Talk:Causes of sexual identity

Is sexual identity a disease? If not, how can it have an etiology? Tweak First definition: The assignment of a cause: as, the etiology of a folkway.

I'm really confused here. What, exactly is meant by sexual identity? If it is synonymous with sexual orientation, there needs to be a lot changed with this article, but I want to make sure first before if I muck things up Thanks Dysprosia 06:31 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Hmm. This uses the term "hermaphrodite", which I believe is now deprecated in favor of "intersexual" (there are no true human hermaphrodites). Haven't we got an article on this under gender identity or some similar name? -- The Anome 07:14 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)


 * The thing is, if sexual identity is synonymous with sexual orientation, then the stuff about intersexed and the "Boy Raised As a Girl" book ref needs to go, as they are concerned with gender identity and not sexual orientation at all.
 * If sexual identity is synonymous with gender identity, then the stuff on the "Gay gene" and the link to homosexuality needs to go, because gender identity has nothing to do with homosexuality...
 * So it's a double edged sword :) Dysprosia 07:17 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yep, and we've got a sexual orientation article, and (if I recall correctly) a causes of sexual orientation article too... -- The Anome 07:19 24 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I have a fairly long discussion that attempts to respond to many of these good questions and acute abservations. Should I append it here or put it somewhere else? If it should go into a separate document somehow, please clue me in. Patrick Moran


 * All that's important, really for now, is to know what is meant by sexual identity. From there, the article can be sculpted into something more factually accurate, and you can put this discussion into the article if you like.
 * Dysprosia 00:13 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I am possibly being lazy by avoiding giving an answer to "what is meant by sexual identity" without the context that I think is necessary. But what bothered me most about the homosexuality entry was that very lack of organic unity, so if you want just skip down to where I start talking about XX, XY, XYX, XYY, etc. Sorry. The discussion and questions raised so far have been excellent. Here are some of my thoughts on the questions raised thus far.

I'll give you three theses I hold, and then I'll put forward my arguments for them after making a few definitions on the fly:

(1) We cannot discuss homosexuality without dealing with both sexual identity and sexual orientation.

(2) For practical reasons it would not make much sense to talk about homosexuality without bringing in gender identity.

(3) People need to understand that sexual preferences are not a matter of choice.

Some definitions:

hermaphrodite -- "union of a male body and a female body." A person or animal with the sexual organs of both the male and the female. (Rare but possible.)

pseudo-hermaphrodite -- A person or animal with ambiguous sexual organs, e.g., micro-penis or very large clitoris. (Typically these characteristics of individuals occur when there has been some interference with normal fetal development.)

intersexual -- someone with sexual characteristics (inter =) between those of a male and those of a female? If this definition holds then it is not a very apposite term.

Some issues: what are:

sexual identity

gender identity

sexual orientation

The question which most often draws a reader to an explanation of homosexuality is, I suspect, "What is going on here? Why is this person behaving in this way?" And, if we expand the question a little, then it becomes something like: "Why is this male behaving like a female in a sexual context?" or "Why is this female behaving like a male in a sexual context?"

Some parts of this question are biological: What is male? What is female? Other parts of this question are social and behavioral? What kinds of sexual partners do (fe)males interact with? What kinds of clothing do (fe)males wear? The first kind of question is related to sexual identity. The second kind of question is related to gender identity -- because whether, e.g., a man is supposed to wear a kilt, a sarong, or trousers depends on whether he is a Scot, a Malaysian, or whatever. How to make a correct cut between shades of gray? Language biases us to dichotomize our world into clearly divided sets such as male and female. We very readily assume that if a male human has one X chromosome and one Y chromosome, and a female human has two X chromosomes and zero Y chromosomes, we have exhausted the field of sexual identity. If we want to know whether some person is male or female, we examine a cell and count the X and Y chromosomes. But language and habits of thought have led us astray because there are several other possibilities such as XYX, XYY, and so forth. The extra chromosome combinations turn out to have real-world consequences, so if language were to be made precise enough to mirror the world to an appropriate level of exactness, then we would need terms for several more "sexes."

The combinations of chromosomes within a cell sample of an individual does not exhaust the complexities of where to "pigeon-hole" the individual because in some individuals about half the cells are XX and about half are XY.

The following comes from my Mac's scrapbook, I think I copied it from Science News:

To be born as a hermaphrodite is a rare side effect of being conceived by IVF, suggest geneticists in Scotland.

David Bonthron of the Western General Hospital in Edinburgh and his colleagues examined a boy born with an ovary and a fallopian tube in place of his left testicle. Some of the boy's cells are male, with one X and one Y chromosome, while others have the female XX pattern (The New England Journal of Medicine, vol 338, p 166).

The boy's mother had IVF treatment. Bonthron believes two embryos transferred into her uterus--one male and one female--fused and became a single fetus.

Your "identity" is known when you, the person under inspection by some authority, turns out to fit a description that the concerned authorities agree upon. John Doe the third is the one whose fingerprint matches this image, whose DNA is such-and-so, who was born in London, England in 1938, etc., etc.

Your "sexual identity" is known when... What? The problem of definition turns out to be fuzzy even after your chromosomal characteristics and your genitalia have been clearly determined. That is because it is "nature and nurture," not "nature or nurture." The way the brain develops depends on genetic characteristics and also on what happens during the growth from single cell to mature organism. Abnormal conditions in the womb can make an XY individual develop into what is in every other way a female. If the appropriate hormonal inputs are not present at the appropriate time, the infant's body is not masculinized. If there is only a partial breakdown in the process, then the brain may not develop the way that a normal XY individual's brain will develop.

Gender identity is even more complex than sexual identity. Sexual identity is complicated, but at least it is subject to objective determination. Gender identity is more subjective. Person have their own understanding of what they are. I may see myself as a man in a man's body, a woman in a man's body, a woman in a woman's body, a man in a woman's body..... or a XX+XY individual in a body that has been surgically "corrected" to be female who is only interested in stereotypically female individuals as romantic interests. (Hmmm, do we rightly call that kind of person a homosexual?)

Gender identity is known by the self, and by other people. How do I conceive of myself? I may think of myself as a heterosexual male who resolved sexual tensions when confined with other males in the most satisfactory way that I could find, but other people may see me as an effeminate homosexual. I may fit their definition because I do not hawk and spit and because they have heard what I did in the army or in prison.

Sexual orientation is another carton of bees. The tendency toward dichotomization is reinforced by people's desire to fit closely to their ideals. One very easily slips from observing that, e.g., "female human beings appear in general to be more nurturing and less inclined to aggressive behavior than human males," to insisting that "ladies must be gentle, demure, and nurturing, never violent or aggressive in word or act." Male humans more often than not are sexually attracted toward and sexually interact with female humans, and vice-versa. From that fact we easily jump to the conclusion that male humans should only interact sexually with female humans and vice-versa. That false conclusion causes a great deal of self doubt and anguish when one finds oneself reacting sexually to an "inappropriate" counterpart.

John Money gives an example that helped me a great deal to understand what is really going on. I was a bit surprised to learn that female rats would take over the care of orphaned rat pups. I was even more surprised to learn that male rats would do the same thing. (If I had been asked what a male rat would do if it found a mewling rat pup at the entrance to its burrow, I would have surely said, "Kill it and eat it!") If a rat pup is separated from its mother and placed in the cage of a female rat, it will make a lot of noise about being separated from mother, warmth, and food. The resident female rat needs almost no encouragement to start trying to take care of it. If a rat pup is placed in the cage of a male rat, the mature rat will remain unmoved by its squeals for a long time, but eventually it will take over the nurturing tasks. The response is the same, but male rats take a lot more "encouragement" to make the response. (Have you every tried to ignore a human baby that is crying in real distress?)

The question of sexual orientation is not answered by yes and no. Humans who are ordinarily sexually attracted to females and oblivious to males will, when isolated from females, begin to react sexually toward males when they reach some individually determined level of deprivation. Humans who are ordinarily sexually attracted to males and oblivious to females will, when isolated from males, begin to react sexually toward females when they  reach some individually determined level of deprivation. Since it is socially costly to admit to homosexual attraction, and since individuals may repress their own feelings of attraction for that reason, it may well be very difficult to get objective information on what it takes to get any given individual sexually aroused by an individual of the same sex. A female human who appears to be easily drawn into sexual interactions with female humans is socially constructed as a "lesbian." A female human who appears to be easily drawn into sexual interactions with male human being is socially constructed as a "normal woman." The same reasoning applies to male humans. So the idea that homosexuality is a social construct has some level of objectivity. At the same time, it risks obscuring the importance of the biological components of this issue.

John Money originally believed that gender identities and sexual preferences were very plastic. He might be interpreted (wrongly, I think) as accepting the view that one's identity as a heterosexual or a homosexual is socially engineered. The relevance of the Colapinto book is that an infant whose penis was totally destroyed in a botched circumcision attempt was "surgically assigned" to be a female on Money's advice, and every attempt was made to socialize that individual as a female, yet the person who had been castrated soon after his penis was destroyed, and who had been given a surgically created vagina, and who had been raised as a female, nevertheless recognized himself, identified himself, as being male. What remained of the biological male at that point? It seems clear that there was something undeniably male about the brain, and that it acted more powerfully in determining the individual's sexual identity and gender identity than did all of the manipulations of information, conditioning, etc. that were used to try to socialize the individual as a  female human.

As a person whom society had defined as female, his attraction to females was "homosexual." As a person whose genetic characteristics were male and whose brain was grown under male hormonal inputs, his attraction to females was "heterosexual."

Except for the individual whose happiness is at stake, and those to whom he may appeal for aid or guidance, it would seem to me to be nobody's business what a given human being's sexual orientation may be. That being said, if someone wants or needs to know, "What is going on here?" then it seems to me that sexual identity, gender identity, and sexual orientation all have to be understood.

If the answer to "What is that person's sexual orientation?" is "That person prefers male humans," or "That person prefers female humans," then the discussion has nothing to do with homosexuality. To make the question relevant to homosexuality, we have to ask, "What is that [XX, XY, XYX, XYY...] person's sexual orientation?" (Presumably an XYY person would have to have a preference for XYY individuals to be a homosexual.)

So we cannot discuss homosexuality without dealing with both sexual identity and sexual orientation.

For practical reasons it would not make much sense to talk about homosexuality without bringing in gender identity. First, because it may matter a great deal to the individual if he or she perceives his or her gender identity as being inappropriate to his or her sexual identity. If a person self-identifies as male and is attracted to males, this may be a source of great pain and shame. The same would apply to someone who self-identifies as female and is attracted to females. If such a person was given the same gender identity by society, then the sexual orientation would in many societies be a great source of social opprobrium and even might incur severe social and/or legal sanctions. On the other hand, in some societies their gender identities might define males having sexual interactions with males and females having sexual interactions with females as normal behavior. So gender identity definitions in one society may make homosexuality normal and in another society may make homosexuality abnormal.

People need to understand that sexual preferences are not a matter of choice. An adult may be able to modify or moderate a preference somewhat, but whether one is attracted to males, to females, to both equally or in some other proportion, or even terrified of the whole lot of them is dependent on a complex chain of causation that may go back even months before that individual's conception when the mother was choosing a mate, deciding whether to permit her body to contain significant amounts of toxic chemicals during pregnancy, etc., etc.

Maybe the encyclopedia page on homosexuality needs to be reorganized, something like:

Definition: Homosexuality, the state of being preferentially attracted to someone of the same sex as an object of romantic, amorous, sexual behavior.

Link to sexual orientation, i.e., sexual preference. Including: Are preferences typically 100%?)

Link to sexual identity. What does it mean to be XX, XY, XXY, etc.

Link to gender identity. What does it mean, within a given culture, to conceive of oneself as male or female? Are there other choices? What does it mean, within a given culture, to conceive of another person as male, female, etc.? Why do so many cultures believe in a "truth in advertising" standard -- It is wrong to advertise yourself falsely by word, act, clothing, etc., as being of one sex or another?

Link to causes of sexual preferences/orientations.

Link to causes of homosexual preferences/orientations.

One other thing I forgot to mention. One's self-perceived sexual orientation (e.g., "I am attracted to people of the opposite sex.") will quite naturally form a part of one's gender identity, the gender identity that one perceives for oneself. If other people perceive one's gender identity in some other way (e.g., "That woman who is trying to pass as a man."), that could add a wrinkle to one's own gender identity, e.g., "I am a male whom many other people identify as a female and I happen to prefer females so I have the burden of being a male who is regarded as a lesbian by many troublesome people.")
 * Patrick0Moran 01:00 26 Jul 2003 (EDT)

I'll take a stab at tweaking the article, but "If we want to know whether some person is male or female, we examine a cell and count the X and Y chromosomes. " isn't exactly correct. Being male and female is much more than that. (Cf transsexual) Dysprosia 05:02 25 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Just change "we examine a cell " to "we think we can just examine a cell", sorry, I thought that part was clearer than it actually is.


 * Patrick0Moran 02:30 26 Jul 2003 (EDT)

Also, I just added a modified version of a couple of paragraphs from the above long posting to fill in the page created for sexual identity.
 * Patrick0Moran 02:30 26 Jul 2003 (EDT)

Hi Patrick0Moran, I am still having a very hard time getting to the bottom of what is the difference between sexual identity and the separate but connected discussions of sex, sexual dimorphism, heteronormativity, gender identity and intersexual. Can you possible clear this up a bit further? I think this article tries to use Brown's four-part composition of sex, gender, sexual orientation and gender role and discuss it in terms of purely physical aspects, is this correct?

Also, I'm having a hard time finding this term in the relavent literature used as anything other than a synonym for sexual orientation. Could you please site other sources where this phrase is used in this manner and if possible, who originated this use of the term? Thanks,Paige 15:11 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)

Yikes! Hours of work and it all went away somewhere. I'll try again later, but using a text editor.

A quick reaction: Why does sexual dimorphism redirect to sex? The sex article does not discuss sexual dimorphism, and dimorphism is an important topic. Patrick0Moran 20:19 28 Jul 2003 (UTC)


 * “I'm having a hard time finding this term (sexual identity) in the relevant literature used as anything other than a synonym for sexual orientation. Could you please site other sources where this phrase is used in this manner and if possible, who originated this use of the term?”

I’ll try to handle this part first. If we can gain some clarity on this point, then the rest should be easy to clear up.

I’ve checked my old standby texts. None of them have an index entry for “sexual identity”. Mondimore, A Natural History of Homosexuality, p. 161, has a discussion of “homosexual identity development.”


 * People can observe a “sexual orientation” in themselves or others without having to identify the sex of the person with that orientation.


 * To judge that someone is a homosexual, one has to identify the sex of the person and the sex of the people that most frequently occasion sexual arousal in that person.


 * Sex is what we identify, and sexual identity is what we write on the identity card, the demography survey, etc. Think of the entries you are requested to make on an I.D. form: Family name, Given names, address... and then comes the place where you are expected to circle “M or F”.

If Francis Bacon circles F, goes to the convent, and prevents himself as Frances Bacon, all hell will break lose when the nuns get a look at his genitals. Sheriffs will not easily forgive another “Francis Bacon” who is caught after thirty years of search and who turns out to be the mother of 7 children living in obscurity is some forgotten corner of the kingdom. So an important part of the identity for each of us is what kind of genitalia we have. If you don’t believe that, address a little girl as “Sonny,” or a little boy as “Sis.”


 * Whatever you take to be your sexual identity will determine whether you assign to yourself a homosexual identity. Whatever other people take to be your sexual identity will determine whether or not they assign a homosexual identity to you.

As a person grows up s/he wants to know, “What am I?” Am I a brave person, a coward, a person who is suited to be a doctor, someone who can only live by continually playing music, a bum, a fool? People call me all these things, tell me I am all these things.” Society may force them into the view that they are cowards. Then a crisis occurs that shows that the teachers and the hotshot students can only stand and stare, and the “chicken shit” is the one who stays calm and takes control of the entire situation. That telling event becomes a very salient part of that person’s identity -- at least his or her personal, internal, identity. The same kind of thing can happen with regard to sexuality, and the revelation can go either way.


 * Gender identity involves signs and behaviors that give information on whether one is male or female when the genitalia are covered by clothing. Along with the obvious signs, e.g., the two cloth balls that hang from the belt buckle area of a kilt, occupations can also be gender coded. With no breasts to give milk, how can a man ever be a nurse? (Ridiculous, no?)

When gender identity is incongruent to sexual identity, interpersonal conflicts will arise. (You announced yourself as a woman, I wined and dined you and got you in bed. Now I find you have male genitalia. I feel deceived. I am angry...)

The equation of sexual identity and sexual orientation is a result of the predominant ideological way of thinking about things. (In this case it seems to have gone backwards from sexual orientation to sexual identity.) The idea is that if one has a male sexual identity (he is in truth the possessor of penis and testicles, can inseminate women successfully, etc.), then one ought to have the “appropriate” sexual orientation toward females. And vice-versa.

We need to go beyond that, somehow, to say that the full set of relevant physiological characteristics of the individual (from genotype to phenotype) plus the relevant learning of the individual all exert strong influences on the preferred erotic objects of the individual.

Are there any problems with the following as an outline?

Causal factors involved in becoming a homosexual.


 * Genetic factors:


 * Prenatal factors:
 * hormonal and any other such inputs
 * information (music, etc.) that may affect fetal development
 * Postnatal factors:
 * nutritional, surgical, and other inputs of a material nature
 * information and experiences that educate the growing individual

The terminology in this discussion is more crucial than I would have imagined. There are all sorts of problems involved the possible differenced between what is really there and what either the individual or the society concludes is there. I am now thinking that "sexual identity" may not be the best term to use, but "sex" is not acceptable either because it seems to point to the "thing in itself". So any suggestions on alternatives to terms used in this article would be very helpful.

Patrick0Moran 03:55, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)


 * Yes - the problem is here that we have to use proper terminology - if the relevant literature doesn't talk of "sexual identity", then neither should we. It does seem that you are using the term as a straight synonym for sex, though. Martin 08:32, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)


 * I've got to agree here. An encyclopedia is not the place to coin new terms.  The title of the article is clearly problematic.  Which leads us naturally to...the content.  What this article seems to be attempting to discuss is simply too broad in its range.  The separate ideas need to be placed into the correct articles (and NPOV'd...and edited...and backed up with support wherever possible).  Perhaps if some one could outline the article using all of the correct Wiki-accepted headings and begin to reduce the scope by merging sections into the apropriate articles, then the main thrust of it could be used to undo the re-direct of sexual dimorphism.  I don't think it's unrealistic to fully expect the article on sex to be huge, considering how much time and energy is devoted to the surrounding topics.  However, creating new meanings for old phrases and just starting a new topic because you do not wish to edit/join the previous discussion is probably a very negative thing for the Wikipedia.  It is the type of thing which I think most Wikipedians would like to see avoided.  To that end, my own suggestions are above, after wich I can only propose adding this page to the list for suggested deletion.  Paige 15:30, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC)

I think that ordinarily, discussions of sexual dimorphism have to do with things like the males of one species being markedly smaller than the female, or vice-versa. For instance, just looking at them you would never be able to tell a male Carolina wren from a female. But when you put them side by side they hardly seem to belong together because the male is so very much larger. The colors of cardinals, the singing vs. non-singing of canaries, the sizes of male and female dogs of the same species, etc. See, for instance, [].

With regard to the "causes of sexual identity" article, the main reason I started it was that the parent page has scattered mentioned of etiological factors with nothing to unify them, and I wanted to draw them together somehow. If people are willing to try to outline that article and bring at least the three forms of explanation offered in different places into some kind of connection that people can understand, then I think that would be a good idea. By all means, delete the page I wrote if you want.

Patrick0Moran 22:20, 29 Jul 2003 (UTC) "if the relevant literature doesn't talk of "sexual identity", then neither should we. "

If the above dictum be taken as a general rule of procedure, then the article on sex should be changed so that it does not use that term either. That is, of course, assuming that someone has checked all the "relevant literature" to see whether or not the term is used. Somebody writing in this body of discussion appears to believe that it is a term that has a recognized meaning, and that the recognized meaning is "sexual orientation."

Patrick0Moran 04:48, 30 Jul 2003 (UTC)