The 'real' gays are gender non-conformists
Speech, male sexual orientation, and childhood gender
nonconformity
Peter Renn
University of Texas at Austin
Abstract
There is a widespread
belief that some men’s sexual orientation can be judged on the basis of their
voice (i.e. that some men “sound gay”). One currently untested explanation of
the origins of gay sounding speech is that it acts as a social marker of
membership in the gay male community. The current study casts doubt on that
hypothesis. However, gay sounding speech was strongly related to recalled
childhood gender nonconformity in both gay and heterosexual men. This is
consistent with the hypothesis that gay sounding speech emerges early in life
when boys mimic and adopt certain speech patterns more typical of females.
Because gay men are significantly more likely to experience gender nonconforming
childhoods, feminine speech patterns become associated with male homosexuality
mainly through proxy.
Introduction
Stereotypes suggest
that gay men’s speech differs from that of heterosexual men. As one scholar
noted, “A dependable wellspring of this caricature [of gay men] is popular
culture, which seemingly never tires of the lisping fag, whose roller coaster
intonation and high pitched shrieks mark him as an object of comedy or contempt”
(Kulick, 2000, p. 260). These stereotypes, however, are not new; case studies
dating back to the nineteenth century frequently remarked on the distinctive
nature of gay men’s voices (Shaw & Ferris, 1883). Accordingly, many people
believe that they can determine a person’s sexual orientation based solely on
the way that he speaks. A handful of studies investigating this issue have
found that judgments of sexual orientation, based only on speech samples, are in
fact usually accurate (Travis, 1981; Gaudio, 1994; Linville, 1998). Other
researchers have isolated specific acoustic cues (also characteristic of female
speech) that people attend to in making these judgments (Linville, 1998; Rogers
& Smyth, 2001). Thus, the notion that gay men speak differently than
heterosexual men has received some empirical support, although stereotypes may
distort and exaggerate this difference.
This line of research
has several implications. It contradicts the opposing belief that sexual
orientation, unlike race or gender, is largely invisible in social interactions
(Frable, Platt, & Joey, 1998). As others have noted, controversial policies
such as “don’t ask, don’t tell” also rely on the assumption that sexual
orientation only becomes apparent when one chooses to disclose it (Ambady,
Hallahan, & Conner, 1999). Perhaps equally important, understanding the
concomitants of sexual orientation may aid in understanding the origins of
sexual orientation itself. Given the widespread belief that speech patterns are
associated with sexual orientation, it is surprising that such little research
has been conducted in this area.
Moreover, the existing
studies in this area suffer from two major handicaps. First, they have relied
on extremely small samples to determine the accuracy of judgments of sexual
orientation and to estimate the magnitude of speech differences between gay and
heterosexual men. The largest published study examining perceptual accuracy
contained only 5 gay and 4 heterosexual male speakers (Linville, 1998). Second,
and more importantly, no study to date has examined the possible origins of
these speech differences. Therefore, the purposes of this paper are to
replicate previous findings using a larger sample and to address the question of
why some men, for lack of a better term, “sound gay.”
Current Explanations
One possible
explanation is that gay sounding speech acts as a marker of membership in the
gay male community and that gay men either consciously or unconsciously acquire
this speech through exposure (Linville, 1998). Others have theorized that
phonemic variation in general may signal group identity (Chambers &
Trudgill, 1980). Thus, the implicit assumption is that gay sounding speech
serves a functional purpose, such as uniting gay men from diverse backgrounds
(Barrett, 1997). It is also possible that gay men adopt specific speech
patterns in order to identify each other in diverse social settings. In that
case, gay sounding speech would be analogous to nonverbal cues of homosexuality,
such as rainbow-colored ornamentation. All these hypotheses presume that gay
sounding men are also those who self-identify as gay (Kulick, 2000). For
example, a closeted gay man may go to great lengths to conceal signs of his
homosexuality rather than advertise it. Hence, openness about one’s
homosexuality, i.e. outness, is hypothesized to mediate gay sounding speech.
Although gay sounding
speech may be used for functional purposes, that does not necessarily
imply that it exists because of them. There are four reasons to question
the hypothesis that such a speech pattern develops in order to accomplish a
particular goal, such as signaling one’s membership in the gay male
community.
First, gay sounding
speech appears to emerge early in life, well before a specific
self-identification as gay. Two longitudinal studies examining the relationship
between homosexuality and childhood gender nonconformity (discussed below) both
noted feminine sounding speech in boys who disproportionately became gay in
adulthood (Zuger, 1984; Green, 1987). Zuger (1984) collapsed feminine speech
into a category with feminine gestures and found that 73% of the effeminate boys
displayed some feature associated with this category. Likewise, one mother in
Green’s study remarked that her son “talks like a girl, sometimes walks like a
girl, acts like a girl” (1987, p. 2). These observations are quite common;
mothers of boys with gender identity problems rate their sons’ speech and motor
behavior as significantly more feminine than mothers of sons in control groups
(with effect sizes ranging from 0.92–4.47) (Zucker, 1992). Thus, if gay (or
feminine) sounding speech emerges early in life, this would be inconsistent with
the hypothesis that such a speech pattern develops in response to something
dependent on self-awareness of sexual orientation (e.g. a desire to signal other
gay men).
Second, such a
hypothesis fails to account for the fact that some gay men do not sound gay
(Travis, 1981; Gaudio, 1994; Linville, 1998) and that, at least based on
informal accounts, a few heterosexual men do. Thus, the literature
demonstrating within-sex speech differences based on sexual orientation has
largely ignored within-orientation differences. If gay sounding speech
originates from a desire to unite gay men from diverse backgrounds, for example,
it makes little sense why a sizable number of gay men do not possess this speech
pattern and are usually misidentified as heterosexual. Likewise, under this
hypothesis, heterosexual men who sound gay (though perhaps few in number) have
no reason to adopt a speech pattern widely associated with a sexual orientation
discordant to their own.
Notably, there are few
stereotypes about lesbian speech (Zwicky, 1997), and the limited research
comparing lesbian and heterosexual women’s speech has found few actual
differences (Moonwomon, 1997; Waksler, 2001; but see Travis, 1981). At face
value, though, many of the current hypotheses about the origins of gay sounding
speech should apply equally well to speech differences between lesbians and
heterosexual women. However, based on current research, these differences
(assuming they exist) are far less perceptually salient than comparable
differences in men. Any hypothesis attempting to explain the causes of gay
sounding speech must also explain why there is such an apparent difference
between gay and heterosexual men’s speech but not between lesbian and
heterosexual women’s speech.
Third, none of the
current explanations would predict that gay sounding speech differs from other
types of speech specifically because it is shifted in a female-typical
direction, which appears to be the case (Rogers & Smyth, 2001; Linville,
1998). Indeed, some have argued that there is no a priori reason to
suspect that gay sounding speech shares greater similarity with female speech,
and that our perception of gay sounding speech as feminine simply reflects our
bias to interpret all deviations from cultural norms as feminine (Zwicky,
1997). For example, if the purpose of gay sounding speech is create a sense of
unity among gay men (Barrett, 1997), one could just as easily imagine the
adoption of some arbitrary deviation from convention—such as putting stresses on
the wrong syllables or clucking in the place to pauses—to mark gay sounding
speech. In reality, though, gay sounding speech differs in a very specific,
female-shifted way.
Fourth, current
explanations of gay sounding speech ignore the social costs that accompany
sounding gay, such as stigmatization during childhood and adolescence. While
gay male youth who are open about their sexual orientation often face
harassment, the very perception of being gay (or feminine) may be an equally if
not more relevant risk factor (Remafedi, Farrow, & Deisher, 1991).
Sociolinguists have idealized the causes of gay sounding speech while seemingly
ignoring the practical consequences of such speech in social interactions. Even
in adulthood, most gay men prefer sex-typicality in their romantic partners
(Bailey, Kim, Hills, & Linsenmeier, 1997) and frequently make proscriptions
against feminine men (i.e. “No femmes” or “If I wanted to date a woman, I’d date
one”). Thus, it is unlikely that many gay men consciously choose to sound gay,
given the attendant costs of such a speech pattern in the romantic marketplace.
While some gay men who
do not normally sound gay may occasionally adopt such a speech pattern as a
“register” in certain social contexts (Barrett, 1997), this is a temporary
deviation from their natural speaking styles, and does not negate the finding
that most gay men desire masculine partners. Conversely, it is clear that some
men “may have spoken in a stereotypically gay style for most or all of their
lives” (Barrett, 1997, p. 194). It is these individuals that pose the more
difficult question. What causes them to sound gay?
Alternate Explanation
There is at least one
other possible explanation of the origins of gay sounding speech: gay sounding
men may have been more likely during childhood to mimic and adopt the speech
patterns more typical of females. Such a method of acquisition would be similar
to that of a learned dialect. This female-shifted speech pattern, superimposed
onto a male voice, produces what we perceive as gay sounding speech.
If gay sounding
speech is learned, it must be acquired fairly early in life, given that some
boys already begin to sound gay in childhood. Moreover, it is likely that
certain behaviors facilitate or reinforce this acquisition. Research on the
acquisition of accents may be relevant here. Children who immigrate with their
parents to a foreign country tend to pick up the accent of the new location,
rather than that of their parents, because they learn from and imitate their
peers (Harris, 1998). For example, after a few months at a nursery school in
California, the daughter of a British linguist began speaking “black English”
(Baron, 1992). Although not all the children attending the school were black,
the children she played with were, and their speech pattern was the one she
adopted.
While it is unlikely
that gay sounding men developed their speech patterns by mimicking other gay
sounding boys in childhood (because they were probably rare), they might have
adopted the speech patterns of other girls. The acoustic cues of gay sounding
speech are also those more prevalent in female speech (Rogers & Smyth,
2001). For example, /s/ production in gay sounding speech (the cue accounting
for the most variance in voice ratings) is longer and has a higher frequency
than typical male speech—but it falls in the range of typical female speech
(Linville, 1998; Avery & Liss, 1996). Given that boys and girls speak
differently on average even before puberty (Bennett & Weinberg, 1979), it is
possible that a small fraction of boys adopt the speech patterns more typical of
girls (or women) and, as a result, sound gay. If so, the things that promote
(or at least accompany) the development of gay sounding speech in childhood
might include behaviors such as preferential affiliation with females, having
more friendships with females, and taking a female role during role play;
affective components serving a similar function might include feeling very
feminine and greater self-identification with other females.
There is, in fact, a
large body of evidence documenting such behaviors in the childhoods of
prehomosexual boys. These behaviors generally fall under the label of
“childhood gender nonconformity,” which takes into account behaviors such as
same- versus opposite-sex peer affiliation, rough-and-tumble play, toy
interests, fantasy roles, and dress-up play. These behaviors not only differ
significantly between boys and girls on average but also between prehomosexual
and preheterosexual children within each sex. As previously mentioned, two
prospective studies have found that boys who exhibit marked levels of childhood
gender nonconformity are much more likely to become gay in adulthood compared to
controls (Zuger, 1984; Green, 1987). While these studies included boys with
levels of childhood gender nonconformity high enough to meet the Diagnostic
and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) criteria for gender
identity disorder, and hence may have limited generalizability for non-clinical
populations, other studies relying on more representative samples of gay men
replicate the finding that childhood gender nonconformity frequently precedes
male homosexuality.
Bailey and Zucker’s
(1995) meta-analysis of 41 studies demonstrated that, on average, gay men and
lesbians recall significantly more gender nonconforming childhoods than their
heterosexual counterparts (effect size = 1.19). These results cannot simply be
attributed to factors influencing subjective recall, e.g. that gay men
internalize of stereotypes about gay men’s femininity and thus expect to
remember more gender-atypical childhoods. For example, a mother’s recall of her
gay son’s gender-related childhood behavior is correlated with her son’s own
recall (Bailey, Nothnagel, & Wolfe, 1995) but is uncorrelated with the
extent of her knowledge about her son’s sexual orientation (Bailey, Miller,
& Willerman, 1993).
This association
between childhood gender nonconformity and homosexuality, however, must be
accompanied by a caveat, which is relevant to the phenomenon of gay sounding
speech: not all gay men recall childhood gender nonconformity and not all
heterosexual men recall childhood gender conformity. In fact, about a
third of gay men have recall profiles identical to that of heterosexual men
(Bailey & Zucker, 1995). Likewise, a boy exhibiting levels of childhood
gender nonconformity comparable to those recalled by most gay men has a 49%
chance of becoming heterosexual in adulthood. Moreover, simply because
childhood gender nonconformity precedes adult homosexuality, it does not
necessarily follow that the former causes the latter. The predominant
biological theory of homosexuality posits that sex-atypical prenatal hormone
exposure partially shifts the organization of certain brain structures toward
that of the opposite sex (for a review, see Rahman & Wilson, in press).
This, in turn, affects sex-typed traits, such as sexual attraction to either
males or females and certain childhood behaviors, which are usually—though not
necessarily—clustered together.
If certain components
of childhood gender nonconformity cause gay sounding speech, but are only
imperfectly associated with adult homosexuality, this may explain why some gay
men do not sound gay and why some heterosexual men do. Likewise, because
childhood gender nonconformity is significantly more predictive of homosexuality
in males than in females (Bailey & Zucker, 1995), the variation in adult
female speech patterns may not correspond to female sexual orientation as well
as does variation in male speech patterns for male sexual orientation. Thus, it
might be the case that there are true differences between lesbian and
heterosexual women’s speech, but that these differences are poor predictors of
female sexual orientation and are less perceptually salient given greater
overall variability in female speech. A causal relationship between childhood
gender nonconformity and gay sounding speech would also be consistent with the
evidence that many prehomosexual boys already begin to sound gay in childhood.
Because this speech pattern persists into adulthood for a sizable number of men
(against countervailing social forces), it appears relatively difficult to
change, in much the same way that an accent is difficult to change once the
critical period for language acquisition and development has passed (Munro,
Flege, & MacKay, 1996; Bialystock & Hakuta, 1994). Not surprisingly,
this critical period for language overlaps with the period of sex-typed
childhood behavior.
Rationale for Present
Study
The primary purpose of
this study is to determine if there is an association between childhood gender
nonconformity and gay sounding speech. This association may explain why
judgments of sexual orientation based on speech are usually accurate, although
the cues that people use to make judgments may depend more on childhood
behaviors than on sexual orientation per se. Moreover, because many of
the currently proposed explanations for gay sounding speech hypothesize a
linkage between speech and openness about one’s homosexuality, one simple test
of this would be to examine whether degree of outness correlates with how gay a
man sounds.
Methods
Participants
Participants were
recruited as part of a larger study investigating various concomitants of sexual
orientation; however, the results reported here are limited to those relevant to
gay sounding speech. The sample consisted of 30 gay, 4 bisexual, and 24
heterosexual males recruited primarily through networking (“snowballing”),
flyers posted around the University of Texas at Austin campus and local
coffeeshops, and (for a limited number of gay participants) through a posting to
a local gay-oriented website. Bisexual males were omitted in any analyses
explicitly comparing groups by sexual orientation but were otherwise included.
All participants were paid $10 as compensation. The gay men were slightly older
than the heterosexual men (mean age = 24 and 21.8, respectively), but this
difference was not statistically significant. The ethnic compositions of the
heterosexual and gay sample were comparable.
Measures
Sexual
Orientation Sexual orientation was assessed by both self-report
(heterosexual, gay, bisexual, or other) and the Kinsey scale, which allows
individuals to rate themselves along a 7-point continuum from exclusively
heterosexual (0) to exclusively homosexual (6). For participants to be
considered heterosexual, they had to identify as such and score 0 or 1 on the
Kinsey scale; for a male to be considered homosexual, he had to identify as such
and score 5 or more.
Childhood Behavior
Scale Childhood gender nonconformity was assessed using the Recalled
Childhood Gender Behavior Scale (Mitchell & Zucker, 1991). The scale
includes 18 items which assess both behavioral aspects of gender conformity
(i.e. “As a child, I enjoyed playing sports such as baseball, hockey,
basketball, and soccer”) as well as affective components (“As a child, I felt
very masculine”). Participants were instructed to consider only the period
before 12 years of age. Participants’ responses to individual items were
averaged together, with higher scores indicating greater recalled childhood
gender nonconformity.
Outness Inventory
Participants identifying as gay completed the Outness Inventory, which
assesses the degree to which a person is open about his or her homosexuality
(Mohr & Fassinger, 2000). Overall outness is derived from averaging
together the inventory’s subscales (outness to family, religion, and world).
Recording Procedures
All recordings were
obtained with a microphone headset (Labtec Axis-521) attached to a computer.
The use of a headset standardized the distance from the speaker’s mouth to the
microphone. Voice samples were digitally recorded at 44.100 kHz using the
1st Sound Recorder software with noise cancellation activated.
Before the recording, I
explicitly requested that participants try their best not to alter their
voice in any way from natural speech. In accord with Gaudio (1994) and Linville
(1998), participants read an excerpt from a play (Torch Song Trilogy),
first silently and then aloud using their natural speaking voices. The dialogue
was a conversation between two individuals in a bar, but participants read the
part of only one speaker. The advantage to having all participants read the
same dialogue is that it controls for any differences in what
participants say, focusing instead on how they say it. The obvious
drawback to this method is that reading text aloud is an imperfect
representation of a person’s actual, spontaneous speech. However, prior
research found no interaction between the type of speech sample acquired
(spontaneous versus reading) and sexual orientation on voice ratings of sounding
gay (Travis 1981). In other words, although there may be perceptible
differences between spontaneous and read speech, these differences are not
immediately relevant to the phenomenon of gay sounding speech.
Participant Ratings
An excerpt
(approximately 30 seconds long) was then extracted from the middle of the voice
samples for playback. Each participant rating the voices (the listener) wore
earphones. Presentation order of the samples was randomized and listeners had
control over when to advance to the next voice. Listeners rated each voice on a
7-point scale for how gay it sounded. In a pilot study of 10 listeners and a
partial sample of the voices, interrater reliability for the voice ratings was
high (Cronbach’s α = 0.91). The results reported here are based on 4 listeners
(not involved in any other part of the experiment) who rated all 58 voices. The
reliability of these listeners’ voice ratings was also high (Cronbach’s α =
0.84).
Results
To determine
whether or not listeners are accurate in judging sexual orientation from voice
samples, previous studies have typically employed forced-choice items in which
participants must classify each voice as belonging to either a heterosexual or
gay male. However, the problem with this approach is that results may be
distorted by listeners who are overly conservative or overly liberal in their
judgments. For instance, a listener who rates the vast majority of voices as
belonging to heterosexual males will have a very poor accuracy index. To avoid
this problem, the present study used discriminant function analysis. In
discriminant analysis, the independent variables are the predictors (the voice
ratings of how gay a voice sounded) and the dependent variables are the groups
(gay or heterosexual). Thus, based on all four listeners’ ratings of how gay a
voice sounded, a prediction was made regarding the sexual orientation of each
speaker and compared with that speaker’s actual sexual orientation. The overall
accuracy of these predictions was 68.5%, which is significantly greater than
what would be expected by chance. Broken down by sexual orientation, 75% of the
heterosexual speakers were correctly classified, while 63% of the gay speakers
were correctly classified.
A one-tailed t test
revealed that gay men were significantly more gay sounding than the heterosexual
men (t (52) = -3.964,
p = .0002). The effect size for this difference was large (Cohen’s
d = 1.12). Moreover, how gay a man’s voice sounded correlated with
childhood gender nonconformity (full sample, r = .544, p <
.0001) in both the gay (r = .429, p = .009) and heterosexual men
(r = .365, p = .040). Figure 1 shows the relationship between
these variables in the full sample.
-------------------------------
Insert Figure 1
here
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When controlling for sexual
orientation, the correlation between childhood gender nonconformity and the gay
voice ratings remained significant (partial r = 0.485, p <
.001). However, when controlling for childhood gender nonconformity, the
correlation between sexual orientation and the voice ratings became
nonsignificant (partial r = .170, p = .207), suggesting that gay
sounding speech is linked to childhood gender nonconformity rather than sexual
orientation. Finally, there was no significant correlation between voice
ratings and level of outness in gay men (r = -.261, p = .086).
Discussion
On average, gay men
sounded significantly more “gay” than heterosexual men. This difference was
highly significant and large in effect size. As such, listeners were able to
judge sexual orientation from voice samples with moderate accuracy (68.5%).
Moreover, how gay a man sounded correlated positively with the extent to which
he recalled a gender nonconforming childhood (though not with his
“outness,” as some theories would have predicted), and this was true for both
gay as well as heterosexual men. Indeed, childhood gender nonconformity
accounted for almost 30% of the variance in the voice ratings. When
statistically controlling for sexual orientation, the correlation between
childhood gender nonconformity and voice ratings remained; however, when
controlling for childhood gender nonconformity, the correlation between voice
ratings and sexual orientation became nonsignificant. In other words, “gay
sounding” voices are probably “childhood gender nonconforming” voices and become
associated with homosexuality only by proxy.
These results cast
doubt on current explanations of gay sounding speech, none of which can account
for (1.) why some men who are gay do not sound gay, (2.) why some men who are
not gay do sound gay, and (3.) why childhood gender nonconformity correlates
with sounding gay. Any competing hypothesis must explain, or at least allow
for, each of these facts.
Before discussing the
implications of the current research, an important caveat is in order. While
the current study provides evidence consistent with the possibility that gay
sounding speech is acquired early in life, it cannot provide definitive proof
for such a hypothesis because of obvious practical and ethical limitations to
experimental manipulation in this area of research. For example, it is also
possible that gay sounding speech, like homosexuality itself, may be directly
accountable by biological factors. Researchers have found gay men differ from
heterosexual men in part of Wernicke’s area, which influences language
comprehension (Reite, Sheeder, Richardson, & Teele, 1995), as well as the
anterior commissure, which is associated with regions regulating phonological
processing (Allen & Gorski, 1992; DiVirgiolio, Clarke, Pizzolato, &
Schaffner, 1999). However, a more compelling case for a neural substrate to
feminine speech patterns requires evidence of structural differences relevant to
speech production or output (e.g. Broca’s area or the motor cortex), which is
currently lacking. More importantly, though, some of the specific acoustic cues
that female and gay sounding speech share in common (and that distinguish them
from male typical speech) also vary across languages, which argues against
direct biological causation. For example, there is substantial variability in
the articulatory and acoustic properties of /s/ across several languages
(Gordon, Barthmeier, & Sands, in press). Thus, it is unlikely that the cues
differentiating gay and non-gay sounding speech can be solely attributed to
culturally-invariant biological origins.
However, this does not
imply that gay sounding speech is unique to standard American English; it merely
suggests that the acoustic cues associated with gay sounding speech may vary
across cultures. Indeed, if the current hypothesis that childhood behavior has
an effect on speech patterns is correct, the extent to which a certain speech
pattern is associated with homosexuality in any given culture should vary as a
function of the extent to which childhood gender nonconformity precedes
homosexuality. Current cross-cultural evidence, however, suggests that the
linkage between childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality is a
near-universal phenomenon (Whitam & Mathy, 1986). As such, it would not be
surprising if prehomosexual boys in other cultures are also more likely to adopt
the speech patterns characteristic of females in that particular language. The
ultimate origin of these particular (non-anatomical) sex differences in speech
are beyond the scope of this paper; however, like speech differences based on
location, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity, we can address their modes of
transmission without directly knowing their cause.
Implications of Findings
Because previous
research has relied on extremely small sample sizes, the present study is the
first to reliably demonstrate that there are robust speech differences between
gay and heterosexual men. This difference is plainly evident to most listeners
and can be discerned from very short samples of speech. Thus, the belief that
homosexuality can be concealed may not hold true for all gay men. While there
are certainly volitional expressions of homosexuality (i.e. rainbow stickers on
cars), “sounding gay” is different in that it appears to be a mostly involuntary
phenomenon that cuts across virtually all social situations. This may be
particularly important during times such as adolescence, when harassment of gay
youth is high. To the extent that this mediates factors such as self-esteem,
future studies should examine depression in gay men as a function of both
childhood gender nonconformity and aspects of voice.
Perhaps equally
important, the current findings add to our understanding of childhood gendered
behavior in general, childhood gender nonconformity in particular, and sexual
orientation. First, the results of the study provide additional support for the
validity of retrospective measures of childhood gender nonconformity. Other
researchers have criticized these measures for their vulnerability to subjective
bias (for a review, see Bailey & Zucker, 1995); however, it is apparent that
participants’ recall of childhood memories are not spurious or random, or else
they would not have been so strongly linked to acoustic cues present in their
voice. Second, although it might be the case that prenatal hormones cause both
childhood gender nonconformity and adult homosexuality, childhood gender
nonconformity by itself appears to play an important causal role in various
outcomes (i.e. gay sounding speech patterns). Third, the fact that a
substantial number of gay men continue to sound gay in adulthood (approximately
2 out of 3, based on current estimates), despite the negative reinforcement they
probably received in childhood for this speech pattern, attests to the power and
salience of the forces underlying childhood sex-typed behavior. Although some
gay men may learn to “defeminize” their behavior over time (which may also
explain the imperfect correlation between gay sounding speech and childhood
gender nonconformity), it appears that the majority do not. The robustness of
these speech patterns also lends credence to the hypothesis that they were
acquired during the critical period of language acquisition (Bialystock &
Halkuta, 1994).
Of course, the current
study cannot answer the more ultimate question of why some boys would be
so innately gender nonconforming in the first place. Several lines of evidence,
however, suggest that childhood sex-typed behavior has a strong biological
component. For example, males prenatally exposed to diethylstilbestrol (DES, a
synthetic estrogen with masculinizing effects previously administered to women
with at-risk pregnancies) recall slightly more masculinized play behavior in
childhood (Kester, Green, Finch, & Williams, 1980). Likewise, environmental
toxins such as polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) can modulate sex steroid
hormones during brain development and have recently been linked to masculinized
play behavior in girls and more femininized play behavior in boys (Vreugdenhil,
Slijper, Mulder, & Weisglas-Kuperus, 2002). Perhaps one of the most
striking findings suggesting a biological factor in childhood play behavior
comes from a recent animal study. When presented with sex-typed toys (such as a
car and ball versus a doll and pot), even vervet monkeys displayed the same sex
differences that human boys and girls show (Alexander & Hines, 2002). In
humans, childhood sex-typed behavior is regulated mostly by gonadal hormones
during prenatal development (Collaer & Hines, 1995).
While the current study
provides support for the hypothesis that certain childhood behaviors (regardless
of their origins) affect speech patterns, a more direct and simultaneous
influence of hormones on brain and behavior cannot be ruled out. For example,
while /s/ production appears to be the most salient cue distinguishing gay
sounding speech from other types of speech (and is subject to variation across
languages), there may be other components of gay sounding speech accountable by
direct physiological factors. Vocal tract dimensions, for example, differ
between men and women, and it is possible that they differ between gay and
heterosexual men as well (Linville, 1998). Likewise, although there is no
direct evidence of a neuroanatomical substrate to gay sounding speech, there is
some evidence that motor behavior (which is controlled by neural structures
overlapping with speech production) differs between men and women and between
gay and heterosexual men. For example, people are able to judge sexual
orientation at above chance levels based on muted video segments of movement
(Ambady, Hallahan, & Conner, 1999). Indeed, stereotypes about gay men’s
speech are often closely tied to stereotypes about their physical mannerisms and
gestures as well. The ultimate cause of sex differences in motor behavior,
however, is currently unclear. One possibility is that it is influenced by
prenatal sex hormones. Females with congenital adrenal hyperplasia, for
example, are exposed to very high levels of androgenic hormones and subsequently
show more masculine motor behavior than control groups (Dittman, 1992). As with
gay sounding speech, cross-cultural studies may prove helpful in separating
biological and environmental influences. If there are in fact biological
influences on both speech and motor behavior, they may also be related to the
genesis of homosexuality.
Finally, it must be
stressed that in any trait showing a difference between gay and heterosexual
males (or between lesbian and heterosexual women), there is always substantial
variability within each of those groups. It would be inappropriate, for
example, to assume that all gay men sound gay, as popular stereotypes would seem
to suggest. The fact that not all gay men sound gay, and that not all gay men
experienced gender nonconforming childhoods, suggests that there may be
etiologically distinct subtypes of male homosexuality. Any explanation of the
causes of homosexuality, or its concomitants, must take this into account.
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Figure 1. Relationship between childhood gender
nonconformity and ratings of “gay sounding” voice.
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