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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.
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.
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