Is sexuality fixed from birth or does it change later in life?

It is sexual orientation that is the characteristic that is being described as fluid here. If your sexual orientation is fluid then by definition your sexual orientation is changing over time. Otherwise it wouldn’t be described as fluid, it’d be static.

If you think I’m wrong, then what characteristic do you think is being described as fluid (as in subject to variance) if not the sexual orientation?

 

I'm not suggesting its unimportant. I'll leave this with a couple of quotes from the article:

"Sexual orientation is stable and unchanging for the vast majority of people, but some research indicates that some people may experience change in their sexual orientation, and this is more likely for women than for men."

"The results of a large-scale, longitudinal study by Savin-Williams, Joyner, and Rieger (2012) indicated that stability of sexual orientation identity over a six-year period was more common than change, and that stability was greatest among men and those identifying as heterosexual. While stability is more common than change, change in sexual orientation identity does occur and the vast majority of research indicates that female sexuality is more fluid than male sexuality."

 

Yeah, that article already excludes the "vast majority" of people from being "sexually fluid" and says their orientation is fixed. So conversion therapy has already lost most of its potential audience.

For those who say that they've experienced "sexual fluidity"- have they chosen to change their orientation? Have they accomplished this through an act of will? If not, and it occurred spontaneously, isn't "conversion therapy" useless for them too?

The article states bluntly that: "There is no scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed through psychotherapy." I guess that can be discarded as not being freethinking enough or something.

It also states that "the few changes in sexual orientation that did occur following therapy did not last". Big surprise.

I would personally ban it for under-18s because they're often forced into it by their parents, doing immense harm. (I'm not sure why JT1999 thinks that a teenager being fundamentally rejected by their parents at a very impressionable age would cause "a relatively small amount of harm".)

For adults, it's a balance of freedom of choice and potential harm and I don't know where I stand on that. It's a sick notion that something inherent and involuntary needs changing, but if people want to fool themselves (or rather, feel compelled by societal signals to do so), I guess they have the right. It's just a shame that there is such a level of intolerance and ignorance (often justified using religion) that people feel forced into these endless cycles of repression and self-loathing.

 

Choosing whether or not to put a label on your sexuality is not the same thing as acknowledging who you find attractive or arousing has changed. Whether you are happy with the changes or not. There are endless posts on here from people struggling to accept new found feelings of attraction that doesn't fit with what they previously thought they liked. I struggled with a label for a while but I've settled on bisexual as its the closest. Should we really care about "the vast majority"? We're all on here because we're not in the vast majority when it comes to sexuality.

I've got no problem with this stuff being off the table for under 18s, they are kids after all. But you are putting words in my mouth, I said nothing about teenagers being fundamentally rejected by their parents at an impressionable age. Of course that is going to be harmful, and its harmful whether or not the parents are trying to push them down a conversion therapy rabbit hole.

 

Involuntary feelings of attraction, not willed like conversion therapy claims. "Newfound feelings" are often newly-acknowledged old feelings. Fine, let's grant that there's a small minority for whom the feelings seem to come out of nowhere. Even then, it's involuntary and completely contrary to the basic principle of conversion therapy, that sexual orientation is somehow subject to our own volition.

If the vast majority of people have a fixed sexual orientation, it probably affects the viability of conversion therapy, no?

I don't see how I'm putting words in your mouth. That is the form that conversion therapy often takes. By definition conversion therapy involves the attempt to reject a part of yourself. You said of conversion therapy that it:

That's just an untrue statement. Even for adults, the harm caused can be immense, which is why several countries have banned the practice completely and more are contemplating doing so.

But anyway, I think it's increasingly apparent that this discussion is a bit pointless so I'll bow out. Hope you have a good day.

 

As you've decided to bow out I'll not respond to any of your points - I do appreciate the debate and I mean that 100% genuinely. No hard feelings here whatsoever. The world would be a boring place if we all agreed

 

I agree that sexual orientation is stable for most people. Most people I know still have the same sexuality as the one they were born with or developed during childhood. Most people don't really do much experimentation with the same sex though, or indeed with gender norms. I do often wonder if people were more open-minded, how many people would either 1) discover their true sexuality far earlier or 2) find their sexuality develops in response to their experiences - you can pick whichever of those you agree with best.

I am really not on the offense either. If you believe that nobody's sexuality can change that's fine with me. I've got no interest in appeals to authority either. Just because a scientific organisation says something today, it doesn't mean they are right and they shouldn't be questioned or have contradictory testimony presented. Those exact same groups considered homosexuality to be a mental illness within living memory, so I hope you can forgive me for my slight scepticism about believing everything they say especially when it contradicts my own experiences.

Peace

 

The idea that anyone would even feel their sexuality “needs to be changed” though is the issue. We shouldn’t live in a world where people feel they need to not be attracted to the same gender. No one should feel they need to change.

 

I believe it can change over time the more you learn about yourself.

 

I believe the core of JT1999's argument is that the above statement is meaningless drivel, which of course, it is.

A person's sexual orientation is defined by their attractions. It's not possible for one of those to be stable while the other changes over time.

 

How can you prove scientifically what sexuality someone is? It can't be proven in the same way you can prove water freezes at 0 degrees or that gravity exists. Sexuality is not a hard science, and its all open to interpretation or people's feelings. If a supposedly straight person starts feeling attracted to people of their own sex all of a sudden, there is literally no way to prove they were either bisexual all along or their sexuality changed. We can argue about it until the end of the world and that isn't going to change. I know what I believe about myself, and I'm accepting of what anyone else believes about themselves. If someone tells me I was always bisexual but just didn't know or had repressed it, if they want to deny my experiences and my feelings about myself, its not going to cause me a problem. I'm 100% comfortable with my sexuality. But my response will be that they're wrong.