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What's unhealthy about being gay or lesbian? I guess transgenderism is different because it's kind of defined as dysmorphia even by its activists, but I don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality.
Well, what's "unhealthy" about anything? Is it "unhealthy" to eat bacon? Apparently yes. Why? Because it shortens your lifespan and creates other complications. Does being homosexual shorten your lifespan?
In short, yes. I have deliberately linked the response of the authors of the relevant study to what they call "homophobic groups [who] appear more interested in restricting the human rights of gay and bisexuals rather than promoting their health and well being." Their only goal was to demonstrate the needs of the gay community, not to strengthen any homophobic agenda. Furthermore, advances in HIV treatment have surely raised that number in the last few decades, but the fact remains that practicing homosexuality is a lifestyle with health consequences similar to those we associate with smoking, sedentary lifestyles, bad foods, etc. Which we typically do not ban, but do often seek to regulate, or at least socially disapprove.
"But sexuality is a part of people's core immutable identity!" I'm skeptical of that, for reasons that aren't important to this argument, but I definitely hear the same thing from obese people, who I've known to talk about food the way that some homosexuals talk about the impossibility of just not doing that. I'm not sure I can accept that it is dehumanizing to be told that your preferred behaviors are unhealthy or even socially forbidden, but I am comfortable that it is unpleasant, and the consequences of letting people eat bacon or have consensual unprotected anal sex in public places with total strangers are in many cases low enough that the costs of forbidding that behavior is more than society should bear. But let's set aside the prevalence of sexually transmitted infections in homosexual men, the high comorbidity of psychiatric disorders that does not seem to be abating as societal acceptance improves, and the effects of promiscuity which apply to everyone but more to homosexual men than any other demographic...
Is infertility "unhealthy?"
This is the final motte of the natural law theorist. Organisms are generally healthy when every part is performing its "proper function." Many parts of you have the function of keeping you alive; if your heart stops pumping blood, it's curtains. Some parts are more utilitarian; if your eyes stop translating photons into useful neurological information, you're not going to die (at least not as a direct result), but you might talk to your doctor about approaches to restoring them.
So what's the proper function of your sex organs and attendant "sexual attraction" neurocircuitry?
Obviously, homosexuality is not infertility of the gonads. But homosexuals (at least if they are strict about their homosexuality) must rely on artificial reproductive technologies for sexual reproduction in the way that people with poor vision must wear glasses to see. Given the prevalence of fertility clinics, it would be weird to say that infertility is not a question of being "unhealthy" (indeed, one highly successful approach to fertility treatment for the obese is: lose weight). One does not visit the fertility doctor when everything is working as nature
intendedarranged via processes of natural selection over millions of years. There is no effective, humane "treatment" for homosexuality, but--imagine if, in 1899 A.D., someone discovered an easily-farmed plant in the rainforest with sap that reset the neurocircuitry of human sexual attraction to "reproductive sex" mode. How would history look different?Now, before I get dog-piled with "but causation" and "but elective sterilization" and "but anti-natalism" and "but bisexuals" and all the other entirely-too-obvious "buts" (I will not make a cheeky comment about "but" sex here dammit sorry sorry):
I don't think any of this matters very much. We did not discover a magical sexuality-changing tree sap in 1899, we do have a variety of interventions to circumvent the costs of our preferences and desires, including "unhealthy" ones, and perhaps most importantly, I eat bacon. Literally, and also metaphorically, where "bacon" is a stand-in for all the many ways I fail to do what is optimally healthy, because for whatever reason it's not who I am, no matter what my rational mind tells me I should prefer in my own best interests. I echo the letter from the lifespan study: the point here is not to excuse any mistreatment of any individual based on the character of their sexual appetites.
But you said you "don't see anything unhealthy about homosexuality," which statement would seem to me to require a very constrained definition of "unhealthy," much more constrained than we apply in basically any other context.
You did propose to set this aside, so I acknowledge that I'm not actually disputing anything necessary to your point, but I nonetheless feel obligated to mention that while these comorbidities are associated with gayness, the causality isn't obvious.
Another interesting analogy is left-handedness. Left-handed people are more likely to have mental health comorbidities than right-handed people. But it would be kind of odd to suggest that left-handedness is unhealthy, and certainly odd to suggest that left-handed people should use their right hands to avoid mental illness. Which isn't to suggest that the latter is (analogously) what you're saying about gay people, but in these conversations the label gay or homosexual (among men) seems to vascillate between the inclination and the practice.
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I'll try to skip over the what-ifs -- though the alternate-universe where ~10% of XX-chromosone'd people went FTM in the '70s and early internet mpreg was drastically less bizarre is a funny thought -- but I really don't think this is a useful metric here, or for many matters involving the brain. People aren't livestock; to the extent any telos can be relevant on statistical levels, it doesn't really make sense at an individual one.
People also go to doctors get have ridiculous breast implants or sizable breast reductions, to reduce weight or help maintain it, so on and so forth. Even for matters pretty heavily tied to reproduction and fully autonomous, "what is the optimal time to start and stop lactating" for a mother doesn't have one Set and Correct Answer, and it's not even coherent to propose one. And the act of reproduction, despite the best effort of whiptail lizards and teenage boys first learning about lotion, is typically at least a two-player task: no matter how functional one person might be as an epitome of 'natural order', they're going to have a pretty rough time making a baby.
Reproduction might be more a telos than hair color (but don't red-heads have higher skin cancer incidence?), but it's not in the same category as eyes having a telos of seeing.
I think that would be a totally new fight, because mpreg is specifically about cis guys getting pregnant (unless we're talking A/B/O which is an entire subset of its own), so then there would be slapfights over "are you saying trans men are not men?" or "why are you making a normal thing - men getting pregnant - into this weird fetish?" Fights in the comments over "Totally disgusted, thought I was getting a nice romantic story about two guys and their expected baby, turns out to be weird cis shit, tag your fetishes before posting you sick fucks" versus "How dare you kinkshame, it's up to you to read the tags and it was clearly stated to be mpreg" versus "Yeah but not everyone knows what 'mpreg' means, they take it at face value that it's about pregnant men" "It is about pregnant men" "No it's not, it's about your obscure kink".
People can and will fight over anything 😁
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And yet the similarities are often astonishingly close!
Yeah, hard disagree. Reproduction is, if anything, more telos-oriented than vision. I think your mistake is that you're too focused on the individual. At the level of a species, the occasional blind or legless specimen is trivial by comparison to propagation errors. We do live in a society that has worked very hard to shove this to the back of our awareness in various ways, but the people I know who are infertile are often at least as upset about their disability as the people I know who lack other organ function. There are a lot of culture war fights going on right now over what health insurers can be required to cover in connection with ART, and as technology advances, I expect those fights to only escalate.
As far as I understand, redheads also feel more pain, respond differently to drugs, etc. but I'm not making an "intelligent design" argument, here. Not every feature of every individual human is crucial to our survival as individuals or a species. But barring certain extremely high-tech interventions, heterosexual sex played a fundamental role in the existence of literally every human. Writing that off as on the same "proper function" level as hair color just seems willfully contrary.
My objection's more at the bar between individual and group considerations.
As a metaphor, at the level of a species, "harvest crops" or "pumping water" played a fundamental role in the daily survival of literally every human on the planet. But most people don't do that often, and some don't do it ever in their entire lives. Sure, they'd be physically capable, for the most part -- but even the gayest guy or most gold star lesbian can find a turkey baster even if they couldn't lie back and think of England, and before that we had the invention of fingers.
But describing people as unhealthy because they don't want to harvest crops isn't even wrong, and wrong even beyond the (already obnoxious) tendency to conflate things like lack-of-exercise and the results of lack-of-exercise. Here, the problem isn't lack-of-hetero-fucking or even the lack of individual-results-of-hetero-fucking -- most men historically never reproduced, either! -- but some gauzy results-of-results matter. Society is downstream of individual actions, but "healthy" as measuring individual actions in how they effect humanity is less comparable to annoying advice to reduce bacon consumption and more like annoying advice to vote Properly.
Sure, but measuring individual actions by how they effect humanity is very much not the point of the word "healthy." We as individuals have both reproductive organs (we even call them "reproductive organs") and sexual-attraction circuitry. The reason we have them is for propagation of the species, that's important in understanding their proper function, but the point is not some utilitarian results-of-results analysis. The point is to say--what are the measures of a healthy heart? A healthy heart circulates blood, pumps in a certain rhythm, etc. What is a healthy hand? A healthy hand has thus-and-such dexterity, grip strength within a certain range, etc. A healthy reproductive system, among other things, successfully propagates the species. That's good for the species, but at the level of the individual, it's what we mean when we say the word healthy--something telos-oriented.
And you can totally deconstruct that word, after all, if we did intelligently design a species we would have different things to say about it, there is no magically necessary connection between the word "healthy" and the process of biological species propagation. This is why I suggested elsewhere in the thread that to really get to the heart of the matter we probably just have to taboo the word "healthy." But when someone asks "how is homosexuality unhealthy" there are a wide range of empirical answers that currently get overlooked in stupid ways because on most of the internet it is taboo to say anything that might be perceived as negative about homosexuality. All I've pointed out is that the "proper function" account we usually mean when we say "unhealthy" pretty obviously applies to homosexuality in the same way it applies to bacon and smoking.
And indeed, I regard crusaders against bacon consumption as approximately as worthy of my attention as crusaders against homosexual sex. I don't mind hearing that bacon is bad for me, when we're having a detailed conversation about empirical facts-of-the-matter. But when people start talking about legislatively banning it, then I feel like something has gone very wrong indeed.
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I really appreciate this aspect of your thought, but I think it reveals an intuitive dichotomy between the definition of "healthy/unhealthy" and "actionably unhealthy." Perhaps, if we're splitting hairs, a further dichotomy between "socially actionable" and "legally actionable" levels of "unhealthy." Some subset of behaviors is well known to be less than optimal for health for most people, those behaviors can be labeled as "known to be unhealthy." Within that subset, we can further split between those that are broadly viewed as non-actionable, which we do not judge at all; those that are socially actionable, we shame and judge but do not legally restrict; and those that are legally actionable, we tax, fine, discourage, and perhaps outlaw them.
There is significant debate over what constitutes actionable vs non-actionable levels of unhealthy. When people say "X isn't unhealthy" they mean something like "X is less unhealthy than things that we similarly do not judge or discourage." It falls below the Actionable line. While when someone uses the phrase "X is Unhealthy" we nearly always mean to say that X is at least within the category of Socially Actionable things which we would feel comfortable judging others for. It is above the Actionable line.
Your very broad definition of healthy/unhealthy captures so many behaviors that aren't socially, let alone legally, actionable that it is your definition that is wildly unconstrained. If Gay Sex is to be discouraged in the same way that donuts are discouraged: that is to say that from my office there are to be five shops specifically devoted to gay sex within a mile radius, that offering gay sex as a polite tip to a power line crew restoring a blackout near my house was normal, that TV ads constantly drove me towards new varieties of commercial gay sex, then I guess you'd be at equivalent levels of marketing something that is "unhealthy."
Well, maybe what I should have said was "a clear view of the question probably requires us to taboo the word 'unhealthy'" and try to figure out what is really being asked, but it's never quite obvious to me when is the best time to make that move, as it can seem a bit uncharitable to open with "I don't think the question you're asking is the one I should answer."
There's more I could probably say (e.g. about the number of rainbow flags likely flying within a mile radius of your office, if donut shops are that densely packed where you are) but I think the main thing is, "my" definition is not wildly unconstrained--rather, what people decide are "actionable" versus "nonactionable" health choices is wildly unprincipled, increasingly governed by culture war battle lines (see bans on: gas stoves, pornography, sugary beverages, masks...), and I'm just pointing that out.
To be honest, Scout's Honor, you'd be wrong. In terms of publicly displayed flags at businesses/institutions rather than at homes, I can think of two? The one soft-Prot church by the golf course, and my yoga studio. Probably a third somewhere in my favorite coffee shop, half the staff is visibly queer, but I don't actually remember seeing it. If we're counting private houses that number increases somewhat, but then I'd need to include grocery stores and gas stations that sell donuts even if they aren't the main product. I actually think I see fewer pride flags than commercial establishments selling donuts in my average day.
I often find myself agreeing with @Walterodim here, and think a lot of my disconnect with the more rabidly anti-woke posters on themotte is that I don't live in an area or work in an industry where I face constant pressure to conform to woke shibboleths.
Where you are: how is the idea that gay people should be celibate viewed? How is it viewed if a gay person chooses celibacy because he believes that gay relationships aren't for him and that it wouldn't be fair to an opposite-sex partner if he was in a relationship with her? What if it's a lesbian choosing celibacy...perhaps because of religious belief? They don't think that other people's relationships are any of their business and support people being able to do what they want, gay marriage, all that...but believe that their God wants them to be celibate, or are maybe celibate out of personal conviction.
Kookie. Nobody believes that around me.
Homosexuality exists but homosexuals should be celibate was a fallback entrenchment in a war that was lost a decade ago. It was a counter argument to "Born This Way" which was so effective it is now almost outmoded on the left. While the Right is circling away from it with the Groomer meme.
Yeah. The Groomer meme... has some truth to it with fetishizing and making transness fashionable. That is bullshit: hawking irreversible medical interventions to kids as anything other than a last resort. If Johnny wants to wear dresses and be called Suzie, fine, maybe that's his generation's rebellion. Same for Johnny taking Mike to the prom. I'm gathering that that's commonplace and acceptable where you are, and that many kids tell their parents that they're not straight...and get a "That's OK, we still love you, do you need a ride to soccer practice?" from them.
As I understand it, you guys are in a liberal stronghold, a super-blue area. Which is different from the suburban-Northeast tossup territory I grew up in. You could see Trump signs, MAGA bumper stickers, rainbow flags, and Hillary or Biden signs on the same street.
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