2 groups of neuroscientists doing 2 different studies on learning, using brain scans to monitor changes in brain structure as participants learn new skills. So, yes, brain architecture is being changed by changing habits of thought. I have so much reading to do….!

Pal mc – “the brain rapidly loses plasticity after around 2-3 years – that is why cannot learn languages easily after about 6-8 years.
In any case the strucutures in the limbic system invovled in emotion and sex are liekly to be even less subject to life/environment otherwise, early hominids could ‘learn’ to lose fear. They don’t and we don’t. There is certainly no way that brains alter their ‘architecture’ after our early years.”

I’m no scientist (clearly), but my understanding of the brain is that the limbic system is pretty much fixed, but others not so much. My understanding is that it becomes harder to make changes as we become habituated to particular ways of doing things, but that changes can be made. I’m currently reading The Brain That Changes Itself [http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge/MAIN.html], along with everything I can find on brain plasticity in journals like Scientific American, Nature, etc. – but I’m not sufficiently familiar with science to be able to read most of the original research papers. What I’m getting is that there’s growing evidence of actual change occurring as a result of changing habits of thought (as in CBT, or the fMRI imaging of Buddhist monks’ brain activity, etc.), and that the white matter is as engaged in learning as the grey matter. Seriously, if you could point me in the direction of more sources on neurology that would help me keep up with this stuff and put it in context, I’d be delighted. I’m really trying hard to educate myself here.

I’m interested in what makes us queer and trans, but I don’t need an answer (or overlapping Venn diagrams of answers) really, anymore than I need to know exactly why my pre-op MtF lesbian friend is a woman or my north African friend is a different colour than me in order to treat them with respect and dignity; that it’s other peoples’ responsibility to determine their own identities and mine to respect them should be clear to me with or without a clear understanding of why their identities may or may not match my expectations – and vice versa.

My own ‘gayness’ is fundamental and unchanging. But one can only ‘become’ – we are created as a bunch of molecules and meaning and existence only come through being-in-the-world. I feel strongly that biological origins for same sex attraction will be found 0 and they will turn out to be the same things that make us male, female, intersex, transgender, bisexual – i.e. there is no separate etiology – only one evolutionary history that has brought us to this point in all the shapes and varieties we come in. Only when we are born and experience life, others, environment – do we become something with meaning. The words male, female, intersex, transgender, bisexuaI I used for illustration only. They are indeed very loaded descriptors. I hate it when scientists describe the process of change in an embryo due to presence of Y chromosome as the masculinisation of the default feminine embryo. Totally inadequate dichotomous view of our humanity and barely adequate in terms of the diversity of biology we see in people (size, sex, cognition etc etc). But I feel strongly that to prove you can be born ‘gay’ is also to make the discovery that the meanings we attach to biology are culturally influenced. I am happy that in my case, being gay is fully congruent with my biology, mind-identity, sex and gender – oh happy synchronicity…

Thanks… Damian

“ If I can read and pull apart Dr Rahman’s book and I only have science a levels “ You can’t , you lose.

Also, I mentioned lying to you which you ignored. Now you are lying again. Please show me the peer-reviewed papers in MAINSTREAM Journals. Do you mean the time one of NARTH’s researchers passed off a poster presented at a conference as a peer-reviewed paper? And gave a different title to get it past conference organizers? Are that so-called longitudinal study published by Jones and Yarhouse from the religious university? Ahh yes…. real science my ass.

Please don’t lie again and state that there is “no evidence” for homosexuality being inborn – you perjure yourself.

Note: skin colour does not change over life with nuture, nor does sex (not gender identity) except by surgery . Why should being gay not be an unchanging characteristic? That is what the scientific evidence shows and what an authentic hermeneutic approach to the ontology and phenomenology of being gay tells us in many cases (though not all persons experience it that way).

I distrust anyone using the word discourse. It reminds me of the very power relations and discursive centres Foucault actually warned us about.

I suggest a reading of “True Nature” Michael Kauth for a balanced approach.

Very well said.

@ will – well said! And this is the core of the problem, isnt it? We dont have to, as you said ‘validate’, out existence to these people or anyone. Its madness to think that all the gay people in the world, millions of them over the centuries, all decided to ‘chose’ to be gay. Only an idiot would assume that to be the case, it just doesnt make any sense!!! The most logical conclusion? It has to be a combination/single biological cause, genetic and pre-natal. Just becuase we dont know something now, doesnt mean we never will.

Regardless of what you believe, and what the religious zealots insist we believe, there is not one shred of proof that people “become” gay. In fact, all evidence is that we are born this way, not including the staggering amount of testimonials verifying this from gay people themselves!!! That’s the one always ignored by the so called religious. It should be easy to prove when you think of it, if it were true, a lot of us would apparently remember being straight….

Anyway, why gay people are is a matter of scientific curiosity. Its is not a prerequisite for validation or equality. The insistence of some malignant sections of society that we need to be ‘scientifically proven’ before we can have acceptance, is nothing than the fallacy of Loki’s Wager.

As a scientist, I am eager to see why gay people exists. But as a gay man, I don’t need someone to somehow validate me what I already know about myself:- I was born this way, and I certainly didn’t wake up one morning and decided to kiss boys for kicks. The very notion that this applies to every gay man on the planet is absurd.

I agree re: heterosexist, normative assumption in science- but you are not free to tell me that how I feel is wrong without some evidence (which of course you can’t provide). Rahman’s evidence doesn’t preclude you from being ‘you’ whatever brought you to that – neither does it preclude a purely biological etiology for being gay. Why do want to take that away from me? I am not talking about gender or sexual binary. I am just talking about me – a gay man – a unique individual with a unique set of genes, embryonic environment and upbringing. I don’t care whatever other categories are out there – there could be as many as there are unique persons and likely so if you drill down enough – I am not arguing for anything binary or dichotomous – I am just talking about me.

Let me put it this way. At least some people are gay and are born that way. Others aren’t. Simples.

We are born without any ideas…

As Paul mc rightly points out, the brain loses plasticity over time…which means that our ideas become more fixed…including those concerning our gender identity and our sexual preferences (and all other likes and dislikes).

(Think of why people “come out” or “transition” at differnet ages…because balance between brain plasticity and environmental factors mean it makes no more sense to the person to hide).

Paint a baby’s bedroom blue, surround it with stereotypical “boy” objects and tell it it is a boy and you may not create a “boy” (recall David Reimer http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Reimer ) but you will certainly influence the child’s gender development and personality.

All ideas, and personality traits are not a free choice just as nobody actively “chooses” to be “gay” or “straight”… to like whisky, to hate evening suits or whatever.

Our environment is not a totally free choice either…

@Anon – the brain rapidly loses plasticity after around 2-3 years – that is why cannot learn languages easily after about 6-8 years.
In any case the strucutures in the limbic system invovled in emotion and sex are liekly to be even less subject to life/environment otherwise, early hominids could ‘learn’ to lose fear. They don’t and we don’t. There is certainly no way that brains alter their ‘architecture’ after our early years.

Having said all that – Rahman and other scientists investigate gay and lesbian specifically. Those are the ‘samples’ most easy to study. There is nothing to say that there are multiple sexualities and self-identities resulting from neurological differentiation in embryo and who’s to say they are nay bettern or worse. They just ‘are’. Same with man vs woman. What we become as persons is only the result of our environment (pre-natal, early years) but that is not to say that male or female or gay or straight or queer can somehow ‘disappear’ with the right environment.