Col, with due respect, I believe it is a LITTLE bit more complex than you have stated it. There is evidence that has been confirmed as valid evidence since the 1990s that the human brain has a structurally detectable difference between male and female persons. This difference DOES NOT have to match the XX/XY chromosome situation. I.e. you CAN get a male brain in a female body and vice versa. The studies verified a few things including that the brain configuration was fixed during pregnancy (gestation) starting at about week 6 and ending about month 6. By the time you are born, your gender-related structures are complete and immutable.
The way these initial studies worked was that some student who needed cash volunteered to have his/her brain scanned with the (then new) technology of the P.E.T. scan to get a fine-structure view of the brain. The initial structural scans verified that men and women had physically different brain structures. Don't ask me what the difference is, because (a) I'm not an M.D. and (b) neither are you, so I could try to tell you and botch the explanation, and you wouldn't be able to know right away that I even HAD botched it. Anyway, as is typical, once the researchers discovered something new (i.e. brain gender structures) had been found, they got an extended grant to increase the size of their study population, and that is when the mixed-case examples started showing up. That is when they found people whose plumbing was one gender but their brains were wired for the other gender. When they questioned the people who had this mixed structure, they were all homosexual.
The part that is important to realize is that these people are born with this mixed "plumbing vs. wiring" situation. There is no conscious decision that anyone can make that would cause the physical brain structure to change. They can't say "Oh, I'm going to identify as a person of opposite gender to what my body appears to be" and then have the brain morph into that gender. Your brain configuration is set before you are born. And if this brain structure can be identified using modern scanning technology, it is real. Which means that there is a structural cause for at least some kinds of homosexuality.
I know you would probably not care to do the research, but I'll tell you what to look for. It's up to you to believe me or not, but if you do a web search for brain scan + homosexual and look for some older articles from UK medical journals that call out Positron Emission Tomography, you would find some of the ground-breaking work on this recognition that the human brain is physically more complex than we first imagined. More modern articles will come from the Scandinavian nations. And, of course, there will be religious apologist sites trying to deflect proof that God makes people gay at birth, which would only increase the already serious doubts about the correctness of the Bible and Koran.
Therefore, your statement "You are born either male or female" may have to be taken with some uncertainty. Part of the problem is that we have to agree on what it means to have a particular gender. Do we mean (strictly) the plumbing and other secondary sexual characteristics? Do we mean behavioral differences? Will we consider that the brain, which is THE most powerful sex organ, is in control of our preferences regardless of what is between our thighs? Are we using a wider definition of gender or a narrower one? Can we even agree on which definition we are using? To even have this discussion, we need to start with some kind of agreement of what we are saying.
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