Hormonal Or Real?...

Hey Confoozed,

Welcome to EC!

Well, there's a lot going on there, so it's hard to adress everything at once. Let us try to organize things first and talk about things step by step, so we can better understand the situation. A few points i would like to raise:

-First of all, are you still in therapy, with a psychologist, psychiatrist or another certified mental health professional? Regardless of your orientation, it seems you have some issues that are hard to adress solely by an internet forum, so therapy would be a great step in the right direction (it isn't like a pill which you take and things are imediatelly resolved, but therapy can help a lot over time).

-Hormones can mess with your feelings, but not with your orientation. To make things short, for example, hormones can increase/decrease your libido, but not the target of your attractions. It is not possible to change someone's attraction: A straight person is straight, a gay person is gay, and so on. Even if a straight person is using lots of medicine and hormones, the orientation wouldn't change. I'm not saying you are X or Y (only you can reach that conclusion), but, while hormones and the changes in libido may confuse you, nothing can change your orientation.

-You said that you feel you are going against your beliefs. Remember that the LGBT community isn't "anti-religion" or something like that: On the contrary, we have lots of religious people in the community (there are many examples here in EC!). Loving someone or feeling attracted to someone isn't wrong/a sin. About this, this may help you: Religion and Homosexuality

Take a deep breath and relax, if you can. I'm sure that writing all of this down here was already a huge step, so be proud of it! Keep talking to us!

 

That's good!

Initiating therapy can be a difficult process. After all, like you said yourself, it may feel like you are opening up to a stranger about things that are deep in you. However, once you get used to it, it can be quite liberating. Remember: Your therapist is there to help you. He/she have studied a lot to be in that position, and, if we are talking about a certified professional (make sure it is a professional, by the way, and not someone who considers themselves a therapist but don't have any register), they can't share your secrets or anything.

If you want, let us know how it goes next week, then!

No offense taken! Don't worry about it.

In other words, what i mean is you can't "turn gay" or "turn straight", by any means. There is no substance that you can take that will change your orientation, no process that will change it. Again, hormone treatments may interfere in your libido - and they frequently do that - but they won't change your orientation.

There are many bigots and charlatains that claim that "conversion" is possible, and that you can change someone's orientation. People who claim that are liars or ignorants. There is no scientific evidence proving that changing one's orientation is possible, and processes that try to do it are more than often very, very harmful (mentally and sometimes physically).to those who go through it.

Don't put too much pressure on yourself. It is hard to change your mind after you have been indoctrinated to believe something in your entire life (like "being LGBT is a sin"). In time, i hope you will be able to see that love is love, regardless of who is involved!

Remember that you don't need to be non-religious to accept LGBT people (being this about yourself or about others). Being LGB is just like being straight, with the difference we love people of the same gender too. That isn't evil.

Of course, just like straight people, there are good and bad LGBT people. And that's exactly the point: We are just like everyone else. Being LGBT isn't a sin or a blessing - it is just normal!

We are here for anything you might need!

 

There are more than one way to comment on this, but i'll choose a simple one: Science works with something called "burden of proof".

In this case, the burden of proof falls into the statement "it is possible to change one's orientation", because that requires proof.

An absurd example of "burden of proof": I tell you that, right now, there is a flying, invisible elephant orbiting around the moon. According to myself, it can't be detected, measured or seen. You tell me you don't believe it.

Of course, the burden of proof falls unto me. I'm the one who needs to prove that the elephant exists, not the contrary. It's the same thing with orientation: People who say that it is possible to change are the ones who need to prove it. And, as far as we know, no one did that. You have many, many stories about this, more than some that turned out to be blatant lies. And none that has been proved by science.

If you know about someone that is doing that in the forum, report it immediately. Friendly discussions are ok, but mocking or disrespecting any religion/non-religion is absolutely not ok here in the forum. I'll wait a PM/report from you, if you do know about someone who is doing that here.

Again, if you wish to discuss moderation, do that in private by posting in Ask The Staff, as we won't discuss this here or in another public thread. However, let me note that we don't delete things just because someone is disagreeing/agreeing with us (otherwise, we would have to delete posts from ourselves all the time - we have a multicultural team and it isn't rare for us to disagree with each other).

Be very, very careful about researching porn addiction. Yes, it is a real thing - porn addiction does exist. However, it is extremely easy to find fanatics on the internet saying stupid things about porn, addiction and functions of the brain. If you are in doubt, i do recommend you ask your therapist - he/she will be able to explain things to you (doesn't seem to be the case here, anyway).

Side note: Mutant isn't an "unfortunate" use, or "just a trade term used in every article about genetics ever". It is an extremely important concept for Biology, used in fields like Genetics, Evolution, and so on. We are talking about "pure" biology here - not culture or other human variables. In this case, "mutant" describes the altered mice by "surgical removal of the vomeronasal organ or genetic inactivation of transient receptor potential channel 2 (TrpC2)" (ZHANG et al., 2013 - by the way, here's the direct link to the article http://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/early/2013/05/22/1220712110.full.pdf).

In the second paragraph, the researchers wrote: "Biologically, changes in sex hormones can change sexual behavior or sexual preference, resulting in either a loss of sexual preference or a reversal of sexual preference". They mention two other papers here to support this, which would be:

-Young WC, Rundlett B (1939) The hormonal induction of homosexual behavior in the spayed female guinea pig.Psychosom Med1:449–460

-Brock O, Bakker J (2011) Potential contribution of prenatal estrogens to the sexual differentiation of mate preferences in mice.Horm Behav59(1):83–89

You can see that all of these studies (besides not studying humans - which is already an interesting variable) are talking about behavior, not orientation, in the sense of attraction. The only moment where the authors talk about orientation is here: "Although a genetic component for homosexual orientation has been suggested, no specific genes have been identified in sexual preference in humans". They aren't wrong - we don't know exactly what causes homosexuality in humans (or even in other animals - as orientation, desire, attraction), but the reasons may be related to genetics (there has been some studies linking to epigenetics, more specifically).

It is extremely important to separate behavior from attraction and desire. In humans, you can see here in the forum many examples of homossexual folks who have/had heterosexual behavior. People who were married to the opposite sex, people who engaged in sex with the opposite sex to try to "change their orientation"... That's behavior, as it isn't related to attraction.

It is important to note that i'm talking about cases after birth - the study of hormone effects on orientation before birth is another thing - not saying it changes anything, but there could be studies pointing that, or not). That said, with hormones, you can increase/decrease sexual libido (like i already said here). This could change sexual behavior, not attraction.

Another example unrelated (directly) to hormones could be found in prisons, for example. There have been a number of records of heterosexual man/women engaging in sex with the same gender, but that doesn't mean orientation changed - the lack of partners of the preffered gender caused that. Was that homosexual behavior? Absolutely. Was that a change in sexual orientation? Nope.

From a blog in Scientific American, in a less technical language:

I recommend reading the entire article here: https://blogs.scientificamerican.co...d-sexual-preference-is-it-really-that-simple/

TL;DR: Seratonin does alter sexual behavior and libido. Nowadays, that's relevant, but not impressive anymore. Does it change sexual orientation? As far as we can tell, no. That's not even the point of that paper.

 

If one actually reads the source study, rather than a popular magazine's interpretation of the study, a lot of issues emerge with the methodology, bias, and other factors within the study. First, it is very limited in citing other researchers of any consequence in building on the theory.

Second, they're making the broad and unambiguous statement that serotonin controls sexual preference, and that lack of serotoninergic neurons are associated with sexual preference (the basis for their argument). This is a pretty bold claim for any researcher with a single study to make, and is a significantly flawed (and likely spurious) conclusion, as there are many instances of reduced sertoninergic neurons in people of all sexual orientations and sexes. The idea that anything that influences serotonin (such as just about every antidepressant on the planet) would impact sexual preference simply makes no sense. This means that anyone taking an antidepressant could potentially alter their sexual orientation. Given that millions of people worldwide are taking SSRI, SNRI and other antidepressants that work on the serotonin pathway, and no other researcher has uncovered any such association that I've been able to find, it's likely either a spurious or fraudulent finding. In fact, the researchers themselves say, buried in the text, "None of the previous studies found a reversal of sexual preference".

Third, their methodology seems pretty sloppy with regard to how they assess sexual preference. This, in turn, calls the entire study into question.

And fourth, the study is funded by the Chinese government, which isn't exactly welcoming LGBT people with open arms and makes the data questionable.

Given all of this, and the lack of replication, it is pretty safe to say it's a junk study.

If and when there are other studies that explore this further, there will be something to talk about. In the meantime, a single study with a bunch of potential biases and methodological problems should not be relied upon to refute decades of study and research by credible researchers, especially when every major psychological, social work, counseling, and psychiatric organization has formally rebuked the idea that sexual orientation change is possible.