Science and sexual orientation

pp. 105-128

in: William Wilkerson, Ambiguity and sexuality, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007

Abstract

I have repeatedly put off discussing how biological aspects of sexuality can be integrated or fused with other factors. The time has finally come to integrate these aspects with the rest of my account. Naturally, the first question concerns the meaning of an expression such as the "biological aspects of sexuality." For, certainly all aspects of our existence are biological, if we use the term "biological" to denote those things that seem to be of the body or of the animal. But nothing I have written so far sounds remotely like what ordinarily passes as biology, and emerging fusion does not portray sexuality and sexual identity as emerging from isolated, physiological processes that could be studied separate from an individual's culture and choices. And this (it seems to me) is what people mean by the "biological aspects of sexual identity": the physiological stuff—genes, hormones, and brain structures— that exist independently of the messy social stuff I discuss, and that produces sexual orientation.