How to Tell if your Son is Gay: A fascinating and enlightening book for parents or anybody interested in raising a homosexual or lesbian child. Cason Crane, 2013 LogoTV Youth Trailblazer Honoree. Wesley C. Davidson, a homosexual rights blogger, and Dr. Jonathan Tobkes, an NYC Psychiatrist, establish a coming-out roadmap for families. Davidson and Tobkes emphasize dialogue and unconditional love to help parents sort through their feelings, overcome obstacles to acceptance, and build their child’s self-esteem.
What?
Your child may be gay if they like sissy things or avoid feminine clothes. Predicting sexual preference is imprecise. Lesbians and gay men often show cross-sex tendencies as children: boys who enjoy their mother’s beauty kit, females who love field hockey or pro wrestling. Are homosexual men prefer swimming, cycling, and tennis to soccer and football. Genetically gay children may have sex-typical traits.
What’s the Penis’ Function?
Jesse Bering, Scientific American/Farrar, Straus and Giroux (North America), Transworld Ltd (UK), Jorge Zahara Editora Ltda (Brazil). Bering. We all know the stereotypes: a young boy’s effeminate walk, fascination with toys, makeup, princesses, and skirts, and scorn for male play. Little girls have a macho attitude, a penchant for tools, a square-jawed readiness for physical tussles with males, and an aversion to perfumed femininity. (studybizz.com) As harbingers of adult homosexuality, these behaviors are feared and scorned. Developmental scientists have just recently uncovered adult homosexuality’s early signs.
Researchers are seeing a pattern of childhood behaviors in LGBT people. Parental homophobia is often justified. J. Michael Bailey and Kenneth J. Zucker’s 1995 article on childhood homosexuality markers. Bailey and Zucker researched sex-typed behavior in boys and girls. Studies indicate sex differences oppose learning. They’re everywhere. Aggregate data reveals statistically substantial sex disparities.
Difference Boys “rough-house” Girls don’t rib-kick
Girls like baby toys and hyperfeminized figurines over machine guns and monster trucks. By age 2, both sexes play gendered pretend games. Boys play soldiers and superheroes, while girls play moms, ballerinas, and princesses. Guys prefer guys as playmates, whereas girls prefer girls. Bailey and Zucker expected homosexuals would show a reversed pattern of sex-typed early behaviors—little boys preferring ladies as playmates, etc.
Authors say prospective or retrospective research can explore this idea. Children with sex-typical patterns are followed into adolescence and early adulthood to assess sexual orientation. This strategy has problems. With few homosexuals, future research needs numerous children. 16 years. Parental volunteering is rare. Researchers usually exclusively study children with severe sex-typical behaviors.
Girl scouts
25 adult women whose parents referred them to a mental health clinic as children were questioned in 2008. They all have GID. They may have favored male playmates, worn guys’ attire, played hard or refused to urinate while sitting. Only 12% of these women were reared gender dysphoric, but their probabilities of being bisexual or homosexual were 23 times higher than a random sample. Lesbians are regularly cross-sex type, data show. LGBT men. 89% of randomly tested gay guys recalled cross-sex childhood behaviors above the heterosexual median, according to Bailey and Zucker.
Critics claim societal norms and prejudices distort memory. Using childhood home movies, a 2008 Developmental Psychology study confirmed this method. Blindly coding young targets with on-screen sex-typical behavior. The study found that adult homosexuals were gender nonconforming as children. Multiple studies have linked childhood gender role aberrations to adult sexual orientation. More gender-nonconforming traits in childhood increase homosexuality or bisexuality in adulthood.
Monkey Bars
Girls who hate dresses don’t all become lesbians, nor do boys who like dresses. Some are trans and heterosexual. I acted androgynously and abnormally. Zucker and Bailey’s findings may explain why 11 of 13 kids at my 7th birthday party are ladies, despite my parents’ impression that I was a young Casanova. By age 10, I was as obnoxious, impolite, and wired as my male contemporaries without being effeminate or a “sissy.” By 13, I internalized male stereotypes. I started wrestling as an 80-pound eighth-grader and became gay.
Prehomosexual males prefer solitary hobbies like swimming, cycling, and tennis to contact sports like football and soccer. I remember playing monkey bars with the girls while the boys played football in second grade.
Who does that?
Researchers believe that adult homosexuality has numerous developmental pathways. Sexual orientation is hereditary and environmental. Children with pronounced sex-typical behaviors may be homosexual due to genetics, but gay adults who were sex-typical as children may be homosexual due to early experiences.
What’s next? Why do homosexual parents worry?
I doubt many parents would want a homosexual child. Parental intolerance is understandable because gay and lesbian children don’t reproduce (unless they get creative). Your child can contribute to your genetic success without sexual reproduction. I don’t know how much money or notoriety trickles down to k. d. lang, Elton John, and Rachel Maddow’s families, but I think they have greater reproductive options with a gay cousin. Cultivate your homosexual child’s inherent skills, and you may be rewarded with one exceptional gay child rather than 10 mediocre straight ones.
Would parents want to know if children’s sexual orientation could be predicted?
As a pro-homosexual pipsqueak, I can say that others’ preparedness would have made it simpler for me. It would have eliminated teenage concerns about why I wasn’t dating a nice girl (or questions from the nice pretty girl about why I was dating her and rejecting her advances). It must be hard to look into your homosexual toddler’s eyes, brush cookie crumbs off her cheek, and throw her out.
It’s difficult to accept that your Child is Gay
“I love you, and I’m here for you,” you should tell your child when they come out as LGBT. Except for her parents, Shannon McElroy’s friends and family had known for years that she was a lesbian. McElroy married her religious parents in secret in January of this year, and only then did she notify them. “A lot of it was fear about how they would react and whether they would actually embrace me,” says McElroy, a 36-year-old York, Pa. community health center program manager. They were still kind, saying things like, ‘We understand,’ and welcoming my wife into the family.”
Despite social changes such as the Marriage Equality Act and greater acceptance of gay rights, according to McElroy, who has worked with LGBT youth at the health center, the process of coming out can still be painful for some people. According to research by the Pew Research Center, nearly 40% of LGBT people have been rejected by a family member or close friend because they are LGBT. About 60% of parents would be unconcerned if their child came out. Many LGBT children’s families are still unaware that their children are gay until it is too late.
Even if parents are receptive, many gay rights campaigners argue that they should never ask a child about his or her sexual orientation explicitly. Kristin Russo announced her bisexuality to the world for the first time over a Thanksgiving dinner. When she was in college, she “couldn’t take any more” of her mother’s questions about her dating life. For the following ten years, Russo and her mother had a strained relationship. Her mother initially refused to accept her daughter as a lesbian until she met some of her daughter’s friends.
