In the nineties a rollback of social constructionism in the gay community carries on apace. In 1991 the research findings of Dr Simon LeVay, characterised as a ‘gay activist’, were published in the US. LeVay studied the brains of gay men who had died from AIDS and of men who claimed they were not gay who had died from the same cause. He found that a tiny area of the hypothalamus was on average twice as large in heterosexual men as in either heterosexual women or homosexual men. He suggested that varying hormone levels before birth ‘wired’ the hypothalamus for either heterosexuality or homosexuality. Since then another study at the University of California Medical School has apparently backed his findings. LeVay sees his work as really positive for ending discrimination against gays. He had always believed that homosexuality was biologically determined and set out to prove it so that anti- gay discrimination might be opposed on the grounds that gays were condemned by nature to their behaviour and must be treated with the mercy that should be shown to any group who cannot help themselves. This is an old argument which harks back to the turn of the century. It is an idea that dies hard. But it does not fit lesbian experience or lesbian feminist theory. LeVay has not yet had access to the brains of lesbians but is convinced that he will find that their brains resemble those of heterosexual men in the crucial area. It is significant that LeVay also believes that biology is responsible for differences between males and females in behaviour. He thinks that women are more verbally competent than men and men more spatially competent than women by reason of brain differences. He manages to associate these brain differences with the fact that gay men are ‘less strongly right-handed than straight men.’ LeVay is clearly prepared to believe that any number of stereotypical differences between men and women are the result of biology with no evidence whatsoever apart from his hunches. Most worryingly he believes that ‘male and female sex drives are biologically determined.’ One fundamental insight of feminist theory is that male sexual behaviour is learned and not natural. There would be no hope otherwise of women’s freedom from sexual violence. […] LeVay shows us that biological arguments about ‘gay genes’ can lead directly into biological arguments that justify women’s oppression. It is worrying that the LeVay theory has been treated enthusiastically in some of the gay press and at least with sympathetic curiosity in the rest. The return to essentialism is in full swing it seems. Feminists have been particularly hostile to biological determinist explanations because the very idea of feminism, the possibility of its birth, depends on fighting the idea of biologically constructed psychological differences between the sexes. After a good grounding in such a battle it is not possible for lesbian feminists to be sanguine about biological explanations of homosexuality. Gay men can be because their freedom as men does not depend to the same extent on fighting biologism.
Sheila Jeffreys, The Lesbian Heresy, pp. 60-61. (via slack-arse-moll)