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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   24877 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 30, 2023

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The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is an Evangelical Christian that has positions and stances on homosexuality that I do not share (I confess, I remain a Millennial lib that has no problem with gay people doing gay things). Nonetheless, this CNN video where they discuss his positions on homosexuality and conversion therapy just seems so bizarre to me. In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked", quote Johnson saying, "there's freedom to change if you want to", and "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".

Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact. Likewise, even if it proves impossible to change one's underlying preference, it certainly remains true that one can elect to follow a different pattern of behavior than their natural tendency. I might have a natural tendency to hook up with a flirtatious woman at the bar while I'm on a work trip, but Mrs. O'Dim wouldn't appreciate this and I value her so much more than some stupid hookup. Were I a religious man, I might be inclined to view my religious obligations through the same sort of lens.

But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference. A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to? Do they see no conflict? Do they understand the conflict, but believe that it's a question that's been solved by The Science, so better to just trust The Science and move on? Cynically, I think it's mostly that expressing the opposite view will get you bullied and fired.

The thing is, we're expected to believe that conversion therapy works for paedophiles (or Minor Attracted Persons, if I'm getting on the new euphemisms bandwagons):

Although roughly 42% of the surveyed outpatient therapists reported having treated at least one MAP patient, their treatment experience with this clientele was still limited (i.e., the median number of treated MAPs among therapists who had treatment experience with this clientele was two). Therapists strongly believed in the beneficial effects of secondary prevention programs for MAPs (M > 6 on a seven-point scale; Table 4) and the large majority were willing to refer patients to different treatment institutions which corresponded with therapists’ strong beliefs in non-offending MAPs’ need for therapeutic treatment.

Here are people who don't choose their sexuality, whose inclinations are fixed, and who are treated by society with contempt, fear and loathing.

Here are sympathetic people in the psychiatry, psychology, and social sciences fields who want to help these pariahs, and part of that is appealing for our understanding and to put aside our reflexive reaction of "they're criminals and perverts, lock them up!"

So what can we do to help and support them not to offend? Well, lots of (https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-022-02377-6) therapy, it seems.

I know I'm a cynic, but I fully expect MAPs to go the same way as homosexuality: a lot of political influence behind the scenes to get it re-classified as 'not a mental disorder', then the PR push about "See? Experts say it's not perversion! Trust the Science!" and eventually therapy to 'help stop the MAP from acting out his attraction to those below the legal age of consent' will be considered every bit as much offensive, and we'll get the same pop culture stories of "they put a hot wire to my head/because the things I did and said/they made these feelings go away/model citizen in every way".

Give it twenty years to get across, child-fucking is a harder row to hoe than two guys wanting to fuck each other. But it'll go that way, they're already putting in the spade work about "no it's got nothing to do with child abuse" that happened with legalising and normalising homosexuality. It will undergo the same "trying to change someone's innate sexual orientation to one deemed acceptable by society is abusive" shift.

The chief treatment error made by therapists is the conscious or unconscious belief that a MAP seeking treatment inevitably has or will molest a child.

MAP-informed therapists understand that, while similarities to sexual offenders against children exist, significant differences between the two groups also exist, particularly in their management of their sexual feelings. These therapists understand the similarities and differences and treat their clients with evidence based methods appropriate to the individual client.

The preferred model of treatment is LGBT affirmative psychotherapy, which treats sexual feelings as innate, unchangeable and subject to personal acceptance. The American Psychological Association provides guidelines on its website (see below). Applied to the minor-attracted person, affirmative therapy separates sexual orientation from its expression, emphasizing personal growth and acceptance of one’s age of attraction. **This in no way endorses sexual contact between adults and minors. **

Awareness of the shame, stigma and fear of exposure that MAPs experience due to their sexual and emotional feelings is crucial to treatment. Therapists should provide a proper diagnosis but use caution in recording a diagnosis of Pedophilic Disorder, because the associated stigma can negatively affect treatment.

And before anyone jumps in with "but being gay is perfectly fine and normal, it's not the same thing at all!", weren't we told that 10% of the population was LGBT so this means it's normal and natural? Well, same goes for being MAP!

The prevalence of minor attraction amongst the general population remains largely unknown due to sampling difficulties (Cantor & McPhail, Citation2016), with it being estimated that up to 5% of adult males may engage in sexual fantasizing involving children during masturbation (Dombert et al., Citation2016).

5% is more than transgender at the moment. As we were reminded constantly during the gay rights campaigns: someone you know, someone you work with, someone in your family, is gay and you don't know it. Aren't you willing to be compassionate and loving? Love trumps hate! Change that to "MAP and you don't know it" and run the same campaigns, and I'm sure there will be "but being MAP is perfectly fine and normal, it's got nothing to do with child sex abuse" talking points put out there as well.

we'll get the same pop culture stories of "they put a hot wire to my head/because the things I did and said/they made these feelings go away/model citizen in every way".

Now that was an unexpected Public Image Limited reference. May the road rise with you, FarNearEverywhere. And remeber: "Anger isn't energy." Or "Anger is an energy." Hard to tell given Rotten's elocution...

You seem to kind of have three points shoved in there, let me see if I can get at them:

  1. 'If therapy works for pedos it should work for gays!'

Answer: 'works' means very different things in these two cases.

The claim for therapy 'working' on gay people is that they become normal straight people with happy heterosexual sex lives and etc after the end of some treatment program instead of just having happy consensual gay relationships.

The claim for therapy 'working' on pedos is that they'll be able to live a sad and unfulfilled life of permanent chastity with enough willpower and constant oversight instead of repeatedly raping people.

These are not really the same definitions of 'working'. It's easy to imagine that you could convince some number of gay people to live sad lives of chastity with enough constant and unending oversight and social pressure (see: clergy). 'Conversion therapy' is making a much stronger claim with much less support.

  1. 'If we accept gay people, pedos will be accepted next!'

Answer: we've been hearing that for generations now and it's never happened. Literally gay people are adults working at offices now who were born before people started using that rhetoric and they've grown up their whole lies rolling their eyes at it because it never happens.

Yeah there are some weirdos on the internet pushing for it, there was NAMBLA in the 80s, there's always been weirdos pushing this agenda from the fringes of society. It's a lot less accepted now than it used to be, Romeo and Juliet were 13, Stray Cat Blues was a hit in the 60s, etc.

What's always missing from this formulation of how your opponents view the world is the concept of victims. You have an analogy based entirely on sexual liberation, without any of the other context.

Which is crazy because tomorrow it will be talk of how actually the progs are total prudes who hate sex because of #MeToo and 'enthusiastic consent' and the like making modern sex and dating an impossible minefield. Progs are obsessed with sexual victimization and finding and protecting and creating through rhetoric victims of sexual abuse, but you completely overlook that when trying to blood libel other sexual minorities by talking about how the progs are totally going to love pedos and make them the next big thing.

This is, charitably, extremely silly.

Your first link is broken.

I don't agree with your prediction. The trend over the last 50 years or so has been an increase in opposition to sexual relationships between children and adults. The age of consent has been going up. The penalties for sexually abusing minors have been increasing. The general concern over paedophilia has been increasing. Age gaps are becoming taboo. The gap in general expected behaviour between adults and children has been increasing while the age at which people are considered to be full adults is getting later and later.

The standard definition of a mental disorder is based on whether the behaviour causes harm. I don't see how paedophilia would not be considered a mental disorder in a society that considers sexual activity between a child and a much older person causes immense psychological harm.

Well we can look at the facts, which are that since the 1980s gay rights have become widely accepted, gay marriage legalized across the West; homophobia seriously reduced, and yet at the same time ages of consent have risen (substantially in parts of Canada and Europe), punishments for abuse of children have hugely increased, many more people are in jail for these crimes, and - perhaps most significantly - it’s much less socially acceptable for a 25 or 30 year old man to have a 15/16 year old girlfriend in 2023 than it was in 1973 or 1993. That’s a good thing (in my opinion), but it suggests that things are moving further against the direction you suggest is likely.

The French tried that in the 70s; it didn't work great for 'em. (Some) Westerners have been there, done that, got the T-shirt.

Ages of consent may have risen, but we're much more accepting of sexual activity at younger ages. Think of "Romeo and Juliet" laws, or the constant tub-thumping over "we must teach sex education at [age whatever] because by age [a couple years more] they're going to be experimenting with sex". That used to be "by sixteen", now it seems to be trending down to "by twelve".

While repugnance around thirty year old man has sex with six year old child will persist, I'm not so sure that "thirty year old man has sex with sixteen year old" will. After all, if some are pushing to reduce the voting age to sixteen, and we accept that a sixteen year old can have a twenty year old boyfriend, then that means we think 'legal minor' may indeed be mature enough to decide such things.

I'm not saying it'll be easy or fast, but I do think there will be a swing back, as with many things, so that the rise in age and the reset of it that you mention may be seen as an over-reaction, and we must correct in the opposite direction, so if Judy is seventeen and eight months of age, why shouldn't she legally be able to have a relationship with thirty year old Tom, what magic happens with waiting just another four months for her to be legally adult at eighteen?

but we're much more accepting of sexual activity at younger ages. Think of "Romeo and Juliet" laws,

Laws distinguishing between young people having sex with each other vs with older ones seem to be rather supporting that increasing acceptance of sexual practices does not imply increased acceptance of paedophiles?

Are they capable of consenting to having sex with one another?

...because right now, 'consent' is the only tool in the toolbox of the Moral Police.

Sex education works at reducing teenage sex and pregnancies, as advertised, by emphasizing the consequences of having sex. If you wanted to encourage teenage sex you wouldn't tell them anything and let nature take its course.

While repugnance around thirty year old man has sex with six year old child will persist, I'm not so sure that "thirty year old man has sex with sixteen year old" will

This is ironic because your second scenario is legal in most of the world, including most of the US and has always been so and in the places where it isn't it's because of feminist campaigning.

The progressive movement that exists today is overwhelmingly sex negative: they are in favor of raising the age of consent (to 25), against age gaps, against workplace relationships, against flirting in public, or in bars, or everywhere except designated dating apps, against prostitution, against pornography (except onlyfans), against sex comedies, against sexy women in video games, against revealing clothing in movies.

Play some of the wokesploitation games (Dream Daddy, Goodbye Volcano High), for example: everyone is some kind of queer but no sex, not even hinted at, maybe a (one) kiss, maybe the farthest they get is holding hands.

The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world. Puberty blockers likely cause permanent inability to orgasm, what has your church done that's as effective as that at preventing teenage sex?

This is ironic because your second scenario is legal in most of the world

It may be legal, but as you point out, there is campaigning to make it repugnant. That's what I mean by the swinging of the pendulum; from 'sure a thirty year age gap between marriage partners is okay, even if it's unusual' to 'he took advantage of that poor twenty-five year old young woman' to, in future, back again to 'yeah she's sixteen and he's forty but hey if she's mature enough to make up her own mind, who are you to say it's wrong?'

The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world.

The irony there being that the extremes of liberalisation have done more than the most conservative attitudes, indeed.

So your evidence for the pendulum swinging in direction X is evidence that it is going in the opposite direction?

to, in future, back again to 'yeah she's sixteen and he's forty but hey if she's mature enough to make up her own mind, who are you to say it's wrong?'

I don’t think that pendulum will swing, because it’s not tenable to get there. Very young women(such as teenagers) being able to have serious relationships, especially relationships with older males, with a rate of it all ending in tragedy that society considers acceptable depends on the power that the parents of very young women exercise over them both formally and informally.

everyone is some kind of queer but no sex, not even hinted at, maybe a (one) kiss, maybe the farthest they get is holding hands.

Ironically, some queer people do complain about this trend of "sexuality without sex," I believe.

The progressive movement that exists today is overwhelmingly sex negative: they are in favor of raising the age of consent (to 25), against age gaps, against workplace relationships, against flirting in public, or in bars, or everywhere except designated dating apps, against prostitution, against pornography (except onlyfans), against sex comedies, against sexy women in video games, against revealing clothing in movies.

The progressive movement that exists today can be summarized as "Straight male sexuality bad, everything else good!". They are in favor of raising the age of consent, but deny that women actually need to get consent from men. They are against age gaps, but deny behavior of older women toward younger men is sexual. They are against men flirting with women unless the women desire it, but think women should be free to flirt with men whenever they wish. They are against any media that panders to the sexual desires of straight men, but are okay with media that panders to the sexual desires of others.

"Sex positivity" has always been tied up in Feminism and thus has always only cared about ensuring sexual outcomes are positive for women.

Sex postive feminists existed at one point, it's just that after they lost the feminist sex wars, the sex negs flayed them and wore their skin to hide their puritanical, hypocritical nature.

Sex positive feminists won the feminist sex wars though. Sex positive feminists were never supportive of male sexuality except so far as it could be exploited by women.

No, that's what "they" say. My conspiracy theory is that the sex positive feminists actually lost. Modern feminists do not like porn and prostitution. They are very fond of sex negative terms like rape culture and objectification.

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I'd say they were mugged by reality, and not-quite-realized but painfully found out that the wall isn't there to keep them in.

The trans kids stuff is the second most successful mass sterilization project in the world. Puberty blockers likely cause permanent inability to orgasm, what has your church done that's as effective as that at preventing teenage sex?

It's almost like the church wasn't aiming for mass sterilization.

PS. I'm glad that the religious right is making a comeback because maybe they can succeed in making sex negativity uncool again.

"The comeback of the religious right" is a lot more wishful thinking by disaffected liberals poking the pendulum with a stick asking it to make a swing back, than it is something happening in real life. Sorry, but the 90's aren't coming back anytime soon, they were the point when the rubber band was about to break, not a stable equilibrium.

Anecdotally, I think this would track with my experience? Some time ago I knew a trans person in her thirties who was enthusiastically seeking to date a seventeen year old, and fully intended to have sex with them at the first opportunity. I expressed concerns and did not get that far.

We are in a period of category collapse, it seems to me, and the elevation of individual will and preference, with consent and harm as the sole acceptable guardrails. It's hard to see how that doesn't lead to some pretty disastrous outcomes.

Seventeen isn't quite a minor (legally maybe) and thirty isn't that old, but yeah. Not a good augury. The types who chase seventeen year olds will be doing that when they're thirty, and forty, and fifty, and...

Leonardo DiCaprio is getting a lot of stick on that front. Now, it's understandable that "men like young women" and "why is this young woman dating this twenty years older than her rich, famous guy, who can know the answer to that?" but after a certain point, it goes from "uncomfortable" to "downright creepy".

What is category collapse? What are some examples of disastrous outcomes you foresee?

We've become much more accepting of extramarital sex, but I don't think there has been much change in the acceptability of having sex at a young age, other than indirectly in that teenagers are usually not married. But it used to be common for teenagers to be married. Romeo and Juliet were 16 and 13.

The trend has actually been away from there being legal minors. The age of consent was traditionally around puberty while the age of majority was originally 21. So there used to a huge gap between reaching an age where you could have sex or marry and when you became a full adult with full rights. This gap is now completely gone in some jurisdictions and where it remains, it has been shrinking.

Romeo and Juliet were 16 and 13.

Romeo and Juliet was also a cautionary tale. They’re portrayed as idiots who create an entirely preventable tragedy by not listening to their elders who think they’re young, impulsive, and need to be restrained, and the ongoing feud between the two families prevents them from intervening effectively. It’s a plot point that Juliet’s father rejects a marriage proposal from an ally of the family on the basis of age and Romeo is portrayed as a young, ignorant hothead.

Romeo and Juliet is an Object Lesson in the importance of a functioning postal system.

but we're much more accepting of sexual activity at younger ages

Maybe in theory, but not really in practice. Average age of virginity loss is rising, not falling- this is also a reaction to "oh no, every kid has seen porn by 12" (and more recently, "kids have to know they're trans before they hit puberty or Bad Things will happen, so we should be trying to force the issue at 6-8"). [Also, there is very little "experimenting with sex" today anyway; the state of modern gender relations combined with easier alternatives to sex for young men has seen to that.]

what magic happens with waiting just another four months for her to be legally adult at eighteen?

Well, brain chemistry says she's not a human being adult until 25, so she deserves the rules we give her. (That is what The Science says- it's not like we've ever used brain size comparisons to oppress other kinds of people in living memory or anything like that.)

and we must correct in the opposite direction

Gender and sexual politics follows (and slightly lags) economic conditions. Traditionalist-conservatives should fear an improvement in economic conditions as much as progressives do, because with better times comes more demand for sex that is usually met by relaxing the conditions around it (which tend to push the average age of first sex down).
As times get worse, we should expect more desperate flail by the faction that still needs to wear the concept of sex-positivity as a skinsuit- so while you'll probably see more examples of successful predation because of that flail (almost always male -> male), it's not going to meaningfully improve access to straight sex for men (or boys).

[Johnson]: "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".

I'd like to soapbox a bit about this.

Johnson is absolutely right on this, maybe more than he knows. One of the more insidious things about the prevailing culture is the way that it encourages people, almost to the extent that it is unthinkable to do otherwise, to identify with their desires -- especially if those desires are sexual. People make fun of the Evangelical thing where they insist on saying "same-sex-attracted" instead of "gay", as if it's some shibboleth, but the reason for this is that "gay" carries with it an assumption that it is, and ought to be, part of one's identity, and the Evangelicals are right that it's a big part of the problem.

Having sexual attraction to other men may be (generally is) involuntary, but engaging in homosexual activity is absolutely a choice, and so is making your desires such a core part of your identity that you automatically interpret any discouragement from gratifying them as an attack on your self. Yet that last choice is, in the prevailing culture, the water that the fish don't know they are swimming in. They are told, "Those people hate you, they want to deny you the right to even exist" because of their opposition to behavior.

People with disordered desires need a narrative other than "you are a disgusting pervert" or "your desires are innate and good and self-actualization means fulfilling them". The bit about "same-sex-attracted" is a (somewhat awkward) way of trying to supply that other narrative.

I think the same is true about "trans". A boy or man who desperately wants to be female, and/or who experiences discomfort at being male, may not be choosing to have those feelings (though they can certainly be fed and encouraged by dwelling on them), but "I am trans" is a decision to adopt those feelings and desires as as an identity. I can't think of any non-awkward way of encapsulating those underlying feelings and desires (yeah, "gender dysphoria", but that carries its own set of assumptions and also doesn't capture the full range here), but the discourse really needs one.

I'm very sympathetic to people saddled with these disordered feelings -- this is not really to my credit, but out of personal experience, as my other posts on the "trans" subject attest -- but I get really angry at the activists who encourage people to see them as a core part of their identity, and accuse opponents of wanting to "deny [their] right to exist". It's like telling an alcoholic that being a "drunkard" is a core part of their identity and that anyone who wants them to stop drinking hates them.

"Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to sin, it would be better for him if a millstone were hung around his neck, and he were drowned in the depth of the sea."

The purpose of identity labels is political organizing and political rhetoric for the purposes of obtaining and protecting civil rights and social respectability.

I agree that, without understanding that purpose for the labels, teh labels are kind of silly and unnecessary. People can just do what they want and say what they do and not need a label about it.

And it's true that gay people specifically have sort of made enough progress at this point that they don't desperately need the political organizing function of the label anymore, which is letting people notice where the label is restrictive or counter-productive or misleading. That seems to me like a natural evolution of this process and what we would expect/want to happen; I strongly believe Gen Z doesn't use orientation-related labels in the same way and with the same context that Gen X and millennials did, and it'll be interesting to see hwo that evolves over a few more generations.

But trans people, fr example, still desperately need a unified label for purposes of political organizing. That label is the shield that gets used to create a unified narrative and cultural and political defense to protect their rights and place in society and give htem all something collective to refer to instead of having to explain and justify themselves each individually. Don't expect them or their allies to put down that shield until they stop facing credible attacks.

One of the more insidious things about the prevailing culture is the way that it encourages people, almost to the extent that it is unthinkable to do otherwise, to identify with their desires -- especially if those desires are sexual. People make fun of the Evangelical thing where they insist on saying "same-sex-attracted" instead of "gay", as if it's some shibboleth, but the reason for this is that "gay" carries with it an assumption that it is, and ought to be, part of one's identity, and the Evangelicals are right that it's a big part of the problem.

I want to chime in to absolutely agree with this, particularly from the perspective of a somewhat conservative Christian, though I'd argue it's an insight that you'll find much more broadly as well. You are not your desires. Put like that, it has a very Buddhist ring to it as well, and I daresay you might find similar ideas in psychotherapy. A desire might be a passing thing, or it might be something that you need to tame and control, or it might be something like a sickness or a pathology. At any rate, it is something that passes through your mind, not your mind itself.

I suppose a gay activist might reply here with the claim that same-sex-attraction isn't a desire as such, but rather it's a permanent disposition. A desire is something in the moment, e.g. "I want to have sex with that hot guy". A permanent disposition over time or even an attribute is different. It's not about specific individual desires, but rather about an overarching framework, the structure in which individual desires rise and pass away.

There's a sense in which that's obviously true, I suppose. By way of comparison, a desire to have a beer could arise in anyone, for all sorts of reasons, but the state of being an alcoholic is more than that. Being an alcoholic is some sort of resilient-across-time tendency which may produce the desire to have a beer on a regular basis, but which is nonetheless more than just the first-order desire.

However, while I accept this precisification as a fair description of the nature of desire, I don't think it changes the central point here - whether we're talking about desires or dispositions, there's still a claim about identity that's being made.

Christians sometimes argue that the core of our identity should be in the confession of the risen Christ - it's being joined to him that forms who we are. They then go on to criticise groups like Spiritual Friendship for getting the order wrong. You aren't a gay person who happens to be a Christian - you're just a Christian, and while you may have some struggles in the flesh (as do we all), those struggles in no way change or reorder your fundamental identity, which is to say, a child of God, a sinner, forgiven, redeemed by Christ's blood. It would be absurd for people to identify as 'gluttonous Christians' or 'proud Christians' or 'Christians tempted to adultery'. The same applies. Christ comes first - he will not accept being made a hobby or an extra.

That might be valid there, but if we want to make a wider critique, we probably need to say something that's understandable even for secular people. I suppose for them what I would say is that identifying with one's desires seems like it carries with it the hidden implication that it's the fulfilment of one's desires that's the key to long-term happiness or to spiritual meaning or whatever else. That, I would argue, is a dangerous mistake. As far as I'm aware, even quite basic pop psychology has retreated from the idea that happiness comes from the fulfilment of desires. Instead, it typically arises as a byproduct of something else - the best advice for how to be happy is generally to focus on doing something else meaningful.

This is by no means saying (from a secular perspective, at least) that one shouldn't be attracted to one's own sex, or that one shouldn't live as the other sex, or generally that one shouldn't be LGBT. LGBT identity may well be compatible with all of this! Just be gay or be trans and then go and live a meaningful, other-oriented life. Rather, it's that one's desires, whether sexual or otherwise, should not be at the heart of your identity. They are not what produce long-term happiness or welfare.

I mean, but conversely, who should have the right to determine what feelings are or aren't part of an identity? I mean conversely, if I start saying "divine-attracted" or "people who experience a religious impulse" and note that they don't have to raise their children to believe in Hell, they can't help that they perceive the divine but pushing it on others is a choice- I suspect some of the same people would become very angry at me.

Hell, being grossed out by gayness also doesn't need to be part of people's identity. As they say, "you are not immune from propaganda identifying with your impulses."

The investment and divestment of impulses from your identity is to some extent voluntary. However, it also serves as a signal as to which impulses you value the highest. To say that "SSA do not have to make that a part of their identity" is close to saying "SSA should not make that part of their identity" which is itself approximately equivalent to "society should not try to fulfill or support SSA". At which point I start disagreeing: so what if men have impulses to have sex with men? Society is a system to arbitrate the fulfillment of impulses with minimal friction. The religious impulse or the purity impulse should not get primacy over the gay impulse.

I mean, but conversely, who should have the right to determine what feelings are or aren't part of an identity?

Clearly, the individual.

Of course having the right is very distant from every exercise of that right being good and healthy. I can choose to identify myself by my sexual interests, I can also choose to eat three pizzas a day. Neither is good for my long term wellbeing - even with sexual interests as mild and vanilla as mine.

A society that celebrates gluttony is similarly grotesque to one that celebrates lust or anger or greed or any other vice. And indeed, there are various cultures and subcultures that do celebrate those things, to the detriment of their members.

I am not inclined towards gay sex, but I am inclined towards promiscuity - like most men, I find the idea of sleeping with lots of women to be attractive. But that would not be a good way to maintain a life and a family, so I deny those baser desires. Similarly, I deny my impulses towards anger and violence.

How much worse off I would be if I decided these desires were "simply the way I am" and constructed a worldview where any effort to improve my behaviour was "not being true to myself".

Society is a system to arbitrate the fulfillment of impulses with minimal friction.

If that is what society really is, I say to hell with it. The amorphous blob of "the formless mass that was Ubbo-Sathla reposed amid the slime and the vapors. Headless, without organs or members, it sloughed from its oozy sides, in a slow, ceaseless wave, the amoebic forms that were the archetypes of earthly life".

If that's society, I'd honestly rather be an earthworm. At least I'd be performing a useful function.

Useful to who? Useful in what way?

How do you reckon with the fact that the only reason the earthworm does anything is to fulfill it's impulses, and it leverages it's billion year evolutionary history and nonstick skin to do so with minimal friction?

I don't think that people who are grossed out by gay sex think of that as part of their identity, though. They think that their emotions are tapping into something real on that topic, but they don't make an identity out of grossed-out-by-gayness. For the most part, at least, they trust those emotions, not identify with them.

But on the meta level, the object level matters (heh). Yes, I think that adopting some identities is good, and adopting others is bad; that sexual desires are bad things to have as identities; that people would be better off if society discouraged people from adopting these bad identities -- or at least didn't put its thumb on the scale the other way as currently.

Or for those who prefer quotations on the subject, from Heretics by G.K. Chesterton:

Somebody complained, I think, to Matthew Arnold that he was getting as dogmatic as Carlyle. He replied, "That may be true; but you overlook an obvious difference. I am dogmatic and right, and Carlyle is dogmatic and wrong." The strong humour of the remark ought not to disguise from us its everlasting seriousness and common sense; no man ought to write at all, or even to speak at all, unless he thinks that he is in truth and the other man in error. In similar style, I hold that I am dogmatic and right, while Mr. Shaw is dogmatic and wrong.

Why though? Why not attraction as identity, instead of race as identity or job as identity or cult as identity or gender as identity?

They are all equally valid and equally worthless way to construct yourself; I don't see why we should say "This cultural hallucination is good but this one is bad" without reference to either outcomes or principles. Those can be argued, at least.

I'm thinking it's fair for attraction to form a core part of your identity if it's a long-lasting constant. I'm sure even the retvrners might include attraction to one's spouse as essential to identity.

But I don't think it's valid to assume that this applies to everyone, equally, as the wokes do.

And I especially don't think that it should be the only or chiefest element of one's identity, since it's only a small part of the human experience.

As a gender abolitionist, I agree. I think attraction, sex, and gender being part of identity is fucking stupid; anything that you don't choose for yourself as part of your identity likewise.

That said, society at large down to the legal system doesn't agree.

Basically; Until nobody gives more of a shit if it's adam and steve instead of adam and eve it will be a core piece of identity because enough people around said gay dudes will make it plain that THEY consider them diferent.

anything that you don't choose for yourself as part of your identity likewise.

Now this I tentatively disagree with. Do you think that only what you choose for yourself should be essential to your identity?

Basically; Until nobody gives more of a shit if it's adam and steve instead of adam and eve it will be a core piece of identity because enough people around said gay dudes will make it plain that THEY consider them diferent.

Because Adam and steve would have failed to sire so much as Cain and Abel, nevermind the rest of humanity. Society and law should treat gay couples differently because they are different. This seems entirely obvious.

Now this I tentatively disagree with. Do you think that only what you choose for yourself should be essential to your identity?

Yup. Anything else is loser shit in my mind. It's laying the cornerstone of your personality on being tall or having the gene that makes cilantro taste like soap. I allow that in society as it is, your identity will be based off of stuff that has the same value as those examples; things that have nothing to do with your choices or history or efforts and everything to do with the genetic lottery. In an imagined perfect world people going around being all "I am a ciltrosoaparian" will be rightly ridiculed as FOOLS and JESTERS.

Basically; Until nobody gives more of a shit if it's adam and steve instead of adam and eve it will be a core piece of identity because enough people around said gay dudes will make it plain that THEY consider them diferent.

I believe this is true the second people also treat couples that don't have children, the infertile, anyone who remains married to a woman past menopause, people that use birth control, and priests with the same level of scrutiny and antipathy as they do gay people (or the opposite, from some parts of the population.)

As the view I outlined does not exist outside the most terminally online spaces and never extends out of them into real life where it might get you made fun of, I empirically deduce the issue with homosexuality must come from something else.

Sure, but then the argument is on who is right, and I am not aware of a strong reason for why who you love should be wrong to be.

I think that sexuality as an identity is either a very narrow and selfish identity, when it's separate from a culture and community, or when it is part of a community, it is not very healthy to center that community around sexuality.

As @07mk said below, you have absolutely thought about this at least an order of magnitude more in one paragraph than anyone on CNN has in all their lives put together. Society didn't come to their beliefs on this subject via rational scientific exploration and explanation. They did so through pure cultural power and intimidation. "You don't want to be an X-ophobe? Then mouth these words and make sure not to think about them too much." Two examples come to mind.

First, I was in grad school at the time. Hung out with a bunch of other overly-educated folks, but at least we're mostly all technical people who value rigor and stuff, not like those fru-frus on the other side of campus. Anyway, I had been taking some neuroscience classes, and so I'd been thinking a lot about how good arguments are constructed in this space and had seen a variety of examples. So, when the topic of sexuality comes up at the bar, I ever so gently and ever so carefully express the slightest of possible concerns that I've been seeing all this really interesting work in neuroscience, and I'm just not quite sure I've really actually personally seen all that much conclusive work on sexuality that entirely supports Dogmatic Position. You know, so, surely it's out there, and someone can probably link me to it or something.

I was expecting, or I guess at least just hoping for, some kind of rational response that either brought to light some form of evidence or argument that was relevant. Maybe a, "Huh, I'll have to actually go through the literature, and see what I can find before I make up my mind." Nah. You get stared at like you're an alien. Like they can't possibly believe that you'd even entertain the idea... not even the idea that Dogmatic Position isn't true... but that you'd even entertain the idea that Dogmatic Position isn't trivially true and needs no evidence and why would you even think about trying to gather evidence on this topic.

The second example is the APA's brief in Obergefell. Here, we had the most prestigious group of experts with the opportunity to make the absolute best scientific case for Dogmatic Position. If it were so abundantly clear from mounds of literature, surely they could at least start us down the path of understanding how the argument/evidence works. You know what they brought? An opinion poll. I shit you not. They also took a review that said, "Research into conversion therapy is shit-tier and tells us basically nothing," and converted it into a form of, "Conversion therapy doesn't seem to work," but otherwise that was it. An opinion poll and research that we think is so bad that we can't really get anything out of it. That's their best scientific evidence for Dogmatic Position.

Moving forward to the Year of Our Lord 2023, very few people actually bother defending Dogmatic Position anymore. Fewer still even attempt to bring actual scientific evidence. The vast vast majority still view Dogmatic Position as just unquestionable first truth, and if you're questioning it, it must be because you have evil right wing political ends.

So before any of those people pounce on my comment, I'll leave you with a third example. I also took a queer theory course back when. I was seeing the beginnings of the woke thing, but didn't know what it was about, wondered if there was some real academic core to it, figured I'd have the best chance of finding some interesting academic core if I just went straight to the academics. In any event, when it came to the question of "biological determinism", my prof said flatly that she was agnostic. So, if you're about to rush to accuse me of evil right wing political ends, please instead formulate your comment as accusing her of having evil right wing political ends.

I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition.

this seems like denial or repression though. does the underlying urge ever go away?

Worth telling you: I got this post on the volunteer queue. I'm not the original reporter, so I don't know exactly why it was reported, but at a wild guess your lack of capital letters probably strikes some people as "low-effort".

this seems like denial or repression though. does the underlying urge ever go away?

I think this is kinda irrelevant. The underlying urge to bang Perkins waitresses certainly never went away for Tiger Woods, but his executing on that urge was not good for him or the rest of his family.

There is also an open question as to homosexual urges as to how much their development itself is conditioned. As we saw with the Catholic Priest scandal, it was a bunch of priests sodomizing teenage boys, simply replicating the behavior they had been taught as a different priest sodomized them 20 years earlier. And because no one much cares to police the sexual adventures of teenage boys (except those they have with teenage girls) this dynamic seems both common and accepted in the gay community.

I am again agnostic. While homosexuality isn't among them, I can say that I have had strong impulses and preferences regarding various things in life that I no longer have. Certainly, fetishes and kinks can come and go (heh) and often seem to be the product of conditioning. I honestly haven't done any meaningful reading on mechanisms or extent for these sorts of things, but it would be surprising to me if there isn't quite a bit of variance in just how much fluidity and control over that fluidity people have.

To be clear, I am not coming at this from any sort of prescriptive perspective.

Would that make it any different from going to a therapist for alcoholism? Any change in behavior means denial or repression to some degree, that doesn't necessarily make it bad.

'Ex-gay' and 'gay but desperately repressing it so you can lead a miserable life of permanent chastity' are qualitatively different claims.

The people that CNN is claiming to be debunked call themselves the 'ex-gay movement'. That's the level of claim at question here, at least at the top level.

Is this purely an academic discussion over whether homosexuality is innate/controllable, or is there an additional implication that homosexual acts should be avoided? If the latter, I’d be interested in hearing reasons why.

I (very quietly)consider myself to be, well, not quite ex-gay but certainly ex-bi, and the median representative of the camp which hates conversion therapy has never quite figured out what they’re actually saying, while the median conversion therapist does less than a homeopath. There is an extremely broad range of things covered under the label ‘conversion therapy’- ranging from electric shocks while looking at gay porn to forced non-sexual same sex bonding to talk therapy. There’s a typical motte and Bailey, obviously, but the electric shocks thing is genuinely both stupid and harmful. And lots of cranks and charlatans are genuinely happy to tell you they can turn you straight, for a price. But conversely most of the opponents of conversion therapy seem to honestly not care one way or another if it works, it should be banned because fewer homosexuals is an inherently bad thing.

For the record, I used a sort of variant of courage international(the one Antonin Scalia’s son is a chaplain for) without going through courage international the organization. I certainly think it worked well enough and was probably good for me in ways other than just no longer wanting to have gay sex(which, whether or not it’s morally evil, is very definitely an unhealthy habit which is worth discouraging).

I don't know why you chose to try to eliminate that desire in yourself, but much respect. It's really difficult, in our culture, to reject seeing that kind of desire as part of one's identity, both because of how these desires present themselves and because of the way that the culture insists on talking about them. You did a difficult -- and IMO praiseworthy -- thing.

I'd also love to see an effortpost on this if you are comfortable with it. In particular I'd like to hear why you think it worked so well for you, when a lot of people, including many who sincerely tried, seem to have met with less success. (I have some theories but they are not particularly well founded.)

I realize this is a deeply personal matter but have you considered a much longer effort-post on this? I've never heard of conversion therapy working before outside of some thathappened-style stories.

To you and @dovetailing; this is indeed a deeply personal matter. As I said, I used a version of the Courage international program, although run independently rather than institutionally, and courage international claims a higher than average success rate. Take that claim with as much or little salt as you prefer. I do not particularly like dwelling on it, but I think that I probably benefitted psychologically in ways other than changing my sexuality. I do not have the therapy workbook nor do I intend to try to dig up the journal I kept, but there was a companion book called, I think, Battle for Normality and written by a Dutch psychologist which explained much of the theory, at least. Everyone involved was male, although that would have been different had I been female(or at least, so I was told), and my same sex attraction was treated as an ordinary character flaw similar to a propensity to overeat or to excessive drinking.

As for motivation, it was really twofold- I found(and still do) ‘LGBT culture’ a creepy, offputting, fetishistic, hypersexualized, and just generally kind of gross exercise in putting on a performance of doing things that would get heterosexual men arrested, and also for religious reasons(as one would expect from having used courage international). I consider it to have been successful, and that this success was probably in part because I was bisexual, not gay. It was at the time difficult, occasionally caused distress, but in the way that difficult things worth doing often do. And I think having the attitude that it would be a difficult but worth doing way to improve also was an important reason; I did not think I was taking a magic pill.

  1. Why not simply disengage from LGBT culture, as opposed to disengaging from homosexuality? I dislike many aspects of “straight Chad culture,” for lack of a better term, but that doesn’t put me off from having hetero sex.
  2. Apart from your religion, why do you consider gay sex an unhealthy habit?

predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition

And if this isn't true then we should seriously consider making pedophilic urges result in irreversible life imprisonment (but I bet a popular alternative would be execution).

I dislike the idea of thought crimes, even if they are heinous thoughts.

Agreed.

But if predilections are indeed not mutable by conditioning or therapy, then at the very least all convicted pedophiles must never be released from prison.

Under a nation of laws, this not exactly how it works. In practice, my understanding of the legal system in the United States is that pedophiles convicted of a serious sexual crime are imprisoned according to the letter of the law, and then upon release shifted into some kind of permanent* detention in a institution for the criminally insane. It is of course, not legal to imprison people simply based on the say so of a psychiatrist that they are a pedophile.

We can make new laws. If sexual predilections are not influenced by therapy or conditioning, then it could be made a legal requirement to hold child molesters in prison for many decades or for them to be involuntarily committed.

In other contexts people can be involuntarily held on the say so of a cop or a psychiatrist. If they are a likely danger. I don't want thought crimes, but being a pedophile is a real danger to children. This is not inherently legally impossible.

You don't want thought crimes, but you do want to put people in prison based on what they think and feel, and in the absence of them actually having done anything, based on the say so of a cop.

I don’t believe any state in the union involuntarily institutionalizes sex offenders, even for crimes against children. After being released from prison, such criminals are almost always put on a permanent, publicly-available sex offender registry; is that possibly what you’re thinking of?

Minnesota does:

The majority of these offenders served prison time and were then civilly committed because they were deemed too dangerous to release. Some came straight from juvenile custody.

The patients claim the Minnesota Sex Offender Program offers little rehabilitation or chance of release from facilities at Moose Lake and St. Peter. And, they say, the indefinite detention violates their constitutional right to due process.

In the history of the program, no one has been unconditionally released, Gustafson said. One man was granted provisional release two years ago. And as the experts evaluate more patients, he expects more orders.

EDIT: More background:

State courts have sent more than 560 high-risk sexual predators to the Minnesota Sex Offender Program for indefinite treatment since 1995. The only person ever released was later pulled back inside for a violation and died there.

Thanks for the correction. According to this article, 20 states allow for the involuntary commitment of sex offenders, which my previous Google search failed to pull up.

Also, the article I linked to is a bit more up-to-date than the two you quoted from. According to it, 15 inmates have been released completely and 135 transferred to “less secure facilities” over the past several years, following complaints about the program. On the other hand, 6% of the 741 inmates (all men) haven’t even been convicted of a crime, which raises serious red flags in my mind.

I’ll admit to being a bit torn about this. I tentatively support committing some fraction of criminals (both sex offenders and otherwise) whose crimes were particularly gruesome and who seem particularly likely to reoffend. Not knowing exactly what these 741 men did, I can’t say whether they would fit my (nebulous and ill-thought-out) criteria.

Not just this, but by not imprisoning high propensity to pediophilia people there are children who will end up getting abused who would not have been abused in the counterfactual. Now you can say that's fine and accept the background level of child abuse this causes as you believe this is less damaging than mass incarceration but you actually have to make an argument about the tradeoff between potential pedophile's freedom and the rights of children to not be abused, and I do not see anyone in modern western society being willing to touch that with a 100 ft barge pole.

The majority of child abuse, including sexual abuse, is committed by non-pedophiles so society is apparently already on board with such trade-offs. Advocating the incarceration of pedophiles simply due to their attractions is just a way for lazy self-righteous people to feel like they are protecting children without having to do the work of actually looking into the causes of abuse and thinking seriously about the trade-offs that would be required to avert it.

you actually have to make an argument about the tradeoff between potential pedophile's freedom and the rights of children to not be abused, and I do not see anyone in modern western society being willing to touch that with a 100 ft barge pole.

Oh, you're just clinging on to some scraps of believing in general sanity. They're already working on that trade-off:

Results from these broader healthcare practitioner studies revealed that MAPs’ abovementioned skepticism concerning therapists’ willingness to treat them and MAPs’ fear of being stigmatized or (unnecessarily) reported to legal authorities may not be unfounded. Mental health professionals and students in training indicated to being willing to report MAPs to legal authorities due to explicit stigmatization and/or a lack of knowledge about the administrative framework concerning reporting standards (e.g., Beggs Christofferson, 2019; Stephens et al., 2021; Walker et al., 2022). For example, clinicians’ decisions to officially report a client who disclosed sexual interest in children were a function of the number of client risk factors (i.e., child sexual exploitation material use, access to children), although, even in the absence of any risk factor, 12% of the clinicians indicated that they would report their client (Stephens et al., 2021). In a study by Beggs Christofferson (2019), 14% of the surveyed therapists considered reporting a client who disclosed sexual interest in children, even if this meant to break the relevant confidentiality law. Among social service students, 54% agreed to report “a pedophile” client (no sexual offense was mentioned) to the police (strikingly, this rate was reduced to 7% when the case in question was labeled as someone with sexual interest in children but who never has committed any offense against children; Walker et al., 2022).

You see? Minor Attracted Persons (please do not say 'paedophile', that is incorrect terminology) are reluctant to go to therapists because of fears around mandatory reporting. And the therapists we surveyed said they'd be willing to report clients they deemed dangerous. So the conclusion is... therapists have to learn to be more understanding and accepting, stop stigmatising, and drop the threat of reporting people to the cops.

In terms of therapist competency, only between roughly a quarter and 43% of practitioners answered correctly that pedophilia is a sexual attraction to children below the age of 11 and such general knowledge deficiencies about aspects related to minor attraction were associated with stigmatizing attitudes (Lievesley et al., 2022).

Even among the more enlightened Swiss, there are still those bad old stigmatising attitudes:

In terms of non-offending MAPs’ perceived dangerousness to children, the majority of Swiss therapists (58.8%) affirmed that a strong link exists between sexual interest in children and child sexual abuse and roughly one in five agreed that sexual interest in children will sooner or later lead to child sexual abuse (20.1%) or that many who have sexual interests in children will also have sex with children (19.4%; Table 2). Concerning punitive attitudes the large majority (84.7%) agreed that non-offending MAPs should not be allowed to work with children, and 40.3% believed that they should undergo mandatory psychotherapy. Roughly a quarter (26%) affirmed that citizens should be informed in case sexual offenders against children move into their neighborhood. However, only a minority opted for psychopharmacological “castration” (8.7%), preventive detention (6.8%), or openly accessible sexual offender registries (4.7%). Finally, aspects that related to deviancy were strongly affirmed by Swiss outpatient therapists: 80.3% believed that non-offending MAPs needed treatment, 57.1% agreed that these patients were sick, and 48.9% ruled out that they were normal with just rare sexual inclinations.

Therapists should be trained that MAPs are the No True Scotsman:

Rather than pondering the yet dominating question in MAP treatment of whether someone with pedohebephilic sexual interests will victimize children, therapists should focus on the question under which specific boundary conditions their clients might (or, importantly, might not) pose a risk to children and how these specific dynamic risk factors can be therapeutically dealt with – if necessary at all in an individual case. Given the fact that child sexual abuse is prevalently committed also by non-pedohebephilic individuals (e.g., Schmidt et al., 2013), this implies adequate knowledge about relevant risk factors. Such basic criminal psychological facts, however, are not part of current general clinical training curriculae in psychology or medicine and should help to keep the prevailing risk focus in check. This may be conducive to setting the stage for recognizing other concerns that lead MAPs to seek therapeutic help.

See? If someone abuses a child, then he was never a real MAP to begin with, and no MAP is likely to go on to abuse children (or at least, very unlikely except under specific circumstances which you should recognise and help them manage). So don't think about "are children at risk here?" when dealing with a client, or else you're just a big ol' meanie!

Definitely someone struggling with this, who hasn't done anything yet, and who is seeking therapy to change or at least sublimate their attraction should be able to get help and shouldn't be scared off by "They'll tell the cops and I'll be labelled a sex offender and my life will be ruined and a mob will try and beat me up or even kill me". But "shift to thinking about dynamic risk factors" will lead to the same attitudes that resulted in "violent rapist who assaulted two women and still has all functional genitals of course should go into a woman's prison as she was a real woman all along, even while raping cis women with her feminine penis and even though she didn't come out as trans until being prosecuted for those crimes". Yeah, no.

Long before you put paedophiles in jail, you should argue for the much cheaper approach of a special arm of the police whose job it is to surveil every house for child abuse. You could probably even farm most of it out to AI. So since we don't even do this, it's not just that society accepts the current level of child abuse in trade for not having to put an unknown fraction of the populace in jail, it accepts the current level of child abuse in trade for not providing every household with a Child Abuse Safety Siri, which is much lower. We don't even do this with schools or churches! In other words, just the cost of implicitly accusing every member of society of being a potential child molester is already too high to be worth stopping the vast majority of abuse that happens. In conclusion, society seriously does not care very much about the background noise of child suffering.

Would you support locking up anyone who feels the urge to commit violent crimes, even if they have succeeded in keeping this urge in check?

The premise here is the claim that sexual predilections are not subject to therapy or conditioning. So in the narrow context of sexuality you can't cure pedophiles or "cure" gay people through conversion therapy.

I don't mean this as fully general advocacy of thoughtcrime.

Re: first two paragraphs:

So, I think you have to sort of take claims in the context they're being made, rather than trying to universalize them. I do wish people were more careful with their language so that this type of interpretation isn't needed, but we'd be living in a very different world if people actually talked that way.

Is it possible that a thousand years from now, we'll have advanced neurosurgical techniques that can totally rewrite any part of your personality or preferences into anything you want, including making you gay or straight or whatever? Sure, that seems likely to me.

Does that mean it's wrong to say that the idea that you can change your sexuality has been 'debunked'?

Not when the context of that statement is on a political reporting show talking about a politician and his links to a specific group, Exodus, that made specific claims about specific ways to change sexuality that have been debunked.

Not when the larger context of the statement is about modern-day politics and public policy and lifestyle choices and culture war and all teh ex-gay and conversion therapies people actually have tried and actually are advocating now, rather than what scifi devices we might have in a thousand years.

I will admit to being somewhat hypocritical here, in that I just made a comment denouncing blanket statements because they're always wrong, and advocating more careful language. Saying 'the idea that you can change your sexuality has been debunked' is the type of blanket statement that will always be wrong, because it's too broad and anything is possible.

But really, that means that the sentiment they're trying to convey was stated informally, not that the sentiment they're trying to convey is wrong. Normal people can appreciate the context and understand what they're saying. Being rational is great, but it shouldn't lower your ability to comprehend communications below that of normal people just using their intuition.

Re: third paragraph:

There's certainly a conflict there, but the conflict is in the map, not the territory.

It's absolutely true that there are different ways of using language and different ways of modeling sexuality that are at odds here. But the disagreements are all about semantics and models, not the reality.

The reality is that most people are pretty stably attracted to certain categories of people.

The gay rights movement built a taxonomy to talk about that around the terms man/woman, but now the trans rights movement wants to build a different taxonomy around those same words. That makes it hard to talk about coherently until one side 'wins' and new language gets ironed out; maybe we'll settle on 'masc' and 'fem' for orientation stuff, I hear a lot of young people using those these days. Or maybe people in 15 years will just say 'I like dicks or 'I don't like dicks' and cal it a day. I don't fucking know anymore.

But the point is, that's all about language, not about which people are attracted to which people. That's just a stable thing in reality, and there's no particular conflict about it in regards to any of these issues.

if I want to call every song I like 'Rock and Roll', and someone else wants to call a song they sing 'Jazz' even though I like it, then we have a semantic conflict. And if for some reason politics gets involved, maybe we'll get incredibly angry about that semantic conflict and scream about it for decades and pass laws about it.

But I still like their song and they still like singing it. There's nothing weird or inconsistent happening in reality there.

In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked"

Without even touching the gay/trans contradiction, this quoted part is one of my bugaboos. As journalism has firmly become more focused on persuasion over reporting, I hear this kind of unsubstantiated statement-of-worldview-as-fact so often from journalists and it always makes my head ache. Very often, concrete statements like this will be done absent of any actual investigation. I listen to a handful of daily short-form headlines podcasts from major organizations, and the base-stealing that goes on is nearly criminal.

For example, very often in news stories about Trump's election claims, the claims will be described by reporters as lies, whereas they are really claims without sufficient proof, which is different. They may in fact be lies, but the statement that they are lies is also often a claim without sufficient proof. Now, I happen to think that they are likely fantasy/wishful thinking, so I am on the side of those who by default disbelieve them, but I also try to maintain some epistemic humility. Most of the claims, as I understand it, have never actually been investigated beyond superficial questioning of motivated participants and taking or rejecting their word as befits the reporter's pre-established narrative.

You see this a lot in environmental reporting, where causality is assigned to "climate change" without attribution. We also saw in a lot of COVID reporting the annoying new pattern of new stories with headlines in the pattern of "No, (insert party) didn't (insert dissenting claim)..." which smugly "corrected" assumed misinformation without ever investigating the veracity of the claim. This example, No, Science Clearly Shows That COVID-19 Wasn’t Leaked From A Wuhan Lab (https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2021/05/20/no-science-clearly-shows-that-covid-19-wasnt-leaked-from-a-wuhan-lab/?sh=41cb66e65585), discusses why the claim is likely not true, and lists the weakman arguments it purports to debunk, but even then it equivocates quite a bit more in the article than its definitive headline indicates.

How much do you want to bet that the CNN panelist asserting that conversion therapy has been "debunked" could not cite a single study to that effect, but would more likely point to popular culture, like books/movies such as "The Miseducation of Cameron Post," "But I'm a Cheerleader," and "Boy Erased?"

even then it equivocates quite a bit more in the article than its definitive headline indicates.

In particular, the article concludes with "There is no compelling reason to believe that P is true," while the headline says "There is compelling reason to believe that P is false."

It is worth remembering that reporters do not write the headlines that appear above their articles. The headline over an article in the "Science" section is written by a generalist sub-editor who knows even less about science than a science journalist does.

That is merely a defense of the reporter in question, but not at all a defense of the media source. If they let their employees systemically tell falsehoods, then that media source systemically tells falsehoods.

The headline over an article in the "Science" section is written by a generalist sub-editor who knows even less about science than a science journalist does.

That doesn't seem to hold them back from substituting the actual claims in the article with their own beliefs, always in the same politically correct direction. That goes beyond incompetence.

A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to?

"A man, who is born attracted to men, should be allowed to date/see/marry/sex with men" and "a man who is* born in the wrong body and should be able to transition to a women" don't seem contradictory to me, thought I do admit that they do seem in conflict.

Isn't the explanation: "both are innate, and should be allowed"? They are both a quality/innateness you're "born with" and cannot change.

If you can change your mind on these things, then they aren't innate.

Thus why detransitioners (and people who "decide" not to be gay anymore?) are seen as such traitors?

Isn't the explanation: "both are innate, and should be allowed"? They are both a quality/innateness you're "born with" and cannot change.

The point is not what should/shouldn't be allowed. The point is that progressives say that one reason gay conversion therapy is bad is because it doesn't even work.

However gender identity is more biological than sexual preferences but progressives belive societal conditioning is so strong it is able to get women in men's bodies to behave like men for decades of their lives, to the point that they often didn't even realise they were women in men's bodies until they were like 25+.

In that case what stops the possibility of societal conditioning being used to get people who are actually gay to behave like they are straight, especially for those people who are questioning their sexual preferences and are unsure (i.e. gay conversion therapy should work)?

Note that this argument is completely distinct from whether we should be doing gay conversion therapy or not, it's just arguing about the efficiency of it, it's a "can" vs "ought to" distinction.

huh. thats a good argument, thank you for replying. It does make me think.

though idk if i can use this as an argument in a SF party, but at least personally this makes a lot of sense.

Basically, we need to accept trans cuz conditioning is really strong to remain in your born-with gender (or is it sex?). So if it’s so strong that you are convinced you are born in the right body, despite internal claimed incongruities, then….

yeah it makes sense to me

for ex. I did theatre, and even the straights were bicurious and kinda convinced that “don’t knock it until you try it”. but mostly everyone was in straight relationships.

the few that were convinced to try, man or woman, all honestly remained straight and date/married straight partners. Looking back, I honestly think their even experimenting was some pressure, but mostly result of so called “gay propaganda”.

Childhood as gay conversion therapy does work: some people only realize they are gay in college. They gather the usual evidence, "women don't interest me" plus "wow that man makes me feel things", but without gayness as a model it just gets lost in the evidential noise of daily life.

The problem is that once you have the model of gayness, you can't exactly erase your memory and redo childhood. So it is a viable conversion therapy, possibly the only viable one, but it is not one that can be applied to a person it has already failed for.

Some people are born pedophiles, they should still be locked up and at the very least heavily monitored if they ever molest children.

good point. born psychopaths are still psychos and are bad for society

That seems unrelated: there's a difference between a partner and a victim.

I’ve never liked born that way as an argument for allowing things. It’s irrelevant. People can be born with proclivities to all sorts of behaviors— drug use, thrill seeking, self isolation, intellectual pursuits, and taste in food and clothing. That they’re attracted to something doesn’t answer the question of whether it’s good. It’s good to be studious. It’s bad to be a drug user. Drug use costs the user, his social network, and society quite a bit.

good point. In the same vein, I remember the “even some animals are gay, so being gay is natural and fine” argument.

even as a kid I remember reading about how wild ducks rape, their their vaginas become more “anti-rape” and male penises also evolved to overcome that and can still rape.

I remember saying “oh so since animals rape, rape is natural and fine?” and of course it was kind if a shut-down argument, no real retort there. Need to bring it back!

I think maybe the appearance of conflict comes from imagining someone who says 'I am attracted to women, but that person who is calling themself a woman is not the type of person I am attracted to, they are faking and must be a man'.

Of course, stated like that, the answer is pretty obvious: you don't have to be attracted to every woman, and your attraction is not necessary to validate their identity.

Look at this meme.

It was made in the 2000s, an era in which it was totally legit for liberal people to make fun of fat people and their motivated reasoning and mental (certainly not physical!) gymnastics. Nowadays body positivity is the order of the day and liberals can only make fun of fat people if they're wearing MAGA hats.

The point of the joke, obviously, is that the fat woman in the photo claims that the shape of her body is entirely genetic in origin while ignoring the obvious dietary choices she makes which contribute to her body shape.

Perhaps the defining characteristic of modern progressivism is a wide-ranging assertion that social influences shape people's identities and desires. Men aren't naturally more interested in STEM than women, they've just been socialised to want to pursue careers in STEM, and were it not for this we'd see them going into childcare and education at the same rates as women. Men aren't naturally stronger and faster than women, it's just that women are systematically discouraged from playing sports. Most people aren't straight because that's their natural inclination, they've just been brainwashed by the heteropatriarchy and in the state of nature we'd all be bisexual. Stereotype threat, power posing, "internalised" Xism etc. etc. The apparent goal of many progressives is to undo the cultural conditioning (borrowing here from Marxist "false consciousness") which causes women to believe that they're more interested in childcare than computers. This false consciousness is unidirectional: a man can mistakenly believe that he's more interested in computers than childcare, but not vice versa; a repressed gay man can be in denial about his sexuality, but no straight man can mistakenly believe he's gay.*

This is the worldview underpinning the fury and rage surrounding the ROGD/social contagion model of transgender identity. I used to (by which I mean, at the time I started writing this comment) think that the tenets of gender ideology made for odd bedfellows with the rest of woke ideology. When I first heard about it, I was like "why are you guys so mad that social influences affect one's gender identity? You think social influences affect everything!" I thought that woke people had made a weird little carve-out for trans people, whose gender identity is assumed to be unresponsive to social influence in the way that their career aspirations or physical fitness might be.

But now that I think about it further, it makes sense from the false consciousness perspective. A trans person who mistakenly believes that they're cis until the moment their "egg hatches" is like a factory worker in Victorian England who, in a horrifying epiphany, realises the extent to which he is the victim of exploitation and alienation at the hands of his boss: they are to be commended, praised, welcomed with open arms. But a cis person who mistakenly believes they're trans: that's like being a strike-breaker. It's no accident that trans activists have nothing but contempt for detransitioners: they're traitors to the cause, scabs. This is one reason they resent the term "groomer", as that's not what they see themselves doing. If you're in a trans subreddit and you find yourself thinking that the list of "possible signs you might be trans" is so exhaustive that everyone alive must have at least one - that's a feature, not a bug. They don't think they're persuading children to be trans - they think that every child is already trans (and queer, and interested in topics associated with the opposite sex, and feminist etc.) and has simply been brainwashed into believing otherwise - if they lived in the state of nature then no "grooming" or education would be required.** Just like Marx thought that every proletariat already supported communism and had simply been tricked into thinking otherwise.***

So no, gender ideology and sexuality aren't carve-outs from the general woke assumption that social influences affect who you are (but only in one direction), they're central examples. But such a carve-out does exist within the woke framework. For whom, you ask? Look up top! Fat acceptance activists, as a group, do not acknowledge any social influences on their condition whatsoever. Hence all the hysterical caterwauling about how diets don't work and teasing fat people just makes them sad and I'm just big-boned and so on and so forth. I suspect quite a lot of fat acceptance activists wouldn't even recognise the joke in the meme above, they literally believe that diet and nutrition have zero impact, none, on how much you weigh. In the woke framework, genes may not determine how smart you are, or strong, or fast, or your career goals, or who you like to have sex with - but they damn sure determine whether you're a size 16 or an 8.

*People talk a lot about how Friends "aged poorly" and so on, but more than anything I think the B-plot here from which the episode derives its title would make woke people furious if it came out today, not least because it's still funny and more relevant now than at the time of release.

**Hence the historically tenuous claims that the gender binary is a recent artifact of Western capitalism and ancient civilizations had a more fluid conception of gender - "two-spirit" etc.

***This can get kind of Gnostic the more you think about it. It's not revisionist of the Wachowskis to claim that The Matrix was always intended as a trans metaphor - the reason this interpretation doesn't jump out at most people is because they're approaching gender ideology from the perspective of "most people are cis, but some people are trans and that's okay and they deserve respect and compassion" as opposed to the perspective of "everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis - freethinkers whose eggs have hatched see the truth". Cypher is a detransitioner and also a cowardly traitorous villain: not a coincidence.

"everyone is trans, but most have been brainwashed into believing they're cis"

But if everyone is trans, then there is no trans. Female brain in male body is female normal, male brain in female body is male normal. They can't be trans because they're not changing anything (except "yeah just need to take my puberty blockers" the same way there are multivitamin supplements for kids and teens). Maybe you don't even need to change your body; in that world it is perfectly true that men can get pregnant and women have dicks.

Vagina, uterus, ovaries, breasts, six months' pregnant? That's a guy and everyone accepts it, that's society's definition of what "male/man" means. Beard, penis and testicles, six foot six tall, built like a brick shithouse? That's a woman, that's what "female/woman" means.

The only trans people in that society would be those insisting "yeah I've got tits and a belle chose, but I'm really a woman!" or "yeah I have a dick and body hair like a yeti, but that doesn't mean I'm not a man!"

And it’s hard not to notice that virtually every example of false consciousness is being more functional, prosocial etc. strictly speaking it is better to be cis(gender identity lines up with your birth sex) than trans(gender identity does not line up with your birth sex). It is better to be able bodied than disabled, fit than fat, etc, etc.

Why do you think that is?

Absolutely, voted in favour in the referendum.

I was going to tepidly vote "yes" on the grounds that eh, civil marriage, why not? But the "Vote Yes" rainbow-farting campaign (with both our formerly traditional attitude parties going all-in on love, love) converted that to white-hot "Hell NO" vote because of the brain-melting stupidity.

The definitive moment for me when I flipped was when I was on a bus to our local city, the usual ads were playing on the radio, and on comes another one of the endless "Vote Yes For Love Love" referendum ads. And it was [expletive deleted] Mrs. Brown talking about her [expletive deleted] fictional son who does not exist and is not real and is only a character in a TV sitcom and how if he was gay and wanted to marry his partner and so forth and that's why we should all vote Yes for Love Love.

(Mrs. Brown isn't a woman, by the way; it's a character created and played by a guy in the tradition of pantomime dames). If it had been the actor talking about his real-life gay son - which so far as I know, he doesn't have - then I'd have shrugged and tuned it out. But it was the sitcom character talking about a fake child which didn't exist, and that was the same thing as all those real gays and lesbians just panting to march down the aisle (allegedly) and whose lives were blighted because sure they could have sex with whom they liked how they liked, they could live together, they could even be in domestic partnerships, but no - not being able to go down to the council registry office was plunging them into despair and fear, from which only our 'yes' vote could deliver them. Even, apparently, if they were figments of the imagination.

That's the exact moment I figuratively hit the roof and decided that I was definitely going to vote, and definitely going to vote "No". Because the glurge about "we only wanna be free to love" was bad enough, but now they were taking us for such idiots led around by whoever could tug on the heart-strings the hardest that fake fictional not-real characters wanting to fake fictionally not-real gay marry their fake fictional not-real lovers was supposed to convince us to junk all human tradition that "men and women marry" (whether that's one man and one woman, or one man and three hundred women, or one man and one woman in a short-term marriage or one woman marries five brothers or any other combination).

Like I said, the brain-melting stupidity of that just flipped me solidly to "Hell will freeze over before I ever again give in a millimetre on any of this shit".

Hold on, they subject you to audio ads on the bus?

They play radio stations, and the commercial ones run ads. Depending what station the driver picks, it can be "general AOR and talk radio" or "help I am going to jump out of this moving vehicle".

I never encountered that Mrs. Brown campaign, but you're dead right, that's very cheap and manipulative.

You were lucky. I only heard it the once, and couldn't believe my ears. I'd been getting the full "Love Love Campaign" ads on the wireless ad nauseam leading up to that, and my first reaction was "hang on, surely this is meant to be Brendan O'Carroll talking about one of his real life sons?" but no. Mrs. Brown and her fake son.

I went "how. effin'. stupid. do. they. think. we. are." and switched from tepid, didn't really care one way or another 'meh probably vote yes if I vote' to steam out of my ears 'damn straight I am going to vote and it'll be NO with bells on'.

You do understand that meme is false. Epistemic status - I do not excercise, diet, or abstain from alcohol. I am older than her and while obese, nowhere near her level.

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So you don't exercise, diet or abstain from alcohol, and you're obese.

Struggling to see how this contradicts the thesis presented by the meme.

I am much less obese than that woman you enjoy laughing at. I could not reach her weight if my life depended on it.

But you are still obese. Are you denying that your diet, lack of exercise and alcohol consumption contributed to your obesity?

Simply: lots of work by libs is a sort of gay conversion therapy for straight people. Pride parades, public school education, pride month, trans day of visibility etc. all exist to glorify homosexuality and, explicitly to help straight people easily “come out of the closet” as gay.

I don’t expect ideological consistency here, but it should be obvious that this implies the reverse should be true. Could you be a closeted…normie? I feel like many people go through this transition in their 30s anyway. They have children, regret not doing it earlier, move to the suburbs, and take the grill pill.

I think if we are going to have actual IRL trans/sterilization clinics for children, then at the very least straight people should be allowed to have therapy sessions where they talk about how they wish they werent gay.

Edit: it’s annoying to say this so forgive me but I just feel the need to say it: I have 0 problem with gay people. Many of my closest, and most loved friends are happily married gay people who just want to be left alone to have their families. They’re loving fathers, and seriously cherished members of my community. It routinely brings me to tears thinking about people being mean to them, and I end up feel a sort of parental desire to protect them from the world. I understand why they hear gay conversion therapy and instinctively recoil, but this is approximately how I think most people feel when they hear about trans conversion clinics, or children at pride events.

Simply: lots of work by libs is a sort of gay conversion therapy for straight people. Pride parades, public school education, pride month, trans day of visibility etc. all exist to glorify homosexuality and, explicitly to help straight people easily “come out of the closet” as gay.

I find this a very dubious assertion. It seems to me, both in terms of public assertion as well as mildly uncharitable questioning of their inner motivations, that the aim isn't to convert straight people, but to have people who are already gay (or at least not a zero on the Kinsey scale) to feel free to express their sexuality.

Would many activists prefer that their campaigns result in everyone turning bisexual or gay? Maybe, probably. Doesn't mean that's what they expect.

This is distinct from the odd grifter who painlessly claims to be gay for the sake of diversity points, since it's verboten to question them even if they've never sucked an actual dick in their lives, but even then they're more likely to claim to be trans or non-binary. While some activists might grudgingly tolerate this (or feel helpless to call it out according to the standards of self-identification they espouse), I don't think they approve of it per se.

but even then they're more likely to claim to be trans or non-binary.

Or even more nebulously, "queer".

What percentage of people going to gay conversion clinics do you think believe themselves be straight be afflicted with something they find undesirable?

I doubt it’s zero.

In their minds they are straight people who need help overcoming a psychological condition.

Would many activists prefer that their campaigns result in everyone turning bisexual or gay? Maybe, probably. Doesn't mean that's what they expect.

I don't think a significant fraction of them think being straight is bad, and even if they did, that's not likely the reason why they endorse Pride. And the tendency of many gays to take pride in "converting" "straight" men is more of a fetishization of the unattainable.*

Of course, I'm trying to interpret the question I think you're trying to ask, because as of the time of writing, what you said:

What percentage of people going to gay conversion clinics do you think believe themselves be straight be afflicted with something they find undesirable?

Makes no sense! I presume you meant "to be straight to be afflicted".

*Many gay people mock the straights, but or ask questions along the lines of "are the straights OK?" but that's more of an in-group catechism and bitching, rather than a genuine belief that being straight is somehow inferior.

Note that I'm specifically addressing gay men (or maybe lesbian too), the trans activist community has an unhealthy obsession with cracking eggs.

To make no sense! I presume you meant "to be straight to be afflicted".

His question was how many people go to conversion therapy go there with the intent of relieving themselves of homosexual attractions so they can live their preferred lives.

It is a bit of a tautology.

I think you’re missing my point, or maybe your being cheeky and I don’t realize it.

A straight person unconverted to gay, and a gay person unconverted to straight are equivalents.

It seems like the assumption is that you can only ever find out that you’re gay, as if that is an evolution. I’m saying it goes both ways. Consider a 20-something who experiments with homosexuality in college and then realizes that they don’t like it later in life.

This is the same as a gay person experimenting with heterosexuality and “coming out” later in life.

We seem to be socially okay with helping straight people convert to homosexuality, but not okay with the opposite.

Yeah. Be married to a woman for thirty years, have kids with her, then come out as gay: you were gay all along, baby!

Straight guy might have once-off sexual encounter of some kind with another guy: Okay dude, that means you're gay. No take-backs.

Gay guy might drunkenly have sex one time with a woman: No, that doesn't mean he's straight or bi! It was just the one time!

It really is a one-way street where you can only move towards and never away from full gayness; if you're bi, you're faking it or too chicken to come out as really gay.

It typically isn’t LGBT activist types who say that a man who has a one-off sexual encounter with another man is gay, though. That’s a ‘masculine’ or red tribe adjacent thing in the modern west, it’s more likely to be a homophobic person who thinks that a guy who fucked another guy once is 100% gay. Progs would say it means he’s bi or queer or whatever.

"Queer" seems to be the new catch-all phrase. And that's what I'm getting at: it's not considered "okay, you're straight, you just did that thing" but "hey dude, you might be queer, have you considered that?" from some of the progressive types.

It typically isn’t LGBT activist types who say that a man who has a one-off sexual encounter with another man is gay, though.

They do though. I've seen people declare others are self-hating gays for being slightly effeminate. They do the same thing with transgenderism nowaydays, and throw abuse at people who say it was just a phase for them.

It seems like the assumption is that you can only ever find out that you’re gay, as if that is an evolution. I’m saying it goes both ways.

There are plenty of people who experiment in college and then end up (almost entirely?) straight. They get a few jokes about them (Lesbian until Graduation and Gay until Graduation), but they aren't particularly subjected to much opprobrium that I can tell.

Is someone who had same sex relationships then went back to different sex relationship straight? or are they bi? I think it might be logically true that if you have been attracted to same sex people and acted upon said attraction, that even if you go back only to opposite sex relationships for the rest of the life, you might not be considered straight.

In other words it might not be equivalent. Especially if, ironically enough we consider straight the default. You either are forever (super) straight or you are not. You don't find out you're straight, you just are.Even the gayest guy I know, who realised he was gay very early in life, originally had the same ideas about romantically rescuing princesses in so on.

Your assertion is they are equivalent, but is it actually the case?

Equivalent for the purposes of my point, which is that “conversion therapy” is morally near to pride, LGBT holidays, trans therapy, etc.

But that only matters if going straight to gay or gay to straight are actually equivalent. If it's impossible to be made gay but possible to be made straight (for example) then they are not the same (and indeed vice versa). Assuming for the moment both attending conversion therapy and Pride are both consensual for now.

I think you’re missing my point, or maybe your being cheeky and I don’t realize it.

While I'm fond of sarcasm, in this case I presume it's the former.

Consider a 20-something who experiments with homosexuality in college and then realizes that they don’t like it later in life.

This is the same as a gay person experimenting with heterosexuality and “coming out” later in life.

We seem to be socially okay with helping straight people convert to homosexuality, but not okay with the opposite.

Even after you've offered a clarifying example, I'd have to disagree.

It's exceedingly common for women (if not men) to "experiment" with each other in college or school. Usually it's just the odd drunken kiss, but it can go further. I know this is true for a fact both because I've heard of it in the West and a friend of my ex drunkenly admitted that we were Eskimo siblings (the friend was a girl). They're otherwise straight, and go on to exclusive have heterosexual relationships and might not even think of a woman romantically again.

This has little in the way of repercussions or even anything beyond mild disapproval from the more staid, nobody I'm aware of advocates for reconverting them after they ceased to experiment with the same team.

I would agree with the Pride activists that any guy who was convinced by a Pride parade or other advocacy to start sucking dick or taking it in the rear wasn't particularly straight to begin with, leaving aside what they identified as.

Female sexuality mores are different than male sexuality.

The real rate of male homosexual experimentation is very hard to figure out and seems to vary by environment.

How much of that is cultural, though?

Girl-on-girl is a bit of raunchy fun. Guy-on-guy experimentation is likely to ick every woman who ever hears of your involvement, without even getting into man-on-man homophobia.

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I can't say I disagree. But they both are presumably relevant here, and most guys don't even try experimenting with other men, so it's not like I can point at them.

This seems to be a very charitable read of what Johnson is saying here. The broad evangelical position is not a nuanced conception of sexual behavior and how it can be influenced, it is a belief that homosexuality is morally wrong, disgusting, and dangerous to society. Johnson is not expressing that sexuality is malleable, he is saying that sufficient religious prayer will remove wickedness from a sinner.

I’m sure sexual behavior and desire can be changed in all kinds of ways, (I doubt that there were Mesopotamians with a latex fetish) but I think giving Johnson credit on this is misunderstanding his position.

But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference.

Isn't the current thinking something like the following:

  • The gender we each feel ourself to be is something we don't have control over.
  • The preferences we feel are also something we don't have control over.
  • Both are externally given to us, whether as a result of biology or socialisation or a complex mixture of factors. The only choice we are able to make is how we ask people to regard us.
  • In both cases, gender and sexual preferences, people should be allowed to seek to resolve any mismatch by changing their outer actions to line up with their inner realities.
  • Seeking to change one of these inner realities, however, is discouraged because gender and sexual preference are supposed to be basic, fundamental human qualities that will eventually push themselves to the fore and create inner turmoil if denied.

Not sure what I think about these issues personally but I'm not too sure if any of the the above statements contradicts any other.

Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact.

I'm 99% certain that, in writing this paragraph, you thought about this issue at least one order of magnitude more than anyone you saw on CNN has in all their lives put together. For at least the past 2 decades, the dogmatic consensus has been that someone's sexuality is a part of their inner essence, that someone doesn't become gay or straight, they merely discover it. If you think about it empirically, it becomes immediately clear that we simply lack the mountains of scientific research in order to conclude this, much less have any confid in the conclusion, but why think about it empirically when thinking about it empirically can get you accused of homophobia?

More generally, there's a tendency of people to reject the effectiveness of what they consider morally abhorrent. You see this with other CW topics like death penalty (obviously it's barbaric AND it doesn't deter crime any better than the alternative) or torture (obviously it's excessively cruel AND it doesn't give us good info). The mirror image is the case too, such as affirmative action (obviously it's morally correct to give individuals belonging to oppressed categories extra opportunities, AND this will enable schools/companies to be better/smarter/richer by being able to make use of previously overlooked individuals from those categories).

I don't know if there's some psych term for this, but it's just incredibly common in all realms of politics, I think. Very often, they're even true. But also very often, people just jump to unwarranted conclusions by falling prey to this pattern.

i thought this was referred to as 'mood affiliation' in some circles but i'm not sure if that's the right term. maybe it's just confirmation bias. see: https://www.econlib.org/mood-affiliation-or-confirming-evidence/

The scientific evidence, from what I’ve read, seems to say that both sexuality and gender identity are influenced by the exposure to prenatal androgens and other hormonal factors. Gay men and trans women would have less androgen exposure than straight men - resulting in different physiological traits such as higher digit ratio and the infamous “gay face”. A gay man will be involuntarily aroused by homosexual sexual stimuli and there’s no evidence that psychological interventions can change that baseline physiological response. All kinds of men (bisexual, or straight men in prison) can have sex with men, but for gays, their attraction is fundamental physiological trait.

Meanwhile a trans woman is a biological male with some degree of gender dysphoria that takes steps to alter their gender presentation and goes on cross-sex hormones to alleviate that dysphoria. Again, gender presentation is a choice, but the gender dysphoria itself is an involuntary (possibly hormonally caused) condition, and psychological interventions will also have limited success - trans repressors will attest to the psychological toll it takes.

One difficulty I see is distinguishing between one’s inner state and one’s actions. A man is not gay because he has sex with men, he is gay because he is attracted to men. A gay man can be married to a woman and need to fantasise about men to have sex with her, and a straight man can have sex with men (e.g. in prison, on a ship) while thinking about women. There are people that will argue that if you’re a man who has sex with men, then you’re gay, but then does that mean that men who masturbate are attracted to their own hands? That teenage boys are attracted to couches, apple pies or whatever objects that they stereotypical use as masturbation aids?

Same with gender identity, except there definitions get even more controversial (i.e. “what is a woman”). The mainstream trans orthodoxy, from what I understand, says there is an inner “gender state” that can be reflected by your gender presentation, and the inner state is what we should call man/woman/non-binary/etc. Conservatives say there’s just biological sex and someone that’s an adult human male is a man, and someone that’s an adult female human is a woman. Personally I’m not sure there is really an inner “gender identity” in the same way there’s an inner sexual orientation, but gender dysphoria is definitely a thing, and it’s possible to change your gender presentation so that other people see you as the opposite sex and consequently call you a man/woman.

The scientific evidence, from what I’ve read, seems to say that both sexuality and gender identity are influenced by the exposure to prenatal androgens and other hormonal factors.

I think that this is what I have read the scientists wish the evidence showed. But instead it shows little if any of that, and instead shows nothing of the sort. To the extent there is any scientific inquiry on this question (and there is little, for reasons most people understand), it appears more to show that we know basically nothing. The brain scan stuff that was hyped up early on is totally bupkiss. For both homosexuality and transness. As has the small amount of research into things like hormone imbalances. Also, both being nit very highly heritable does point to environmental causes, but whether that is in the womb, early home, puberty, etc is simply not known to any real extent.

a trans woman is a biological male with some degree of gender dysphoria that takes steps to alter their gender presentation and goes on cross-sex hormones to alleviate that dysphoria

What about trans-identified males who profess not to experience gender dysphoria of any kind, do not medically transition, and make little if any effort to alter their gender presentation? In your opinion, are these people noncentral examples of trans women, or are they not really trans women?

People with no dysphoria who don’t medically transition but ask to be considered the opposite sex, well, I’m fairly suspicious of their motives. I’ve personally seen people like that on dating apps, and it seems to be either men who want to hook up with female-attracted trans women, or women that want to hook up with gay men; both think that just stating they’re trans but doing nothing else is enough.

I don’t think it’s useful to gatekeep trans identity too much, but I think mainstream trans views have gone too far and made the definitions useless. If you’re trans you should at least want to transition. Allowing sexual predators and fetishists to claim the label is hurting actual trans people, who just want to be seen and function as normal members of the opposite sex.

Agreed.

One difficulty I see is distinguishing between one’s inner state and one’s actions. A man is not gay because he has sex with men, he is gay because he is attracted to men.

Objective tests in the form of penile plethysmography exist, though they're most commonly employed to assess pedophiles in niche situations or the unlucky men with erectile dysfunction, but I agree that forcing people to take it for the purposes of giving them a certified gay card is out of the Overton Window for the foreseeable future!

The scientific evidence, from what I’ve read, seems to say that both sexuality and gender identity are influenced by the exposure to prenatal androgens and other hormonal factors.

Indeed. The anthropological evidence appears to tell a different story, though.

Gay men and trans women

There are 3 "genders": women, tops (as in 'dominant partner': men attempting to perform their standard sociobiological role 'properly'), and bottoms (as in 'submissive partner': all boys, and men not attempting to perform their standard sociobiological role 'properly'). One can transition between the latter two (and some men may find a niche that allows them to be successful despite not operating as a man should- but it's still an edge case for which the conditions that enable its prosperity -> visibility don't arise outside of highly dense urban areas), but never between the latter two and the first, because that is not how human bodies work.

This is why men who fuck boys in societies where that's a thing don't identify as "gay" (and why medical systems say "men who have sex with men" and not "gay"). The gender role of men is, after Maslow's Hierarchy has been mastered, to pursue whatever/whoever catches their fancy and so long as they're doing that we (provided your personal risk tolerance for disease is high enough and your culture lacks certain memes; Abramic religion being the most famous) usually don't care all that much about what that is. And while it's still somewhat of a duty to acquire a wife and maybe some kids of one's own too, dom men fucking sub men (outside of the confines of the financial relationship of marriage, or if the man is powerful enough that he doesn't have to worry about that) is not a property crime the same way fucking a virgin woman is, so it's more a curiosity than anything else.

Of course, this equilibrium can be disrupted by things like human ingenuity inherently creating conditions for an ever-shrinking top/male gender role while advancing the one for women (and the few bottom/males, but that's more a coincidence). But I can't see how putting the interests of a gender whose incentive structure is completely different on par with the gender that's still wired to work for a living would in any way change how society understands gender dynamics. If women are sufficiently incentivized to see themselves in the top/bottom structure as men do, there will be a lot more women in the bottom category, and they might completely destroy this compact in favor of... something else.

They also would, understandably, treat boys and bottom/men as women rather than their own distinct thing, but in fairness their parents didn't fully understand it either due to a meme or because they lived through the transition and didn't know what to make of it, so...

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