Since Freud's remark that unavailability of a strong and friendly father figure favours the development of homosexuality, the notion has prevailed that, in males, homosexuality and/or ‘femininity’ are due either to the father's physical unavailability or to a disturbance of the father-son relationship. If this hypothesis were valid, one would expect that such gross defect in male role learning as appears in transsexual males should be quite clearly associated with unreplaced father loss or various forms of gross deficiency in father-son relations.