How come it's ok for people to want to change their gender but not their sexuality?
Hogeyz
Posts: 1,086 Forum Member
✭✭✭
I was watching the programme "Cure me, I'm gay" by Dr Christian Jessen, and like most right minded people I was horrified at the baseless and, lets be honest, bigoted "cures" for homosexuality. Like Christian Jessen I believe that sexuality is a spectrum and that your sexual preference is something you are born with and that you should just be who you are, and be proud of it.
However this got me thinking, although I find the notion that someone would want to change their sexuality as unnecessary and wrong, people change their gender quite often and people are more often than not supportive. Your gender is, if anything, more easily definable than your sexuality, so why the difference in attitude to people wanting to change it?
I have no problem with people getting sex changes, to each their own, but for example if a male friend said he was getting a sex change, he would probably receive support, however if a gay friend suggested he wanted to become straight, I imagine the response would be less than supportive.
Why do people think there is such a difference?
However this got me thinking, although I find the notion that someone would want to change their sexuality as unnecessary and wrong, people change their gender quite often and people are more often than not supportive. Your gender is, if anything, more easily definable than your sexuality, so why the difference in attitude to people wanting to change it?
I have no problem with people getting sex changes, to each their own, but for example if a male friend said he was getting a sex change, he would probably receive support, however if a gay friend suggested he wanted to become straight, I imagine the response would be less than supportive.
Why do people think there is such a difference?
0
Comments
To which I would say the brain is, and it's probably better to adapt the body to fit the brain, than adapt the brain to fit the body.
Edit: That said, there have been people who were born and lived as one gender, identified and lived as another gender for a while then went back to living as and identifying as their original gender. They couldn't have been becoming what they always were deep-down.
I might be wrong, but I thought sex was biological (and can't be changed without an operation) but gender is in the brain, and is what people 'change'. (Although I agree with a poster above who said they don't really 'change' and it's more understanding how they've always been?)
I don't know for sure, because it's not something I've personally been through, but I do think Sex, Gender, Sexual Orientation and Romantic Orientation are all different things, and don't always sync up.
That's a good point. I think people should be accepted in whichever way they choose to identify. However there's little to no evidence that altering the brain to make you straight can actually be done.
You can't ever change your sex. It's in your DNA. You can change your phenotype but not your chromosomes.
You're right about gender not being a physical thing, that's exactly what I mean when I say that people don't change their gender. It seems like they do, when they start telling people about being trans and changing their appearance, but that stuff is just external - they never identified with the gender they were assigned in the first place. They're not changing from it, because they never were it in the first place.
It's analogous to thinking that a person has changed from straight to gay when they come out - they were never straight in the first place.
If someone wants to change their sexuality, then it's their life so it's not for anyone else to comment. People should just mind their business all round.
Exactly! It's the nature of the cures that is the issue not the notion of a cure itself.
Whereas, some people want to change their gender because they identify with the opposite gender and feel like they are in the wrong body. Even if that means they will face prejudice.
So, I feel in the former case, it is done because outside influences have made them unhappy in who they are. That makes me feel uncomfortable. Terming it as a 'cure' makes me more so.
In the latter, they are doing it for themselves and not because of anyone else. That seems fair enough.
But that might be oversimplifying it.
If someone wants to change their sexuality from gay to straight then chances are they are uncomfortable being themselves and they are trying to escape the prejudice that comes with it, which is quite sad really.
I used to think so, but I'm not so sure now.
Maybe it is something that can change over the course of your life.
It seems to be a human perception that you have to be either this or that. Maybe nature doesn't work with labels and your sexuality can perhaps change quite naturally.
But I don't think it's something you can make change. Even if you could it wouldn't be something I'd support.
I worry that a person might feel compelled to do it for flawed reasons but, then again, I'd have the same concerns about a person who wants gender surgery too.
I kinda wonder if the idea of a sex-change is a little too, erm, simplistic.
I mean, if a tall person was utterly convinced that they should be short, would we endorse a decision to undergo surgery to achieve that or would it be better to try and convince them that being tall is okay?
I'm not saying we should try to convince transgender people that they should try to alter their sexuality to match their body but maybe we should consider that maybe we should consider that it's okay to just be a female brain in a male body (or vice versa)?
Bottom line, though, is that if a person genuinely wants to tinker with their body or their mind, best of luck to them.
Homosexuality isn't a disease so the notion of a cure is absurd and deeply offensive. The only reason people want to change sexuality is because of outside influence to change so it's not a question of what they want but what they feel forced to do. That makes it a moral issue.
And quite possibly the deception involved in giving the treatment, and the element of coercion that seems often to be present. The whole thing stinks, basically.
Neither is having large breasts but plenty of women want breast reduction ops (or vice versa).
Actually the more I think about this the more irritated I am by the presumption that it's perfectly fine for people to change whatever they want but if someone wants to change their sexuality it suddenly becomes a massive "moral issue".
Yes, I agree. But that is criticising the nature and implementation of the 'cures' not the the idea of a 'cure' itself.
Yes, there is evidence. In areas of cognition where differences between the sexes are apparent, trans people show brain activity consistent with cisgender controls of the same gender as them, not the same sex. In other words trans men's brains behave like cisgender men's brains, even though they are biologically female. And vice verse for trans women.
Pretty much suggests that this activity is affected by gender, not sex. That of course doesn't rule out environmental influence because the brain is plastic - it will reorganise itself based on new input. So it doesn't mean that being trans was set in stone, but it at least physically corroborates how trans people describe their mental experiences.
On your other point: gender is inherently not the same thing as sex - this has always been the case, it's just that now society is more open to acknowledging that than covering it up. If gender followed sex perfectly, then we would already have had three categories of gender identity for many years: male, female and intersex. But intersex people have been pushed into identifying as men or women throughout history, because gender is a social construct. If it followed biology perfectly then that would not have happened.
I think this notion makes some people uncomfortable because gender can be such an important part of our identity that we think of as being in our DNA. It can be difficult for people to acknowledge that they have been shaped by society's structures - takes away their sense of control.