On Tuesday, I picked up Scientific American Mind (SAM), a magazine I occasionally purchase if an article catches my eye, or if I’m killing time by myself. This will never happen again. I picked up the latest issue and noticed a ‘special edition’. Plastered on the front was “HIS BRAIN, HER BRAIN; How we’re different” but scrutiny on the gender divide remains for an upcoming post. I’m focusing on a particular article in the latest issue titled “Is Your Child Gay?” Suddenly filled with dread that my offspring might turn out to be of the homosexual kind, I turned to page 50, where a very expressive writer by the name of Jesse Bering told me how I can look out for signs that my darling child might actually, y’know…bat for other team.

I must apologise, my tone is heavily ridden with mockery and disgust. I simply cannot believe an article like this was allowed to be published. Don’t worry, my only defence is not sarcasm and adjectives. I will rip SAM a new literary asshole. Prepare for the most articulate motherblogging blow.

The subheading, which pretty much sets the tone for the whole article, reads

“If your son likes sissy stuff or your daughter shuns feminine frocks, he or she is more likely to buck the heterosexual norm. But predicting sexual preference is still an inexact science.”

If your son likes ‘sissy’ stuff (superb word choice) or if your daughter doesn’t want to wear ‘feminine’ frocks (I wasn’t aware there were ‘masculine’ frocks available) then congratulations – your child has an opinion! And a wonderfully diverse taste. The article opens with a paragraph starting with “We all know the stereotypes…” Yes, we do. We really, really do. Please don’t give us your two cents on your incredibly patronising stereotype of a gay man and woman as children. We were born into those stereotypes, we grew up with those stereotypes, we were rejected because of those stereotypes, and we rose up against those stereotypes. But we’re still fighting those stereotypes.

The language used in this article doesn’t get any better, and it almost assures parents who do ‘worry’ about their child being gay, that ‘worrying’ about it is normal, because it’s not something you should be okay with. Look out for it, investigate it, target it, and cure it. Which sounds like a way to prevent and treat a disease, but that’s exactly how Bering is putting homosexuality across as; a disease.

“These behavioural patterns are feared, loathed and often spoken of directly as harbingers of adult homosexuality… Curiously enough, the age-old homophobic fears of many parents reflect some genuine predictive currency.”

So you better watch out for your homo-ridden kids when it’s playtime, because that’s when you can really pick out the divas and the dykes. Here comes stereotyped toys and gender roles. “A key sex difference,” Bering writes, “with boys gravitating toward toy machine guns and monster trucks and girls orienting toward baby dolls and hyperfeminised figurines.” Ah to be raised without gender stereotypes.

The only reason parents ‘panic’ when they see their baby boy playing with a doll is because that doll has been slotted in this horrible box labelled ‘girl’s toys’. The only reason parents think their daughter might be gay is because she shows an interest in trucks and cars she picked from the box labelled ‘boy’s toys’. Who put those labels there in the first place? Our sexist society. What happens when those kids grow up? They’re taunted with these gender roles that they never adhered to, and as a result, they are reinforced, and passed on. Toy interests are a key sex difference because we’ve made that key sex difference.

The idea of gender inversion in homosexuals penetrates many domains – personality, facial composition, and behaviour. But, as I found in my dissertation, they aren’t accurate enough cues to determine sexual orientation of a person. Here, Bering tells of two psychologists, Bailey & Zucker who hypothesized that homosexuals show gender inversion in sex-typed childhood behaviours. This article was written in 1995, 17 years ago. I would really like to think a lot has changed in that time, in regards to views on homosexuality and even with gender equality. For a start, same-sex marriage has become legal, recognised in at least six American states, throughout North and South America, and Europe. The stereotypes of homosexuals was not made to flatter them, it was made to weaken and isolate them, vindictive measures to rid society of this abnormal lifestyle. But with nationwide acceptance increasing, stereotypes break down, because, well, homosexuals are normal people too.  Sexism is ever present, but women are ever stronger. I’m not saying these problems don’t exist anywhere today – society is rife with hidden sexism – but I’ll just say, a majority of viewpoints are more liberal than they were, say two decades ago.

What they found, was, as Bering put it, “Little boys preferring girls as playmates and becoming infatuated with their mother’s makeup kit; little girls strangely enamoured of field hockey or professional wrestling – that sort of thing.” Oh yes, that sort of sexist thing. When I was a little lez, I loved nothing more than professional wrestling. All my lesbo friends, why, I met them on the hockey pitch itself. And my best gayboy couldn’t bear to be without his mother’s make-up bag, it was his security blanket. Sarcasm aside, it’s likely that some gays will have similar experiences of this. When I was a little girl, my aunt gave my sister a Barbie and an Action Man for me on our birthday (we’re twins). My aunt has no concept of what girls and boys toys are, and my mum dressed my sister and I exactly the same, so it was just a random choice what presents we received. It was only afterwards that I realised that Action Man is a boys toy, when I went to ‘Toys R Us’ and had to get my dude some accessories from the navy blue and khaki camouflaged decorated boys section. Nevertheless, my obsession with Action Man grew, as did my homosexuality.

The article goes on to say how a different psychologist (Drummond et al., 2008) tested this hypothesis with a small sample of women who were referred to their parents for a mental health assessment when they were kids, and found to have severe signs of gender identity disorders. If my math is correct, these kids were referred around 1993, when cross-dressing kids was a signal to panic, and sexuality was unquestionably linked to gender. And let’s not forget how the Diagnostic Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders  used to think of transsexualism as a mental illness and a disease. Now in 2012, gender dysphoria is only a disorder, thank god.

In my opinion, there’s not much you can draw from a sample of 25 women, who were forced to get a mental health check-up by their possibly homophobic and narrow-minded mothers. But let’s allow the numbers to speak for themselves: those women were up to 23 times higher to be bisexual or homosexual than any general sample of women. Probably. But there were only 25 of them. The study was done retrospectively and in the 90s, which means opinions are heavily swayed by negative attitudes of gender expression at the time. Bering takes into consideration these factors, and adds, “Not all tomboys becomes lesbians, of course, but these data suggest that lesbians often have a history of cross-sex-typed behaviours.” I’m not a sexist, but…girls aren’t allowed to play football, or wear trousers.

Another retrospective study by Bailey & Zucker shows that gay men are just as guilty as lesbians, with their kooky cross-sex-typed behaviours.

Please make your way to Part 2 for a closer look at Mr Jesse Bering.