Free We Are Our Brains by D. F. Swaab

influence sexual behavior unconsciously. A male pheromone stimulates activity in the hypothalamus of heterosexual women and homosexual men but doesn’t provoke a response in heterosexual men. It seems that male scents don’t turn them on. Lesbian women were found to react differently to pheromones than heterosexual women. Savic also showed that heterosexual women and homosexual men had more extensive functional connections between the amygdalaand other brain areas than heterosexual men and homosexual women, proving that brain circuits function differently according to sexual orientation. Functional scanning also showed changes of activity in other brain areas. In the case of heterosexual men and homosexual women, the thalamus and prefrontal cortex responded more strongly to a photograph of a female face, while in the case of homosexual men and heterosexual women these structures responded more strongly to a male face. In other words, sexual orientation is determined by many structural and functional differences in the brain, all of which develop in the womb during the second half of pregnancy. They aren’t caused by the behavior of dominant mothers, who are the traditional scapegoats in this context. Just for the record, I made a habit over the years of asking the medical students I taught (250 at a time) which of them did
not
have a dominant mother. No one ever raised their hand.
HOMOSEXUALITY: NO CHOICE
    Xq28—Thanks for the genes, mom!
    T-shirt referring to research done by Dean Hamer showing that a gene for homosexuality might reside in the q28 marker on the X chromosome
    Homosexuality is God’s way of insuring that the truly gifted aren’t burdened with children.
    Sam Austin, composer and lyricist
    Toward the end of George W. Bush’s presidency, an “ex-gay movement” that regarded homosexuality as a curable disease gained momentum. Hundreds of clinics and therapists jumped on the bandwagon, and it was claimed (but not proven) that 30 percent of those who went into therapy were cured. At such clinics, you received two weeks of “treatment” for $2,500 or six weeks of treatment for $6,000. The therapists were often homosexual themselvesbut claimed to have been turned into family men after therapy. A countermovement with the slogan “It’s OK to be gay” claimed that the therapies involved conditioning based on stigma and shame as well as discrimination against homosexuals. In 2009 an annihilating report by the American Psychological Association (APA) confirmed that the treatments were causing a rash of suicides among patients. The report concluded that therapy to change homosexuals into heterosexuals didn’t work and that the association’s 150,000 members should stop offering it to their clients. The report stated that the best such therapy could do was to teach people to ignore their feelings and to suppress homosexual inclinations. It went on to confirm that the therapy could cause depression and even lead to suicide.
    All the research indicates that our sexual orientation is programmed in the brain before birth, determining it for the rest of our lives (see earlier in this chapter). Many structural and functional differences have now been found between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men that must occur early on in development and can no longer be changed by the post-birth environment. Even an upbringing in a British boarding school apparently doesn’t make you more likely to be homosexual in adulthood. Initially I thought that “curing” homosexuals was a typical aberration of the Christian community in America, but I was amazed to find that it goes on in the Netherlands too. The Pentecostal Church holds meetings whose prayers can allegedly “cure” you simultaneously of homosexuality and HIV infections, after which you’re married off to a woman from the Pentecostal community. It’s not just misleading but also