Word: sexes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...mental retardation?and as many kinds of it." The only thing most experts agree on is that homosexuality is not a result of any kinky gene or hormone predispositions?at least none that can be detected by present techniques. Male and female homosexuals do not constitute a "third sex"; biologically, they are full men and women...
...reason that the invert's sex behavior is not dictated by his anatomy is related to a remarkable finding of sex researchers: no one becomes fully male or female automatically. The diverse psychological components of masculinity and femininity?"gender role identity"?are learned. Gender is like language, says Johns Hopkins University Medical Psychologist John Money: "Genetics ordains only that language can develop, not whether it will be Nahuatl, Arabic or English...
This does not mean that homosexuality is latent in all mature humans, as has been widely believed from a misreading of Freud. In American culture, sex roles are most powerfully determined in the home, and at such a young age (generally in the first few years of life) that the psychological identity of most homosexuals?like that of most heterosexuals?is set before they know it. In the case of homosexuality, parents with emotional problems can be a powerful cause, leaving their child without a solid identification with the parent of the same sex and with deeply divided feelings...
...should ignore each other until puberty and then concentrate heavily on dating can also distort parental attitudes. If a mother catches a little boy playing doctor with a little girl under the porch and tells him he has been bad, says Gebhard, she may be subtly telling him that sex with girls is bad: "Anything that discourages heterosexuality encourages homosexuality." If an uptight parent or teacher catches an impressionable adolescent boy in sexual experiments with other boys and leaps to the conclusion that he is a homosexual, the scoldings he gets may make him freeze up with girls in another...
...several years. A boy who likes dolls or engages in occasional homosexual experiments is not necessarily "queer": such activities are often a normal part of growing up. On the other hand, a child who becomes preoccupied with such interests or is constantly ill at ease with the opposite sex obviously needs some form of psychiatric counseling. While only about one-third of confirmed adult inverts can be helped to change, therapists agree that a much larger number of "prehomosexual" children can be treated successfully...