WHERE MEDICINE LETS US DOWN

In recent years there have been many stories about banning medical treatment aimed at “converting” gay men to heterosexuality. It’s been termed conversion therapy, reparative therapy and gay therapy. 

An Australian doctor was barred from practising after prescribing chemical castration to “cure” a gay teenager. The British psychiatry association reminds its member that conversion therapy was banned there in 2008. And, in the US, California has just become the first state to ban such treatments for people under 18, saying they have no basis in science or medicine.

California Governor Jerry Brown deserves praise for signing the legislation on October 1. The bill will come into effect on January 1. But what if the reason Brown cited is one day negated – if research finds scientific or medical proof that gays can in fact be “cured”? 

 It’s dangerous to defer to medical proof alone. We tend to regard medical validation as the final answer, but sometimes it is not factual but theoretical, or a matter of consensus. New discoveries can change established beliefs. Tying the future of homosexuality to current medical or scientific belief leaves us vulnerable to future shifts in the majority opinion of researchers.

Scientific evidence is usually a sound basis for social policy, but we need to remember that science and medicine often deal in probability rather than fact. Sometimes other explanations are better answers.

We’ve all heard stories about gay men who marry women and happily have babies. We also meet married men having affairs with men. This is the diversity of human sexuality, and it knows no limits.

We make a mistake when we attach our sexuality to our identity. Society believes that the way we have sex defines who we are, but life throws up contradictions. Some people’s sexuality is fluid. For others it’s fixed. 

So there’s no need to ban conversion therapy. In fact we don’t need such therapy at all if we recognise sexual fluidity. 

Medical reference is meaningless. We just need to make people face the truth and accept sexual diversity. Then we can detach it from our identity.

Overt, unquestioning acceptance of medical or scientific proof and banning gay therapy merely endorse the correlation between sexuality and identity.   It might sound like a measured answer now, but it can’t resolve any issues. We’re way beyond any medical explanation.