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