Dr. Marc Breedlove

I remember I had a hard time going to sleep.

So it was like something about this was really agitating me.

And I didn't choose to have that reaction.

And my guess is that whatever sex you had your first crush on, that's the one you're going to be attracted to the rest of your life.

Yeah.

So this idea that it was a choice, that always just seems so absurd to me.

On the other hand...

Even though, you know, I've been doing animal research with giving hormones early in life and seeing what it did to the nervous system, et cetera.

And every time I wrote an NIH grant, I said, well, you know, the effect of early hormones may be important for human behavior.

But to tell you the truth, I never actually believed that, right?

It was just – I just wanted to justify it because it seemed to me –

that we are so sensitive to social influences.

And we have this long stretch of time where our brains are still growing at a fetal rate of growth until like 9 or 10 years of age, and we're taking in so much information.

And think of what a heterosexual world is, right?

I mean all those Disney movies with Prince Charming and et cetera.

And so it always seemed to me that social –

learning would be more than enough to explain why 95% of people are straight.

But that doesn't mean that was a choice, and it doesn't mean that they would even be aware of what the social influence was.

So my example is I speak English.

I'm hopelessly monolingual.