Country Netherlands Media type Print (Hardcover) ISBN 978-0444414779 | Language English Pages 272 Originally published 1976 Page count 272 | |
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Subjects Homosexuality, Transsexualism | ||
Hormones and Brain Differentiation is a 1976 book about homosexuality and transsexualism by Günter Dörner, in which Dörner advocated manipulating the sex hormone levels of pregnant women to prevent their offspring from becoming homosexual, and, based on experiments on rats, proposed brain surgery as a method of altering the sexual orientation of adult homosexuals. The book formed part of a 1970s campaign by Dörner to prevent homosexuality, and like other parts of his work has been controversial.
Contents
Summary
According to Dörner, research on animals shows that "the direction of sex drive can be changed, at least in part, by intrahypothalamic sex hormone implantations or hypothalamic lesions." He argued that "an important preventative therapy of sexual differentiation disturbances" could be achieved through "administration of androgens in gonosomal male foetuses with androgen deficiency during the critical differentiation periods of genital organs and, in particular, of the brain." Dörner noted that there are possible arguments against a program to prevent homosexuality, including the fact that "numerous prominent personalities" of the past were homosexuals, including some who were "outstanding poets, painters, or composers." However, he defended his proposal on the grounds that 25% of homosexuals attempt suicide and that "a great number of males and females with inborn sexual deviations are suffering from psychosexual pressure." Quoting the author C. Hamburger, Dörner wrote that he had received letters from unhappy transsexuals and homosexuals, and that in his view the medical profession has a responsibility to ease their suffering.
Reception
Hormones and Brain Differentiation, like other parts of Dörner's work, aroused great controversy. According to neuroscientist Simon LeVay, the book formed part of Dörner's 1970s campaign for a public-health program for the elimination of homosexuality, which would involve "the measurement of sex hormone levels in the amniotic fluid of pregnant women and the correction of those levels in those cases where homosexuality seemed a likely outcome." LeVay wrote that Dörner's proposal to use brain surgery to alter the sexual orientation of homosexuals was based on experiments Dörner and his colleagues performed on rats in the 1960s and 1970s, in which allegedly homosexual rats (which in some cases had been castrated early in life) were converted to heterosexuality.
In Sexual Preference (1981), psychologist Alan P. Bell and sociologists Martin S. Weinberg and Sue Kiefer Hammersmith cited Dörner's book as evidence that homosexuality is linked to "the levels of male and female hormones in a person's system." Philosopher Timothy F. Murphy identified Hormones and Brain Differentiation as part of a large body of "commentary linking the latest findings in sexual orientation research with techniques by which parents might control the erotic lives of their own children." Murphy observed that since Dörner "believes that homoeroticism is a tragedy ending in millions of suicides, it is not surprising that he believes fetuses at risk for homosexuality should be identified through amniocentesis and that abortion would be desirable for those fetuses unable to benefit from androgen therapy." Psychologist Jim McKnight, arguing that "homosexuality is intermediate between heterosexual men and women", wrote that Dörner was correct to predict that, "Hormonal assays, stress responses, maternal recollections, anatomical and encephalographic differences all lie...somewhere between what is recognisably male and female heterosexual behavior."