Lamia
October 22, 2012, 12:00am
37
alterego:
My post somewhat confusingly discusses both possibilities, i.e, that it’s not genetic, and that given that, it is either a choice or not. Both are consistent with my theory, since I think sexual preference is essentially learned, and can be unlearned.
If it can be unlearned, why don’t we have more evidence of people who have successfully changed their sexual orientation? It’s not like no one has ever attempted this before.
Here’s some info from a study I looked up for a previous thread :
Ariel Shidlo and Michael Schroeder’s 2002 study “Changing Sexual Orientation: A Consumers’ Report”** seems to be the best study on how successful “ex-gay” therapies actually are. This study involved interviewing 202 people who had undergone sexual orientation conversion intervention. 13% (26 people) of these people considered themselves to be success stories, but nearly half of these still experienced repeated “slips” into homosexual behavior. Of the remaining 14 people, 6 reported having successfully stopped engaging in homosexual behavior but still experienced some same-sex desire and did not self-identify as heterosexual. Only 8 people (4%) self-identified as heterosexual and reported exclusively engaging in heterosexual behavior with little or no same-sex desire.
[snip]
The majority (77%) of the participants in Shidlo and Schroeder’s study indicated not only that the therapy hadn’t changed their sexual orientation, but that it had done them significant long-term damage. (Another 10% reported experiencing neither change in orientation nor any long-term psychological harm.) 11 participants reported attempting suicide after undergoing “ex-gay” therapy. Only 3 of these had previously attempted suicide. So it looks to me like “ex-gay” therapy is at least as likely to make people want to kill themselves as it is to result in a successful conversion to heterosexuality.
[snip]
**Professional Psychology: Research and Practice , 2002, Vol. 33, No. 3, 249–259
And these weren’t all, or even mostly, teenagers forced into religious “ex-gay” programs by their families. About three quarters of the people in this study had sought out “ex-gay” therapy for themselves, and a majority saw licensed mental health practitioners.
ETA:
alterego:
The studies fail to control for cognitive dissonance. Changing your sexuality intentionally would be analogous to changing your religion - you must restructure huge portions of your ego (unlearning dissonance-inducing knowledge) and it is a painful process for many people. That does not make it impossible, and indeed, without a proof, calling something impossible is stretching it.
I’d be interested to see a study showing that changing one’s religion causes significant long-term psychological harm or drives people to attempt suicide.