Supreme Court turns away challenge to California ban on 'gay conversion' therapy

TheGoverness said:

perpetuating the false idea that you can somehow "change" someone's sexuality.

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That is your opinion. There is no evidence that a person cannot change their sexuality. This is not to say that there is concrete evidence that one can change their sexuality mind you. But anecdotally, there are many people who claim to have changed their sexuality, every person who "realizes" that they are actually gay after living a straight life with an opposite gendered person, is changing their sexuality. If sexuality is set in stone and is not malleable, everyone would realize they are gay, straight or bi with their first orgasm, but this is not the experience of many gay people, one of my favorite LGBT related songs is Tom Robinson's Glad to be Gay, written in protest of British police, British Newspapers and the public's treatment of fellow gay people. Tom who knew he was gay since he was a boy, says he just fell in love with a woman without anticipating it, and then married her. There are many people who claim they were gay and now they claim they are straight.

L0neW0lf said:

That is your opinion. There is no evidence that a person cannot change their sexuality. This is not to say that there is concrete evidence that one can change their sexuality mind you.

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All of the efforts to change/mold people's sexual orientation have not been demonstrated to work in the slightest.

But anecdotally, there are many people who claim to have changed their sexuality,

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Anecdotal evidence is not reliable, nor is it scientific.

every person who "realizes" that they are actually gay after living a straight life with an opposite gendered person, is changing their sexuality.

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That's 100% false. There are gay people that have led straight lives, and have had children. That does not mean their sexuality "changed"; they were always gay.

If sexuality is set in stone and is not malleable, everyone would realize they are gay with their first orgasm,

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That's not true at all. And nobody said it was set in stone either. Although it is not definitive, based on the evidence and data researchers have gathered so far, sexuality seems to be determined by certain environmental and hormonal factors.

Is Sexual Orientation Determined at Birth? - Born Gay? - ProCon.org

, one of my favorite LGBT related songs is Tom Robinson's Glad to be Gay, written in protest of British police, British Newspapers and the public's treatment of fellow gay people. Tom who knew he was gay since he was a boy, says he just fell in love with a woman without anticipating it, and then married her.

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Tom Robinson has never claimed that he "changed his sexuality", as far as I've seen. And he's obviously bisexual, not gay.

TheGoverness said:

All of the efforts to change/mold people's sexual orientation have not been demonstrated to work in the slightest.

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There are many ex-gay, and ex-straight people who disagree with you.

Anecdotal evidence is not reliable, nor is it scientific.

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I agree, but you are of course not presenting any scientific or reliable evidence that proves sexuality cannot be changed. So there's that.

That's 100% false. There are gay people that have led straight lives, and have had children. That does not mean their sexuality "changed"; they were always gay.

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Here you are denying the experience of others. Of course there are gay people who got married and used women as beards. But those are not the people I was speaking about, I am speaking about men and women who claim that they "realized" they were gay after spending years thinking they are 'straight'. I have read multiple accounts of such people.

That's not true at all. And nobody said it was set in stone either. Although it is not definitive, based on the evidence and data researchers have gathered so far, sexuality seems to be determined by certain environmental and hormonal factors.

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Yes it seems that way, but no one can tell you what actually causes a person to be gay, which makes your whole claim that sexuality cannot be changes even more ridiculous. We do not have a great understanding about how sexuality works.
Moreover, biology can be changed.

Tom Robinson has never claimed that he "changed his sexuality", as far as I've seen. And he's obviously bisexual, not gay.

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He identified for most of his life as a gay guy, last time I checked gay men are not sexually into women. Either he spent his whole life lying about being gay, or he was gay and then his sexuality for whatever reason changed and he started to realize he is into women, you continuously deny that the latter can happen but there are many many men and women who claim this has happened to them. You do this not based on any scientific evidence.


The reality is, as far as I can tell, scientific literature on this subject matter is sparse. Sexuality is still not entirely understood. Maybe sexually cannot be changed, maybe it can. What we know for sure.

L0neW0lf said:

There are many ex-gay, and ex-straight people who disagree with you.

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There are ex-ex-gay people who disagree with those 'ex-gay' people, and I would love to see someone who claims to be 'ex-straight-'

RAMOSS said:

There are ex-ex-gay people who disagree with those 'ex-gay' people, and I would love to see someone who claims to be 'ex-straight-'

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Sorry but they can disagree all they want, and it would not be relevant. As for loving to see examples of so called late bloomers, there you go:

For Carren Strock, the revelation came when she was 44. She had met her husband – "a terrific guy, very sweet" – at high school when she was 16, had been married to him for 25 years, had two dearly loved children, and what she describes as a "white-picket-fence existence" in New York. Then, one day, sitting opposite her best friend, she realised: "Oh my God. I'm in love with this woman." The notion that she might be a lesbian had never occurred to her before. "If you'd asked me the previous year," she says, "I would have replied: 'I know exactly who and what I am – I am not a lesbian, nor could I ever be one.'"

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and:

This was certainly true for Laura Manning, a lawyer from London, who is now in her late 40s. She had always had a vague inkling she might have feelings for women, but met a man at university, "a really gentle man, Jeff, and I fell in love with him, and for a long time that was enough to balance my feelings". She married him in her late 20s, had two children in her early 30s, "and once I'd got that maternal part of my life out of the way, I suddenly started thinking about me again. I started to feel more and more uncomfortable about the image that I was presenting, because I felt like it wasn't true." In her late 30s, she began going out clubbing, "coming back on the bus at four in the morning, and then getting up and going to work. I was still living with Jeff, and I just started shutting down our relationship. He knew I was pushing him away."

The marriage ended, and Manning moved out. She has since had two long-term relationships with women, and says she's much happier since she came out, but suspects that her biological urge to have children, and her genuine feelings for Jeff, made her marriage inevitable on some level. "The thought of sex with a man repels me now, but at the time, when I was in my marriage, I didn't feel that, and I didn't feel I was repressing anything. The intensity of feeling in my relationship with Jeff overcame and blanketed my desires for women."

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Why it's never too late to be a lesbian