> >Miles criticized the metholodogy of the study. That's not homophobia.
>
>But how can Miles criticize something that I did not post and has yet to be
>published? There was no methodology in what I posted and the article
>has not been published in a journal yet.
I looked into the journal Personality and Individual Differences, and the issue in which Lee Ellis and Jill Hellberg published their article is available online.
What's missing from journalists' reports on the article is the facts that correlation does not itself prove causation; that the researchers only controlled for "three maternal variables: maternal age, maternal education, and self-rated maternal recall" (Lee Ellis and Jill Hellberg, "Fetal Exposure to Prescription Drugs and Adult Sexual Orientation," Personality and Individual Differences 38.1, January 2005); and that the actual populations of the mothers of homosexual, bisexual, and heterosexual offsprings in the study who remember taking any of the nineteen pills whose effects the researchers investigated were minuscule segments of "the mothers of more than 5,000 American and Canadian students and members of gay and lesbian support groups" (Matthews, December 5, 2004).
How minuscule?
"Whereas seven out of 3241 (0.2%) of the mothers of female heterosexuals recalled having taken [amphetamine-based] diet medication [primarily Dexedrine and Tenuate Dospan] during pregnancy, two out of 144 (1.7%) of the mothers of homosexuals did so (p=0.033)"; and "Whereas 31 of the 3241 (1.0%) mothers of heterosexuals took these medications [synthetic thyroid medications, primarily Synthroid and Thyroxine] during pregnancy, six of the 144 (5.2%) mothers of homosexuals did so" (emphasis added, Ellis and Hellberg, January 2005). Even the researchers themselves offer this caviat: "It should be emphasized that because the sample sizes for most categories of drugs were often exceedingly small (especially in the case of mothers whose offspring were homosexual or bisexual), caution must be exercised in offering interpretations" (Ellis and Hellberg, January 2005).
Cf. "Lesbian Pills: Sexuality, Science, and the Media": <http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/12/lesbian-pills-sexuality-science-and.html> -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * "Proud of Britain": <http://www.proudofbritain.net/ > and <http://www.proud-of-britain.org.uk/>