Yes. If we ever get that technology, we should use it to turn everybody into perfectly 50/50 bisexuals. What a wonderful world that would be.
I’ve never wished I was a boy.
But apparently a lot of my personality traits and of the ways I do things (even my handwriting when I was 10) would have been OK in a boy, not OK in a girl.
My parents and many of my teachers spent years trying to fix me, to scrunch this square peg so it would fit into their tiny round hole.
The notion of someone being able to turn me into “a proper girl” with a pill is terrifying… I wouldn’t wish anybody to be chemically “fixed” of their own social unacceptabilities. What we need to change is our society, not our children.
And FTR, I know some Downies with better brains than most people 
They’re socially unacceptable, too, whether they happen to have good brains or not.
Nava - you’re talking about chemically enforced conformity in the last part of your post , which I don’t think anyone here is advocating - it’s about options not making us all the same. Tweaking a fetus before birth to make it not have one specific (but significant) trait is not the same thing as taking a pill that makes you a “proper” girl (unless you were talking about “curing” lesbianism).
It’s merely an extension of the same principle. First it’s the gays, so they’ll fit in better. Then the atheists, so they’ll fit in better. Then the tomboys, then the bookworms, and so on until we’re all cookie-cutter people.
I have a government document (a 30 something page pamphlet) by the department of health… I think the title is something along the lines of “The issue of homosexuality” by some sort of mental health comission dated 1972, IIRC.
They discuss shock treatment… It’s been a long time since I’ve read it… But that was the most ahem shocking item in the pages.
I believe they pretty much decided that nothing, shock treatment, forced viewing of heterosexual pornography, nadda, would make someone straight again.
I can’t remember the exact wording, but somewhere in the introduction they mention something about “If the efforts are not successful in curing the patient perhaps efforts can be made to make the patient able to fit into society without acting on the urges.”
I know I don’t have it word for word, but that is definitely the theme.
I have news for you:
DNA and RNA are chemical substances.
Gene-splitting is chemistry.
Bio-chemistry includes the word chemistry because that’s what it is.
Nava - I’m aware of this, I wasn’t disagreeing with you. I was trying to draw a distinction between changing one trait (i.e. sexuality) and lots of traits (i.e. all the things that make up an individuals character). I interpreted your point about not wanting to take a pill to make you a “proper lady” as being the latter, not the former.
Der Trihs - well indeed, however a line must be drawn somewhere between positive science modifying nature (namely curing blindness, cystic fibrosis, the cause of cot death) and negative (essentially what eugenics becomes, like getting rid of all the dirty Jews to make the human race purer). Are we saying that any form of genetic modification, even if it means the difference between someone have a life suffering from a clear disability and them not having that? As another poster said here if they were born blind and found out that their parents passed up the chance to cure that before they were born that they’d probably be pretty pissed (I know I would be if I was in that situation). However I don’t think the same applies to the decision to “cure” me of being gay, for the reasons I outlined quite clearly upthread.
No; I have no problem with curing genetic diseases or genetic enhancements, even drastic ones. What I do have a problem with is the idea of genetically shoehorning our species into some approved stereotype. That is what a treatment to make unborn all straight children would be. It’s no different than deciding to make all children innately religious fundamentalists, say.
When I was in college, a young woman I dated left this graffito on my kitchen wall:
DRUGS ARE A CRUTCH,
BUT LIFE IS A BROKEN LEG!
Sorry about the snark.
Thing is, all those people would have been dandy with me being the way I am… except for one little detail. Not “many details”, not “lots of traits”: one. I wasn’t a boy. Yet OTOH, if I’d been male, 6’ tall and slim (based on a look at my bros and cousins), but otherwise exactly with my tastes, interests and so forth…
then what would have been “wrong” in their narrow little world is that I would have been gay! They still wouldn’t have been pleased.
The problem is narrowmindedness, not genetics.
We are skirting an issue, that people are born gay. Some boneheads do not even accept that and think they are recruited or it is a choice. This is fundamental argument for the fundamentalists.
I’ve been thinking about something tangentially-related to this discussion: Assuming no genetic alteration is possible to change peoples’ preferences, what changes would there be if a fairly simple, cheap, easily done test could determine ones’ sexuality?
Would you have the test done, even if you’re fairly confident of your sexuality?
How about if the test were required (by both parties) to get a marriage license (assuming companies provide full benefits for spouses proven by this test to be appropriately gender-preference-matched)?
How about if gay couples were allowed to get married, provided they both tested as gay?
How timely is this article?
Gay sheep are biologically different from straight sheep and they ARE born that way
Throws up quite a lot of the points being discussed in this thread.
As for the second question, why bother ? That would be like taking a test to deterimine if I like lasagna; I know I do. Besides, I already have such a test; it’s called “looking at people”. Women : Sexy. Men : Blah. Test over, heterosexuality confirmed.
As for the changes that would result, a lot of gay fetuses would get aborted - or potentially gay, or 38% likely to be gay.
It would rub the faces of a lot of straight couples in a little of what gay couples feel.
Why should we care ?
Der Trihs - I agree with everything you say in your last post.
I know that’s not a terribly significant point on it’s own, but as it’s quite rare that you get to say that on SDMB without any kind of qualification or caveat I thought it was worth saying (I may even put a link to this post in my sig - “on this day the impossible occured…”). 
No, it’s very different. Being gay is not a choice. Your religion—or none—is. If we made all children straight at birth they wold still be able to make all the choices they would have been able to if they were gay. Not so with stripping someone of the choice of religion.
From everything I’ve heard over the years, religiousity does appear to be largely inborn. You may choose which religion you belong to, but people appear to have little choice in being religous. That’s a major reason why I don’t try converting people to atheism; I expect such attampts to be not much more successful than attempts to make gays straight.
Well, even assuming that’s true (which I don’t think it is), your hypothetical changed people to a specific religion. So your explanation here is wanting, to say the least.
Fundamentalism is a style of religion, not a specific religion. If fact, while I can’t find a cite, I recall reading about a medical treatment that does tend to induce religious fundamentalism. IIRC it’s for a genetic disorder that causes the brain to outgrow the skull, leading to the brain being crushed and death. The treatment stops the brain from growing, but stunts it’s development in some ways.
Much as I would truly love to cure the world of traditional religious fundamentalism at birth (zelous atheists and Satanists are fine in my book, as they don’t try and forgo the improvement of this world for the promise of the next or tell people that the [insert text] says so and you will obey it, heathen!) I think that would make us just as bad as those people we’re criticising for wanting to cure their children of being gay. Isn’t it the same thing? Getting rid of a trait we don’t like to make the world a better place (in our view, of course).
I’m happy to let people be born or bred extremely religous, whichever it is, and just beat them to death with Equality Act 2006 if they try and force their views on me (why else did you think they made that piece of legislation so thick? )