Sexual orientation in women: an investigation of hormonal and personality variables

There are conflicting findings from the few existing studies of levels of sex hormones in lesbian and heterosexual women. MacCulloch and Waddington (1981) suggest that levels of certain sex hormones will only be "abnormal" in "primary" lesbians, defined by these authors as those lesbians who have no previous heterosexual experience and who score less than 20 on the heterosexual component of the Sexual Orientation Method questionnaire (SOM). They define secondary lesbians as those who have previous heterosexual experience and who score more than 20 on the heterosexual component of the SOM. In the present study (part of a wider investigation of a large number of variables, Dancey 1990) 40 lesbian women were classified into primary and secondary groups according to the above criteria. These two groups, and another lesbian and a heterosexual group, were measured at the same point in the menstrual cycle for levels of testosterone, androstenedione, oestradiol and progesterone. They were also tested on instrumentality and expressivity, two traits measured by the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ), related to sex roles. No significant differences were found between the groups on any of the measures, apart from the defining criteria. This study has therefore failed to validate the distinction between primary and secondary lesbianism.