Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
A Question of Birth
This is an honest question.
For many years, before we even heard about the LGBT movement (with increasing letters added), we heard from the gay community that being gay was a matter of birth. The reason a person is gay is because they were “born that way.” There was an assumption there is a genetic disposition to gay orientation, so it is wrong to even suggest that a gay person could change. California legislators came to believe it was necessary to pass laws against “conversion therapy” because it would be wrong to try to change how someone is “born.”
But now we hear that if a person is born physiologically male or female, and comes to feel that they were “born in the wrong body,” it is necessary to perform surgery to change their body to correspond to the way they feel. Even for adolescents (a time in life when feelings are extreme and transitory) should have access to procedures to change gender, if they feel uncomfortable in their bodies.
So the question: Why it is morally wrong to even suggest an adolescent (or an adult) should pursue therapy to “change the way they were born” but morally imperative for an adolescent (or adult) be provided with surgery to change the way they were born?
Published in Healthcare
@Zafar and @FredCole consider conversion therapy to be equivalent to FGM. This, to me, is simple crazy.
Therapy is about “normalizing” in one sense or another. There is no reason why sexual attraction should be an exception. I see no reason why Conversion Therapy is any different from therapy trying to work through addiction or depression or relationship-coaching.
Unless, of course, we simply want to say that any thoughts a person has should be validated and acceptable, without any expectation that they can or should change and grow.
I believe that people are supposed to grow above and beyond their animalistic urges. We conservatives praise people who keep their marital oaths, and who don’t quickly resort to violence. Why should sexuality be different?
Conversely, some are born with or acquire some biological problems which tend to alter personality, and which may seem like “just personality problems” unless they’re identified (and hopefully treated — if they can be). Some of these problems are exacerbated if you’re also born one sex rather than the other.
To me, experiencing bodily existence as horrific or painful just doesn’t seem that weird, and that can include how you experience your sex characteristics. But then, there are some heritable problems running in my family, any one of which is considered mostly manageable these days if promptly identified (which they aren’t always), and which are exacerbated by female hormones. Many women in my family haven’t exactly appreciated being born women — for understandable reasons, it turns out. Their unease wasn’t a delusion, although to be fair, none of us ever seriously considered trying to live life as a man a reasonable solution to the unease.
It can be really difficult to tease out psychological unease from physical unease. With more medical technology at our disposal, you’d suppose we might become better at it, but technical advances have also revealed how entangled these things can be.
Two reasons:
1. It doesn’t actually work.
2. Contrary to helping, it actively does harm.
Should what you describe here be approached as normal or abnormal, abnormal meaning being relatively rare, low single digits in per cent?
Huh?
Therapy, by and large, does not work. I view it as a navel-gazing coping mechanism, at best.
Nonetheless, the idea that one can adjust one’s desires and urges is hardly strange. We do it all the time.
I know “normally” married homosexuals with children and families. They chose that (though I have no knowledge of how they got there).
People who want to be attracted to the opposite sex should be free to make that choice, even if it goes against their “natural” desires.
Would you change your mind if I bring an example where it DID work, and the person in questions says it did not harm?
After all, there ARE studies that claim you are incorrect. There ARE examples of people who claim it worked, and helped.
Do you believe they are lying?
You’re welcome to present your example.
Among women, I suspect discomfort that is exacerbated in some way by female hormones reaches the double digits. I am much less sure what it might be like for men.
In general, I think expecting people to be too satisfied with the sex they were born with might drive those who are dissatisfied to more drastic measures, such as attempting transition when just learning to live with the dissatisfaction in the body and social role they were born into would be the less-unhappy path. So there is something to be said for promoting the idea that some amount of dissatisfaction is rather normal, and something most eventually learn to live with. Treating the dissatisfaction as really freakish might lead more to believe they really are freaks who couldn’t possibly pass as normal without drastic intervention.
See the link I offered.
Youtube has plenty of videos of people who say conversion therapy helped them.
I briefly dated a woman I had met in shul. A convert to Judaism, and also a woman who had had an exclusive lesbian relationship for years but decided she wanted to marry a man and raise a family (I knew the marry and kids part but not the first part the person who introduced us either didn’t know it or didn’t mention it.) She still had a friendly relationship with her ex and intended to include her in her social life on occasion.
I decided I wasn’t tall enough for that ride.
As others have noted, the Left is not limited by logic in this area. On the one hand, the Left demands that we believe gender is infinitely variable, and “fluid,” which is to say that it doesn’t exist. On the other hand, gender is such an important concept to one’s identity, that to misgender someone is among the most heinous of deeds. Gender is so important that, to be taken seriously, we must view all things through the lens of normal (straight “cis”) men’s oppression of women, homosexuals, and the rest of the alphabet soup of gender-non-conformists.
I would have thought the incidence of bisexual men would be at least as high as that of strictly homosexual men. After all, a bisexual is only one step removed from a heterosexual man, in that he is attracted to other men. The homosexual is even more abnormal, in that he enjoys the company of men, but has the additional defect of having no attraction to women.
Those are certainly the two reasons put forth by those who oppose it. OTOH, “banning” it is rather clearly state intrusion into personal choices made by individuals perfectly capable of weighing pros and cons.
But by banning it, saying 1 and 2 above is easy and no need to demonstrate it except to people who are picky, like here.
H, the ban is for children, who are not perfectly capable. Adults who want to cure cancer with bat’s wings and essence of newt can do so. You can’t do it to kids. It’s not a question of sex, but of quackery.
But are we not seeing much action related to gender choices and/or selection directed towards minors?
I am—as many of you know—perfectly content to allow gay and lesbian persons to arrange their lives as they see fit and, at the risk of starting that old argument again, I think they not only ought to be allowed to marry, they should be strongly encouraged to do so. (Just like everyone else—enough with all this fiddling around! harrumph!)
Still, the question of conversion therapy is an interesting one. While I can definitely imagine it being imposed on an unwilling subject, with harmful results, surely there could be some instances in which an individual might genuinely wish to have help tamping down homosexual urges so as to live in accordance with other values he or she holds dear.
Most of us have multiple ways of understanding ourselves and our roles in the world. A heterosexual man of my acquaintance with a history of infidelity (nature or nurture? there is evidence for both) is in therapy to help him constrain this in the name of his equally strong desire to be an honorable married man.
A homosexual man who strongly identifies with his Muslim faith might seek help in dealing with and, yes, suppressing the homosexual feelings he has which, if acted upon, would interfere with his relationship —as he understands it-–with God.
We are so accustomed to thinking of the sexual self as the basic, essential true self that we can’t imagine sacrificing this one dimension to enable some other dimension of ourselves to expand.
Are we seeing “much action”? Or is it that those are the stories that get attention and end up making it seem More frequent than it actually is?
I wish this were true of “gender reassignment” surgery and hormone-blocking drugs, which are also given to kids to help them “transition.”
But it seems the activists are A-OK with doing those biologically harmful things to kids.
Well, I don’t see that it is banned.
Seems every week we’re reading another story in the mainstream news about little junior who, at age 8, has decided he’s a she and his encouraging parents start him on his cross-dressing routine.
Not only is it not banned. It’s celebrated by our elites and all over our news outlets. And it’s screwing up these poor kids for life.
The only consistent element is that there cannot be “normal.” Whether there is a genetic deviation or psychological menu is not important except as a way to destroy “normal”. Sexuality, marriage, family and natural law must be flattened so that there are no traditional, private barriers to a new order in which alienated individuals must turn to the state for meaning.
Notice that whether the altered sexuality is genetic or cognitive (virtual antonyms), we normals are not permitted to assert that there is a basic, normal human nature. That is the point.
I don’t know what you mean by choices. There’s one movement to do gender surgery on minors, and most people are right to shun it. There’s a vastly larger group of people who think it’s a serious issue for adults to consider. This is probably roughly 1/100th the size of the mainstream gay movement. It would be like judging Protestantism by the actions of a snake-handling cult.
It’s not very convincing. Although it comes from a Catholic Medical Association, none of its authors are doctors. The actual, honest-to-God doctors don’t think this works, or does good, or fails to do harm. I worked in the film business in NYC and LA. I knew plenty of gays. Not one ever thought of changing that, or believed it was even possible. They tend to laugh at the idea.
It’s not different. But being homo is no more “animalistic” than being hetero.
Then you must be a lot, lot older than me, Freev, and I’m 66. I have never, not once heard a gay person describe it as a “livestyle choice”. The only people who ever use that phrase are their opponents which is why we used to read it here on Ricochet all the time.
N of 1, but a colleague was, about 5 or 6 years ago, about to start administering puberty arresting drugs to her 12 year old. Don’t know what happened since; I haven’t gone to the seminars with that presenter since.
I’m not so sure about that. Something like 80% of homosexual men have had sexual relations with women. Often more than once. Apparently, they’re able to perform, as would be indicated by the number of same-sex attracted men who marry and have children (notable example: Oscar Wilde).