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DO A SHORT INX FGER MAKE YOU GAY?
This is bee of today’s news reports on a new study Nature by Berkeley psychology profsor Marc Breedlove that says gay people are likelier to have x fgers that are substantially shorter than their rg fgers. Our tentative ncln: We’re all gay.
Our first orr of bs is to dismiss the AP’s simplistic assertn that women’s x and rg fgers “tend to be about the same length” and, if they’re not, uld be a sign that the woman is gay. Acrdg to Breedlove, though, homosexual women tend, as men do, to have x fgers that are much shorter than their rg fgers. It’s also te, apparently, that a fair number of heterosexual women have the same nfiguratn; the Inquirer piece has evolutnary blogist Robert Trivers of Rutgers, who has performed siar rearch, sayg he found substantial overlap between gay and straight women on relative fger size.
) But “some gay men did appear, based on their fger lengths, to have been exposed to greater than normal levels of fetal androgens before birth, ” the prs release ntu. If there is, Breedlove says, “lls to qutn all of our cultural assumptns that gay men are feme. ” Ined, would argue the oppose–that gay men are “hypermasculized, ” i.
MEN WHO WEAR RGS ON THEIR MIDDLE FGER, ARE THEY GAY?
Chatterbox is no posn to judge Breedlove’s science, but he will rtate, for those who’ve not heard before, Chatterbox’s Law of Blogil Determism: Conservativ believe that gen terme everythg except homosexualy; liberals believe that gen terme nothg except homosexualy. Meanwhile, among the male tws, the bisexual or gay brothers had more "male-typil" hands than the straight on—ntrary to what the rearchers expected—although the difference was not signifint.
"Rearch suggts that our sexualy is termed the womb and is pennt on the amount of male hormone we are exposed to or the way our dividual bodi react to that hormone, wh those exposed to higher levels of ttosterone beg more likely to be bisexual or homosexual, " the thors wrote. However, is important to strs, that the evince is currently not strong enough to accurately predict whether someone is gay, straight or bisexual by lookg at the rat between their fgers. "Some work has shown that gay men have more "male-typil" rats than straight men; other work has shown the oppose pattern; and still further work has shown no difference at all.
As such, is not clear whether there is any real difference the level of ttosterone exposure between straight and gay men or how ttosterone exposure might map on to sexual orientatn differenc. Some scientists believe prenatal sex hormon are also part of the puzzle of homosexualy and that a high level of ttosterone may wire the bra for attractn to the same sex. Intrigugly, rearch shows that a prenatal ttosterone level is most strongly lked to homosexualy women, acrdg to an article the Archiv of Sexual Behavr.