Researchers carried out by biologists believe they have found specific biological markers which indicate sexual positions that gay men prefer.

The research, that was carried out at the University of Toronto Mississauga found that men who prefer to be bottoms often have older brothers, are left handed or did not conform to gender stereotypes from a young age.

The research pinpoints “non-right handedness” as a key factor which signifies this.

Those who demonstrated more masculine personality traits were likely to be tops, while those with more feminine traits were often bottoms.

“Self identified tops rated themselves as more masculine compared to bottoms and tops were more likely to score higher on male-typical cognitive styles while bottoms were higher on female-typical cognitive styles,” the research stated.

“Among gay men, variation in gender nonconformity appears to correspond with variation in anal sex role behaviour.

“Specifically, gay men with an insertive anal sex role (i.e., tops) scored higher on masculine personality traits compared to males with a receptive (i.e., bottom) anal sex role preference.

“Conversely, bottoms scored higher on feminine personality traits compared to tops,” it added.

Those who participated in the study were recruited either through Facebook or at the Toronto Pride festival in 2015 and the researchers compared a gay and straight sample of men.

Interestingly, there was no difference in terms of age found between the participants.

An author of the study explained: “These findings suggest that the developmental processes underlying handedness act in a nonlinear fashion to influence male same-sex sexual orientation and childhood gender nonconformity.”