An update on the Ada Initiative

That is (mostly) true, but "male" and "female" are sexes, not genders. One's gender is more correctly referred to as "masculine" or "feminine", and while there is a general correlation, the two categories do not always correspond. One's sex is a biological concept, but gender is a social/cultural phenomenon. Quite a few things which do not have a biological sex--and perhaps are not even biological in origin--are still considered either masculine or feminine. Just look at languages like French and Spanish, where all nouns are assigned a specific gender. Even in English there are a few cases like that; ships are always treated as feminine, for example.

I'm confused. What has homosexual behaviour got to do with social roles, identification with gender stereotypes, choice of career, participation in a FOSS conference etc?

(So we are digressing here, but, in any case, are you talking about the proportion of the population that express homosexual preference? live as homosexuals? live as married homosexuals, or have multiple partners? live according to homosexual stereotypes, in which case, which ones, referring to males or females? What about bisexual people? What about people who start out with one sexual preference and move to another during the course of their lives?
Just this simple list of different behavioural possibilities provides a pretty good indication that we are profoundly different from, and much more complicated than, animals in our sexual preferences and behaviour, btw, and that our preferences can hardly be biologically predetermined. What would the determinant be?

Peter Tatchell, the well-known gay rights activist, has the following to say [1]:

'If genes determine our sexual orientation we would expect that in cases of identical twins where one was gay the other would be gay too – in every case. But, in fact, in only just over half the cases are both twins gay. The same lack of complete concordance is found in hormone-associated physical attributes. Not all gay men, for example, have a larger than average penis.

'My conclusion? While genes and hormones predispose a person to a particular sexual orientation, they do not determine it. They are significant influences, not the sole cause. Other factors are also at work. Social expectation, cultural values and peer pressure, for instance, push us towards heterosexuality. Without these pro-straight influences, more people might be lesbian, gay or bisexual.

'Wilson’s and Rahman’s biological determinist thesis has another major flaw. If we are all born either gay or straight, how do they explain people who switch in mid-life from happy heterosexuality to happy homosexuality (and vice versa)?'

I would certainly agree with his views here, although, like I said, without any proven determinant, I wouldn't be inclined to suggest that genes and hormones, or any 'wiring' of the brain, 'predispose a person to a particular sexual orientation'. Maybe they really do; but while there is not concrete evidence that they do, there is a wealth of societal evidence to suggest that they do _not_, expressed via the malleability of people's sexual behaviour.)

Thanks very much for all your trouble supplying me with the links, the case of David Reimer was especially interesting :-)

I think all the David Reimer case can really tell us about Reimer's preference is that he did not 'identify as a girl' after having had his physical sex determining attributes interfered with when he was a child, and that attempts to force a female identity onto him by treating him like a girl were unsuccessful. It does not demonstrate that identification with gendered _behaviour_ is biologically derived.
(To be honest, considering the appalling, distressing way Reimer was treated as a child by his psychologist, I would hesitate before drawing _any_ conclusions about what is 'normal' for human behaviour from how he subsequently turned out. I'm hardly surprised he was suffering from suicidal depression by the time he was 13.)

The passage about Reimer not identifying as a girl is interesting;

'He was ostracized and bullied by peers, and neither frilly dresses (which he was forced to wear during frigid Winnipeg winters) nor female hormones made him feel female.'

Here we have an indication of a presumed biological determinant _not_ working - the female hormones did not make Reimer 'feel female'. I.e., if female hormones (rather than one's highly personal, complex, identification of self) are all it takes to 'feel female' - whatever that means - we would have expected their introduction to have had that effect on Reimer.

That being forced to wear a frilly dress does not lead to one feeling innately 'female' against one's identity inclinations is hardly surprising, as the 'girliness' of frills is something that many 'normally'-brought-up girls pick up very early on (along with other gendered cues) as they grow up, assimilating frills into their developing 'female' personal identity (assuming they aren't already dressed up in frills by their parents from infancy). (Incidentally, it's a preference that can easily be discarded when girls get older, and learn that there's more to 'female' than frills. Boot-cut jeans, for example. Or - as in my case - girls may simply not like frills, even from an early age, for a reason that is as unclear as the one that links 'female' with 'frills' in the first place.)
There is, in other words, nothing that biologically predetermines a human child to choose to wear a frilly dress. In fact there is nothing that biologically predetermines humans to choose wear clothes of any type at all; no genetic, hormonal or neural pre-'wiring' for 'clothes'; it is a cultural phenomenon. When it is not done for pragmatic reasons (to protect us from cold) it is done for cultural ones.

But it appears not even a simple identification with your birth sex (let alone culturally-derived ideas about gender) is necessarily biologically predetermined in humans. What about people who develop 'normally' as one sex, but go on to choose to change sex via surgical intervention later in life? This is surely a choice driven by someone's conscious sense of an elaborate, personal self-identity, actually working _against_ all biological predisposition.

With regards to the pubmed study, I didn't find this especially helpful because of too-vague definitions. I can't find a link to the full article there (maybe I am not looking in the right place?) but at least in the abstract the link points to, while there are references to 'male gender identity' this is not elaborated; in psychotherapy, did the patient just keep expressing a desire to be physically male? Did the psychotherapists infer that the patient wanted to be male because they were behaving in a 'male-stereotypical' way, and if so, what way? Did they express a disinclination to wear a frilly dress, or express an inclination to become a particle physicist?
And what was the 'childhood-onset cross gender behavior' noticed since the age of 3? Who had noticed it, the patient's parents? How and why did they report it? In other words, I think we need to know if, how, and to what extent the report subject's gender identity might have been projected on to them by outside forces.

Fine looks at some studies dealing with CAH (congenital adrenal hyperplasia) in her book which examine whether girls with this condition are likely to be drawn to a male gender identity. The studies she looks at certainly seem to indicate that they do; they prefer playing with 'male' toys and are less interested in 'girlish' pastimes.
However she also urges caution when deriving any assumptions from the results of these studies.
Amongst other points she makes are the following;

- The high prenatal testosterone levels of CAH are not demonstrated to improve mathematical performance, rather it has been suggested that they impair it. Someone's future potential and personal or occupational choices cannot be determined by whether they have CAH.

- There has been no attempt to work out whether 'girls with CAH are drawn to some particular _quality_ in boyish toys and activities or whether they are drawn to them simply by virtue of the fact that they are associated with males'. I.e., the girls with CAH may be looking at what boys are playing with and then making their choices accordingly, rather than having some sort of hormonal predisposition to play with a truck instead of a doll (and why would that happen anyway?).
This is highly relevant to biologically deterministic arguments, and the case for this is strengthened when we see that CAH girls are less interested in activities that are certainly cultural, not biological, inventions, such as dressing up in girlish clothes and pretending to be a female character.

- The definition of toys as 'girlish' and 'boyish' often says more about the researcher's assumptions and preoccupations than it does about a child's choice of the toys. As Fine says, 'What form of brain masculinisation could lead to ... an interest in fishing over needlepoint ... or masculine costumes over feminine ones?'
In other words, while CAH girls may have a predisposition to identify with males to a greater extent than non-CAH girls, their subsequent behaviour is governed by _cultural_ norms. This is a lot more complex a picture than the one which attempts to draw a crude and direct correlation between girls choosing dolls/boys choosing trucks and hormonal predisposition, and it is only likely to become far more complex as the child grows up and elaborates a more detailed sense of 'self'.
Oh, and, of course, there are lots of girls that prefer 'male' pastimes to 'female' ones that don't have CAH :-)

- A reference note given by Fine makes the following point:
'As Bleier pointed out in her critique of earlier studies in this area, 'authors and subsequent scientists accept at face value the idea of tomboyism [such as play preferences, clothing preferences, career interests, and so on] as an index of a characteristic called "masculinity", presumed to be as objective and innate a human feature as height and eye colour. Yet "masculinity" is a gender characteristic and, as such, culturally, not biologically, constructed'.

From what I could deduce from looking at the abstract of the article from the APA, there was nothing implied there that contradicts my view that gender identity is learned. Indeed one sentence states:
'Because of the centrality of early gender development to the cognitive perspective, the latest research is reviewed on how infants and toddlers discriminate the sexes and learn the attributes correlated with sex.'
(There is an option to purchase this article, but I keep getting timed out when I try to do this, so maybe I will try another time. In any case this looks like an interesting source of references, thanks for the link.)

"However, brain is very malleable especially regarding high-level abstract thought. So there's no real significant difference in the _ability_ of women to be good at math/science."

Very true. Well, 'high-level abstract thought', and our explicit self-awareness and consciousness of which that is an expression, is what liberates us from the diktat of our biology (and is why I think it is so very misleading to compare human behaviour to that of animals).

"I think what _might_ be somewhat biologically driven is inclination of women to study hard science/math."

Surely that must be a very big 'might'. I think people develop inclinations to do things for all sorts of (complicated personal) reasons, which makes identifying a biological prompt for them pretty much impossible. How would the link be proved? Again, you have the problem that people move from one inclination to another over the course of their lives, or change from one occupation to a completely different one, while their biological constitution remains static.

[1] http://www.petertatchell.net/lgbt_rights/gay_gene/borngay...