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