Sexual Orientation: Is it Innate or a Learned Behavior?

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Sexual Orientation: Is it Innate or a learned behavior? The most controversial and researched topic in science today is the argument whether sexual orientation in humans is innate or a learned behavior. Scientist are even conducting research and studies to see if there is something called a “gay-gene” that could be affecting us during the stages of Mitosis. Sexuality is something humans cannot control, the debate between nature vs. nurture sides whether you were born this way or was it the way you were raised. Studies have proven that sexual orientation could be discovered as early as age three. Childhood development plays a big role in the destiny of your future as far as sexuality. There are some ways in which we do control our sexual behavior. The learned behavior on this topic is what society portrays. Society have succeeded with the denial of gay rights and including things like religion to back up their theories. This has also triggered denial of acceptance and hate-crimes which makes this research so controversial. Religion has corrupted the minds of the people of the world forcing them to believe what should be right and what is wrong. Organizations like NOH8 and #ItGetsBetter have raised money to pay for scientific research on the “gay-gene”. Studies have shown that sexual orientations have some biological factors which have proven that sexuality can be innate and not a learned behavior. Sexuality Development Sexuality development has several factors that make up the complex process this process are all things associated with the brain and child development. There are several stages... ... middle of paper ... ... Richard Pillard and Michael Bailey conducted a research on a set of identical twins. Twins are more reliable when conducting this research because they share the exact same DNA. Pillard and Bailey studied the sexual orientation of two male twins; during their research a lot of things were discovered. One of the twins was gay and the other was straight, in their findings they proposed that there was an issue with testosterone levels in the gay twin. This till today is up for debate because of the lack of biological proof that shows that testosterone affects ones sexual orientation. They did prove that with identical twins if one twin is homosexual the chances of the other twin being homosexual are roughly 50%. This was compared to single a born child which is 5 or 6% and 22% in fraternal twins. The same exact results when the two psychologists studied female pairs.

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