GCN.ie

28 Jul 2008

August column - All in the genes?

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The papers have been full of a study in Sweden which has shown that lesbians have brains like straight men, and gay men have brains like straight women.  It would have been more interesting if they’d compared the brains of a few straight women and men against a huge sample of lesbians and gay men, but there you go – ever the deviants, we are the ones people want to find out about. The nature of straight men and women is taken for granted.

It’s not surprising that this has made headlines. This is a highly political finding, as it is supposed to show that sexual orientation is innate, which means that the Iris Robinsons of this world are on a hiding to nothing when they say we can be cured of our ‘vile and disgusting’ ways.

I suppose that sexual orientation must have a genetic component – everything else seems to. Indeed, another piece of research publicised recently seems to explain how gayness has persisted down the millennia, despite the persecution and the burnings and Christian fundamentalists trying to cure you of it: a gene for gayness seem to be linked to a gene for increased fertility in women. 

But I can’t help feeling it has to be a lot more complicated than the Swedish study makes out. What this tiny study indicated was that straight men and lesbians both have the right hemispheres of their brain larger than the left, whereas both hemispheres of straight women and gay men are the same size.  But what might this mean?

It is generally accepted that the right side of the brain controls spatial awareness and the left side controls speech, and also that men generally tend to be better at the spatial thing and women at the verbal stuff. Of course, the increased size of the right hemisphere in straight men/lesbians might have nothing to so with spatial awareness, and no doubt I’m being a bit reductive here, but tell me this: if having a larger right brain does mean you have strong spatial awareness, why would you ever let a gay man or straight woman cut your hair or decorate your house?

Also, you can’t help wondering, might it only mean that better spatial awareness might lead to an increase in right hemisphere size, whereas better verbal ability leaves no trace? Might the increase in right hemisphere size be explained by practice in later life? Do we become good at spatial awareness because we tend to have certain roles thrust upon us, or do we take on those roles because we’re innately good at them? And what does it matter anyway, if all we do all day is sit at computers which check our spelling and ensure that our lines are straight?

Nevertheless, I’m sure that something as recalcitrant as same-sex orientation (which by the nature of things you would expect to be bred or beaten out of a population) is likely to have some sort of complex genetic component. This is supported by the finding that there were differences between straight men/lesbians as opposed to gay men/straight women in the bit of the brain called the amygdala, as the amygdala does not seem to be affected by learning or experience.

But what do these differences really mean? Moving beyond the stereotypes, do we really think that lesbians are ‘like’ straight men and gay men ‘like’ straight women? We do not. Take sex, for example: naturally, I don’t have wide experience of gay men’s sexuality, but from beady observation, and generalising wildly, it strikes me as being like straight men’s sexuality, only in spades. Ditto with the girls.

But you also have to factor in things like youth, hormone levels and cultural expectation, whereupon you might find that hard-drinking ladettes would approximate to the male stereotype and a comfortable old gay male couple the female one.  Playing away, for example, has never been sex-specific, as DNA testing of the younger children in families has proved. It was just harder for women to get away with it.

Even the terms ‘gay’ and ‘straight’ are not precise. Come on, lads, how many supposedly straight people have you done it with?  Besides, sexual behaviour is a lot more complicated than whom you’re sexually attracted to. How does this supposed pattern fit with butch/bitch, butch/femme, top/bottom? On those rare occasions that we talk really openly about sex (which even among those who talk about it all the time remains a highly secretive discourse) it becomes clear that, in what really matters to you sexually, you may have much more in common with someone of a different gender or sexual orientation than one of your own.

I want to see more research on what people feel sex is like, to illuminate the genetic findings. Sex is obviously essential for the continuation of the species, as homophobes never tire of telling us, as if we didn’t produce children as well. But, paradoxically, it is often so socially disruptive that great tragedies have been written about it. It brings us close to god, but it’s also wickedly unruly. Now, that’s that’s what I think is really interesting.