Why Men Don’t Iron: The New Reality of Gender Differences. Anne Moir
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boys because their parents treat them as boys, but because their brains were set into the male pattern in the foetus. More evidence of such hormonal influence is provided by a few cases where pregnant mothers were exposed to atypical hormones during medical treatment, and once again the results are clear. The more testosterone a foetus receives, the more male the behaviour of the subsequent child.53
If this is true then we might expect to see a reverse manifestion – the less testosterone a foetus receives, the more female the behaviour – and such a correlation does exist: 70% of male homosexuals displayed a preference for girl-type play as children.54 The first such signs usually show when the child is a toddler. He will sometimes assert that he is a girl, perhaps favour cross-dressing, and he will frequently prefer the company of girls as playmates to that of boys. Parents frequently try to stop this kind of behaviour and sometimes take such children for psychiatric treatment, and it is from that caseload that most studies of homosexual childhood originate.55 ‘The differences in childhood history between homosexual and heterosexual groups are striking’, but they are also precisely what one might expect if the cause is biological and not societal.
Not only behaviour but also abilities are affected by hormones. Girls who are exposed to male hormones in the womb have better spatial ability than normal girls (spatial ability helps us to park a car in a narrow space). The significance of this finding is that differences in spatial ability are one of the largest measures of difference between the sexes. Boys and men, for example, are much better at judging size and distance than girls and women, and spatial ability translates into all sorts of practical differences. Sense of direction and hand-eye co-ordination are consistently superior in men, which is why a male darts team is consistently better than a female one.
There have been two studies of hand-eye co-ordination that measured how well the subjects could throw a missile and hit a target. The studies discovered that the homosexual’s ability to throw accurately was much poorer than the ability of heterosexual men; in fact homosexual target throwing was like a woman’s.56 Another study, related to neither ability nor behaviour, has shown that homosexuals possess fingerprints of the female pattern.57 Hall and Kimura conclude that these findings are consistent with a biological contribution to sexual orientation and indicate that such an influence may occur early in prenatal life – exactly what our other researches have discovered. An even more recent study found that lesbian women literally hear like men. There is a sex difference in the structure of the inner ear that is under the control of foetal testosterone. Lesbians have the male type of inner ear structure.58
The evidence for the foetal origin of human sexual orientation is indirect, simply because we cannot test the hypothesis by direct experimentation, but it is still overwhelming. Our sexual nature is laid down in the womb. It is possible that there might be some genetic predisposition to homosexuality or to heterosexuality, but it is not necessary to postulate a genetic cause when the hormonal evidence is so compelling. Society does not construct homosexuality, nature does, and it does so at a time when the homosexual has no choice in the matter. Being gay, then, is not a perversion of biology, it is not a conscious lifestyle choice and it is not a disease. It is a natural variation of human sexuality.
We are still a long way from understanding the full causes of homosexuality, though no serious scientist would any longer deny that those causes lie in biology. When it comes to sexual orientation, as with other inherited traits, it is the cumulative effect of evidence from different areas that proves the case. Single studies have their flaws, but the sheer number of studies all indicating the same thing makes it hard to understand why there is still any argument about the proposition that sexual orientation is an inborn biological trait.
At this point the critics will say: ‘Yes that’s right and it is all too complex to unravel. It is impossible to separate the cultural and biological influences.’ They usually then add, ‘And anyway cultural influences are so much stronger, so why bother with those little bits of biology?’ But there is a stability in the gender divide. By that we mean that you do not change your sexual orientation as your social circumstances change (with the exception of the prison example). If cultural influences were stronger than biological ones, then we might expect to see individuals reacting to societal pressures, veering from homosexuality to heterosexuality and back again as their circumstances change, but we do not see it. The only reasonable conclusion is that biological influences are far stronger than cultural pressures, and that an individual’s sexual orientation, be it gay or straight, is unchangeable. For the vast majority of men that pattern is heterosexual, for a small minority it is homosexual, and for most there is no in-between. Straight males do not fear the hidden gayness inside themselves because it simply is not there.
There is a divide between gay and straight; the two are largely distinct, though there is a bisexual minority among the gay category. The studies put the incidence of bisexuality at 3% (of gays), but it is probably far less.59 We also need to clear up another popular misconception here. Some men are hormonally primed to be less competitive and aggressive than other males, but that does not make them gay. We are discussing sexual orientation, not general personality traits. Some gays are every bit as macho and aggressive as the most belligerent heterosexual males, while some straight males have a gentleness and passivity that is often labelled ‘queer’, a confusion that probably arises from Freudian-inspired ‘pop psychology’.
The debate over homosexuality is mired in confusion. Much of it is generated by the gay lobby, with its insistence that gayness is latent in all men, more is generated by those who condemn homosexuality as an aberration, something unnatural, unhealthy and ‘sinful’. That argument can only work if gayness is believed to be socially conditioned and thus ‘correctable’. It used to be thought gayness could be ‘cured’. In the 1950s the American Psychiatric Association declared homosexuality to be a deviant condition that could and should be treated. One, however, might as well try to ‘cure’ blue eyes.
Homosexuality is natural, just as is the aversion that heterosexuals feel for homosexual sex. It is equally natural for gays to resent the aversion, to feel condemned by it, but those with a troubling sexual identity too often generalize from their own state (it is a common failing to generalize from one’s own experience to that of others) and find androgyny to be the biological template. That is a one-sided denial of male sexuality.
Are you bald if you still have one hair on your head? If you have ten? Or ten thousand? Or a hundred thousand? (There can be three hundred thousand hairs on a head.) Here a subtle fallacy nips at the retreating heels of the first. So there is an indeterminate middle? We all have a female template that is variously modified by male hormones, so how can any of us be either all male or all female? We must be both male and female. The fallacy makes the subtle error of arguing that because there is no distinct break between the gradations, then there is no distinction between the extremes, that all is grey. It concludes there is no real difference beween a one-haired man and a man with three hundred thousand hairs. Or between men and women. So they settle on an ‘in between’: neither one thing nor the other … both/and. On the surface this may seem the essence of moderation, yet in truth it is to incorporate the peripheral into the centre. The ‘in between’ is, statistically, nowhere in the middle, but at the far end of the spectrum. And, having reasoned that the exception is the rule, they proceed (like social revolutionaries everywhere) to stamp out difference in the name of moderation, in the name of universal humankind. Thus they elide the critical differences between the male and female.
The conservative, or traditionalist, prefers plain black versus white. We must all be one or the other, and anyone beyond the categories is an unnatural aberration. No wonder that those beyond the categories resent their exclusion and, just as their opponents attempt to straighten the ‘bent’, they respond by trying to curve the straight. But the opposite to nonsense is not the opposing nonsense, it is good sense and sound science.
Assertions of androgyny, that the male has a ‘female’ side waiting for his embrace, is made nonsense by science. To tell a man to ‘get in touch with his female side’ is an insult, for it implies that his male side is inadequate. Do women alone show concern, love, compassion, sympathy or kindness? To suggest as much is as offensive as to suggest that only men possess courage, honour, audacity or determination. For a man to