A Sex of One's Own

Nature versus nurture was always too simple a formulation. Now, we ask: Is it chance, choice, family, culture, hormones or genes that determine who we are and whom we love? Or some combination of these factors? Or, more intriguingly, a combination that differs for different people?

For all the sophistication of our twenty-first-century science, we still haven't much more than a clue. There's a dizzying litany of potential explanations for sexual behavior, inclinations, identity. And sometimes it seems as though competing disciplines are tugging us in opposite directions.

Our recent historians of sexuality, following Michel Foucault, have tended to favor social-constructionist approaches that suggest the mutability of sexual behavior. Writers such as George Chauncey (Gay New York) and Jonathan Ned Katz (The Invention of Heterosexuality) have explored how cultural categories shape both behavior and identity. During more liberal eras, as social repression eases, a wider variety of sexual expressions and labels becomes possible. Today, we have not simply gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered people, but also a panorama of subcategories--like bisexual gay men and male-to-female transsexuals.

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