Homosexual Discussion ForumHomosexuality and the Possibility of ChangeThe term imutable and innate are meant in a different way than you are taking it. As I said in that big ranty thing, scientifically speaking it is unknown either way because the brain is so complex. In the link I made is an outline of what science knows and doesn't know. One key section is right at the begining.
Having defined homosexuality as a pathology, psychiatrists and other doctors made bold to "treat" it. James Harrison, a psychologist who produced the 1992 documentary film Changing Our Minds, notes that the medical profession viewed homosexuality with such abhorrence that virtually any proposed treatment seemed defensible. Lesbians were forced to submit to hysterectomies and estrogen injections, although it became clear that neither of these had any effect on their sexual orientation. Gay men were subjected to similar abuses. Changing Our Minds incorporates a film clip from the late 1940s, now slightly muddy, of a young gay man undergoing a transorbital lobotomy. We see a small device like an ice pick inserted through the eye socket, above the eyeball and into the brain. The pick is moved back and forth, reducing the prefrontal lobe to a hemorrhaging pulp. Harrison's documentary also includes a grainy black-and-white clip from a 1950s educational film produced by the U.S. Navy. A gay man lies in a hospital bed. Doctors strap him down and attach electrodes to his head. "We're going to help you get better," says a male voice in the background. When the power is turned on, the body of the gay man jerks violently, and he begins to scream. Doctors also tried castration and various kinds of aversion therapy. None of these could be shown to change the sexual orientation of the people involved.
Among those who looked into the matter was the sex researcher Alfred Kinsey, whose 1948 report Sexual Behavior in the Human Male showed homosexuality to be surprisingly common across lines of family, class, and educational and geographic background. In his book Being Homosexual, the psychoanalyst Richard Isay writes,
Kinsey and his co-workers for many years attempted to find patients who had been converted from homosexuality to heterosexuality during therapy, and were surprised that they could not find one whose sexual orientation had been changed. When they interviewed persons who claimed they had been homosexuals but were now functioning heterosexually, they found that all these men were simply suppressing homosexual behavior. . . and that they used homosexual fantasies to maintain potency when they attempted intercourse. One man claimed that, although he had once been actively homosexual, he had now "cut out all of that and don't even think of men -- except when I masturbate."
Psychiatry not only consistently failed to show that homosexuality was a preference, a malleable thing, susceptible to reversal; it also consistently failed to show that homosexuality was a pathology. In 1956, in Chicago, a young psychologist named Evelyn Hooker presented a study to a meeting of the American Psychological Association. Hooker had during her training been routinely instructed in the theory of homosexuality as a pathology. A group of young gay men with whom she had become friendly seemed, however, to be quite healthy and well adjusted. One of them, a former student of hers, sat her down one day and, as she recalls in Changing Our Minds, said, "Now, Evelyn, it is your scientific duty to study men like me." She demurred. It was only when a fellow scientist remarked to her, "He's right -- we know nothing about them," that Hooker sought and received a study grant from the National Institute of Mental Health. She chose a group of thirty gay men as the objects of her research and thirty straight men as controls; none of the sixty had ever sought or undergone psychiatric treatment. "It was the first time [homosexuals] had been studied outside a medical setting or prison," she says. "I was prepared, if I was so convinced, to say that these men were not as well adjusted as they seemed on the surface."
Hooker administered psychological tests to her sixty subjects, including the Rorschach ink-blot test, producing sixty psychological profiles. She removed all identifying marks, including those indicating sexual orientation, and, to eliminate her own biases, gave them for interpretation to three eminent psychologists. One of these was Bruno Klopfer, who believed that he would be able to distinguish homosexuals from heterosexuals by means of the Rorschach test. As it turned out, none of the three could tell the homosexuals and heterosexuals apart. In side-by-side comparisons of matched profiles, the heterosexuals and homosexuals were indistinguishable, demonstrating an equal distribution of pathology and mental health. Reviewing Hooker's results from a test in which the subject creates pictures with cutout figures, one of the interpreters, a psychologist named Edwin Shneidman, stumbled onto a particular subject's orientation only when he came across a cutout scene depicting two men in a bedroom. Shneidman remembers, "I said to Evelyn, 'Gee, I wish I could say that I see it all now, that this is the profile of a person with a homosexual orientation, but I can't see it at all.'"
Hooker's research throughout her long career was driven by the belief that for psychiatry to be minimally scientific, pathology must be defined in a way that is objective and empirically observable. Her study was the first of many showing that homosexuality could not be so defined as pathology. In 1973 the American Psychiatric Association removed homosexuality from its official Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, signifying the end of homosexuality's official status as a disease. Today's psychiatrists and psychologists, with very few exceptions, do not try to change sexual orientation, and those aspiring to work in the fields of psychiatry and psychology are now trained not to regard homosexuality as a disease.
What he is saying is that from a physchiatric perspective, homosexuals in general cannot be "converted" into hetro-sexuals. They can only be repressed.
That is why I said that you are the exception not the rule. You claim to be a converted homosexual and if you are what you say you are then you are the exception not the rule.
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