As to this study... In my experience on this subject (Brain science) when men and or women for that matter take on opposite gender roles, the brain patterns almost always tend to mimic each other, both heterosexually and homosexually.
The only thing you can conclude from any study of this primitive nature is that our brains appear to be born to adapt.
What I find striking from this study and any like it though is that these social researchers aren't doing themselves any favors, because showing adaptability whether emotionally or sexually adds to the environmental causation argument for sexuality. I'd like to see this done on young adults without children to compare data.
Tim-
No, this is referring to how hormones affect how brain structures develop in utero. This isn't about brain plasticity / learned behavior.
eg:
Sexual hormones and the brain: an essential alliance for sexual identity and sexual orientation (2010)
"The fetal brain develops during the intrauterine period in the male direction through a direct action of testosterone on the developing nerve cells, or in the female direction through the absence of this hormone surge. In this way, our gender identity (the conviction of belonging to the male or female gender) and sexual orientation are programmed or organized into our brain structures when we are still in the womb.
There is no indication that social environment after birth has an effect on gender identity or sexual orientation."
Royal College of Psychiatrists
"Despite almost a century of psychoanalytic and psychological speculation,
there is no substantive evidence to support the suggestion that the nature of parenting or early childhood experiences play any role in the formation of a person’s fundamental heterosexual or homosexual orientation. It would appear that sexual orientation is biological in nature, determined by a complex interplay of genetic factors and the early uterine environment."
Brain scans have provided the most compelling evidence yet that being gay or straight is a biologically fixed trait. (2008)
The scans reveal that in gay people, key structures of the brain governing emotion, mood, anxiety and aggressiveness resemble those in straight people of the opposite sex.
"This is the most robust measure so far of cerebral differences between homosexual and heterosexual subjects," she says.
Previous studies have also shown differences in brain architecture and activity between gay and straight people, but most relied on people's responses to sexuality driven cues that could have been learned, such as rating the attractiveness of male or female faces.
To get round this, Savic and her colleague, Per Lindström, chose to measure brain parameters
likely to have been fixed at birth.
"That was the whole point of the study, to show parameters that differ, but which couldn't be altered by learning or cognitive processes," says Savic.
"This study demonstrates that homosexuals of both sexes show strong cross-sex shifts in brain symmetry," says Qazi Rahman, a leading researcher on sexual orientation at Queen Mary college, University of London, UK.
"The connectivity differences reported in the amygdala are striking."
"Paradoxically, it's more informative to look at things that have no direct connection with sexual orientation, and that's where this study scores," says Simon LeVay, a prominent US author who in 1991 reported finding differences(pdf) in a part of the brain called the hypothalamus between straight and gay men.
http://www.pnas.org/content/105/27/9403.full.pdf+html
