Childhood Trauma and Sexual Orientation

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I had a very traumatic child-hood and have often wondered whether it's caused by some kind of a fear of the male body. Although, most of my friends are male and I find it easier to befriend guys than girls. I have a lot of gay friends, both girls and guys. Some of them have been abused, but far from all of them. My cousin is gay, and he wasn't. I have some other gay relatives, and they weren't. I also know a lot of straight people, both guys and girls, that were abused. If that really were the cause, then why aren't they gay. And why are the people gay that haven't been.

I had a guy I know ask me why I was a lesbian last week. I gave him a very simple answer. I said: "Why are you straight"? I think both questions are equally stupid and basically the same question. Although, I guess not everybody are so easy about it. A friend of mine. who is a gay guy, was there too when he asked that question and he got really upset at the guy.

That's why I try to be diplomatic about my thoughts on abuse and sexuality, because I certainly don't want anyone thinking that I think being gay is some sort of fixable condition. Not at all. Of course, I've never thought homosexuality was a result of abuse, but that perhaps bisexuality, asexuality, pedophilia (NOT comparing bisexuality and pedophilia in ANY way, except to say they are differences in sexuality that could have been impacted by abuse or formative experience), fetishes, and other atypical types of attraction may be.

You believe that most people are born bisexual and then end up going one way or the other, so you obviously won't agree with that opinion. However, speaking from a purely biological perspective, it wouldn't make sense for all infants to start out bisexual...that would negatively skew the possibility of procreation in any species. I believe that heterosexuality is the default setting, but that the environment in the womb could alter the development process, so that the brain (hypothalamus, specifically) either does not receive the signal to change (in the cases of male fetuses) or does receive a signal to change when it should not (in the case of female fetuses).

If you believe the theory of the hypothalamus controlling gender identity and sexuality, which I do, then the size of the hypothalamus will directly affect how you identify yourself, both with gender and sexuality. Let me try to explain with a very rough 'diagram':

==== (heterosexual male/female-to-male transsexual) / == (heterosexual female/male-to-female transsexual)
=== (gay male/female/transsexual)

With this model, there is really nowhere for bisexuality to fit as a natural, inborn trait. If your hypothalamus is somewhere in between the size of a hetero female or hetero male, then you will be homosexual. Yes, this is very simplified. Sure, you could argue that the hypothalamus could easy fall in between hetero male/female and homo male/female, thus creating bisexuality, but that at least rules out the idea that bisexuality is the natural state of a fetus.

Also, the fact that most bisexuals that I know of are not 50/50, but somewhere close to 80/20, suggests that the gender that they are attracted to more fully (love/relationship/sex as opposed to just romantically or just sexually) is the gender they were meant to be attracted to, but that somewhere along the line, some life event led them to develop a secondary attraction.

Again, I am in NO WAY suggesting that there is anything wrong with homosexuality or bisexuality, or that, even if bisexuality is caused by abuse or some other formative experience, that it could in any way be cured, or even that it should be. I'm a biological female who's attracted to men, but I often identity better with gay men, so I'm sensitive to the fact that, no matter how or why one feels sexual attraction, that it's not something that is ever a choice.

Oh, btw, it was also never my suggestion that abuse=homo/bisexuality. Again, I think it could be ANY strong experience from childhood that could affect one's sexual preferences outside of gay/straight. A good example of this is Humbert Humbert, the protagonist from "Lolita", who becomes fixated on young teenage girls as a sexual preference because his first love, a 14-year-old girl, died very unexpectedly. Every girl he loves from that point on must remind him of her. Yes, he's an invented character, but there are plenty of real-life people who could share that experience, I'm sure.

I don't necessarily mean most people are born bisexual; I just mean more than what we see in everyday life as adults. For example: say that 80% of all adults identify as straight, 5% identify as bisexual, and 15% identify as gay or lesbian (I have no idea how accurate that is, I just made it up to illustrate my point). I'm saying that perhaps some of those straight adults are bisexual by nature, but because they feel the need to conform (as humans generally do) they ignored their attraction to the same gender and focussed on the attraction to the opposite gender. So perhaps only 50% would have been straight regardless, whereas the other 30% only ended up straight because of the society they were born into. For this reason, although it'd be unethical, I would be very curious to see what would happen if an isolated society could be set up where all children were conditioned to believe that being gay was the norm and being straight was the deviation, and kept away from the rest of the world who would say otherwise. I imagine that a lot more of them would grow up to identify as gay because they had ignored their attraction to the opposite sex in order to fit in.

So I'm saying that perhaps it's possible that if a child's natural state is bisexual and they are assaulted by a member of the same gender, it cold trigger a fascination with the same gender, or an idea in their head that this is the norm, that then ends up conditioning them to identify as gay because perhaps they've only ever had one crush on a member of the opposite sex - based on natural desires - versus many crushes on the same sex - based on natural desires coupled with that fascination they developed. Similarly, Ingz mentioned above being conditioned to hate the gender that you were assaulted by.

I'm definitely not saying this is always the case, or that I'm definitely right. It's just a theory I have that makes sense to me. But as I said, I don't say it much because I wouldn't want people to use that as an excuse to say that being gay/bi is 'wrong.'

I agree with what you're saying about paedophilia though. Perhaps it does develop naturally in some people, but I do think that a lot of the time it's the result of circumstance. A lot of paedophiles may have become sexually active very young with other children, which may not be harmful, and as such come to develop the association between sex and children. The fact that they themselves have grown up into adults doesn't factor into that. This is further supported by the fact that people who became sexually active as teenagers tend to be attracted to teenagers and young adults (though in these cases they generally have the self-control to stay away from the teenagers where such an encounter would be illegal) whereas people who become sexually active as adults may be attracted to older adults.