Promoting a Comment Thread

I don't normally bump things out of comment threads, but Roger's last comment back here deserves a more thorough commentary than I think is appropriate in a comment.

What follows is my own thinking on Roger's comment:

I think the reality that behavioural science will arrive at has been quite elegantly expressed in The Sexual Spectrum: Exploring Human Diversity. (although heavily anecdotal, the author puts forward a rather well reasoned model)

Reality is this - human behavioural attributes exist along a continuum for any "attribute pair" you wish to describe Heck, I'm left handed - mostly, but there's some things I do right handed (and when it comes to throwing a ball, I'm basically hopeless), so even there, it's not an absolute - I have some degree of ambidexterity.

Where sexual identity is involved, it's likely a bimodal distribution, with a huge weight towards heterosexual behaviour at one end of the spectrum, and a smaller, but significant bump on the homosexual end of the scale. In between you find a small percentage of people who express some significant degree of bisexual behaviour. (Please note, I'm working heavily from inference here, and there's probably several lifetimes worth of hard research to confirm my suspicions)

My strong suspicion is that most people are "tethered" to some point along the spectrum, and although they may be able to express themselves differently to some degree or another, someone who is "firmly" heterosexual, or firmly homosexual just won't get very far trying "the other field" so to speak.

What confuses the issue are those who fall in the middle. The bisexuals whose "tether" is long enough to allow them to drift towards either a primarily homosexual or primarily heterosexual presentation, and then at some later time to apparently "change" their identity. (What has actually changed is the outward expression of their sexual identity, not the core attribute they are "tethered" to).

Personally, I suspect that most of the "success" stories out of the "reparative therapy" game are precisely such people. Similarly, I suspect that the "failures" are in fact firmly within the "homosexual" side of the spectrum, and are going to find it as difficult to "change" as it would be to convince a solidly heterosexual person to become a practicing homosexual.

Attempting to "change" someone's sexual identity by therapy is unlikely to be successful unless they fall into the category of "bisexual", and there you are not changing their identity so much as their social expression of it. Attempting to force the issue by coercion of any sort is apt to be extremely damaging to the individual in the long term.

By way of example, I'd like to relay an experience I had with a course I took a few years ago.

It was a leadership training course, and quite a good one (or so I thought). Naturally, one of the exercises was a Myers-Briggs personality type test. I scored an amazingly strong "I" (introverted) score on the test. (Not surprising to me - I like little better than a quiet evening with a glass of wine, my parrot and a good novel to read) Several of my classmates were quite shocked by this revelation that I am a strong introvert - apparently they hadn't guessed at all from how I conduct myself at work.

Near the end of the course, the instructor paid me quite a delightful compliment. He told me that although I was a very strong introvert, I had developed some very good ways to manage myself in my day to day work life.

I do not claim that it's easy for me to do that - there are days where my role at work exacts a frighteningly high price from me, and I go home and make like a hermit for a few days.

On the Introvert/Extrovert scale, I'm a strong Introvert, but I can "play" as if I'm an extrovert. Trust me, I don't "get it" where extroverts are concerned. Put me in a room full of people and I just want to escape - I don't get "energized" by the experience - but there are those who certainly do. (and similarly, they don't "get it" where my proclivity to go home and find a good book is concerned!)

My point is this - although I can "act" the part, sooner or later my "tether" gets over stretched, and like a great big bungee cord yanks me back home sooner or later. The further it gets stretched, the more dramatic my reaction when I find myself "pulled back".

(again, this is anecdotal evidence I present here, but it should give you some sense of where I come from when discussing these issues)

Sadly, this leaves the religious "conversion" advocates like Kempling just as high and dry as they are using the more polar model. It still comes down to attempting to "change" something that is simply not responsive to therapy.

Just as you can't turn me into a person energized by a roomful of social interaction, I do not think that one can make a homosexual turn into a heterosexual (or vice versa). They may "act" straight, but like me when I have to play the running extrovert, sooner or later the price for that expression will be paid. It is only those who land in the "bisexual" part of the continuum who are close enough to drift into either side that will "seem" to change.