Polyamory: Intimate practice, identity or sexual orientation?

Polyamory as a Sexual Orientation

Banning Therapy to Change Sexual Orientation or Gender Identity in Patients Under 18.

Five U.S. states, the District of Columbia, and one Canadian province have enacted laws forbidding the practice by mental health professionals of what is commonly termed “conversion therapy” or “reparative therapy.” In a person younger than 18, such therapy is meant to change sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender behaviors. I contend that these laws are problematic from both psychiatri...

Taxometric analyses of sexual orientation and gender identity.

Taxa are nonarbitrary classes whose existence is an empirical question and not a matter of mere semantic convenience. Taxometric procedures detect whether numerical relations between purported indicators of conjectured taxa bear the hallmarks of true taxa. On the basis of theoretical considerations, the current study tested whether taxa underlie sexual orientation and related measures of gender...

Sexual differentiation of the human brain in relation to gender identity and sexual orientation.

During the intrauterine period the fetal brain develops in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed into our brain structures when we are still in t...

Sexual differentiation of the human brain: relevance for gender identity, transsexualism and sexual orientation.

Male sexual differentiation of the brain and behavior are thought, on the basis of experiments in rodents, to be caused by androgens, following conversion to estrogens. However, observations in human subjects with genetic and other disorders show that direct effects of testosterone on the developing fetal brain are of major importance for the development of male gender identity and male heteros...