4 ms·

Not malleable enough for conversion therapy to work.

CryptoPunk 6y ago
I believe it's not proven that it can work, not that it's proven not to work at all. I suspect there is a strong motivation to discourage research into its effectiveness and discredit that research which has been done, and for understandable reasons, like not wanting people who are homosexuals to see their orientation as a psychopathology. In any case, I suspect that sexual orientation develops and crystalizes long before conversion therapy is generally resorted to. I also wouldn't be surprised if conversion therapy has the opposite effect of that intended, of re-inforcing homosexual orientations, by presenting it as central to the subject's identity.
DoreenMichele 6y ago
To my mind, that's a little like saying "Wow, it sure is shocking how forcible rape fails to get people all hot and bothered and learn to love sex." Conversion therapy is the opposite of someone deciding "Hmmmm. You know, I never thought about it before but now that I am in some new circumstance with people with different traits, I'm finding myself weirdly attracted to categories of people that never did a thing for me before and maybe, just maybe, gender per se was not the trait that really mattered to my ability to get turned on." Conversion therapy is forced on people in an ugly fashion by other people who hate them for what they are and desperately want to "fix" them. Regardless of the reason for therapy, this approach is almost always counterproductive.
- CryptoPunk 6y ago
  Not all conversion therapy is forced on people. I suspect the vast majority is voluntary. I also would not be surprised if it increases, rather than diminishes, homosexuality. Interventions can have counter-intuitive effects.
  - DoreenMichele 6y ago
    I suspect the vast majority is voluntary. I find that a questionable assertion. A lot of therapy is pursued because someone is being given the message by a great many people around them "You are broken and you need to go get yourself fixed" in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It's really rather hard to achieve a mental state of "I am going to therapy because I choose it for my benefit because I want this." A lot of people are there because the entire world likes to blame individuals as being somehow at fault for their lives not working rather than having compassion for the myriad ways in which the world likes to crap on all kinds of people for the crime of existing. I've done it. I went to therapy for me. But even then it was an act of defiance and some of the people closest to me were assholes acting like "It's about damn time you went and got fixed, bitch!" rather than going "Glad you are at a place where you feel comfortable confronting your personal demons from other people doing really amazingly shitty things to you, like raping you when you were just twelve years old."
    - CryptoPunk 6y ago
      I meant voluntary in the sense that the patient wants to be there and wants to be converted. As opposed to the patient being physically forced to be there and having no desire to be converted. I think the contextual factors, like what is causing the patient to want to be converted, are not relevant to how effective the therapy would be. This is not to say that those factors are not generally important, for other reasons. I think it's important not to just assume everything that is being done for the wrong reasons, is ineffective. It can be mentally comforting to believe that consequences of malevolent actions are always negative, and that argument can also be used to create public support against those malevolent forces, but I think the fallacies that get built up over time from this kind of wishful thinking undermine the objective and scientific foundations of perception that society needs to collectively reason about and tackle its major challenges, which tend to be extremely complex and necessitate more than just compassion/good-intentions to solve.
      - DoreenMichele 6y ago
        My views on life are more complex than what you are inferring. But some things are a case of "you can't get there from here." I'm fond of the saying "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity." While in our early to mid twenties, my husband and I both ended up in therapy individually plus couples counseling. He was very introverted and hated talking to a therapist. One day I told him "You don't have to go to therapy. Therapy is a means to an end and it's okay if it isn't your cup of tea. I just want our marriage to be better and I don't care how that happens." He promptly quit both therapy for himself and couples counseling and was promptly a better husband. I never asked how he pulled that off and I never once threw it in his face that he quit or told him he should have continued for some reason. I got what I wanted out of it -- my marriage worked better, in spite of us both having issues -- and I had meant what I said. For psychological and emotional stuff, intent and context can make a big difference. I typically think of this in terms of "The definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent. If you want it and agree to it, we call it making love and if it is done against your will we call it rape." Making love is a very positive experience. Being raped is a very negative and scarring experience. They don't necessarily look all that different in the details of what happens. People tend to imagine rape is some violent event perpetrated by some random stranger and that's mostly not how it happens. The big difference is consent. And it makes all the difference. I do not have a simple nor naive view of life. I'm well aware people are complex and life is not black or white nor even shades of grey. It's a highly technicolor experience and sometimes making the hard choice is a positive and sometimes something being forced upon is takes us where we need to go, though it's not a path we would have chosen. But for something like how you feel about your own sexuality and express your own sexuality and relate to your own sexuality, I'm quite clear that it makes a big difference if you really wanted it or if it you "chose" it because all of the world had a gun pointed at your head and "choosing" this was presented to you as the lesser evil compared to what the world will do to you if you don't choose it. I was homeless for some years and I still write about homelessness. I started a project for general support for the LGBTQ crowd because they are at such inordinately high risk of homelessness. Having spent years homeless while a whole lot of people stood around and went "Meh. Not my problem. Get a real job." while I watched other people get support that got them off the street and kept them off the street (from the same people being ugly to me) I don't have to imagine the kind of pressure the LGBTQ crowd is subjected to regarding how unacceptable they are and how literally life threatening that can be in quietly prosaic evil ways. I'm not straight but I'm very hetero passing. So I'm not unacquainted with the process of examining my own sexual orientation and wondering what that means and so forth. Anyway, it's a subject I've thought a lot about and that's my take. This is not intended to be argumentative per se. It's intended as conversational, though it can be hard to adequately convey that online due in part to a lack of voice tone, body language and other important cues. I hope you have a great day.

I believe it's not proven that it can work, not that it's proven not to work at all. I suspect there is a strong motivation to discourage research into its effectiveness and discredit that research which has been done, and for understandable reasons, like not wanting people who are homosexuals to see their orientation as a psychopathology. In any case, I suspect that sexual orientation develops and crystalizes long before conversion therapy is generally resorted to. I also wouldn't be surprised if conversion therapy has the opposite effect of that intended, of re-inforcing homosexual orientations, by presenting it as central to the subject's identity.

DoreenMichele 6y ago

To my mind, that's a little like saying "Wow, it sure is shocking how forcible rape fails to get people all hot and bothered and learn to love sex." Conversion therapy is the opposite of someone deciding "Hmmmm. You know, I never thought about it before but now that I am in some new circumstance with people with different traits, I'm finding myself weirdly attracted to categories of people that never did a thing for me before and maybe, just maybe, gender per se was not the trait that really mattered to my ability to get turned on." Conversion therapy is forced on people in an ugly fashion by other people who hate them for what they are and desperately want to "fix" them. Regardless of the reason for therapy, this approach is almost always counterproductive.

CryptoPunk 6y ago
Not all conversion therapy is forced on people. I suspect the vast majority is voluntary. I also would not be surprised if it increases, rather than diminishes, homosexuality. Interventions can have counter-intuitive effects.
- DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I suspect the vast majority is voluntary. I find that a questionable assertion. A lot of therapy is pursued because someone is being given the message by a great many people around them "You are broken and you need to go get yourself fixed" in subtle and not-so-subtle ways. It's really rather hard to achieve a mental state of "I am going to therapy because I choose it for my benefit because I want this." A lot of people are there because the entire world likes to blame individuals as being somehow at fault for their lives not working rather than having compassion for the myriad ways in which the world likes to crap on all kinds of people for the crime of existing. I've done it. I went to therapy for me. But even then it was an act of defiance and some of the people closest to me were assholes acting like "It's about damn time you went and got fixed, bitch!" rather than going "Glad you are at a place where you feel comfortable confronting your personal demons from other people doing really amazingly shitty things to you, like raping you when you were just twelve years old."
  - CryptoPunk 6y ago
    I meant voluntary in the sense that the patient wants to be there and wants to be converted. As opposed to the patient being physically forced to be there and having no desire to be converted. I think the contextual factors, like what is causing the patient to want to be converted, are not relevant to how effective the therapy would be. This is not to say that those factors are not generally important, for other reasons. I think it's important not to just assume everything that is being done for the wrong reasons, is ineffective. It can be mentally comforting to believe that consequences of malevolent actions are always negative, and that argument can also be used to create public support against those malevolent forces, but I think the fallacies that get built up over time from this kind of wishful thinking undermine the objective and scientific foundations of perception that society needs to collectively reason about and tackle its major challenges, which tend to be extremely complex and necessitate more than just compassion/good-intentions to solve.
    - DoreenMichele 6y ago
      My views on life are more complex than what you are inferring. But some things are a case of "you can't get there from here." I'm fond of the saying "Going to war to preserve the peace is like fucking to preserve virginity." While in our early to mid twenties, my husband and I both ended up in therapy individually plus couples counseling. He was very introverted and hated talking to a therapist. One day I told him "You don't have to go to therapy. Therapy is a means to an end and it's okay if it isn't your cup of tea. I just want our marriage to be better and I don't care how that happens." He promptly quit both therapy for himself and couples counseling and was promptly a better husband. I never asked how he pulled that off and I never once threw it in his face that he quit or told him he should have continued for some reason. I got what I wanted out of it -- my marriage worked better, in spite of us both having issues -- and I had meant what I said. For psychological and emotional stuff, intent and context can make a big difference. I typically think of this in terms of "The definition of rape hinges on the detail of consent. If you want it and agree to it, we call it making love and if it is done against your will we call it rape." Making love is a very positive experience. Being raped is a very negative and scarring experience. They don't necessarily look all that different in the details of what happens. People tend to imagine rape is some violent event perpetrated by some random stranger and that's mostly not how it happens. The big difference is consent. And it makes all the difference. I do not have a simple nor naive view of life. I'm well aware people are complex and life is not black or white nor even shades of grey. It's a highly technicolor experience and sometimes making the hard choice is a positive and sometimes something being forced upon is takes us where we need to go, though it's not a path we would have chosen. But for something like how you feel about your own sexuality and express your own sexuality and relate to your own sexuality, I'm quite clear that it makes a big difference if you really wanted it or if it you "chose" it because all of the world had a gun pointed at your head and "choosing" this was presented to you as the lesser evil compared to what the world will do to you if you don't choose it. I was homeless for some years and I still write about homelessness. I started a project for general support for the LGBTQ crowd because they are at such inordinately high risk of homelessness. Having spent years homeless while a whole lot of people stood around and went "Meh. Not my problem. Get a real job." while I watched other people get support that got them off the street and kept them off the street (from the same people being ugly to me) I don't have to imagine the kind of pressure the LGBTQ crowd is subjected to regarding how unacceptable they are and how literally life threatening that can be in quietly prosaic evil ways. I'm not straight but I'm very hetero passing. So I'm not unacquainted with the process of examining my own sexual orientation and wondering what that means and so forth. Anyway, it's a subject I've thought a lot about and that's my take. This is not intended to be argumentative per se. It's intended as conversational, though it can be hard to adequately convey that online due in part to a lack of voice tone, body language and other important cues. I hope you have a great day.