A confusing matter, and a Dr Who complaint

When do gay kids start "acting gay"? - By Brian Palmer - Slate Magazine

Prompted by news of a lawsuit in America to do with anti-gay bullying in a school, Brian Palmer looks at the somewhat interesting question of whether a young child acting outside of "traditional gender roles" is an indication of future sexual identity. In brief:

A hefty pile of research shows that boys as young as 3 years old who break from traditional gender roles have a high likelihood of becoming gay adults. Predictive behaviors include playing with Barbie dolls, shying away from roughhousing, and taking an interest in makeup and women's clothing. (Read the Explainer's take on why boys prefer to play with sticks while girls go for dolls here.) The relationship isn't one-to-one, however, and it's certainly not the case that all boys who love Barbie dolls will later identify as gay. The correlation is much weaker in the other direction: A disproportionate number of boys who don't conform to gender stereotypes turn out to be gay men, but lots of gay men played with G.I. Joe as boys and quarterbacked the high-school football team. Neither does the relationship appear to be as strong among girls. Tomboys aren't as likely to become lesbian adults.

Psychiatrist Richard Green conducted the leading study in this field in the 1970s and '80s. He followed 44 boys who defied traditional gender roles from early childhood to adulthood. Thirty of them became gay or bisexual adults while just one child from a 34-member gender-conforming control group turned out to be gay. The subjects who strayed the most from conventionally boyish behavior were the most likely to be gay. Green's study has since been repeated by other researchers with similar outcomes. (Studies on females show that only around one-quarter of gender nonconforming girls grow up to be lesbians.)

The complicated thing about this is that acting outside of normal gender roles is also commonly seen as a sign of future gender identity issues. Why is it that some boys with this apparent inborn inclination to feminine interests will go on to develop a deep unhappiness with their own body to such an extent that they feel they can't be happy unless they hormonally/surgically modify it, and others will go to be "merely" homosexual, with varying degrees of feminine behaviour as part of that?

Of course, lots of people have written extensively about sexual identity and gender issues, but I am not inclined to waste a huge amount of time on reading about it; I just note that it is a matter that I think is obviously complicated, and far from properly understood.

I think I noted recently here that Native Americans (supposedly) saw cross-gender behaviour in kids as a sign they were a special, virtually holy, "two spirits" combining both male and female spirits. According to this article:

Every tribe watched their young carefully to determine if one of their children were two-spirits. If a boy leaned towards female clothes and mannerism, the tribe encouraged his explorations and vice versa for females.

Given the political use to which such anthropology can be put in the gay marriage debate, there is reason to be a bit suspicious about over-statements on this, and indeed, here's a site that claims reverence of "two spirits" was by no means a universal practice:

According to researcher Will Roscoe, former coordinator of the Gay American Indians History Project, there is no single belief about Two-Spirits among the more than 800 tribes in the United States and Alaska, about 200 of which are not federally recognized. Two-spirits may be respected within one tribe and ostracized in another, while the topic of sexuality could be ignored altogether in yet another tribe.

As I said, human behaviour and psychology in this field is very complicated.

It certainly also makes it a bit of a challenge wondering how one should explain "gay" issues to children. I have not yet had to discuss the "gay" question with my own kids, despite the best efforts of Dr Who to continually bring up gay issues again and again. Surely I can't be the only father in the world who finds this annoying. Even after the departure of the gay re-inventor of the show, Russell Davies, who you could clearly see was inserting a subtext of all types of pan sexual behaviour as being cool and normal, the new producer Steven Moffat, who is not gay, is openly going out of his way to keep introducing gay characters. Here's what he said in an interview:

But also someone pointed out to me [that] in the previous Doctor Who, the first one I had run, there were no gay or bisexual characters and I was sort of slightly appalled. I was thinking, I’m not like that at all. I would never have done that. So I was thinking, “Dammit, it’s the one criticism I’ve ever listened to. Good point, Doctor Who should always be…" It’s not because it’s politically and morally correct. It’s right for Doctor Who, isn’t it? It’s cheeky and off-centered. And fun.

Yeah, well, thanks a lot Steve. You've made it into a psyops program aimed at educating kids on sexuality. Yep, that's why we watch Doctor Who, which is, after all, still primarily a kid's science fiction program, just that it is well enough acted with good enough production values that adults watch it too. And, by the way, although I like the cast quite a lot, its stories are not as good as they were a few years ago, before the Davies decline. In fact, it's nearly time to give it a rest again, I think, after this season.

Anyway, back to kids and the "gay" explanation. I spoke to another father who said he simply answered the question "what's a lesbian" by saying it was a woman who loved a woman. Easy peasy. Maybe that is suitable for an 8 year old, but honestly, explaining homosexuality purely in terms of "love" isn't being realistic with a slightly older kid who has something of an understanding about heterosexual sex.

Part of the problem, as I say, is that it's not clear that adults understand it at all properly from a biological, psychological or cultural point of view either. So I don't care what others may say - it's a tricky issue to explain to a child/young teenager.