Brain research 101.

Sexual orientation and gender identity.Female, male, gay, straight, bi, transgender.

Across the last several decades, the frontal lobe and hypothalamus have been the 2 broad areas that brain researchers have successfully identified thus far……where the brain cells are located that determine human sexual orientation and gender identity.

As to say that looking at genitals or measuring testosterone levels isn’t the most educated, accurate, or up to date approach.

Regardless of subject matter, when it comes to the human brain, just about everything having to do with humans exists along a broad, linear spectrum.For stuff like autism, spectrums look like most people clumped together at one end, with a sprinkling of folks spreadout to the opposite end.

For human sexual orientation and gender identity, the largest groups of humans are clustered at 2 polar extremes of straight female and straight male, with a very large number of people spread out between those 2 polar opposites. This would likely be far more obvious had humans historically been less culturally, religiously, and politically problematic towards the subject.One wouldn’t need brain scan technology and several decades of brain research to be aware of such things.

I equate this subject of human physiology to that of fast twitch vs slow twitch muscle fibers in 1970’s and 80’s Exercise Physiology. Folks believed that these muscle fiber types were genetically set in stone. For a couple decades after the hard data existed showing this wasn’t the case, people continued to believe otherwise.

Hence my mantra during my 30 years of following 60 research journals…..

Put data ahead of dogma.

Follow the data not the crowd.