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Personality tests also show differences, with gay men ranking higher than straight men in standardised tests for agreeableness, expressiveness, conscientiousness, openness to experience and neuroticism. Lesbians tend to be more assertive and less neurotic than straight women.

Dr Zietsch and his colleagues tested their idea by doing a twin study of their own. They asked 4,904 individual twins, not all of them identical, to fill out anonymous questionnaires about their sexual orientation, their gender self-identification and the number of opposite-sex partners they had had during the course of their lives.

Their first observation was that the number of sexual partners an individual claimed did correlate with that individual’s “gender identity”. The more feminine a man, the more masculine a woman, the higher the hit rate with the opposite sex—though women of all gender identities reported fewer partners than men did.

When the relationships between twins were included in the statistical analysis (all genes in common for identical twins; a 50% overlap for the non-identical) the team was able to show that both atypical gender identity and its influence on the number of people of the opposite sex an individual claimed to have seduced were under a significant amount of genetic control. More directly, the study showed that heterosexuals with a homosexual twin tend to have more sexual partners than heterosexuals with a heterosexual twin.

According to the final crunching of the numbers, genes explain 27% of an individual’s gender identity and 59% of the variation in the number of sexual partners that people have. The team also measured the genetic component of sexual orientation and came up with a figure of 47%—more or less the same, therefore, as that from previous studies. The idea that it is having fecund relatives that sustains homosexuality thus looks quite plausible.

Catherine Tuerk, who runs the support group for parents in Washington, D.C., started out as an advocate for gay rights after her son came out, in his 20s. She has a theory about why some parents have become so comfortable with the transgender label: “Parents have told me it’s almost easier to tell others, ‘My kid was born in the wrong body,’ rather than explaining that he might be gay, which is in the back of everyone’s mind. When people think about being gay, they think about sex—and thinking about sex and kids is taboo.”

A 2008 study of 25 girls who had been seen in Zucker’s clinic showed positive results; 22 were no longer gender-dysphoric, meaning they were comfortable living as girls. But that doesn’t mean they were happy. I spoke to the mother of one Zucker patient in her late 20s, who said her daughter was repulsed by the thought of a sex change but was still suffering—she’d become an alcoholic, and was cutting herself.

Diagnoses of gender-identity disorder among adults have tripled in Western countries since the 1960s; for men, the estimates now range from one in 7,400 to one in 42,000 (for women, the frequency of diagnosis is lower). Since 1952, when Army veteran George Jorgensen’s sex-change operation hit the front page of the New York Daily News, national resistance has softened a bit, too. Former NASCAR driver J.T. Hayes recently talked to Newsweek about having had a sex-change operation. Women’s colleges have had to adjust to the presence of “trans-men,” and the president-elect of the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association is a trans-woman and a successful cardiologist.

Around the world, clinics that specialize in gender-identity disorder in children report an explosion in referrals over the past few years. Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who runs the most comprehensive gender-identity clinic for youth in Toronto, has seen his waiting list quadruple in the past four years, to about 80 kids—an increase he attributes to media coverage and the proliferation of new sites on the Internet.

Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, who runs the main clinic in the Netherlands, has seen the average age of her patients plummet since 2002. “We used to get calls mostly from parents who were concerned about their children being gay,” says Catherine Tuerk, who since 1998 has run a support network for parents of children with gender-variant behavior, out of Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. “Now about 90 percent of our calls are from parents with some concern that their child may be transgender.”

The point was to take the situation out of the realm of deep pathology or mental illness, while at the same time separating it from voluntary behavior, and to put it into the idiom of garden-variety “challenge.”

A recent medical innovation holds out the promise that this might be the first generation of transsexuals who can live inconspicuously. About three years ago, physicians in the U.S. started treating transgender children with puberty blockers, drugs originally intended to halt precocious puberty. The blockers put teens in a state of suspended development.

“Yeah, it is fixable,” piped up another mom, who’d been on the 20/20 special. “We call it the disorder we cured with a skirt.”

The problem with blockers is that parents have to begin making medical decisions for their children when the children are quite young. From the earliest signs of puberty, doctors have about 18 months to start the blockers for ideal results. For girls, that’s usually between ages 10 and 12; for boys, between 12 and 14.

Blockers are entirely reversible; should a child change his or her mind about becoming the other gender, a doctor can stop the drugs and normal puberty will begin. The Dutch clinic has given them to about 70 children since it started the treatment, in 2000; clinics in the United States and Canada have given them to dozens more. According to Dr. Peggy Cohen-Kettenis, the psychologist who heads the Dutch clinic, no case of a child stopping the blockers and changing course has yet been reported.

This suggests one of two things: either the screening is excellent, or once a child begins, he or she is set firmly on the path to medical intervention. “Adolescents may consider this step a guarantee of sex reassignment,” wrote Cohen-Kettenis, “and it could make them therefore less rather than more inclined to engage in introspection.” In the Netherlands, clinicians try to guard against this with an extensive diagnostic protocol, including testing and many sessions “to confirm that the desire for treatment is very persistent,” before starting the blockers.

The most extensive study on transgender boys was published in 1987 as The “Sissy Boy Syndrome” and the Development of Homosexuality. For 15 years, Dr. Richard Green followed 44 boys who exhibited extreme feminine behaviors, and a control group of boys who did not.

Green expected most of the boys in the study to end up as transsexuals, but nothing like that happened. Three-fourths of the 44 boys turned out to be gay or bisexual (Green says a few more have since contacted him and told him they too were gay). Only one became a transsexual. “We can’t tell a pre-gay from a pre-transsexual at 8,” says Green, who recently retired from running the adult gender-identity clinic in England. “Are you helping or hurting a kid by allowing them to live as the other gender?

In 2012, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders—the bible for psychiatric professionals—will be updated. Many in the transgender community see this as their opportunity to remove gender-identity disorder from the book, much the same way homosexuality was delisted in 1973.

Zucker has compared young children who believe they are meant to live as the other sex to people who want to amputate healthy limbs, or who believe they are cats, or those with something called ethnic-identity disorder

Hetgeen volgens de onderzoekers weer is te herleiden tot de uitgesproken machocultuur onder veel Marokkaanse (straat)jongeren, waarin stoer, mannelijk en dwars gedrag (‘in straattaal van de jongens: kapot moeilijk’) de hoogst haalbare status is.

Evenmin is gebleken dat de oververtegenwoordiging van Marokkanen iets te maken zou hebben met nare seksuele ervaringen in hun jeugd.

Religie, aldus de onderzoekers, speelt daarbij geen enkele rol

Verdachten van fysiek geweld, althans in de hoofdstad, zijn meestal jongens van 17 tot 25 jaar oud. Ze zijn even vaak autochtoon-Nederlands als van Marokkaanse afkomst, elk 36 procent. Maar omdat blanke Nederlanders in die leeftijdscategorie 39 procent van het totaal uitmaken en Marokkanen 16 procent is er sprake van duidelijke Marokkaanse oververtegenwoordiging.

Buijs, Hekma en Duyvendak onderzochten tevens de veel gehoorde stelling dat het imago van Amsterdam als homohoofdstad van de wereld ‘naar de knoppen zou zijn’, zoals voormalig D66-leider Boris Dittrich (thans Human Right Watch) het recent nog verwoordde. Onjuist, aldus de wetenschappers.

Same-sex relations are not banned in Turkey. But like America, it bans gays and cross-dressing men from the army. Yet to win exemption from mandatory military service, they must prove their sexual orientation. A Human Rights Watch report notes that this can involve “abusive and intrusive anal examinations”, and adds that many are forced into psychiatric treatment because they are deemed to be mentally ill.

If we avoid the tempting but misleading analogy to race and look at what's directly at stake, the combination of widespread opposition to same-sex marriage and equally widespread support for other gay rights is easier to understand. Gay rights in employment and civil unions don't require the elimination of longstanding and culturally potent sex roles. Same-sex marriage does.

Civil rights law reflects this ambivalence about sex difference. While constitutional law applies "strict scrutiny" to racial distinctions and federal employment law condemns race discrimination in almost all its forms, there's no such comprehensiveness with respect to sex. Sex discrimination is not subject to the same exacting scrutiny as race discrimination under constitutional law, and federal employment law allows many types of it. For instance, courts have routinely upheld workplace rules that enforce sex-specific dress and grooming norms against legal challenge. Employers lawfully can require women to wear makeup and feminine attire and prohibit men from wearing jewelry and long hair. By contrast, they can't have one set of grooming rules for white employees and another one for black employees. Civil rights laws explicitly allow employers to defend a claim of sex discrimination by arguing that male or female sex is itself a job requirement—say, for prison guards who do strip searches or for restroom attendants. By contrast, as a matter of federal law, no job can be the exclusive province of white people, or black people, or Asians or Latinos.

Exit polls in California found that 70 percent of black voters backed the ban. Slightly more than half of Latino voters, who made up almost 20 percent of voters, favored the ban, while 53 percent of whites opposed it.

The status of those marriages, among 17,000 same-sex unions performed in the state, was left in doubt by the vote

The cities of Los Angeles and San Francisco, and Santa Clara County, as well as several civil rights and gay rights groups, said on Wednesday that they would sue to block the ban.

Proposition 8 was one of the most expensive ballot measures ever waged, with combined spending of more than $75 million. Focus on the Family and other religious conservative groups contributed money to help pass the same-sex marriage measures in all three states.

In alle vier de onderzochte sectoren, de sport, de horeca, het bank- en verzekeringswezen en bij Defensie is vrijwel iedereen open over zijn of haar homoseksualiteit.

Dit zijn enkele conclusies uit de SCP-publicatie Gewoon Doen. Acceptatie van homoseksualiteit in Nederland

In Nederland hebben homoseksuelen tegenwoordig dezelfde rechten als heteroseksuelen. In 2001 is het burgerlijk huwelijk opengesteld voor paren van hetzelfde geslacht en kregen homoseksuele paren de wettelijke mogelijkheid om kinderen te adopteren.

In internationaal perspectief is Nederland samen met een aantal Scandinavische landen koploper waar het gaat om de acceptatie van homoseksualiteit. Het merendeel van de Nederlanders vindt het een goede zaak dat homoseksuelen dezelfde rechten hebben als heteroseksuelen

Opzichtige homoseksualiteit wordt niet gewaardeerd.

Uit onderzoek in 2000 bleek dat meer dan één op de tien Nederlanders het onaanvaardbaar vond als een zoon of dochter met iemand zou samenwonen van hetzelfde geslacht.

Veel homoseksuele mannen en vrouwen die werken in de horeca, de krijgsmacht en het bank- en verzekeringswezen, of die een teamsport beoefenen zoals hockey hebben te maken met zogenaamde grapjes en vervelende opmerkingen.

Net zoals de Amsterdamse hoofdinspecteur deed met Vietnamdemonstranten in de jaren zestig, laadde de politie de travestieten in vrachtwagens en dumpte die buiten de stad.

Ik zat zelf een keer in een homobar bij een inval van de politie. Toen ze zagen dat niemand met lang haar of make-up rondliep, gingen ze weg omdat er geen homo’s zouden zijn’, lacht Özkan.

Ter illustratie vertelt hij een waargebeurd verhaal uit het leger. ‘Twee mannen werden met elkaar betrapt in een washok. De passieve werd uit het leger gegooid, maar de actieve, de echte vent dus, kreeg alleen celstraf.’