“Sin, Sickness, or Status? Homosexual Gender Identity and Psychoneuroendocrinology” by John Money, American Psychologist, 1987, Vol. 42, No. 4. “Neurohormonal Functioning and Sexual Orientation: A Theory of Homosexuality-Heterosexuality” by Lee Ellis and M. Ashley Ames, Psychological Bulletin, 1987, Vol. 101, No. 2.
by Dr. Ralph Blair
Nearly 20 years ago, Johns Hopkins’ John Money wrote that homosexual as well as heterosexual orientation is the “product of the confluence of heredity and environment”. In his Distinguished Scientific Award address at the 1986 meeting of the American Psychological Association, he continued to say, in concert with scientific researchers around the world, that sexual orientation or status is dependent on both prenatal brain homrmonalization and postnatal socialization. In 1970, he said that “to classify homosexuality [or heterosexuality] as hereditary or constitutional versus acquired is outmoded”. In this 1986 address,, printed in American Psychologist, he continues to refer to “the obsolete nature-nurture debate”, again reminding us that “it is counterproductive to characterize prenatal determinants … as biological and postnatal determinants as not. The postnatal determinants that enter the brain through the senses by way of social communication and learning also are biological, for there is a biology of learning and remembering”. He’s right to reject the term “preference” as erroneously implying a voluntary choice but his use of “orientation” in bisexuality is unconvincing.
Ellis and Ames, of the State University of North Dakota and Indiana University, observe that the Western world assumed heterosexuality to be ordained by God and all homosexuality to be caused by sin, the devil, or domineering mothers. They well argue that now, “scientific evidence supports the view that hormonal and neurological variables, operating during gestation, are the main determinants of sexual orientation” and that “very unusual postnatal experiences would be required to overcome strong predispositions toward either heterosexuality or homosexuality”. Stating that “sexual differentiation develops in essentially the same fashion throughout the mammalian order”, the authors insufficiently discriminate between nonhuman animals and humans when they infer sexual orientation from behavior. They should learn from Money that the human “potential to fall in love” or not, with members of one gender or the other, is the most useful identifying characteristic of sexual orientation. They give a helpful review of the scientific literature on genetic, genital, non-genital morphological, neurological and behavioral dimensions of sexuality and an excellent review of the experimental induction of sexual inversion in nonhuman as well as in the complex of human sexual inversions. Presenting their case for the gestational neurohormonal theory, they state that “sexual orientation … is primarily determined by the degree to which the nervous system is exposed to testosterone, its metabolite estradiol, and to certain other sex hormones while neuro-organization is taking place. … For humans, sexual orientation appears to be primarily determined roughly between the middle of the 2nd and the end of the 5th month of gestation”. They deduce from the theory a number of testable hypotheses that have “already been tested fairly extensively” including the greater incidence of homosexuality in males over females, the higher frequency of other sexual inversions in homosexuals (e.g., mannerisms and interests – though not invariably), relations with parents (for NB: “not only do parents influence the behavior of their offspring, but, from birth onward, offspring influence the behavior of their parents)”, the nonrandom distribution of homosexuality along family lines (hereditability), and the ineffectiveness of attempts to change sexual orientation after birth. They could have added as well that clinical and sociological research reveals that the typical gay man has sensed his being “different” for as long as he can remember. It feels to him he was born gay – as it feels to a heterosexual man that he was born heterosexual. Ellis and Ames conclude that “learning, by and large, only appears to alter how, when, and where the orientation is expressed”. This article is a demanding one for non-science readers (it includes some 300 references) but the authors’ last sentence should wake up even the most exhausted reader: “Were it not for delicately balanced combinations of genetic, neurological, hormonal, and environmental factors, largely occurring prior to birth, each and every one of us would be homosexual”.
Money, Ellis and Ames still speak of both nature and nurture, but clearly nature is rising ever higher on the research horizon. (These papers don’t address questions of how an individual becomes attracted to only certain persons within the gender group. Social learning theory, particularly imprinting, does.) Their findings are as devastating to homophobic orthodoxy today as were those of the astronomers to the geocentric orthodoxy of Galileo’s day. And these discoveries, too, are viewed as devilish attacks against a presumably inerrant religious establishment that can ill afford to revise mistaken readings of Scripture in light of what is revealed through God’s Common Grace – not to mention better exegesis. Thus one finds no serious interaction with these data among fundamentalists and most evangelicals. To grant that sexual orientation is a biological given rather than a choice is too much for their cosmology to bear. But that burden is borne by millions of lesbians and gay men who daily try to live the lives that began for them in fetal life. How many know that the same God who created the earth to orbit the sun is the One who, as the oppressed Psalmist trusted, has been their God even from those early months when they floated unselfconsciously within their mothers’ wombs?