Hormones & Sex

What makes a man manly or a woman womanly--or vice versa? Many homosexuals are living proof that physical organs alone are not decisive. Freud and his followers argued that the sexual personality was often determined by seemingly trivial incidents in childhood. When the so-called "sexual hormones" (testosterone in men, estradiol in women) were discovered, many physicians decided that hormones must be the agents which determine sexual behavior. In recent years, tens of thousands of effeminate males and masculine females have been given shots of one or the other.

In the current Psychosomatic Medicine, Dr. William H. Perloff of Philadelphia vigorously debunks the supposed importance of hormones in determining sexual appetites. Although most widely used in treating impotence and frigidity, hormones are useful, says he, only in the rare cases where these disorders are plainly caused by a hormone imbalance. Both homosexuality and milder cases where patients show mannerisms of the opposite sex are entirely psychological in origin, says Perloff. For these, hormone treatments are useless.

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