GeniesLoki

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.

I'm now kinda curious what conversion therapy protocols look like. Because all of my ideas on what might work in this space are things it's really hard for me to imagine religiously motivated conversion therapists buying into.

A lot of the to-me obvious stuff was tried in the mid-twentieth century: behaviorists tried pairing masturbation with heterosexual porn, for example. Not much luck. Christian conversion therapy is mostly Freudian or biblical in orientation.

The Freudian approach emphasizes resolving gender-related traumas: the theory is that homosexuality is a sexualization of the unmet desire for same-sex friendship. So platonic male friendship, resolution of childhood trauma, teaching gender-conforming behavior, etc.