Introduction

There are many historical, cross-cultural, and contemporary accounts of adult homosexual men and women who as children engaged in behaviors that were considered atypical for their sex. Historically, this led many theorists and researchers to ascribe childhood gender atypical behavior as a pathway to adult homosexuality. This book challenges the premise that gender nonconformity in childhood leads to adult homosexuality and reviews the empirical retrospective and prospective literature on the relation between sex-typed behavior in childhood and sexual orientation in adulthood. It demonstrate that childhood gender conformity or nonconformity is an intervening step in the developmental path from the genotype to sexual orientation. The book also argues that gender nonconformity is not the key to understanding women’s sexual orientation. Instead, they assert, the associations among masculinity, femininity and women’s sexual orientation are diverse and vary across time and place.