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Do You Think Orientation Can Change?

Discussion in 'Coming Out Advice' started by Azul, Jul 20, 2012.

  1. Azul

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    Any thought can go here. Can life experiences shape a person's desires?
     
  2. TheGreyMan

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    I honestly think we're all bisexual or pansexual to an extent, meaning we can fall in love with anyone somehow if they're good enough for us. Like, imagine if you were incredibly close to someone for 10 or so years. You could easily fall for them not only emotionally, but maybe physically as well. Pretty sure it's called demisexuality I think?
     
  3. Chip

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    Life experience can affect desire (i.e, preference) but there's no evidence it can affect orientation.

    So if I'm raised in an ultra-conservative, religious, bigoted family and told that it's evil and horrible to be gay, then I will certainly have a strong desire to not be gay. But it won't have any effect on whether or not I actually am.

    So what happens in those cases, where the people never deal with the conflict between what their orientation actually is, and what they want it to be, is we see the pathetic people like Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and the like... people who are clearly gay, but simply can't bring themselves to accept it and embrace and love themselves as they are. And that's sad, because they go through life very unhappy.
     
  4. WeirdnessMagnet

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    It's a highly politically-charged question. The fact is, no one ever managed to demonstrate it could be done intentionally, but it seems that many bi people have a story about either themselves or someone who "became bi" from whatever other orientation... Which of course proves little, due to the very nature of how pan and bisexuality tend to work... And I believe, that if true, it's an one-way ticket. Once a bi, always a bi.
     
    #4 WeirdnessMagnet, Jul 20, 2012
    Last edited: Jul 20, 2012
  5. GlindaRose

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    I don't think it so much 'changes' but I think it can be fluid and very tricky to pinpoint, meaning that generic categories can quickly go out the window. I know for sure that I have yet to find a word which I feel exactly describes my orientation because sometimes it feels all over the place. In general, simplistic terms I am bisexual, but there is so much more to it than just that.

    I think the most important thing is not so much that you feel like you have to define your orientation, but that you live by doing what makes you happy at any given point. If you like a guy, and he likes you back, then pursue him. If you like a girl, and she likes you back, then pursue her. At the end of the day, when you're older it won't so much matter how you describe your orientation, as you will settle down with that one person you love more than anyone else in the world, regardless of what their gender is.
     
  6. BurritoQueer

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    I believe that life experiences can trigger something in your body which would essentially make you be able to have feelings toward the other gender?
     
  7. Ianthe

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    In certain situations, people sometimes (usually temporarily) experience attractions that are outside their sexual orientation. But the underlying orientation is not changed.

    This might include situations in which potential mates of the preferred gender are not available, for example.

    I also know of people who stay with their transgender partners through their transition, and maintain a sexual relationship through that. It doesn't change their underlying sexual orientation, they simply find that their established feelings and attachment transcend their sexual orientation. If the relationship ends, they return to their previous dating patterns.

    And of course, none of it is voluntary, and it can't be done on purpose.
     
  8. LSunday

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    My personal belief is that everyone is, to some degree, pansexual (with obvious preferences), and what really determines sexuality is a very complex combination of genetics, social pressure, and early-child experiences.

    Not to say it's a choice; that's not how feelings work. On a basic level, you don't 'choose' to be happy or sad, but you aren't 'genetically' happy either. Genetics can lead to you having a more carefree personality, or give a much greater likelihood of being happy, and in your early development you form a personality around what will and won't make you happy.

    I'd imagine sexuality works a similar way. People can be born anywhere from 100% straight to 0%, and their early life can then push that in certain directions. Given the current social stigma, I'd say a lot of people who sit around 75-50% end up being straight. I do, however, believe sexuality is pretty damn near unchangeable by the age of 8 at the latest.

    But, it's a controversial issue, with lots of people who don't know what they're talking about shouting about how their belief is right and everyone else is wrong, regardless of the evidence presented. I can't presume to know that I know better than anyone else.

    But, I do believe orientation CAN change... but you can't force it to happen, and the chance of it happening after you become aware of it is one in a trillion.
     
  9. AshenAngel

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    I definitely went through a 'bi phase' that now I see was more of myself subconsiously in denial of my true sexuality. I didn't want to be gay. But there isn't anything I can do about it. I don't think sexuality is something you can change. You can try to, you can try to hide it, you can try to act differently- but you can't change who you are. This is my opinion.
     
  10. J Snow

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    Well I believe most people are bisexual to some extent and how they express their desires can be greatly fluid. Take for instance the high rates of homosexual activity in the American prison system. I don't believe that anything about a person's sexual orientation changes if their behavior changes in such a case. They are just expressing that bisexual side they hid.

    Also, research suggests that in general female sexuality is more fluid than male sexuality. The reasoning being that men are more aroused by physical imagery and women are more aroused by emotion on average.
     
  11. Night Rain

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    According to this article, it can be changed (for fruit flies, and temporarily): Scientists Make Fruit Flies Gay, Then Straight Again | Fox News

    I guess that's not too far off for humans. The only thing I'm sure is sexual orientation can't be changed by will or prayer. :grin: But the question is, will you choose to be straight if you can? If they ever make a pill to change one's sexual orientation permanent, I don't think I'll take it, because it will seem like my orientation is wrong, that I have to change it. I may consider bisexual or pansexual though, just for the fun of it. :stuck_out_tongue_closed_eyes:
     
  12. TwoMethod

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    I see the point you're trying to make, and it's a very valid one. The whole not wanting to be gay thing not being able to change your orientation is true.

    But your whole premise of life experience not affecting orientation is wrong; it's not what we know from science.

    Twin studies are a very clever way of trying to understand sexual orientation and the factors that affect it. (Twin studies are also widely used in the fields of medicine (especially psychiatry) and more general psychology.) The most interesting type of twin study is with identical twins. In cases where one identical twin is gay, it's possible to determine what the chances the other twin will be gay. What makes studying identical twins so interesting is that each twin has exactly the same genes as the other one. So if orientation was purely genetic, we would be looking for — what — yeah, 100% concordance. But that is certainly not what we find!

    In a 1991 study Bailey and Pillard, the other has only a 52% chance of also being gay. So that suggests that there is a whole lot else going on.

    But that 52% result was actually quite high, and the study has been criticised for its self-selection bias (which is when the people in the study chose to participate i.e. they weren't randomly selected and were not a representative sample).

    More recent and more accurate studies have produced much lower results. For instance, a study by Bearman and Brückner in 2002 demonstrated a concordance rate of only 7.7%. That means that in cases where one identical twin was gay, the chances of the other one being gay were actually quite low. And these are people with the exact same genes! They said that besides the effect of genetics, individual-specific environmental sources (sources that were not shared), like development in the womb (which admittedly is before birth!), experience with illness and trauma, as well as peer groups and sexual experiences had a statistically significant effect on orientation. Influences of shared-environment variables such as familial environment and societal attitudes also had a statistically significant effect, though it was weaker than the effect that the unshared experiences had. Their conclusion was that their results "[did] not suggest genetic influence independent of social context".

    Probably the best study to date was done in Sweden by Långström, Rahman, Carlström and Lichtenstein. It avoided any self-selection biases and had an extremely large sample: all adult twins aged between 20 and 47 in Sweden. They found for that all twins, genetic factors explained between 34-39% of concordance, whereas individual specific environment (again, their life-experiences that were not shared) explained around 60% of the variance.

    So to say that there is no evidence that life experience cannot affect orientation is completely untrue. Even if you somehow disagree with the evidence, there is no doubt that "evidence" exists.
     
  13. Chip

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    In going back over the studies you cite (all three of which are pretty well known by anybody who looks at this sort of material) I came away with a different interpretation than you did. Additionally, there are a number of other studies looking at twins separated at birth, adoptive children, birth order, and quite a number of other factors, and their impact on sexual orientation. (I'm excluding the downright terrible ones commissioned by or conducted by the religious loonies who have an agenda.)

    None are conclusive. And that's basically what I was saying; we can look at twins studies and every other variation under the sun and we can infer correlation, but we can't infer causation (at least, not if we're being scientific about it.) There's zero credible data that sexual orientation can be changed, and that is what the OP (and most everyone else at EC dealing with coming out issues) seems to be interested in. Even the guy who founded Exodus, the oldest "reparative therapy" program, admitted as much.

    If we're going to look at this sort of data, we also have to acknowledge all sorts of confounding factors; for example, we have no way of accurately knowing what percentage of interviewees in these surveys are closeted, or even blissfully unaware of their sexual identity, and therefore not reporting honestly. And quite a few other factors; for example, we know from the literature on sexual abuse survivors, that a number of male abuse survivors exhibit every behavior of someone who is homosexual (have sex with men, attracted to men, don't have relationships with women) and yet do not identify themselves as gay.

    The practical reality is, for a support community focused on helping people who are in the process of coming out in trying to identify who they are, we don't do anyone a service by bringing up and arguing about data from studies that are at best equivocal about theoretical aspects of how homosexuality occurs. Nobody credible argues that sexual orientation can be changed, and that is what is important to the OP and others at EC.

    People who are just coming to terms with the idea they may not be straight are desperately seeking something to hold onto in order to justify that maybe they aren't really gay, or that they can change and be straight. And as I said, the people who never get past that denial, or believe they can change, are the people who end up like Ted Haggard and Larry Craig; pathetic, closeted people who probably can't even admit to themselves that they are gay.

    What's important here is that people understand that sexual orientation appears to be pretty stable over time. Whether orientation is fixed early in life (such as before age 5, as some researchers theorize) or prior to birth, or some combination thereof really isn't important; what matters is that for the majority of people, their orientation (as opposed to their behavior or their identity, if they remain in denial) remains relatively stable over time, whether it's gay, straight, or somewhere in between. And that, in turn, is helpful in learning to love and accept oneself as s/he is, rather than clinging to a hope that s/he can change orientation.
     
  14. Bradley

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    Based on all the studies I've read, I strongly believe that sexual orientation is determined before birth, through a combination of genetic factors and prenatal development. A persons sexual interests may change or develop throughout their life, and may be impacted by life experience, but that persons sexual orientation (that is, which gender they find attractive) is hardwired at birth. The only proven cases of a change in sexual orientation are a result of brain trauma. Suppressing one's sexuality through shame and self hatred is not changing ones sexual orientation.


    This conclusion is making an awful lot of assumptions, the biggest being that all genes present in a persons DNA are active, which is simply not the case, and the second being that identical twins have identical DNA, which they don't (Identical Twins' DNA Varies | LiveScience.

    Even though identical twins have nearly identical DNA, they may develop differently in the womb, and having a certain gene does not guarantee that one will develop a certain trait, genes can be dormant or active. For example, there are cases where one identical twin develops a genetic disorder while the other remains healthy, even though they both have the gene for it.
     
  15. IllusiveRannoch

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    a change of orientation, i don't quite think so. viewpoints,......possibly. im a bit of a fan of history, especially science, and a few other subjects, and came across more than a few interesting people and events. an increase in knowledge tends to go hand in hand with the removal of ignorance, and allows you to be much more open and understanding to the world. experiences like Emma Goldman's (quite a fascinatingly cool woman) may be understandable in affecting one's viewing the sexual attraction to one gender over another based on experiences. anyways, short version of hers was as a young girl seeing a peasant beaten in the street (by men), her father (man) being to her growing up, later having to fight off unwanted sexual advances first from a teacher (man) while in school, then later from soldiers (also men) while working in a corset shop and eventually raped by a male suitor during mid teen years which she later wrote about in some of her books. so i can see how events enacted by people frequently derived from a single gender can influence how someone might view that gender. but from what i know so far, is events like these that happen to people that possibly result in some sort of psychological trauma, can be overcome through various means so the person can restore their mental and emotional well being.

    don't mistake what i just said as anything derogatory towards guys, given my own gayness >:slight_smile:, but it looks like most of the science-y stuff was already stated by the others.
     
  16. sougo

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    yes, mine has changed... I've had an attraction for men and women for as long as I can remember.

    In my teens and twenties I was a 2 on Kinsey/Klein, but twenty-something years later I'm a 4 (most of the time)

    Opportunity has definitely colored this change, the availability of men has made them my partner more often and this has made me more comfortable with a male partner.
     
  17. PurpleCrab

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    My personal opinion on this is that while most people have the potential to desire somebody of either gender(bisexual to some extant) there still hard wired gay and straight people who cannot physically desire a gender.

    So for most people, no matter what they (think) their orientation is, the right circumstances of life can bring them some surprises. But not for everyone.

    My reasoning is about keeping an open mind; that everything or almost is possible, then so is being 100% gay and 100% straight no matter what.
     
  18. Bradley

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    So your sexual orientation hasn't changed, you are still bisexual right? Do you believe it is possible to go from bisexual to 100% straight or gay? Becoming more interested or comfortable with one sex as a bisexual is not a change in sexual orientation.
     
  19. Chip

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    That depends on how we're defining what "bisexual" is.

    If we're defining it as the self-label people choose when they are just coming out, then a pretty large percentage of people who self-label as bisexual early in their coming out process are really gay, but not ready to accept that label yet. So for these people they were likely not bi in the first place, but labeled themselves as such.

    If we're defining bisexuality by some more objective standard (I have no idea what it would be), then, assuming we exclude people who have started coming out in the last year, my guess is that while you will see occasional people going from "bisexual" to "straight" or "gay", I suspect most will be stable over time rather than switch back and forth.
     
  20. Billeraphon

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    Do I think orientation can change? I ask myself this question every day.