New Gene Theory Rests on Bad Science
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Before reading Bailey’s book, I had the opportunity to attend his talk at UCLA. The conference room was overflowing. There were many familiar faces of LGBT academic colleagues and a large number of transgendered people from the community. Bailey was far more soft-spoken and conciliatory than I expected. His PowerPoint slide show had the polish of a well-rehearsed stump speech. Then came the Q&A. Rarely have I witnessed such open invective and ad hominem attacks at an academic colloquium. The gay academics, most of them social constructionists, were dismissive of any biological or “essentialist” attempts to explain sexual orientation. Their raw anger, expressed in sarcastic comments about Bailey’s own masculinity and sartorial style, betrayed their own defensiveness about Bailey’s central stereotype-reinforcing thesis, which is this: sissy boys are future fags, and gay men really are effeminate. The transsexual questioners were incensed by Bailey’s taxonomy of transgenderism, which holds that there are two classes of transgenders: extremely effeminate homosexuals and extreme transvestites.

Bailey’s book is readable and almost too colloquial, but it does cover a tremendous amount of scientific literature on three topics: “sissy boys” or technically “Gender Identity Disorder in Children,” adult gay men, and transsexuals. Bailey’s research is only on gay adults. On the other two topics he summarizes the work of others, giving preference to those who support his own opinions. Fundamentally, Bailey believes that gender identity and sexual orientation (in men) are predominantly determined by congenital factors. These could include in utero hormonal molding of critical areas of the brain, but for the underlying cause Bailey strongly leans towards genes. He was the co-author with psychiatrist Richard Pillard of a highly publicized 1991 article on the heritability of homosexuality. The “gay twin” study, as it was popularly known, found that in their group of identical twins 51 percent of the gay subjects had a co-twin who was also gay. In the group of fraternal twins, only 24 percent were concordant for homosexual orientation. This dropped down to nineteen percent among the group of adoptive brothers. These results suggested that homosexuality runs in the family, since brothers who shared more genetic material had a higher likelihood of both being gay. However, a confounding behavioral factor is that identical twins get treated much more alike than do fraternal twins or adopted siblings. In any case, even in the identical twins the chances of sharing sexual orientation were fifty-fifty, indicating that genes are not the only determining factor.

Bailey, however, is betting on genes, just like the majority of gay men and transsexuals who have a deeply felt sense that their sexuality and gender identity are congenital. Nearly everyone, including Bailey, has a viscerally negative feeling for the classical psychoanalytic formulations of the origins of homosexuality: a close-binding mother and a hostile, distant father cause boys to identify with their mother and never overcome their infantile narcissistic eroticism. These ideas dominated from the 1940’s until 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association officially depathologized homosexuality. However, just because the analytic model has never proven to have much specificity (most people would be gay if all it took was a smothering mother and a distant father), it does not mean that environmental and social factors play no role in shaping sexuality and gender.

Bailey’s first case is a poster child for the “sissy boy” theory: cross-dressing; girl’s play from an early age; little interest in rough games; various effeminate mannerisms. In the 1960’s and 70’s these children were subjected to masculinization programs using behavior modification regimens rewarding masculinity and punishing femininity. The few studies of such boys—notably Richard Green’s The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and The Development of Homosexuality (1987)—found that the majority of them grow up to be gay and very few become transsexuals. There is no indication that behavioral modification changes sexual orientation, but it is hard to know this without a well-organized clinical trial randomizing boys with Gender Identity Disorder to masculinization treatment versus a sham intervention. Fortunately, no ethics committee would approve this. Yet Bailey is convinced such cases betray congenital origins, and he turns to intersex cases to support his claim.

The case of David Reimer (known as John/Joan) has recently gotten much attention. David’s penis was accidentally burnt off in a circumcision accident as an infant, and under the guidance of psychologist John Money, David’s parents agreed to have him surgically feminized and to raise him as a girl. Money’s optimistic reporting on this “experiment of nature” strongly bolstered his theory that gender identity could be arbitrarily shaped by social and surgical forces if done early in life. The implications were not lost on feminists in the 1960’s, who relied on Money’s work to argue that gender is socially constructed. Unfortunately, David Reimer did not adjust to a female identity, and when told his history as an adolescent, he promptly reverted back to being a boy. When the updated case was publicized a few years ago, it was used to discredit Money and social constructionism in general. Bailey joins this posse in using the case to argue that gender identity really is congenital and presumably determined by the hormonal effects on the brain during some critical period of fetal development.

Simon LeVay and a long list of sex researchers going back to the 19th century have relied on the same basic theory to explain homosexuality. Their sexual inversion model hypothesizes that some critical sex hormone imbalance in utero (perhaps due to maternal stress, birth order, or genetic factors) leads to the feminization of gay men’s brains and, conversely, to the masculinization of lesbians’ brains.

LET ME SAY up front that I am not anti-science. On the contrary, I suspect that congenital, biological factors do play a role in the sexual and gender behavior of humans. Furthermore, from my clinical experience with gay, lesbian, and transgendered teens, some experienced and expressed their transgenderism or homosexuality at such an early age that for them it does seem to be congenital. Therefore, I do not believe that pursuing a biological understanding of sexuality is pointless or intrinsically homophobic. So many gay and transgendered people are already convinced that their genes made them that way, and the hypothetical “gay gene” regularly is invoked in families, the press, and courts in defense of gays. However, the long legacy of overtly homophobic and sexist research must alert us to the ethical dangers and methodological pitfalls of such work.

Bailey’s own research on gay men highlights some of these problems. He tried to tease out specific traits that are widely used to distinguish gays from straights—such as gait, speech, occupation, sex drive—and to study scientifically whether there was some objective basis for stereotypes of gays. He aimed to show that “gaydar” is real and quantifiable. We don’t know what criteria went into selecting or excluding the subjects, but Bailey found that both gay and straight raters found that the gay subjects talked and walked “gayer” than did straight subjects. The 1-to-7 rating scale was from “heterosexual” to “gay,” not “masculine” to “feminine.”

There are two big problems with Bailey’s interpretation of these findings. Objectively appearing or sounding gay does not mean that gay men are effeminate. Quentin Crisp once observed that sissies don’t throw a ball like a girl, but like a sissy. Only if you limit your gender view to masculine and feminine, collapsing heterosexual and homosexual into these binarized sexes, are you stuck with imagining that gay men have effeminate behaviors and feminized brains. Bravo’s new television show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is not trying to turn straight lugs into girls, but teach them gay style. Furthermore, what are considered effeminate or masculine behaviors and interests are tremendously variable from culture to culture and throughout time: Aristocratic men in the 18th century wore makeup and high heels; Indian men hold hands in the streets; and Scotsmen wear kilts.

Secondly, as Bailey admitted at his conference, all the traits that he studied could be learned, and therefore do not necessarily support his biological hypothesis. A native New Yorker can distinguish a Brooklyn accent from a Bronx one (even tell you the speaker’s ethnicity, class, and neighborhood). No one would argue that accent is determined in utero! A person’s table manners speak volumes about her class, not about her genes. Any gay traveler also knows that American gaydar malfunctions in foreign countries (or even ethnic subcultures within the U.S.). Ethnographers of sexuality from Latino and Asian cultures have all described how diverse sexual behaviors and categories are. Sure, we could hammer these people into the binarized American slots of “gay” and “straight,” but that would be doing them serious cultural violence.

When it comes to the behavior that biologists know is shaped by sex hormones, Bailey’s argument really starts to unravel. On a variety of surveys of sexual behaviors and erotic interests, gay men and straight men emerge as substantially similar to each other and distinct from women as a whole. Bailey’s stereotype-affirming data argue that men (gay and straight) want lots of sex with young, physically gorgeous partners. He goes through various explanatory contortions trying to justify this within evolutionary biological schemas, but it’s impossible to explain the genetic logic of non-procreative gays and fruitful straight men having the same sex drive. Ultimately, these findings undermine his broader argument that gay men are like women.

Bailey’s take on transgenderism has generated both Internet flaming and formal ethical complaints. He draws primarily on the research of Canadian psychologist Ray Blanchard. Based on his experience evaluating transsexuals in the gender clinic of the Clarke Institute of Psychiatry in Toronto, Blanchard developed the notion of “autogynephilia” in men. The term refers to the eroticization of the body as female through fantasy, cross-dressing, or sex reassignment hormones and surgery. Furthermore, Blanchard proposed that there are two types of transsexuals: homosexuals and autogynephiles.

Bailey is a proponent of this binary classification system. He views the “homosexual transsexuals” as the extreme end of a spectrum of homosexual effeminacy. These were the “sissy boys” who remained effeminate adolescents, sometimes going through a gay phase, but who choose to go on estrogen as teenagers or young adults. Some will have breast implants, a few will undergo genital feminization, but many will remain “she-males”: attractive, feminine-appearing women with a penis. As noted before, most effeminate boys do become gay teenagers. So which are the few who go on to be transgendered? Bailey’s account is surprisingly sociological and not at all biological. An effeminate boy from a middle- or upper-class family that is supportive and stable “has more motivation to ‘hang in there’ until he normalizes his gender role behavior, because he has a good chance at a conventionally successful future.” (Here, as on many other occasions, Bailey betrays his anti-transgender bias.) However, poor kids from rejecting black or Latino families have nothing to lose by abandoning the male role and have little choice but to turn tricks as transvestite prostitutes.

This explanation has a few holes in it. U.S. society has generally become far more accepting of gays and a range of gender behaviors, yet transgenderism has not been waning. On the contrary, it seems to have a far greater social presence. Transgender organizations on campuses across the U.S. also suggest an increase in the numbers of transgender youth from middle-class families who are supportive of their gender queer kids.

Bailey’s willingness to consider social and psychological factors does not extend to his other class of transsexuals, the autogynephiles. If he portrays homosexual transsexuals as sex-obsessed queens, the autogynephiles emerge as masturbation addicts delusionally driven to feminize their bodies. Blanchard characterizes this group as transitioning later in life, often after marriage, fatherhood, and a successful career. They often describe an adolescent onset of fetishistic cross-dressing that is painfully suppressed or engaged in with extreme shame. Eventually the feminine drive becomes irrepressible and they cross-dress more. Some eventually turn to sex reassignment, supposedly in an obsessive auto-erotic pursuit of feminization. The later age of transitioning often means that they make less convincing females than the transsexuals who started on estrogen in adolescence.

Many transsexuals are outraged by Bailey’s classification system, characterizing transsexuals as either boy-crazy ultra-sissy fags or extreme transvestitic fetishists. Many gay men are offended by Bailey’s attempts to relabel us as sissies. It’s not that there are no flaming queens or fetishistic transsexuals. Even among transsexuals, there is a heated debate about the significance of autogynephilia. The problem with Bailey is his simplistic approach to forcing people into his classification system. This is nowhere more evident than in his repeated dismissal of people’s experiences that do not conform to his model. For example, he believes that there are basically no bisexual men, that homosexual transsexuals are all attracted to men, and that autogynephilic transsexuals are all attracted to women. Whenever a subject reports something different, Bailey just says, “I doubt that.” From my clinical experience, transsexuals become quite flexible in their sexual orientation, particularly as they transition.

There is a marvelous diversity to sexuality and gender identity across cultures and throughout history, as well as in an individual’s personal development. Bailey tries to present biology and social construction as diametrically opposed, and he grossly misrepresents social construction to serve his purposes. Social constructionists do not claim that everyone was bisexual before the 19th century, or that same-sex attraction is a recent phenomenon, or that “homosexuality has no nature.” The social construction of sexuality (by which I mean cultural, historical, and developmental factors that shape sexuality) does not negate biology. On the contrary, any biological study of sexuality and gender that can stand the test of time needs to take social factors into account. Hormonal effects may indeed shape the fetal brain and produce infantile behavior that is interpreted as gender atypical for a certain culture. How such children get treated by their family, peers, and society can have a profound effect on how their gender and sexuality develop. The existing roles in a particular society for both normative and atypical gender and sexuality greatly delimit our possibilities. And the choices individuals make, whether to suppress or explore their desires and fantasies at different stages in their development, will also shape their future sexual history.

Will we ever find a “gay” or “transsexual gene”? Most likely not. But sophisticated researchers who take into consideration the complexity of sexuality may well find genes that in a fraction of gays and transsexuals are somewhat predictive of sexuality. The big question then will be, why aren’t more people queer?