They then compared those results to the participants' self-reported responses as teenagers to a series of internet-administered questions about their sexuality.īeginning with the 3.5-year-old age group, the team found that children who engaged mostly in "gender-conforming" play (boys who played with trucks and girls who played with dolls, as an example) were likely to report being heterosexual at age 15, whereas the teenagers who reported being gay, lesbian, or not strictly heterosexual were more likely to engage in "gender-nonconforming" play. Hines and Li looked at parental reporting of children's play at ages 2.5, 3.5, and 4.75 years old, and arranged them on a scale of one to 100, with lower scores meaning more female-typical play and higher scores more male-typical play. Female-typical play, on the other hand, would include dolls, playing house, and playing with other girls. Parents observed and reported various aspects of their children's behavior, which Hines and her Cambridge colleague, Gu Li, analyzed for what they call male-typical or female-typical play.Īn example of stereotypical male-typical play, as defined by the study, would include playing with toy trucks, "rough-and-tumble" wrestling, and playing with other boys. The study includes thousands of British children born in the 1990s.
Seeking to improve on this earlier research, Melissa Hines, a psychologist at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom, turned to data from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children. But these have largely been criticized for their small sample sizes, for drawing from children who exhibit what the authors call "extreme" gender nonconformity, and for various other methodological shortcomings.
In the decades since, other studies have reported that whether a child plays along traditional gender lines can predict their later sexual orientation.
He was influential in the development of the term "gender identity disorder" to describe stress and confusion over one's sex and gender, though the term-and Green's work more broadly-has come under fire from many psychologists and social scientists today who say it's wrong to label someone's gender and sexuality "disordered." The new study builds largely on research done in the 1970s by American sex and gender researcher Richard Green, who spent decades investigating sexuality. "That being said … they're still not answering questions of how these preferences for toys or different kinds of behaviors develop in the first place." The fact that it looks at development over time and relies on parents' observations is a big improvement over previous studies that attempted to answer similar questions based on respondents' own, often unreliable, memories, she says. "Within its paradigm, it's one of the better studies I've seen," says Anne Fausto-Sterling, professor emerita of biology and gender studies at Brown University. The investigation, which tracked more than 4500 kids over the first 15 years of their lives, seeks to answer one of the most controversial questions in the social sciences, but experts are mixed on the findings. The objects and people children play with as early as toddlerhood may provide clues to their eventual sexual orientation, reveals the largest study of its kind.