Therapy

[Frer3]

What are your thoughts on Gay-Straight therapy? If there were Straight-Gay therapy available, would you send anybody there?

[Lexington]

As in "you're straight, but this therapy would make you gay"? No - why would I? I can't think of any issues a straight person has that making them gay would solve (other than a severe case of blandness...).

Lex

I think he means to turn Gay people into straight. Unless you're kidding and I am too dense to realize..D:

People who were gay who turned straight don't exist. They are either straight people who are just being payed to say they were once gay, or they are brainwashed gay people who always end up just realizing they were brainwashed.

So no.

Now, if there was an actual legit proven-by-science method..then still no. I am proud of who I am. I don't need to change myself for the comfort of bigots.

[Chip]

if you mean "reparative therapy" or "sexual orientation conversion therapy",

1. It doesn't work. There isn't a single well-designed study, searching the literature back more than 50 years, showing that reparative therapy is effective in changing anyone's sexual orientation.

2. It is often extremely harmful and damaging to the psyche of the person subjected to it. Simply the idea that someone can change their sexual orientation sets out an unhealthy and unreachable goal, and when it doesn't happen, the person is often left feeling even more despondent and self-loathing.

So I think it would be horribly unethical, harmful, and wrong on every level to send anyone to reparative therapy.

Now... that said, not everyone who is questioning their sexual orientation is gay or even bi. So good therapy, with a skilled therapist, can help someone explore where their true feelings are and understand and accept themselves wherever they lie on the sexual orientation spectrum, and I think anyone can benefit from that.

Also, for the record... there are a small number of cases where, for example, someone is sexually abused as a child, and the sexual abuse confuses the child's sexual preference. But preference and orientation are different. For example, if a male child is fundamentally straight, but abuse has made him uncomfortable with women, then therapy (ANY good therapy) will help him understand that his fear of the opposite sex comes from the abuse, and once that's resolved, he will again feel comfortable around women.

So the ex-gay (reparative therapy) people do get a handful of people who aren't gay in the first place, but have abuse issues and are attracted to same-sex partners as a result... those people get therapy, and end up the way they were fundamentally born (straight), and the ex-gay people parade them around as "cures." But they were never gay in the first place, so the whole thing is a scam.

And... the number of people who are abused and have their sexual orientation affected by that are very, very few.