Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven
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| Sunny Days in Heaven Spiritual/Political/Philosophical Blog on the Nature of Truth and Falsehood and Heaven |
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Sunday, June 02, 2002 Not Gene nor Bruce I once read about a study which hypothesized that homosexuality was caused by an imbalance of hormones in the womb. Too much testosterone and female rats were homosexual. Too much estrogen and male rats were homosexual. I've never seen any follow up studies to this one I read about. One interesting aspect of this if it happened to be determinative is that it would make homosexuality curable (perhaps) by monitoring hormone levels and compensating for imbalances with some type of therapy. No parent except a twisted one has ever wished their child to be born a homosexual, and so it is a condition that would be wiped out (or made extremely rare) by advanced societies. What would advocates do then? Proclaim a war on medical technology that would make homosexuality extinct? If I did some googling, I wonder if I could find reference to any such study as I recall reading?] Furthermore A little research reveals this article saying: Prenatal hormone exposure also has effeminizing or emasculating effects on rats. In one study ( 5 ), adult male rats displayed lordosis (the typically female act of submitting to being mounted) if they had been castrated at birth and perinatally injected with estrogen ( see figure 3 ). These rats' chemical make-ups therefore differed from normal male rats in two ways. First, they were deprived of the appropriate amount of testosterone which would have normally been produced in their testes during infancy. Secondly, the amount of estrogen (a primary female sex organ) which the rats were given would not have come close to the amount of estrogen naturally produced in male rats. "Normal male rats displayed normal mounting behaviors as adults, regardless of whether or not estrogen was administered. The male rats which produced testosterone appeared to be "immune" to the estrogen injected into their systems. Only the castrated rats (whose bodies had no testosterone) were affected by the estrogen. Thus, one can deduce that the presence of sex hormones appears to determine certain sexual behaviors in rats, particularly in relation to mounting or attempting to be mounted. " "The research team of Vom Saal, Grant, McMullen and Laves ( 10 ) offers another potential cause whose basis is also rooted in prenatal hormones. Fetal female rats were seen to have higher levels of testosterone if they had been situated between two male embryos in utero . The reception of testosterone from adjacent brothers was enough "to alter (a female rat's) behavioral phenotype"( 10 )." This article - Why Am I Gay? - is a more accessible compendium of various theories, research, and animal behaviors on the subject. posted by Mark Butterworth | 2:43 AM | |
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