Some people (men, at least, usually) do have sex with other men without ever thinking of themselves as homosexual, and not necessarily because there is no alternative in their situation. And some anecdotally do “change” - the British writer and jazz singer George Melly, who was homosexual through all his days in the Navy and for quite a while thereafter, described in his memoirs how he was passed by a large group of cyclists on the road, and realised he’d been checking out the women rather than the men, and remained heterosexual and married for the rest of his days.
But the prior question is, why should it matter so much that a “conversion therapy” is required? Suppose “gay conversion therapy” were to be interpreted in the opposite sense, i.e., offering heterosexuals something to convert them to homosexuality. I can imagine the head-exploding reaction - and if that’s nonsensical (as it would be) then so is this.
But, in Italy and Greece the old gods are pretty much no longer worshipped (I assume some neo pagans still do). Last I checked, Hindus in India were still reading the Ramayan and the Mahabharata, and praying to Krishna and Ganesh. That’s the part I don’t understand. In Italy and Greece, a new religion brought new societal values. In India, you still have Hinduism (which I know is not a monolith). So why have things changed?
Okay, you want the complicated, you can have the complicated. Buckle up buttercup, here we go:
Things have actually not “changed” in mainstream Hindu society in the sense that heterosexual matrimony and procreation, especially having sons, has always been emphasized as SUPER important to the point of being nearly absolutely mandatory. The ideal of family life based on lifelong heterosexual matrimony is scripturally and categorically prescribed as part of dharma or righteous conduct for Hindus, and this has been the case from remote antiquity right up to the present. In fact, global “westernized” modernity has only very recently begun to shift this cultural viewpoint in the direction of normalizing individualistic diversity of lifestyle patterns including divorce/remarriage, same-sex marriage, etc.
Acceptance in Hindu cultures of male same-sex sexual activity has almost always involved the assumption that such activity is a natural (if slightly disapproved) but ultimately insignificant sideline to the serious dharma matters of (heterosexual) marriage and children. Here’s Wikipedia:
So while many Hindus throughout history and today would turn a blind eye to casual “musti” sex play between two men or to a man’s temporary liaison with a hijra prostitute, for example, most would be very strongly opposed to, say, their son’s actually identifying as a hijra or other third-gender category, or to rejecting heterosexual matrimony in favor of a male life partner.
In a sense, then, what all those distraught Indian parents who want their gay sons to go through GCT are concerned about is not so much that their son sometimes enjoys having sex with men, but that he’s not willing to have sex with women, in the context of scripturally and socially mandated heterosexual marriage and family.
Okay so far? Watch this space for parts (2) and (3).
About that “introduction of a new religion” bit. Just because dharmic/“Hindu” religious practices exhibit a lot of continuity and commonalities between ancient/medieval and modern times (although by no means totally without change and diversification) doesn’t mean that other religions haven’t strongly impacted Hindu society as well. Both late medieval/early modern Islam (via the Indo-Islamic empires) and modern Christianity (via European, and especially British, colonialism as well as post-colonial globalization) have significantly influenced the social norms of Hindu culture. (Not to mention that about 14% of the present Indian population are Muslim themselves, while a smaller minority, about 2.5%, are Christian.)
Muslim doctrine, of course, generally forbids homosexual sex, although plenty of Muslim cultures (including Indo-Muslim ones) have tolerated it to some extent. In fact, some sources indicate that in medieval times homosexual relationships were more tolerated among Indian Muslim elites than among the Hindu majority. Some remarks:
And of course, you don’t need me to explain to you that European Christian colonizers were generally even more adamantly and formally opposed to same-sex sexual activity (although even there, natch, there were various subcultures of covert toleration), and were far more draconian when it came to imposing their religious views on the legal systems governing their colonial subjects. Big honking Human Rights Watch report on “sodomy laws” and British colonialism.
But what about the wimminz? In Hindu cultures, as in most other cultures, lesbianism has generally been perceived as far less of a potential threat to social norms of heterosexual marriage and family life than male homosexuality, primarily because women are realistically assumed to have far less autonomy in determining whether, when, and with whom they’ll have sex.
Nonetheless, same-sex sexual activity is explicitly prohibited in canonical Hindu dharma texts between women as well as between men. At the same time, though, sexological works such as the ancient classic Kamasutra refer to various acts in both lesbian and male homosexual sexual practice, as part of their comprehensive taxonomy of the ways that human beings get jiggy wit it. Because so much of the Indian historical record in all forms, both Hindu and Indo-Muslim, is male-authored, it is hard to tell (at least from my mostly-layperson perspective; I’m sure a specialist in Indian social history could tell you more) which of the textual and visual-arts references to female same-sex sexual activity represent independent lesbian desires/acts per se, and which represent a sort of “Playboy lesbianism” avant la lettre,* designed primarily to appeal to the heterosexual desires of men. (E.g., having your maid/girlfriend shoot a dildo up your hoo-ha from a crossbow. NSFW and do not try this at home.)
Again, you don’t need me to rehash the comparatively well-known debates on the extent to which lesbianism was specifically referenced or covered by Christianity-inspired anti-sodomy legislation in the British Empire. So let’s leave it at that, unless there are any further questions.
*I’m not definitively claiming that “Playboy lesbianism avant la lettre” is the most absurdly pretentious phrase I’ve ever written, but it certainly makes the shortlist.
If somebody wants to change their sex, their transgenderism is no skin off my back. They should be allowed to do what they want. If somebody is gay and doesn’t want to be gay, I say they are free to go ahead and try to change if that’s what they want. Again, no skin off my back.
Personally, I think people are a lot more malleable than the current thinking. I read that there was a study and in roughly 50% of the cases where an identical twin was gay, the other twin was not. I suspect that there is an environmental component. Maybe it gets fixed early in life and then can’t be changed. Maybe it stays malleable for some. I don’t know.
I believe strongly in my own adaptability, and I believe that if there was some huge societal upside to being gay, and a big disadvantage to being straight than I would probably be truly and sincerely gay. I think a lot more people would be.
For me, it would all be about replacing that desire with desire for something else that I choose to value more.
I used to smoke and I used to be very overweight. I told myself that cupcakes and cigarettes were disgusting and that I didn’t want them. I told myself that I wanted salad and long runs. Now I’ve run 30 marathons, 6 ultra marathons, and haven’t had a cigarette since 1999. Don’t miss it don’t want it.
I tell myself that I really like my job, and that I want to do it, and am excited about it, and I am. But, I wasn’t born 5hat way. I had to train myself.
I am the Captain of my my soul, the master of myself, otherwise, I am nothing. I am in charge of what I like, desire, etc. Those things are the tools I use to motivate myself to do what I believe to be worthy. I master them. They don’t master me. My sexuality is trivial compared to this.
Okay, prove it. Talk is cheap. There are tons of dudes out there that would probably be interested in a fit runner such as yourself. Go bang some of them, be sure to enjoy it, and get back to us.
A trans person does NOT change their sex. A trans woman has always been a woman. A trans man has always been a man. At some point, they recognize they were born with oh let’s call it a birth defect. They talk to a therapist. They get hormonal therapy. They may or not get corrective surgery.
This, I believe.
Trans folks go through a lot of hoops to make sure they won’t change their minds after hormones or surgery. Conversion ‘therapy’ involves no such saftey measures. Physicians providing hormone replacement therapy and sex reassignment surgery follow the Hipocratic oath to not make the patient worse. The monsters providing conversion pretty much only cause harm and make the patient worse.
A trans person does NOT change their sex. A trans woman has always been a woman. A trans man has always been a man. At some point, they recognize they were born with oh let’s call it a birth defect. They talk to a therapist. They get hormonal therapy. They may or not get corrective surgery.
[quote]
You are making a valueless semantic argument (since you clearly understood exactly what I said), and you are not educating me.
Unfortunately, some people also regret their gender reassignment surgery.
Does this mean that they should not have been allowed to have it and that the people who did it to them are monsters?
I don’t think so. If somebody wants to get their gender reassigned and feels that would be helpful to them they should be free to do so. If someone feels similarly about their sexuality they should have the same freedom to pursue its alteration.
I could be wrong. I am not certain. How could I be without actually doing it? However, I find it useful to assume that I am fully in control of myself. It stops me from acting on impulse and then excusing myself by claiming I couldn’t help myself. Knowing that I am going to accept responsibility for my actions helps me make better choices than I otherwise would.
I’m puzzled by your use of terminology here. When you say “a trans man has always been a man”, isn’t that usually termed gender identity rather than sex? The term transgender means that gender identity does not correspond with something, isn’t that something usually called sex - birth sex or biological sex? When it’s so important to clarify this distinction, it seems odd to then be adamant that sex reassignment surgery does not involve changing one’s sex.
Pretend for a moment that there exists a society that is incredibly bigoted towards tall people. If you’re under 6 ft, people treat you normally but if you’re over 6 ft, then you face all sorts of discrimination, both subtle and overt.
Now pretend that a group of people have invented a “cure” for tallness which involves literally lopping off your feet and cauterizing the stumps so that you become an “acceptable” height. Sure, you will have troubles walking for the rest of your life and you’ll be in constant pain, but once you have the bottoms of your limbs removed, other people will treat you normally from then on.
Now, I think most people would agree that parents who are afraid of their children growing “too tall” and force their kids into height reduction surgery so they can maintain their respectability in the community are absolute monsters. But what about people who grow up in such a society and then completely voluntarily want to chop their own limbs off to conform to societal expectations? I think most people would also say that this shouldn’t be allowed, because it’s clear in this example that the problem isn’t with people’s height, it’s with society’s bigotry.
This analogy is deliberately absurd because we’ve all lived in societies where people of all heights are able to live in perfect harmony and it’s clear that height is not some debilitating condition. Similarly, people who have lived in environments in which homosexuality is accepted as just another spectrum of human expression very quickly realize that there’s no intrinsic harm that comes from being gay, the only harm comes from society’s structural oppression of gay people. Thus, even if gay conversion therapy was able to “fix the problem” for a given definition of “fix”, it should still be illegal because the problematic part of that statement is not “fix”, it’s “problem”.
ISTM that you are in fact agreeing with DocCathode here. If “sex” means anatomical and/or genetic sex characteristics, those aren’t necessarily changed in the transitioning process (and in the case of the genetic characteristics, of course, cannot be changed).
A transgender man’s gender identity—the fact of his being a man—does not correspond to the sex he was assigned at birth, and that will never change. He may choose to change some of his sex characteristics to the extent that he can, but ISTM too that calling that “changing his sex” sounds too sweeping.
But he’s not “changing his gender” either, because he’s always fundamentally identified as a man. What he’s doing in the transition process, AFAICT, is really just asserting his actual gender identity, and (sometimes) making physical changes to better conform to the expected characteristics of his gender.
I’m not sure he did understand you, because I’m not sure I did, either. You referenced trans people as, apparently, support for your claim that you could alter your sexuality through an act of will. Trans people are a very bad example for this claim, because if a trans person could stop being trans through an act of will, almost every single one of them would have done it as soon as they realized they were trans.
However, on re-reading, it appears you may have meant, “If trans people are allowed to change their physical sex, people ought to be allowed to change their sexual orientation.” Is this what you were trying to get at with your analogy? Because it genuinely was not very clear.
Again, I’m not sure precisely what argument you’re making here. If a person wants to change their sexual orientation, they should be “allowed” to do that, sure, for all the good it will do them. But that’s a different question from, “Should people be allowed to profit off of medical procedures that have been demonstrated conclusively to not just be ineffectual, but to be actually harmful to their patients?” The data against gay conversion therapy is so overwhelming, I think there’s a genuine case to be made that the people operating these clinics are not just operating under a different ideology, but are in fact knowing frauds.
As an analogy, I don’t think people who want to talk to their dead relatives should be imprisoned. I do think that charlatans who extort money from those people using stage magic to fool them into thinking that they’re talking to their dead relatives should be in prison.
So, if some gay dude wants to spend a couple months staring really intently at pictures of vaginas until he starts getting wood, well, that’s a really stupid use of your time, but not actually any more stupid than watching professional sports. Someone who knowingly lies to that gay dude, and says he has a process that can make him a consummate 'poon hound? I’m 100% okay with legislating that guy’s business out of existence.
So, bisexuality is a thing, right? If you can transform your heterosexuality into homosexuality, it should be pretty easy to transform it into bisexuality. That’s a purely additive process: you just need to learn to like dick. You don’t have to unlearn liking pussy. So, that should be easy enough, right? Tell ya what. Here’s a broken link to a pic of a dude with a dick in his mouth:
Just take the space out from behind the “https:” You take your time with that, and get back to us when you can shoot a load just looking at that pic. This should be easy peasy, compared to your waterboarding experience.
I don’t think there’s any misunderstanding or dispute beyond the semantics. I’m just trying to understand the preferred terminology. Since the term birth sex or biological sex includes the genetic component, should we describe SRS as changing anatomical sex to align with gender identity?
Buckle up buttercup, here we go: