Dr. Marc Breedlove

So it was... And I can tell you that when we published that in 2000, it did cause quite an uproar.

I heard from a lot of strangers that I'd never heard from before.

And it was pretty interesting.

Of course, there were...

Several people wrote who had told me that they were gay, and they were very positive, very supportive.

But I got lots of emails from people saying, I know you're lying.

You're making this up to justify your gay lifestyle.

It's like, well –

Okay, except I don't happen to be gay.

I mean, we had a nice mix of orientations on the research team, but people were having a hard time with it.

And to assure your listeners about if they were looking at their hands, if they're a woman and they looked at the hands and they see that the index finger is quite a bit shorter than the ring finger, and they're thinking, I thought I was straight, et cetera.

So here's a joke that I tell, which is,

If you want, I'm going to teach you right now.

You gather a big sample of people, and I'm going to teach you how to look at their hands, look at the right hand, and guess their sexual orientation, and you're going to be right 95% of the time.

Okay?

You want to learn how?

So look at the right hand, pay really careful attention to whether the index finger is shorter than the ring finger, and no matter what, you see, guess straight.

And you will be right 95% of the time, if it was a random sample of people.

So the important thing to get across is that while these average differences across group are theoretically important, because they do indeed indicate that lesbians are more likely to have been exposed to slightly more testosterone before birth, that doesn't mean you can predict how much testosterone one person was exposed to from their digit ratio, because other things influence the digit ratios.

I got made fun of quite a lot, but I thought it was a blast.