X and Why by Tom Whipple

Author:Tom Whipple
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781780723495
Publisher: Short Books

Rosie Ablewhite and Sarah Nunn are taking me through their childhood photos. There is them as toddlers: Sarah in a dress, playing with a Barbie; Rosie in a Batman suit, playing with Aladdin. There is them a little older: Sarah dressed as Wilma from the Flintstones, Rosie dressed as Fred. There is, for Rosie, a preponderance of dungarees throughout. They might be genetically identical twins, but telling them apart in these pictures is rarely difficult.

Chatting on Rosie’s sofa – at the age of 29 they still live ten minutes from each other – both concede that the signs had been there, if they had bothered looking. “I’ve always been a tomboy,” says Rosie. “I’ve always worn dresses,” interrupts Sarah. “You have dogs, I have cats. We’re kind of opposites.”

“Any boyfriend I brought home instantly felt more at home with Rosie,” Sarah continues. “She liked football, talked about boy things, played video games. They’d be like, ‘Sarah, you’re really boring. I’m going to go and play with Rosie.’ I’d get jealous that they liked her better.” She had a trump card, though. “When they tried to get romantic with Rosie she’d say, ‘That’s not me.’ Then they came back.”

Once, Rosie did have a boyfriend, but she found she didn’t want to kiss him. So Sarah gamely stepped in. “I said to him, ‘I’m the same but I will kiss you’.”

Even then, the sisters didn’t realise that Rosie was gay. When, finally, they pieced together the evidence, it felt impossibly strange. “I was shocked when she told me she was gay,” says Sarah. “I was like, am I gay too?”

“That’s why I questioned it for so long,” says Rosie. “No offence, Sarah was really boy crazy.”

Rosie and Sarah are some of the participants in Dr Rieger’s latest research, conducted with his colleague Tuesday Watts. Drs Rieger and Watts found that childhood photographs of twins with different sexuality often show early divergence in dress. It is, Dr Rieger says, “mindblowing” that genetically identical women, raised in the same household, can “differ in something as important as sexuality”.

As with male homosexuals, genetics must be involved in female homosexuality. So too must environment. If it seems strange that people still differ despite having the same genes and the same upbringing, then that is because we are forgetting that “environment” encompasses everything they encounter, including the womb. “Even identical twins can develop with different placentas,” says Dr Rieger. “This means they are literally fed different substances, including different hormones. It could be that even if you grew up as identical twins, the prenatal hormonal environment still differed.”

Quite what that difference is, or how it works, is unclear – and it is still equally possible something happened after birth. Lesbians are, for sexuality researchers, among the rarest groups. “Although we often think of sexual orientation as gay versus straight, amongst women bisexuality is far more common,” says Dr Rieger.

He thinks lesbians are a special case. It is particularly interesting that they are the only group of women

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