1426 



HORMONAL REGULATION OF BEHAVIOR 



homosexuality it is not the only index. Psy- 

 chologic sex is not restricted to sexuality in 

 the sense of genital eroticism, but includes, 

 for example, wishes and fantasies, demeanor 

 and interests. 



By way of illustrating this point as it 

 pertains to homosexuality, we cite an ex- 

 cerpt from the letter to the authors from a 

 24-year-old woman. A Latin- American uni- 

 versity student, the woman was not fluent in 

 idiomatic English, but nonetheless, clearly 

 expressed her dilemma. 



"...I want to add that my attitudes, my way 

 of thinking and feehng, my viewpoints regarding 

 life, love, and everything else that make up and 

 define the personality toward a specific sex have 

 been masculine since I can remember. Later on, 

 when a person reaches that complicated and diffi- 

 cult age when he discovers the difference between 

 men and women, I suddenly realized that I liked 

 girls very much, but not precisely as friends. I 

 have never practiced homosexuali.sm, which I con- 

 sider dishonest and abnormal. I have struggled to 

 adapt myself to the behavior of girl friends, in an 

 endeavor to be like them, but I have failed com- 

 pletely. I know it is u.seless to pretend to adjust 

 myself to a feminine life because the problems, 

 behavior, and attitudes of such sex are so strange 

 and far away from me that I could not make them 

 a part of my everyday life I have used lip- 

 stick; I have tried to dress differently — more like 

 other girls, but I have not known how to select a 

 more attractive dress; and to go to a dress-maker 

 fills me with an anger that I do not understand. I 

 have tried to widen the circle of my acquaintances 

 by joining a girls' club, but I have dropped out be- 

 cause I cannot bear their small talk, which, even if 

 I respect, I cannot share. I have gone out with 

 some good male friends who have shown them- 

 selves to be interested in talking with me about 

 the current things, but I have not been able to 

 dance once, and one night I made myself ridiculous 

 by leaving without any explanations because of my 

 deep feelings of inadequacy " 



This patient, like many others seen clini- 

 cally, displayed a host of signs character- 

 istic of a pervasive identification with a 

 male model. Such a person may be said to 

 have acquired what Brown (1958b) regards 

 as an inverted gender identification. Almost 

 invariably'^ the person with inverted gender 

 identification desires sexual activity with a 

 person of the same anatomic sex and in that 

 sense can be regarded as homosexual in his 



^^One exception would seem to be the case of 

 transvestism. Transvestites often eschew homo- 

 sexual sex activity and may have established a 

 heterosexual adjustment of sorts (Hamburger, 

 Stiirup and Dahl-Iversen, 1953; Benjaniin, 1954). 



or her preference of sex partner whether or 

 not homosexual activity has actually takeji 

 place. In this light homosexuals as a group 

 have as their common denominator only an 

 erotic preference for sexual partners of the 

 same anatomic or biologic sex. Brown has 

 proposed the terms inverted homosexual and 

 noninverted homosexual as more accurately 

 describing the psychologic features in the 

 gender role identification of these individu- 

 als. Such terminology does have the un- 

 doubted advantage of avoiding the impre- 

 cision inherent in the older and more 

 commonly used adjectives "active" and 

 "passive," which refer only to erotic behav- 

 ior as such. 



With the identification of the sex hor- 

 mones, it was doubtless unavoidable that 

 homosexuality, transvestism and other de- 

 viant patterns of sexual behavior in humans 

 came to be ascribed, popularly, to an im- 

 balance of androgen or estrogen. Such a be- 

 lief was fostered and kept alive by reports 

 of studies in lower animals revealing that 

 injection of sex hormones of the opposite sex 

 could evoke inverted sex behavior; that is to 

 say, such animals failed to conform to the 

 usual pattern of sexual aggressiveness or re- 

 ceptiveness and, further, assumed coital 

 positions typical of the ojiposite sex (Young 

 and Rundlett, 1939; Ball, 1940; Beach, 1941, 

 1942a, 1942b, 1945). But anthropomorphic 

 interpretations are always risky and in this 

 instance have proven deceptive and un- 

 warranted insofar as the psychologic sex dis- 

 orders in humans is concerned. Studies pur- 

 porting to demonstrate an excess of estrogen 

 in the urinary androgen-estrogen levels of 

 homosexual men (Glass, Deuel and Wright, 

 1940) have not been verified (Perloff, 1949) . 

 It is common clinical experience that the 

 treatment of homosexual persons with sex 

 hormones, although often intensifying erotic 

 genital sensation, does not bring about any 

 change in sex-role or psychosexual orienta- 

 tion. This is not particularly surprising be- 

 cause, as previously stated, androgens and 

 estrogens have an indirect, rather than a 

 direct influence on gender role and erotic 

 orientation. There does not seem to be a 

 valid basis for the endorsement of any 

 theory of a simple and direct hormonal de- 

 termination of human sexual behavior, 

 either typical or atypical. 



