While limp wrists and weak handshakes have long been discounted as homophobic stereotypes,
researchers in Toronto and London have in fact found new correlations
between our hands and our sexual and gender identities. Their studies show that gay men
and transsexuals are more likely to be left-handed than the general population, and
transgender men and women tend to have distinctly ridged fingerprints.
And in April, Berkeley researchers announced another link between fingers and
sexual orientation. They found that lesbians are more likely than straight women to have shorter
index fingers than ring fingers -- a typically masculine trait. Likewise,
men with older brothers are both more likely to be gay and to have
relatively shorter index fingers.
Why? Investigators in all three recent studies suggest that sexual orientation and gender identity are at
least partially formed before birth. Exposure to a higher level of male sex hormones in the womb may
increase the incidence of homosexuality, while affecting fingerprints, finger length,
and hand preference.
All this handwringing over hands and fingers is just the latest blow thrown
in the ongoing "nature vs.
nurture" debate over the origins of homosexuality. Since the early 1990s
scientists like Simon LeVay have studied the anatomical differences
between gay and straight people. Among other things, they have discovered
that gay men's brains differ physically from those of straight men, and
that lesbians' inner ears function somewhat like men's. But scientists
continue to warn against concluding that sexuality is either 100 percent
biological or 100 percent social.
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The controversy
The
Berkeley study
A history of
"nature vs. nurture"
The
Sexual Brain
Queer Science
A
Separate Creation
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