Homosexual orientation is not fixed?! Mother Jones!
HT: EO
Cahill—who says he doesn't think he was born gay—points out that even if it is crucial for public support, essentialism has a dark side: the remedicalization of homosexuality, this time as a biological condition that can be treated. Michael Bailey, a Northwestern University psychologist who has conducted some of the key studies of the genetics of sexual orientation, infuriated the gay and lesbian community with a paper arguing that, should prenatal markers of homosexuality be identified, parents ought to have the right to abort potentially gay fetuses. "It's reminiscent of eugenicist theories," Cahill tells me. "If it's seen as an undesirable trait, it could lead in some creepy directions." These could include not only abortion, but also gene therapy or modulating uterine hormone levels to prevent the birth of a gay child.
Psychology professor Lisa Diamond may have the best reason of all for activists to shy away from arguing that homosexuality is inborn and immutable: It's not exactly true. She doesn't dispute the findings that show a biological role in sexual orientation, but she thinks far too much is made of them....Diamond has spent the last 12 years doing her part to fill in this gap by following a group of 79 women who originally described themselves as nonheterosexual, and she's found that sexual orientation is much more fluid than activists like Besen believe. "Contrary to this notion that gay people struggle with their identity in childhood and early adolescence, then come out and ride off into the sunset," she says, "the more time goes on, the more variability comes out. Women change their identities and find their attractions changing." In the first year of her study, 43 percent of her subjects identified themselves as lesbian, 30 percent as bisexual, and 27 percent as unlabeled. By year 10, those percentages had changed significantly: 30 percent said they were lesbian, 29 percent said they were bisexual, 22 percent wouldn't label themselves, and 7 percent said they were now straight (the remaining 12 percent had left the study). Across the entire group, Diamond found that only 58 percent of her subjects' sexual partners were women; in year eight, even the women who identified as lesbians reported that between 10 and 20 percent of their sexual partners were men. Diamond concludes that the categorization of women into gay, straight, and bisexual misses an important fact: that they move back and forth among these categories, and that the fluidity that allows them to do so is as crucial a variable in sexual development as their orientation.
Diamond cautions that it's important not to confuse plasticity—the capacity for sexual orientation to change—with choice—the ability to change it at will. "Trying to change your attractions doesn't work very well, but you can change the structure of your social life, and that might lead to changes in the feelings you experience." This is a time-honored way of handling unwanted sexual feelings, she points out. "Jane Austen made a career out of this: People fall in love with a person of the wrong social class. What do you do? You get yourself out of those situations." For the women in Diamond's study who tell her, "'I hate straight society, I don't want to be straight,'" Austen's solution is an effective treatment for unwanted other-sex attraction. "If you're around women all the time and you are never around men, you are probably going to be more attracted to women," she says. Such women sometimes end up falling in love with women, and their sexual feelings follow. And it can work the other way, Diamond says: Women who identify themselves as gay or bisexual sometimes find themselves, to their own surprise, in love with men with whom they then become sexual partners. Indeed, she says, "love has no sexual orientation."
Which isn't all that different from what they say at narth—that people like Aaron who hate the gay lifestyle and don't want to be gay should leave the gay bars, do regular guy things with men, and put themselves in the company of women for romance. And indeed the narthites know all about Diamond's work. "We know that straight people become gays and lesbians," narth's outgoing president Joseph Nicolosi told the group gathered in Orlando. "So it seems totally reasonable that some gay and lesbian people would become straight. The issue is whether therapy changes sexual orientation. People grow and change as a result of life experiences, especially personal relationships. Why then can't the experience of therapy and the relationship with the therapist also effect change?" Diamond calls this interpretation a "misuse" of her research—"the fluidity I've observed does not mean that reparative therapy works"—but what is really being misused, she says, is science. "We live in a culture where people disagree vehemently about whether or not sexual minorities deserve equal rights," she told me. "People cling to this idea that science can provide the answers, and I don't think it can. I think in some ways it's dangerous for the lesbian and gay community to use biology as a proxy for that debate."
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