Sexuality can change – so why ban help for those who aren’t glad to be gay?
by Will Jones, The Conservative Woman:
So the government, obviously at a loose end with all the Brexit arrangements going swimmingly, has announced an intention to ban ‘gay conversion therapy’. Precisely what will be banned remains unclear, but it seems to be any therapeutic intervention aimed at altering a person’s ‘sexual orientation’, in other words the relative strength of their sexual attraction to their own sex and the opposite sex. You might have thought that in a free country we would be free to pursue therapy like this. We can seek treatment if we’re unhappy about our biological sex, or with the size of our breasts or penises, so surely we can seek help if we’re unhappy with our sexual preferences. But apparently not.
Many appear to be of the view that it is only people under the malign influence of conservative religion who could have any wish to avoid being gay. But in fact all it really needs is for someone to want to settle down and have a family in the usual biological way. Not an uncommon aspiration, you would have thought.
Modern studies reveal an intriguing picture of human sexuality, one which is much more complex than the ‘some people are gay and some are straight’ binary myth that permeates popular culture and, increasingly, government policy. A 2003 study by Paul Dickson, for example, found only a third of those who identified as lesbian in their early 20s reported still being attracted only to women a decade later. This instability of homosexual orientation has been found to be particularly marked in women. Other studies have counterintuitively revealed that lesbians are many times more likely to become unintentionally pregnant, and gay men are many times more likely unintentionally to have impregnated a (female) sexual partner, than their heterosexual peers – indicating, of course, much greater engagement in straight sex than their orientation identifier would suggest.
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