Childhood Gender Noncomformity Remains a Robust and Neutral Correlate of Sexual Orientation: Reply to Hegarty (2009)

In this issue, P. Hegarty comments on an article by G. Rieger, J. A. W. Linsenmeier, L. Gygax, and J. M. Bailey (2008) that compared videos of homosexual and heterosexual people from childhood and adulthood. The current authors claim it is reasonable to treat masculinity-femininity as a bipolar scale and present justification for the approach used in the earlier study. Measures used by Rieger et al. (2008) yielded large differences between homosexual and heterosexual participants, and these differences are likely to be more meaningful than the low and nonsignificant within-group correlations on which Hegarty chose to focus. The authors address his suggestion that they are working within a paradigm detrimental to the well-being of homosexual and gender-nonconforming individuals and suggest that greater openness to research such as theirs could have beneficial consequences.