You have been properly ‘cited’ in the ‘correction’. Good.

One of my sisters-in law is a twin – her orientation is completely straight and her fraternal twin sister’s orientation is gay. Since they have the same father who could have passed on the epi mark that was not erased, wouldn’t both babies be affected in the womb or would that be applied to identical twins only?

Perhaps we should ‘take seriously’ GI, before seeking to ‘categorize’ SO? I don’t know (I’m just ‘thinking aloud’).

I vaguely wonder if epigenetics could explain the difficult to diagnose expression of my pernicious anemia. Talk about a kick in the head… At least I’m not going weirdly blind anymore.

What hear you about the UCLA epigenetic study?

“Rice’s model still needs to be tested on real-life parent-offspring pairs, but he says this epigenetic link makes more sense than any other explanation, and that his team has mapped out a way for other scientists to test their work.

” ‘We’ve found a story that looks really good,,’ he says. ‘There’s more verification needed, but we point out how we can easily do epigenetic profiles genome-wide. We predict where the epi-marks occur, we just need other studies to look at it empirically. This can be tested and proven within six months. It’s easy to test. If it’s a bad idea, we can throw it away in short order.’ ”

Now we’ll see if there are any takers out there . Hey, 6 months? Why not?

Cool!

Something that probably does need a ‘closer look’ is the relationship between GI and SO. One of my closest friends is a transgendered woman and the sense from my many conversation with her is that they really are almost entirely separate matters. There’s also a problem with ‘categories’: she’s a transgendered woman who is attracted to women. What does that make her? Heterosexual? Lesbian? What?

If GI and SO were the same, Lesbian Transwomen and Gay Transmen would not exist. They do, in significant numbers. Therefore GI and SO are different.

Terminology is a problem, a big one. I regard anyone not floridly psychotic who self-identifies as female as a woman, regardless of other circumstances.

That’s regardless of whether she was :

The “standard factory model” – XX chromosomes, female genitalia, assigned female at birth.

An XY woman :XY chromosomes, female genitalia, assigned female at birth.

An Intersex XX woman: XX chromosomes, ambiguous genitalia, assigned male at birth

A Trans woman : Usually XY, sometimes XXY, rarely XX, male or mostly male genitalia, assigned male at birth;

And many, many other possible combinations.

Otherwise we have absurdities such as “transvestite homosexual men” who are gynephillic and do not cross-dress, just because they identify as women – and have neuro-anatomy, and often other anatomy, to match.

If GI and SO were wholly unconnected, due to societal pressures, then the number of Gay and Lesbian Trans people would reasonably be expected to be larger than the number of Straight ones. They’re not. So there is some correlation, just a weak one.

If we posit that different parts of the brain determine GI and SO, and that feminisation or mascuinisation of GI due to hormonal environment in the womb strongly biases the odds of the same feminisation or masculinisation of SO, but that feminisation/masculinisation of SO only weakly biases the odds of feminisation/masculinisation of GI, then we get similar numbers to what is observed.

We’d expect to observe both Stone Butch lesbians, and Lipstick lesbians, Twinks and Bears, in both cisgendered (ie not transgendered) and transgendered populations.

The difficulties with determining SO are twofold:

1) Nearly everyone’s SO changes. It goes from Asexual to Androphillic, Gynephillic, or both to a greater or lesser degree, at puberty. So what is established before birth is a potential, apparently an unchangeable one, that is activated by a hormonal flood at puberty.

GI on the other hand, though it might crystallise late or not at all in boundary cases, is usually evidenced long before puberty, as early as age 2 in unusually strongly gendered cases, usually around age 5-6, nearly always by age 10.

An “effeminate boy” is likely to be Androphillic after puberty, but Gender Identity may well crystallise as male. A “tomboy” has a slightly higher chance of being Gynephillic, but Gender Identity is likely to crystallise as female.That’s regardless of whether either are brought up as male or female, that will only have an effect in boundary cases.

2) The other problem is how do we determine if others are male or female? Is our SO dependant on pheremones, appearance, observation of behaviour and body language, socially-determined cues such as dress?

I don’t consider a man who is attracted to another male that is a very convincing “drag queen”, mimicking female mannerisms, dress, behaviour etc to be Androphillic.

Here there are obviously instinctive, hard-wired attractions at work, but equally obvious social factors – high heels, makeup, long hair that are associated with our concepts of sex.