe, thanks for the link. I did see this article before.
The following is somewhat off-topic from Dr. Kaye … but, not so much. Intrauterine development and science.
My own opinion, after much reflection …
1. Most parents, maybe more than most, do not want a child that is gay. Is that hyperbole on my part? Perhaps.
2. Intrauterine ‘markers’ are found that prove to be very strongly associated with homosexuality.
3. What do said parents do upon being told the ‘bad’ news?
4. Abort
5. Or, science has shown a way … not unlike, Dr. Maria New’s ‘medical help’. Intrauterine chemotherapy, targeted at the right time, shown to be safe (?) to mother and child, delivers a str8 baby.
6. Bio-ethics lagging far behind scientific discoveries … stands mute.
7. Faith beliefs step in the breach … abortion not an option for some … but, how will the conservative, Christian churches respond?
Liberty and Justice for all … does that include the developing baby? What will “speaking the truth in love” look like in these circumstances. Is it more loving to have ‘no baby’ … ‘a str8 baby’ … a gay baby … a baby just the way God made him/her?
How would you respond?
See http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1996453,00.html
Part 1:
Actually, here people are pretty good. No-one’s taught this stuff at school. I’ve been called in by professors of psychology and medicine to give remedial lectures to their students, not in first year, but to third-year and post-grad students, as they weren’t taught it in med school either.
I have an advantage there. They don’t realise that they’re being taught by one of those anomalous cases. So when I drop that piece of information as the tail of the lecture, the sheer shock of that is a “teachable moment”. Like the traditional old Buddhist technique of unexpectedly whacking the student with a stick “and thus they became enlightened”.
I’m sure Warren can tell you more about the mechanism at work there than I can, in a way it induces very mild psychic trauma to make sure the message that has been conveyed immediately before is laid down in permanent memory more strongly.
Anyway, if third year med and psych students at top Universities don’t know this stuff, how can lay people be expected to?
Exactly correct, yes (and keep those compliments coming!). Right now we’re at the stage of determining the limits of our simplifications and categories. Basically, a lot of things we assumed just “were” turn out not to be so clear-cut.
In the past, experiments were performed using subjects as stereotypically male as possible, or stereotypically female as possible. We wanted to highlight any differences that there may or may not have been between them neurologically, so we could determine whether differences existed or not. We didn’t know. So we had to exclude possible sources of noise and uncertainty, and of course that means we were experimenting using an atypical cohort.
Once we found differences – or, in many cases, determined that no differences existed, we could start using cohorts that better matched reality.
Now we’re extending the bounds even further, though there’s still a lot we don’t know. We get tantalising hints suggesting directions of future research, but it’s likely many of these are false trails because sample sizes are too small.
Here’s an example of one such, quite possibly false, trail:
One person we studied had untreated male gender dysphoria (S7), took no hormones and kept his transsexual feelings under wraps. He appeared to have a large INAH3 volume – in the male range – but a female INAH3 number of neurons (68) and a female BSTc somatostatin neuron number (95). Hence, this individual’s hypothalamic characteristics were mid-way between male and female values
That’s from Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation D.Swaab & A.Garcia-Fulgaras Functional Neurology, Jan-Mar 2009:
Here’s another, showing that things are not so clear-cut as we’d thought they might be:
We analyzed MRI data of 24 male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals not yet treated with cross-sex hormones in order to determine whether gray matter volumes in MTF transsexuals more closely resemble people who share their biological sex (30 control men), or people who share their gender identity (30 control women). Results revealed that regional gray matter variation in MTF transsexuals is more similar to the pattern found in men than in women. However, MTF transsexuals show a significantly larger volume of regional gray matter in the right putamen compared to men. These findings provide new evidence that transsexualism is associated with distinct cerebral pattern, which supports the assumption that brain anatomy plays a role in gender identity.
From Regional gray matter variation in male-to-female transsexualism. by Luders et al Neuroimage. 2009 Jul 15;46(4):904-7.
Finally, another one showing that things aren’t as neat as we might expect, but that we’re now studying subtle, rather than gross differences:
This study investigated the functional brain organization of 68 male-to-female (MtF) transwomen and 26 female-to-male (FtM) transmen by comparing their performance with 36 typical male and 28 typical female controls on two indicators of cerebral lateralization: dichotic listening and handedness. A sex-differentiating dichotic test and a handedness questionnaire were administered. It was hypothesized that the MtF participants’ dichotic performance would be significantly different from the control males and resemble the control female pattern. This hypothesis was supported. It was also hypothesized that the FtM dichotic pattern would be significantly different from the control females and would resemble the control male pattern. This hypothesis was not supported. Finally, it was hypothesized that there would be significantly more nonexclusive right-handers in both trans-groups. This hypothesis was supported. Taken together, the dichotic and handedness data reported here indicate that the MtF and FtM conditions are not mirror images in terms of the verbal-auditory aspects of their brain organization and neurobiology plays an important role, particularly in the development of the male-to-female trans-condition.
From Dichotic Listening, Handedness, Brain Organization and Transsexuality Govier et al International Journal of Transgenderism, 12:144–154, 2010
Actually, here people are pretty good. No-one’s taught this stuff at school. I’ve been called in by professors of psychology and medicine to give remedial lectures to their students, not in first year, but to third-year and post-grad students, as they weren’t taught it in med school either.
I have an advantage there. They don’t realise that they’re being taught by one of those anomalous cases. So when I drop that piece of information as the tail of the lecture, the sheer shock of that is a “teachable moment”. Like the traditional old Buddhist technique of unexpectedly whacking the student with a stick “and thus they became enlightened”.
I’m sure Warren can tell you more about the mechanism at work there than I can, in a way it induces very mild psychic trauma to make sure the message that has been conveyed immediately before is laid down in permanent memory more strongly.
Anyway, if third year med and psych students at top Universities don’t know this stuff, how can lay people be expected to?
Exactly correct, yes (and keep those compliments coming!). Right now we’re at the stage of determining the limits of our simplifications and categories. Basically, a lot of things we assumed just “were” turn out not to be so clear-cut.
In the past, experiments were performed using subjects as stereotypically male as possible, or stereotypically female as possible. We wanted to highlight any differences that there may or may not have been between them neurologically, so we could determine whether differences existed or not. We didn’t know. So we had to exclude possible sources of noise and uncertainty, and of course that means we were experimenting using an atypical cohort.
Once we found differences – or, in many cases, determined that no differences existed, we could start using cohorts that better matched reality.
Now we’re extending the bounds even further, though there’s still a lot we don’t know. We get tantalising hints suggesting directions of future research, but it’s likely many of these are false trails because sample sizes are too small.
Here’s an example of one such, quite possibly false, trail:
One person we studied had untreated male gender dysphoria (S7), took no hormones and kept his transsexual feelings under wraps. He appeared to have a large INAH3 volume – in the male range – but a female INAH3 number of neurons (68) and a female BSTc somatostatin neuron number (95). Hence, this individual’s hypothalamic characteristics were mid-way between male and female values
That’s from Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation D.Swaab & A.Garcia-Fulgaras Functional Neurology, Jan-Mar 2009:
Here’s another, showing that things are not so clear-cut as we’d thought they might be:
We analyzed MRI data of 24 male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals not yet treated with cross-sex hormones in order to determine whether gray matter volumes in MTF transsexuals more closely resemble people who share their biological sex (30 control men), or people who share their gender identity (30 control women). Results revealed that regional gray matter variation in MTF transsexuals is more similar to the pattern found in men than in women. However, MTF transsexuals show a significantly larger volume of regional gray matter in the right putamen compared to men. These findings provide new evidence that transsexualism is associated with distinct cerebral pattern, which supports the assumption that brain anatomy plays a role in gender identity.
From Regional gray matter variation in male-to-female transsexualism. by Luders et al Neuroimage. 2009 Jul 15;46(4):904-7.
Finally, another one showing that things aren’t as neat as we might expect, but that we’re now studying subtle, rather than gross differences:
This study investigated the functional brain organization of 68 male-to-female (MtF) transwomen and 26 female-to-male (FtM) transmen by comparing their performance with 36 typical male and 28 typical female controls on two indicators of cerebral lateralization: dichotic listening and handedness. A sex-differentiating dichotic test and a handedness questionnaire were administered. It was hypothesized that the MtF participants’ dichotic performance would be significantly different from the control males and resemble the control female pattern. This hypothesis was supported. It was also hypothesized that the FtM dichotic pattern would be significantly different from the control females and would resemble the control male pattern. This hypothesis was not supported. Finally, it was hypothesized that there would be significantly more nonexclusive right-handers in both trans-groups. This hypothesis was supported. Taken together, the dichotic and handedness data reported here indicate that the MtF and FtM conditions are not mirror images in terms of the verbal-auditory aspects of their brain organization and neurobiology plays an important role, particularly in the development of the male-to-female trans-condition.
From Dichotic Listening, Handedness, Brain Organization and Transsexuality Govier et al International Journal of Transgenderism, 12:144–154, 2010
If you’re talking about sexual orientation, “who am I attracted to” as opposed to “what sex am I”, while there’s lots of evidence of biological causation in the extremes, there’s also a lot of fuzz and uncertainty outside those areas.
When we have people writing articles titled Straight, Gay or Lying? denying that bixuality exists, then we have a problem. I’ll quote from that article:
Far more nature than nurture – but the boundary between Straight and Gay isn’t a sharp one, and the boundary between Lesbian and Straight is a huge area, possibly bigger than either of those extremes.
Absolutely yes. Also left-handedness, senses of smell and hearing, and a lot of other neurologically determined characteristics, some of which are sexuaolly dimorphic, others merely characteristic of atypical neurological development in general.
I’m with Dr Milton Diamond on this one, about whom I have said in the past “He is to the science of sex and gender what Albert Einstein was to Physics.”
Naturally occurring variations, like colour-blindness, left-handedness, or having red hair. Some of which are genetic, some not, but all congenital.
Regarding interuterine tampering – that’s two issues, one of morality, one of science. Scientifically, we can’t at the moment monitor the hormonal environment in the womb without damaging the foetus. So experiments involving humans can’t be done, and even on animals requires an ethics panel to review them.
However, when there’s a genetic cause, because we can analyse the genes of the parents… see below.
Morally, the question of intervention (assuming we could do it) is a subset of the general case of “designer babies”. I can only give you my personal feelings here, and that is to intervene when not intervening would definitely cause harm (e.g 2 copies of the gene causing Tays-Sachs syndrome), not to intervene where intervening would definitely cause harm, and in other circumstances “it’s beyond my pay grade”.
Example – is it moral to increase a child’s IQ from seriously subnormal levels to normal ones, at the cost of a 10% increased risk of developing schizophrenia?
What about from normal to genius? What about taking a potential genius and decreasing the IQ to developmentally subnormal to decrease the probability of schizophrenia?
Now for one actual example of intervention that happened recently. Female children with 2 copies of a gene that causes CAH will have masculinised genitalia, and will very likely be lesbian, and if not lesbian, bisexual.
Such effects can be removed by administration of a particular drug pre-natally. However…. this drug marginally decreases IQ, and also causes some heart problems in some patients. Moreover, at the time this drug has to be administered to be effective, we can’t know if the foetus has 2 copies, 1 or none, and not even if the child is female or male. Only 1 in 8 such children could get these “benefits” (if benefits they be), but all suffer the ill-effects.
This is not a hypothetical. Such treatment has been offered and accepted by some parents. Better a straight, biddable if not-too-bright child with heart problems, than an intelligent but Intersex lesbian. Even if 7 other children have to suffer.
Zoe, thanks for the link. I did see this article before.
The following is somewhat off-topic from Dr. Kaye … but, not so much. Intrauterine development and science.
My own opinion, after much reflection …
1. Most parents, maybe more than most, do not want a child that is gay. Is that hyperbole on my part? Perhaps.
2. Intrauterine ‘markers’ are found that prove to be very strongly associated with homosexuality.
3. What do said parents do upon being told the ‘bad’ news?
4. Abort
5. Or, science has shown a way … not unlike, Dr. Maria New’s ‘medical help’. Intrauterine chemotherapy, targeted at the right time, shown to be safe (?) to mother and child, delivers a str8 baby.
6. Bio-ethics lagging far behind scientific discoveries … stands mute.
7. Faith beliefs step in the breach … abortion not an option for some … but, how will the conservative, Christian churches respond?
Liberty and Justice for all … does that include the developing baby? What will “speaking the truth in love” look like in these circumstances. Is it more loving to have ‘no baby’ … ‘a str8 baby’ … a gay baby … a baby just the way God made him/her?
How would you respond?
See http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1996453,00.html
Actually, here people are pretty good. No-one’s taught this stuff at school. I’ve been called in by professors of psychology and medicine to give remedial lectures to their students, not in first year, but to third-year and post-grad students, as they weren’t taught it in med school either.
I have an advantage there. They don’t realise that they’re being taught by one of those anomalous cases. So when I drop that piece of information as the tail of the lecture, the sheer shock of that is a “teachable moment”. Like the traditional old Buddhist technique of unexpectedly whacking the student with a stick “and thus they became enlightened”.
I’m sure Warren can tell you more about the mechanism at work there than I can, in a way it induces very mild psychic trauma to make sure the message that has been conveyed immediately before is laid down in permanent memory more strongly.
Anyway, if third year med and psych students at top Universities don’t know this stuff, how can lay people be expected to?
Exactly correct, yes (and keep those compliments coming!). Right now we’re at the stage of determining the limits of our simplifications and categories. Basically, a lot of things we assumed just “were” turn out not to be so clear-cut.
In the past, experiments were performed using subjects as stereotypically male as possible, or stereotypically female as possible. We wanted to highlight any differences that there may or may not have been between them neurologically, so we could determine whether differences existed or not. We didn’t know. So we had to exclude possible sources of noise and uncertainty, and of course that means we were experimenting using an atypical cohort.
Once we found differences – or, in many cases, determined that no differences existed, we could start using cohorts that better matched reality.
Now we’re extending the bounds even further, though there’s still a lot we don’t know. We get tantalising hints suggesting directions of future research, but it’s likely many of these are false trails because sample sizes are too small.
Here’s an example of one such, quite possibly false, trail:
One person we studied had untreated male gender dysphoria (S7), took no hormones and kept his transsexual feelings under wraps. He appeared to have a large INAH3 volume – in the male range – but a female INAH3 number of neurons (68) and a female BSTc somatostatin neuron number (95). Hence, this individual’s hypothalamic characteristics were mid-way between male and female values
That’s from Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation D.Swaab & A.Garcia-Fulgaras Functional Neurology, Jan-Mar 2009:
Here’s another, showing that things are not so clear-cut as we’d thought they might be:
We analyzed MRI data of 24 male-to-female (MTF) transsexuals not yet treated with cross-sex hormones in order to determine whether gray matter volumes in MTF transsexuals more closely resemble people who share their biological sex (30 control men), or people who share their gender identity (30 control women). Results revealed that regional gray matter variation in MTF transsexuals is more similar to the pattern found in men than in women. However, MTF transsexuals show a significantly larger volume of regional gray matter in the right putamen compared to men. These findings provide new evidence that transsexualism is associated with distinct cerebral pattern, which supports the assumption that brain anatomy plays a role in gender identity.
From Regional gray matter variation in male-to-female transsexualism. by Luders et al Neuroimage. 2009 Jul 15;46(4):904-7.
Finally, another one showing that things aren’t as neat as we might expect, but that we’re now studying subtle, rather than gross differences:
This study investigated the functional brain organization of 68 male-to-female (MtF) transwomen and 26 female-to-male (FtM) transmen by comparing their performance with 36 typical male and 28 typical female controls on two indicators of cerebral lateralization: dichotic listening and handedness. A sex-differentiating dichotic test and a handedness questionnaire were administered. It was hypothesized that the MtF participants’ dichotic performance would be significantly different from the control males and resemble the control female pattern. This hypothesis was supported. It was also hypothesized that the FtM dichotic pattern would be significantly different from the control females and would resemble the control male pattern. This hypothesis was not supported. Finally, it was hypothesized that there would be significantly more nonexclusive right-handers in both trans-groups. This hypothesis was supported. Taken together, the dichotic and handedness data reported here indicate that the MtF and FtM conditions are not mirror images in terms of the verbal-auditory aspects of their brain organization and neurobiology plays an important role, particularly in the development of the male-to-female trans-condition.
From Dichotic Listening, Handedness, Brain Organization and Transsexuality Govier et al International Journal of Transgenderism, 12:144–154, 2010
If you’re talking about sexual orientation, “who am I attracted to” as opposed to “what sex am I”, while there’s lots of evidence of biological causation in the extremes, there’s also a lot of fuzz and uncertainty outside those areas.
When we have people writing articles titled Straight, Gay or Lying? denying that bixuality exists, then we have a problem. I’ll quote from that article:
Far more nature than nurture – but the boundary between Straight and Gay isn’t a sharp one, and the boundary between Lesbian and Straight is a huge area, possibly bigger than either of those extremes.
Absolutely yes. Also left-handedness, senses of smell and hearing, and a lot of other neurologically determined characteristics, some of which are sexuaolly dimorphic, others merely characteristic of atypical neurological development in general.
I’m with Dr Milton Diamond on this one, about whom I have said in the past “He is to the science of sex and gender what Albert Einstein was to Physics.”
Naturally occurring variations, like colour-blindness, left-handedness, or having red hair. Some of which are genetic, some not, but all congenital.
Regarding interuterine tampering – that’s two issues, one of morality, one of science. Scientifically, we can’t at the moment monitor the hormonal environment in the womb without damaging the foetus. So experiments involving humans can’t be done, and even on animals requires an ethics panel to review them.
However, when there’s a genetic cause, because we can analyse the genes of the parents… see below.
Morally, the question of intervention (assuming we could do it) is a subset of the general case of “designer babies”. I can only give you my personal feelings here, and that is to intervene when not intervening would definitely cause harm (e.g 2 copies of the gene causing Tays-Sachs syndrome), not to intervene where intervening would definitely cause harm, and in other circumstances “it’s beyond my pay grade”.
Example – is it moral to increase a child’s IQ from seriously subnormal levels to normal ones, at the cost of a 10% increased risk of developing schizophrenia?
What about from normal to genius? What about taking a potential genius and decreasing the IQ to developmentally subnormal to decrease the probability of schizophrenia?
Now for one actual example of intervention that happened recently. Female children with 2 copies of a gene that causes CAH will have masculinised genitalia, and will very likely be lesbian, and if not lesbian, bisexual.
Such effects can be removed by administration of a particular drug pre-natally. However…. this drug marginally decreases IQ, and also causes some heart problems in some patients. Moreover, at the time this drug has to be administered to be effective, we can’t know if the foetus has 2 copies, 1 or none, and not even if the child is female or male. Only 1 in 8 such children could get these “benefits” (if benefits they be), but all suffer the ill-effects.
This is not a hypothetical. Such treatment has been offered and accepted by some parents. Better a straight, biddable if not-too-bright child with heart problems, than an intelligent but Intersex lesbian. Even if 7 other children have to suffer.
Zoe =
StraightGrandmother= True very true. I like to say, “So late smart…”
Zoe =
StraightGrandmother= True very true. I like to say, “So late smart…”
Warren,
Now you are seeing the larger picture…thank you for your ongoing curiosity.
Zoe, it must be frustrating for yourself, personally, in your humanity; as well, as frustrating to you as a scientist (rocket science, is it??) to watch many of us stumble about with notions that seem to be ‘flat earth’ notions.
Reading your Comments, which as an aside are always a joy to read … on many levels, semantically, grammatically, content … you seem to be saying that the fields of biology, physiology, micro-biology are making serious strides in observing (maybe understanding) some ‘sexual’ developmental processes. Is that correct?
Setting aside your biases as much as possible, what is your opinion, from all you’ve read and studied, as to the foundations of sexuality? Particularly, do you think, homosexuality lies more in the nature sphere, rather than the nuture area? More particularly, is there any value to associating homosexuality with autism, or the like, developmentally? Specifically, do you, personally, see these as naturally occurring variations … or, as others would see them, biological variants to be fixed … say, intrauterine tampering?
Patrocles, perhaps, you know Dr. Kaye personally; and, have observed from your personal observation and interaction with him … that he’s the kind of guy who always goes for the popular and fashionable.
Anyhow, I suspect Dr. Kaye is in the late Autumn or Early Winter of his life. I don’t know him; and, have no idea how old he is. I simply arrived at my conjecture based on the release of the study. That’s why I asked Warren how old he is.
I happen to think aging is useful, insofar as we hopefully grow in wisdom. Grey hairs should bring with them a humbler point of view about life: we tend to realize that we’re not the center of the universe, and our dearly held beliefs may not be so ‘right’ after all. At least, that’s seems to be my personal experience.
My biases may preclude me from reaching a different conclusion; but, my first reaction to reading Warren’s interchange with Dr. Kaye, was … Wow. A man who’s spent a career; a good part of a lifetime; a man with a lot of experience, personal experience working with homosexuals; a man, who in my estimation, would jump at the opportunity to have it all wrapped up with buttons and bows as to the etiology of homosexuality … this Doctor has the humility to say, he has no idea what causes homosexuality.
If that strikes others as going with the popular and fashionable, then so be it. Perhaps, they’re right. I find, however, as I get older, that imputing a kinder, better motive to others words and actions alters everything for the good. I wish others to do that to me.
It can. The evidence is pretty solid there, though of course since biology is fuzzy and messy, the differences are only statistically significant, there’s overlap, and while most androphiles may be pattern (A) on one area, (b) in another, with gynophiles (B) and (a) respectively, some will be A/a, some B/b, or even A/z.
That is another matter entirely. In fact we can show that such areas do alter after birth, during the process of puberty. However… the pattern they alter to appears to be pre-destined, due to pre-natal environment.
Let’s leave aside for the moment sexual orientation – because I’m not entirely sure how that should be measured. It’s fine when the target of attraction is stereotypically male in both sex and gender, but what if they’re not? What if they’re as biologically anomalous as I am? I know I tend to attract mildly bisexual men the most, then straight ones, with gays turned off completely. But those categories themselves are problematic – what clues are observed to determine my sex?. I know what sex I am – but how do other people? Anyway, let’s just look at Gender Identity.
The “gold standard” is the BSTc layer of the hypothalamus. That’s strongly sexually dimorphic. Both gay and straight men strongly tend to have one pattern, both lesbian and straight women another, with little overlap. This is not affected by post-natal endocrine anomalies, such as HRT to treat cancer, or other conditions leading to a cross-sexed endocrine balance.
We can also observe cross-sexed behaviour in children before adolescence, and if it persists into adolescence, they’re transsexual, no exceptions that we’ve detected so far.
One problem: the sexual differentiation of the BSTc layer only happen at puberty. Before then, there’s no observable difference. This cannot be causal, it must be symptomatic.
What causes this pre-destined pattern to emerge, regardless of hormonal environment? How do the very cells in this structure get pre-programmed to develop in a certain way? They do, we can observe that – we just don’t know the mechanism.
I mustn’t universalise from my own experience, but any theory has to account, if only as a rare pathway, for my own situation. Cogito Ergo Sum – my existence must be possible, however unlikely, and while others can’t be certain of what I perceive to be my feelings, I can.
Warren,
Now you are seeing the larger picture…thank you for your ongoing curiosity.
There are to ways of thinking about intrauterine events.
First possibility: Intrauterine events have an influence on the person’s masculinity or femininity. But that doesn’t give us a clue for sexual orientation – or only, if we maintain that all gay men were equally feminine and all lesbian women were equally masculine. (And we have to maintain that a persons’ degree of masculinity/feminity can’t be influenced after their birth – which is an interesting idea, but extremely questionable.)
Second possibility: A particular intrauterine event has an influence just at the moment when that part of the brain is formed which decides on the person’s sexual orientation. But that implies that sexual orientation can be observed in the brain, and even in a part of the brain which is unalterable after birth.
Dr. Kaye seems to be the kind of guy who always goes for the popular and fashionable. In the sixties, blaming parents was fashionable. Nowadays “intrauterine events” are fashionable.
But in the sixties there were at least studies which drafted a model in which way parents influenced sexual orientation – a model which was plausible in itself, even if not proved against strong objections.
This intrauterine thing has not even arrived at that point.
Zoe, it must be frustrating for yourself, personally, in your humanity; as well, as frustrating to you as a scientist (rocket science, is it??) to watch many of us stumble about with notions that seem to be ‘flat earth’ notions.
Reading your Comments, which as an aside are always a joy to read … on many levels, semantically, grammatically, content … you seem to be saying that the fields of biology, physiology, micro-biology are making serious strides in observing (maybe understanding) some ‘sexual’ developmental processes. Is that correct?
Setting aside your biases as much as possible, what is your opinion, from all you’ve read and studied, as to the foundations of sexuality? Particularly, do you think, homosexuality lies more in the nature sphere, rather than the nuture area? More particularly, is there any value to associating homosexuality with autism, or the like, developmentally? Specifically, do you, personally, see these as naturally occurring variations … or, as others would see them, biological variants to be fixed … say, intrauterine tampering?
Patrocles, perhaps, you know Dr. Kaye personally; and, have observed from your personal observation and interaction with him … that he’s the kind of guy who always goes for the popular and fashionable.
Anyhow, I suspect Dr. Kaye is in the late Autumn or Early Winter of his life. I don’t know him; and, have no idea how old he is. I simply arrived at my conjecture based on the release of the study. That’s why I asked Warren how old he is.
I happen to think aging is useful, insofar as we hopefully grow in wisdom. Grey hairs should bring with them a humbler point of view about life: we tend to realize that we’re not the center of the universe, and our dearly held beliefs may not be so ‘right’ after all. At least, that’s seems to be my personal experience.
My biases may preclude me from reaching a different conclusion; but, my first reaction to reading Warren’s interchange with Dr. Kaye, was … Wow. A man who’s spent a career; a good part of a lifetime; a man with a lot of experience, personal experience working with homosexuals; a man, who in my estimation, would jump at the opportunity to have it all wrapped up with buttons and bows as to the etiology of homosexuality … this Doctor has the humility to say, he has no idea what causes homosexuality.
If that strikes others as going with the popular and fashionable, then so be it. Perhaps, they’re right. I find, however, as I get older, that imputing a kinder, better motive to others words and actions alters everything for the good. I wish others to do that to me.
It can. The evidence is pretty solid there, though of course since biology is fuzzy and messy, the differences are only statistically significant, there’s overlap, and while most androphiles may be pattern (A) on one area, (b) in another, with gynophiles (B) and (a) respectively, some will be A/a, some B/b, or even A/z.
That is another matter entirely. In fact we can show that such areas do alter after birth, during the process of puberty. However… the pattern they alter to appears to be pre-destined, due to pre-natal environment.
Let’s leave aside for the moment sexual orientation – because I’m not entirely sure how that should be measured. It’s fine when the target of attraction is stereotypically male in both sex and gender, but what if they’re not? What if they’re as biologically anomalous as I am? I know I tend to attract mildly bisexual men the most, then straight ones, with gays turned off completely. But those categories themselves are problematic – what clues are observed to determine my sex?. I know what sex I am – but how do other people? Anyway, let’s just look at Gender Identity.
The “gold standard” is the BSTc layer of the hypothalamus. That’s strongly sexually dimorphic. Both gay and straight men strongly tend to have one pattern, both lesbian and straight women another, with little overlap. This is not affected by post-natal endocrine anomalies, such as HRT to treat cancer, or other conditions leading to a cross-sexed endocrine balance.
We can also observe cross-sexed behaviour in children before adolescence, and if it persists into adolescence, they’re transsexual, no exceptions that we’ve detected so far.
One problem: the sexual differentiation of the BSTc layer only happen at puberty. Before then, there’s no observable difference. This cannot be causal, it must be symptomatic.
What causes this pre-destined pattern to emerge, regardless of hormonal environment? How do the very cells in this structure get pre-programmed to develop in a certain way? They do, we can observe that – we just don’t know the mechanism.
I mustn’t universalise from my own experience, but any theory has to account, if only as a rare pathway, for my own situation. Cogito Ergo Sum – my existence must be possible, however unlikely, and while others can’t be certain of what I perceive to be my feelings, I can.
There are to ways of thinking about intrauterine events.
First possibility: Intrauterine events have an influence on the person’s masculinity or femininity. But that doesn’t give us a clue for sexual orientation – or only, if we maintain that all gay men were equally feminine and all lesbian women were equally masculine. (And we have to maintain that a persons’ degree of masculinity/feminity can’t be influenced after their birth – which is an interesting idea, but extremely questionable.)
Second possibility: A particular intrauterine event has an influence just at the moment when that part of the brain is formed which decides on the person’s sexual orientation. But that implies that sexual orientation can be observed in the brain, and even in a part of the brain which is unalterable after birth.
Warren, in the Dark Age of Psychiatry, it was the norm. Drapetomania. Hysteria.
Psychonanalysis was never evidence-based. We knew it did some good, in a minority of situations, sometimes. Well, we thought so, no-one ever actually checked, this belief was based on singleton case-studies, not double-blind experiments with controls.
Here’s McHugh on the subject of Transsexuality:
It’s difficult to see how anyone could be unaware of a history 50 years long to find an environmental, rather than biological, cause. And the death-toll from failed “talking cures” along the way is staggering.
Ideology drives a belief, and facts that contradict that belief have to be ignored in order to maintain ideological purity. I find McHugh’s words to be a classic case of projection. One thing though – in the 60’s, there really was a “:follow your own bliss” Zeitgeist. He had evidence for his original beliefs. But that article was written in 1992. 19 years later, he’s still of his original belief, he’s learnt nothing since then.
I hope I never let my ideas become ossified like that.
That’s something I have to be careful of too. We all do.
It’s a trap for those with highly developed senses of morality: we see what we think should be, rather than what’s actually there.
I think the best we can do is try to guard against it, and to be prepared to change our minds when exposed to new evidence. There has to be some hysteresis, some resistance, but not very much.
I’ve taken a very firm stand on the biological basis of gender identity. Far firmer than most (a danger sign). I’ve tried my hardest to post what articles and evidence I can find refuting or limiting my position, and indeed have changed my opinions on the boundaries of what we know, always on the side of less clearly defined categories. Yet the mountain of evidence suggesting my analysis is accurate grows higher at an accelerating rate. I may still be out in Left Field, but at least now I’m well within the accepted ballpark.
Sexual orientation is another matter; my opinions there are nowhere near as well-formed. I’m not even sure what “sexual orientation” means – what characteristics define androphilia from gynephilia. Are we dealing with sex characteristics or gender characteristics, or both? How much is a matter of biology – instinctive recognition of someone else’s sex based on appearance, texture, smell, taste, (behaviour?) and how much is socially conditioned?
So much I don’t know. So many over-simplifications that can impede understanding. So much I “know” that’s quite probably wrong.
I can easily imagine Dr Zucker (who I think is deeply mistaken) having similar thoughts. But Nicolosi? Not so much.