I would like to respond to the letter Being gay: Media distortion deplorable .

As a medical professional myself, I disagree with the notion that homosexual behavior is an inborn trait. Looking through the American Psychological Association (APA) website, I do, however, agree that homosexuality is not a mental disorder per se as these people actually believe in their sexual orientation.

Being a scientific person, I seek to study homosexuality by looking at all past studies conducted. Thus far, I am yet to be convinced that homosexuality is inborn.

'People are born gay' is one of the most persistent claims of today. Gay activists say that a gay person's sexual orientation emerges in early adolescence and is fixed and unchangeable. This claim is backed-up by the prestigious American Psychological Association and the American Psychiatric Association (APAs).

There are three ways to test for inborn traits: twin studies, brain dissections and gene 'linkage' studies. Twin studies show that something other than genetics must account for homosexuality because nearly half of the identical twin studied didn't have the same sexual preference.

If homosexuality were inherited, identical twins should either be both straight or both gay. Besides, none of the twin studies have been replicated, and other twin studies have produced completely different results.

Brain dissections by researcher Simon LeVay who studied the hypothalamic differences between the brains of homosexual and heterosexual men noted that: 'It's important to stress what I didn't find. I did not prove that homosexuality is genetic, or find a genetic cause for being gay.

'I didn't show that gay men are born that way, the most common mistake people make in interpreting my work. Nor did I locate a gay center in the brain.'

Finally, an early study attempting to show a link between homosexuality and the X chromosome has yet to be replicated, and a second study actually contradicted the findings of the first. Researcher Dean Hamer, for example, attempted to link male homosexuality to a bit of DNA located at the tip of the X chromosome.

He has written: 'Homosexuality is not purely genetic ... environmental factors play a role. There is not a single master gene that makes people gay ... I don't think we will ever be able to predict who will be gay.'

So if not genes, what then causes homosexuality?

Regent University's Spring 2002 Law Review is entirely devoted to a discussion on the various aspects of homosexuality, including the origin and causes of homosexual behaviour. It includes a study, 'Homosexuality: Innate and immutable?' by Dr A Dean Byrd and Stony Olsen.

After discussing the lack of evidence on the genetic origins of homosexuality, Byrd and his associate detail the various environmental factors that can lead a person into a homosexual lifestyle. They include:

Gender confusion: Dr George Rekers, an expert on Gender identity disorders, is author of dozens of research papers on homosexuality and wrote Growing up straight: What every family should know about homosexuality in 1982. He is also editor of Handbook of child and adolescent sexual problems , published in 1995.

Rekers stated in 1995, that, 'Gender nonconformity in childhood may be the single common observable factor associated with homosexuality. Some of the typical childhood factors leading to homosexuality are a feeling of being different from other children; a perception of the father as being distant, uninvolved and unapproving; a perception of the mother being too close, too involved; diminished or distorted masculinity or femininity; premature introduction to sexuality; and gender confusion.

Failure to internalise maleness: Dr Joseph Nicolosi, president of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (Narth) has written: 'Homosexuality is a developmental problem that is almost always the result of problems in family relationships, particularly between father and son.

As a result of failure with the father, the boy does not fully internalise the male gender identity, and develops homosexuality. This is the most commonly seen clinical model.'

Rekers, writing in Growing up straight , observes: 'Many studies of homosexual patients as well as of non-patient homosexuals have established a classic pattern of background family relations. The most frequent family pattern reported from the male homosexuals includes a binding, intimate mother in combination with a hostile, detached father'.

Sexual abuse by same-sex predators: In studies conducted by Diana Shrier and Robert Johnson in 1985 and 1988, males who had been sexually abused as children were almost seven times as likely as non-molested boys to become homosexuals.

Dr Gregory Dickson recently completed a doctoral dissertation on the pattern of relationships between mothers and their male homosexual sons. His paper is entitled 'An empirical study of the mother/son dyad in relation to the development of adult male homosexuality: An object relations perspective'. Dickson's study is reviewed on the Narth website.

His study sheds new light on the relationship between early childhood sexual abuse and a child's later involvement in homosexual behaviour. According to Dickson, an alarming 49 percent of homosexuals surveyed had been molested compared to less than two percent of heterosexuals.

His study affirms previous findings of Dr David Finkelhor (1984), which found that boys victimised by older men were four times more likely to be currently involved in homosexual behaviour than were non-victims.

As Finkelhor observed: 'It may be common for a boy who has been involved in an experience with an older man to label himself as homosexual (1) because he has had a homosexual experience and (2) because he was found to be sexually attractive by a man.

'Once he labels himself homosexual, the boy may begin to behave consistently with that role and gravitate toward homosexual activity." ( Child sexual abuse: New theory and research , New York: The Free Press, 1984).

Counselor Dr Robert Hicks, author of The masculine journey , has written: " in counseling gay men for 20 years, I have not had one yet whom I would say had a normative childhood or normative adolescent development in the sexual arena.

'More often than not I have found stories of abusive, alcoholic, or absent (physically and emotionally) fathers, stories of incest or first experiences of sex forced upon them by older brothers, neighborhood men or even friends. I sometimes find these men have had early exposure to pornography...'.

In short, what the studies conducted above have shown is that homosexuality has not been proven to be an inborn trait.