Comment from Homosexuality (workspace) 

Actually, my citation can be the very same 2000 Breedlove study that our friend in Farmington includes in Fetal hormones and sexual orientation. Background is that length of ring finger relative to index finger is strongly correlated with fetal testosterone levels. That fact is rather well established quite apart from sexual orientation. Breedlove found an additional much weaker correlation between implied fetal testosterone and sexual orientation, with lesbians in particularly being most strongly androgynized. It's definitely interesting. Gay men show the same pattern (gays more androgynized), but to a smaller degree.

However, there is a huge overlap between the suggested fetal testosterone levels and sexual orientation. That is, on average of a bunch of lesbians had higher fetal testosterone than a paired group of straight women. But many lesbians had lower fetal testosterone than the straight-woman average. And many straight women had higher fetal testosterone than the lesbian average. The standard deviation within each group is much more than the mean difference between the groups.

So what does it show? Well, I dunno. There's something potentially interesting there, especially if it can be replicated in much larger samples. But it's hardly clear causation, nor even clear correlation. What it amounts to might be something like (purely hypothetically): "High testesterone exposure female fetuses have a 10% chance of becoming lesbian; low testosterone exposure female fetuses have a 5% chance of becoming lesbian." But that's about the strongest conclusion I can imagine coming out of this (and it hasn't yet, it's been suggested), and that's a relatively weak factor. Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters 23:00, 2005 August 21 (UTC)