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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.
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.)
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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.
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