Preston left, Kamran right.
If I hold out my hand, I can see that my ring finger and my index finger are about the same length. That may be a sign of my body’s homosexuality. In general, men tend to have longer ring fingers than index fingers, while women’s index fingers tend to be the same size or slightly shorter than their ring fingers.
While finger length sounds like a random data point, it isn’t. The length of our fingers is determined by the amount of testosterone we receive in the womb. Apparently I had less, resulting in feminized finger lengths, while Kamran had the more typical male amount. This jibes with the concept these are statistical probabilities or tendencies, not absolutes.
Lesbians tend towards men’s finger lengths, a sign of a masculinized body.
Strangely, none of this applies to gay men with more than one older brother. As the oldest of five kids, this doesn’t apply to me.
I really enjoy how we learned all this. With serious funding of gay people blocked, researchers went out into public street fairs, asked participants to complete a questionnaire about their sexuality, and then photocopied their hands for measurement later. The triumph of the copying machine as scientific research tool.
Summary:
- Gay men: Finger length tends towards female patterns, indicating lower testosterone exposure in the womb. The pattern is not seen in gay men with more than one older brother.
- Lesbians: Finger lengths tend towards male patterns, indicating higher testosterone exposure in the womb.
Source:
- S. Marc Breedlove et al, Finger-length ratios and sexual orientation, (2000) Nature, 404, 455 – 456
This article is part of a series, Written on the Body, exploring the correlations between our body structures and sexual attraction.
There is no “gay gene” it is a logical absurdity – the concept of a gene which encodes its self-elimination is preposterous.
But what is the percentage? I’m a straight woman with a much longer ring finger. I admit I have a dominate personality, but I have a very femine face and body, large bust,small waist, big hips. I did read that look/ plus that finger trait usually lends to some of our most successful female actresses, I’m not an actress,darn! So, am I usual or unusual?
hehe. Well Vee, we all vary. What the body things show is propensities – correlations, not causation. So you can have some finger length, but that really tells us nothing about you as a person. But times thousands of people we might find that lots of people with short pinkies are extra smart or something, which is an interesting thing if we connect pinkie length to some other process in early in embryonic development – it might help us locate a process that affects intelligence. Biology is not destiny, but they do correlate sometimes. ;)
Yeah, Phil, that’s not really how genes work. Take a gene that leads to breast cancer – not helpful to species success. Unless… that same gene plays other roles in the body. There is strong evidence that a gene that tends to make some boys gay, for example, might make his sisters more fertile. That same gene expressed mildly in his straight brothers might make them more gentle and better husbands. Or the occasional gay male in the tribe, unattached to any women, might benefit the clan’s overall survival rate. There are many more examples out there, but those three give you the idea. A gene can play multiple roles depending on how it is expressed in the individual, while benefitting the species as a whole.
Forgive me if i’ve mixed up my lefts and rights here. But in the picture Kamrans hand is on the right, which you say has a “normal” amount of testosterone. We’ll gloss over the word normal as if your fingers a a relative length to each other that causes no concern you’re normal. But I digress, just not a fan of the word normal.
“In general, men tend to have longer index fingers than ring fingers, while women’s index fingers tend to be the same size or slightly shorter than their ring fingers.”
If thats the case and kamran has a normal amount of testosterone and has a masculanised hand. Wouldn’t his index finger be longer than his ring finger. Which from the picture doesn’t appear to be the case. Are Hollywood camera angles to blame here?
Personally my ring finger is longer than my index. I am a bisexual man with one older brother. (just for the sake of comparison)
It took me a second of looking at the text and the photos to figure out the problem – I got my rings and indexes crossed. It’s the text that was wrong… men typically have longer index fingers, not ring fingers. I have corrected the post. (I also changed “normal” for “typical” to be more clear.) Thank you for catching that!!