Serious Question.

johnnysmurfman

Hi,

Firstly, let me just state that this is a serious enquiry not intended to trivialise any issue or offend anyone.

My question relates to a situation where an individual states that he is gay but must establish it to satisfy a particular authority. Are there any scientific tests, whether in the form of a physical examination or a psycological assessment that might establish to a reasonable degree, an individual's sexuality. For example, where a person claims to be a victim of torture he or she will normally be physically and emotionally analysed in order to establish whether this is in fact the case. I'm thinking about this from the aspect of an individual seeking refugee status in a third country in circumstances where homosexuality is illegal and punishable by imprisonment/death in that individual's country of origin and where if that individual could establish his homosexuality he might be more likely to succeed in his claim for refugee status.

Thanks for your time.

azezil

To the best of my knowledge, no there isn't.

Stark

I guess they could show a person images and test for brain response.

ryanairzer

I remember on Law and Order some guy was pretending to be a child molester and he had to some sort of a test where he was subjected to various images, some of them children in sexual poses etc. and some machine tested his digital response. So I guess something similiar could be used to test someone's sexuality.

In fact I remember reading some article where homophobic and non homophobic men who identified as strictly heterosexual were studied and they did some sort of test to compare the homosexual tendancies of each group so yeah, there is a way seemingly.

lucyburn

Stark wrote: »

I guess they could show a person images and test for brain response.

Yes that's what i suspect too, they can put probes on a patients head which measures brain activity-pictures of naked people etc..; the doctors can read the results and tell when the brain gets more or less excited.
I don't know if its fool proof though or even very practical.

gillyfromlyre

There is some kind of gadget a girlfriend was telling me about, lucyburn had the jist of it, the fancy dan gets certain brain activities which register him or her as gay

qwertyphobia

For the example you are talking about, a person seeking asylum no one would go to the expense or effort of a brian scan.

If a scan of brain responces to images would show up anything is somthing I would douth. We simply can't tell with much level of certainity if that flicker on the screen would be caused by shame, disgust, arousal, curisity. On top of that you would then have to make a host of assumptions as what thoes emotions could tell you about the subjects sexuality.

It would be all just a stack of cards stacked up atop of each other and would stand up in no court (even imigration appeal courts)