GeniesLoki

Hard cosign. I'm extremely strongly of the opinion that there is a significant amount of (though certainly not total!) freedom of choice in both gender and sexuality, having exercised such choice myself, and I really resent discourse about it being all innate and immutable.

There is (= should be!) choice about what you DO, sexually and in terms of your gender presentation. There certainly is around your identity. But choice about your sexual attraction and internal sense of your gender? Not much, if any, of that is.

I always get confused by this. I've made lots of intentional choices about my attraction and gender. The fact other people haven't seems very strange to me. Frankly if you're certain about your identity it's often because you've not thought about it very much.

Hmm, both can change - I am not saying they're fixed - but being able to go "I think I will now be attracted to X" or "I think I will now have a Y gender" is not most people's experience. If it was, conversion therapy (sic) would work.

Maybe my ingroup is unusual. But I've always thought the problem with conversion therapy is that brainwashing someone against their will produces trauma more easily than change. Bihacking seems to work for a decent fraction of people who try it.

Conversion therapy is often undertaken consensually by people who are quite desperate to change, and it generally doesn't work.

In that instance conversion therapy is undertaken by people who have tried and failed to reorient their attraction on their own.

Yeah, that's my theory too. You'd expect conversion therapy to work occasionally because of bi people/sexual fluidity but it does not. My guess is that if you grow up fundie and there is any way you can be straight you take it *before* you go to conversion therapy.