New Study: Gay Brains Structured Like Those of the Opposite Sex

Well, it looks like more bad news for the Christianists based on new Swedish research being released just as gay marriage takes off today in California. But then, the Christianists care little for science and research, preferring to live in a fantasy land of their own based on hate and bigotry. Perfessional homophobes and merchants of anti-gay lies Robert Knight and Peter LaBarbera among others will be wetting themselves in spastic aggitation over it all. Obviously, we gays know damn well that our sexual orientation and the gender of the objects of our romantic attraction are not a choice no matter how many lies the likes of Concerned Bitches for America and similar organizations disseminate. This new reseach shows a definite difference in brain structure between gays and the straight members of their gender. Obviously, we do not somehow choose to have different brain characteristics. It will be amusing to see what lengths the Christianists go to avoid recognizing this new knowledge. Here are some highlights from New Scientist:

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Brain scans have provided the most compelling evidence yet that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait. The scans reveal that in gay people, key structures of the brain governing emotion, mood, anxiety and aggressiveness resemble those in straight people of the opposite sex. The differences are likely to have been forged in the womb or in early infancy, says Ivanka Savic, who conducted the study at the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm, Sweden.

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Previous studies have also shown differences in brain architecture and activity between gay and straight people, but most relied on people's responses to sexuality driven cues that could have been learned, such as rating the attractiveness of male or female faces. To get round this, Savic and her colleague, Per Lindström, chose to measure brain parameters likely to have been fixed at birth.

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The results showed that straight men had asymmetric brains, with the right hemisphere slightly larger – and the gay women also had this asymmetry. Gay men, meanwhile, had symmetrical brains like those of straight women. They found that the patterns of connectivity in gay men matched those of straight women, and vice versa (see image, above right). In straight women and gay men, the connections were mainly into regions of the brain that manifest fear as intense anxiety.

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"This study demonstrates that homosexuals of both sexes show strong cross-sex shifts in brain symmetry," says Qazi Rahman, a leading researcher on sexual orientation at Queen Mary college, University of London, UK. "The connectivity differences reported in the amygdala are striking."