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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.
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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