Star post
Who gets the better deal? Transgendered people, or transoriented people?
Today, not for the first time, I read a comment complaining that people who are transgendered face problems of non-acceptance. It reminded me of the non-acceptance experienced by people who are, or who want to become, transoriented.
Transgendered people and transoriented people both experience non-acceptance, and for the same basic reason.
Transgendered people are (for example) male, but want to be accepted in future as female (or vice versa). In some cases, trangendered people have had their bodies changed, so that they resemble more their acquired gender, and less their birth gender. Transgendered people experience rejection on the part of people with strong, fixed beliefs. Beliefs that it is impossible for a man really to change himself, or be changed, into a woman (or vice versa).
Transoriented people (as I am defining the term here) have a similar tale to tell. They have experienced (for example) same sex attraction, but have decided that they want in future to be people who are attracted to the opposite sex (or vice versa). They want other people to accept them as they are, complete with their desire to change, or that fact of their having already changed, their “sexual orientation” (so-to-speak). But, unlike transgendered people, they have changed their minds rather than their bodies, so that their behaviour resembles more that of their acquired sexual orientation than the sexual orientation with which they have formerly identified. Transoriented people often experience rejection on the part of people with strong, fixed beliefs too. Beliefs, in this case, that it isn’t possible for somebody who has in the past said that he has had a homosexual orientation really to change into somebody who now has a heterosexual orientation to all practical intents and purposes.
Which do you think is the more unkind? Being transgendered and finding oneself shunned or insulted by people who don’t believe that changing one’s gender by changing one’s body is possible? Or being transoriented, and finding oneself shunned or insulted by different people, who don’t believe that changing one’s sexual orientation by changing one’s mind is possible?
Despite the obvious parallels between the plight of both transgendered people and the transoriented people, health professionals seem willing to offer transgendered people and transoriented people completely different “help” (if one can call what they offer “help”, in either case).
During the past few years, I think that I have discerned an increase in the tolerance shown to transgendered people. Those who say that they have changed their gender by changing their bodies are more accepted than they were. During the same period, I have noticed an increased intolerance shown towards transoriented people. Those who say that they have changed their sexual orientation by changing their minds are disliked more than ever.
Click on the picture to access the link
Transport For London banned an advertisement recently, which they had accepted an order to display, on the sides of London buses. All the banned advert did, was to remind the public politely, that transoriented people exist, and are proud, and suggested that any members of the public with a bad attitude towards transoriented people should “get over it”. What was so controversial about that? Yet some of the verbal abuse directed at transoriented people during the discussion that followed in various web places was a sight to behold.
I wonder how the sizes of the trangendered and transoriented populations compare. Even more, I wonder why transgendered people are better accepted than the transoriented people. Changing one’s mind isn’t as drastic as changing one’s body, but it seems to be far less socially acceptable. Why is there such a double standard?
Cet animal est très méchant. Quand on l’attaque, il se défend.
JohnAllman.UK 
The reason for all this absurdity and intolerance is the rise of the LGBT movement. Yes of course people should be able to change their minds and they should also be able to get therapy to help them do so if they wish. To demand physical sex-change operations on the NHS while being intolerant of a mental change is ridiculous nonsense – just like all the other ridiculous nonsense of the LGBT movement.
“Born gay” – false. Disproved by science.
“Born in the wrong body” – false again. Rubbish that has no scientific meaning.
“Transsexual” – delusion. Even an operation can only change you superficially. Your real sex is genetic and never changes.
“Gender is a choice” – false. Gender difference is now proven by science and sex is not merely a matter of external genitalia.
“Being gay is equal to being straight” – false. Being homosexual is just confused.
But be careful – when Roger Helmer the MEP pointed out this contradiction however quietly and politely, he was vilified. Socialists and liberals wrote attacks on him shouting that they “hated ” him. No kidding.
I personally have known several people who changed their minds about being homosexual. Ex-lesbians are quite common.
I am one such myself. I was recruited into homosexuality at the age of eleven, and made a decision never to return to that vice (as I then thought of it) when I was seventeen.
Yesterday, I found the following peer-reviewed learned paper, which claims a 47% success rate for talking therapies, in rectifying the “deviant” homosexual sexual orientation, into a “normal” heterosexual orientation.
Procedures of the Royal Society of Medicine Volume 61 August 1968, pages 27-30
Meeting December 12 1967
Treatment of Sexual Deviations
Dr Ismond Rosen (Paddington Clinic and Day Hospital, London)
The Basis of Psychotherapeutic Treatment of Sexual Deviation
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1902459/pdf/procrsmed00153-0071.pdf
The paper that followed the above in that edition of the learned journal documented a less successful therapy, an aversion therapy.
I doubt that Darwinian evolution of our genes has been such since Dr Rosen published his discoveries, as to invalidate that science of yesteryear for present-day purposes. Rather, the change since those days has surely been to our “memes”, as Richard Dawkins calls them. What I know, from the experience of living the life that I have, might have enabled me to write a book myself, albeit one that any publisher would likely feel terrified to publish in today’s climate of LGBT fury, entitled “The Sexual Orientation Delusion” (mimicking the title one of one of Dawkins’ meme books).
We who have practised homosexuality in our pasts, but who have repented, and accomplished successful sexual orientation change efforts, have simply been erased, as though we did not exist. Our testimony doesn’t suit the present-day media-controlling ruling class, and the Gaystapo will probably never allow the likes of us anywhere near a microphone, to proclaim to the world our joyful personal testimonies of recovery.
You weren’t gay, you were experimenting. Lots of people experimented with all sorts of things when they were teenagers. That doesn’t mean you’re gay any more than being done experimenting when you grow up means you’re “transoriented”.
I think it’s disrespectful to discount lived-experience personal testimonies, expressed within the terms of the model into which they fit most easily in the minds of those writing them, instead trying to shoehorn those testimonies into a different model with which you feel more at ease yourself, by redrafting them.
“I was recruited into homosexuality at the age of ten”…I don’t know exactly what that means, but if you were in a “homosexual” relationship at that age, you were a victim of sexual abuse. Regardless of the gender of the offender, you should not have been exposed to any sexual conduct at that age. I am sorry if that is what happened. But to then say that you were “recruited” into “homosexuality” is nonsensical. If, in later years, you would have enjoyed an adult consensual homosexual relationship, you either responded in the vein as you were so innocently exposed and believed yourself to be gay, or you truly felt homosexual tendencies. Either way, saying it was a “vice” does great disservice to the homosexual population, as much as intolerance to transoriented people, such as you claim to be.
I think that “erasure” is an apt term to describe what you are attempting to do here, with Gagged Dad’s revelation about his past. You are trying to neutralise his testimony of his experience of life after homosexuality.
Those whom you describe as “the homosexual population” do a “great disservice” themselves, to the likes of Gagged Dad, in offering to rewrite for them their frank autobiographical confessions, in language that you or they would have preferred them to have used when telling their own personal stories.
That is sickeningly patronising, if you want my opinion. It amounts to saying, “Thank you for sharing information about your own suffering and recovery, as you incorrectly understand life’s lessons that you think you have learnt. Oh but, if only you would adopt my own completely different understanding, arrived at in a few moments upon reading your story, of what lasted several years of your life, and about which you have been pondering for several decades since – an understanding that I have that is utterly superior to your own understanding of the multiple years of your own life about which you opened up to us briefly … If only you would start to think about these issues the way I do, you would be thinking correctly about what you had lived through for the first time in your life. You would be all the happier if you changed your understanding of what happened to you in the past, to a fresh understanding that you were willing to learn from me.”
Garbage. You cant change gay to str8. What can be done is to drive gays so far in the closet they become pathological liars aboutt their own sexuality
the enhanced self hatred is tthen spewed out in horrible ways by these victims of what is usually called “abuse” eg “gays support the westboro baptists nut cases.”
the whole fix the gays thing is collapsing. Keep riding that horse and it will fall over and you to will be crushed like a dog turd stepped on
There isn’t really an argument in your comment, is there? You seem merely to be asserting beliefs that others do not share. There is no attempt on your part to make those beliefs seem at all reasonable to the reader whose own life story provides a counter-example that disproves at least the second of your beliefs, because that belief it is a generalisation to the entire population, which a single counter-example can disprove.
The beliefs you express are (1) that when somebody experiences dysphoria about his gender, doctors can mutilate his body, and that this will somehow reverse the process that happened at conception that assigned him his birth gender. His gender will have been “re-assigned”. In contrast, your second belief is (2) that nobody is able to change his or her mind.
Those are the two beliefs of yours that I find don’t work for me. The latter belief in particular (nobody can change his mind, for example by choosing different sexual behaviour in future) is contradicted by the personal experience of changed minds of every single person those who has ever changed his mind about homosexuality. Their experience trumps other people’s experience of perceiving themselves to be unable to change their minds. Why? Because a single exception disproves a general rule, in this case the rule you assert, the universal impossibility of anybody ever changing his or her mind about homosexuality.
I don’t believe that gender can really be “reassigned”. I know for a fact that people can make decisions about homosexuality, and carry those decisions out, because I have done it myself. You dismiss my experience, merely because it is an experience you haven’t yet chosen to have yourself.
You haven’t changed your mind about homosexuality (or so I am assuming, but only for the sake of argument). So, as far as you are concerned, nobody else is able or allowed to change his mind about homosexuality either.
In contrast, I remember changing my mind about homosexuality. I am tremendously pleased to this day that I did.
I would hope to educate my son that human beings have free will. You would presumably prefer him to grow up believing in determinism. Your argument for determinism? Merely asserting that I am talking “garbage”, when I assert freedom of the will. That’s neither clever, nor respectful.
The doctrine that there are no “ex-gays” is an insult to every “ex-gay” on the planet. “Erasure” is an apt term to use, for this arrogance.
The onus of proof is on you, that becoming (as it were) “ex-gay”, a decision that many have taken and practised, isn’t a decision that anybody who wants to is equally free to take and to practise. Calling that belief “garbage” doesn’t discharge that onus of proof.
If you want to comment on the London Gay Pride Parade there is an opportunity to do so in the Daily Mail:-
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2351540/Gay-Pride-London-Angels-brides-risque-nuns-Colourful-scenes-Londons-annual-Gay-Pride-Parade.html
-JG.
A person who is in the public eye and who has led a straight married life and who has children from that marriage may become divorced from his wife, and that is a sad reality for many. But if that person happens to declare himself gay, such as Gareth Thomas,then he is handed the ‘Sportsman Of The Year Award’ by Stonewall for his brave and inspirational example. Despite the destruction of his family.
A transoriented person can expect no more than to be vilified and mocked by the same organisation and ignored by the politically influenced psychiatric profession.
Its a one way system.
In your post you redefine the term “transoriented” http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=transoriented to mean anybody who changes their mind about their sexual orientation then your “evidence” of discrimination seems to be that when gay people “transorient” their friends don’t want to hang out with them anymore.
Of course you don’t offer up any examples of this happening and never once consider that there might be other reasons their friends don’t hang out with them anymore. Maybe the “friends” that don’t hang out with them were actually sex partners who are obviously not needed for that anymore. Maybe they insist on preaching to their friends or trying to convert them into their new “lifestyle” and their friends are sick of it. Or, maybe these are just people who you’ve invented in your head.
Regardless, your old friends not wanting to hang out with you anymore is not something we can legislate away. You’ve given no examples of anybody losing benefits or jobs. No examples of any “ex-gay” people being beaten to death or thrown out of their home for their lifestyle choice. No examples of an “ex-gay” person being bullied to the point of suicide or being told by their legislators that they’re a bigger threat to the country than terrorists.
You’ll have to forgive my lack of sympath
You don’t appear actually to be responding to the content of my post. There’s nothing in my post about losing friends, for example. Your comment is fairly good an example of a “straw man” argument.
Who poses the greater threat to “the country”, terrorists or homosexualists, is a topic I’d prefer to leave until another time. However, it is abundantly clear that homosexualists pose a vastly greater threat to Gagged Dad himself, and his son, than terrorists do. Perhaps you should read his own guest post on this blog, so that you know what you are talking about.
I really hate the term ex-gay. It’s labeling and stereotyping. I just prefer to say I switched teams. And I really hate it when people ask me questions about how and why I did. I am like seriously AIN’T NOBODY GOT TIME FOR DAT.
You are entitled to your privacy. 🙂
Ironically, your article on ‘Transoriented erasure’ erases half of the transoriented population. I’m talking about those people who started out their adult life firmly believing that they were heterosexual but later ‘changed their mind’ as you put it and now consider themselves to be homosexual. I hope that you would advocate an equal level of tolerance and respect for people who have changed their minds about being heterosexual as you do for those who have changed their minds about being homosexual.
Neil
I wrote,
“Transoriented people … have experienced (for example) same sex attraction, but have decided that they want in future to be people who are attracted to the opposite sex (or vice versa).”
I don ‘t see in that the asymmetry you accuse me of. Nor can I see why it would be be “ironic” if that asymmetry was present.
Have you a citation for your statistic, “half” – your apparently claim that about 50% of the transoriented population have transitioned straight-to-gay, rather than gay-to-straight?
My observation is that nobody is trying to “erase” those who transition from straight to gay, like celebrity Elton John, and like the father of one of the most damaged of the adults in my circle, a father who inflicted that betrayal and confusion upon his own son when his son was only about two-and-a-half.
Nobody muscular is posing for photographs, as Billy Bean did in a hate poster against ex-gays, brandishing a baseball bat, overprinted with hate speech threatening to “destroy” any “ex-straight” people he came across, calling them names. Billy Bean’s hate was solely against ex-gay people, like Gagged Dad, a guest blogger on this blog.
No Mayor of London has interfered to prevent ex-straight people telling the world, in adverts on the sides of buses if they are willing to pay, that they exist, and that those who resent this ought to get over it.
No government is threatening to make it unlawful to offer psychotherapy to people attracted to the opposite sex as well as the same sex, that will help them to cultivate their same-sex attractions, and to eradicate their opposite sex attractions, because that is the lifestyle choice they have made for themselves, but are finding it hard to stick to.
And so on.
I do not believe in the doctrine of “sexual orientation” myself. (See “B*ggers CAN be choosers!”, one of my earliest posts.) I believe in free will, not determinism. I resorted to using that sort of dumbed-down language in this post, purely in order to make my own simple point as quickly and as clearly as I could, to people too busy to take a long lesson in thinking properly about sex and sexuality from the likes of me, before I could even get to the point, expressing that point as I would wish to.
Become sceptical about all the non-scientific doctrines you have passively absorbed, all your life, especially the idiotic “sexual orientation” doctrine, a doctrine from the school of thought known as mechanistic determinism. Nobody is born with an immutable biological attribute that science has established exists, and can be measured, which drives them inevitably, deterministically, to spend their lives wishing that they could have sex with people of their own sex, condemned to devise strange, deviant sexual acts that mimic – even parody – (and often less hygienically), sexual intercourse, for want of a quorum of the necessary body parts for THE sexual act that starts babies.
Please settle for nothing less in this life than your body enables you to perform. If your mind resists that destiny, please conquer your mind. Please don’t give up on life, protesting, “I just can’t. There’s something abnormal about me stopping me. It might be a fault in me, but it’s not my fault that I have this fault!” That has been your indoctrination. You are not obliged to believe any of it.
You look young. Maybe you will learn wisdom. If we are machines, not men, we can choose nothing. If we are men, not a machines, then we have free will, and can chose everything we do. The only limits on how we choose to use our bodies as they can be used, are the strengths of our wills, and what choices, if we make them, our circumstances make feasible. I cannot fly, because I was born without wings. But anything my body enables me to do, I can choose to do, and so can you. Any vice or dirty habit we choose to abstain from, we can abstain from, unless there is something wrong with our wills. Decide how you want to live, and live that way.
If your choice has been to transition from straight to gay yourself, then I would love to hear about the process that culminated in your making that choice. The pros and cons of choosing that direction of transition are seldom discussed, because bullies who believe in determinism, who do not believe that humans can make choices at all, try to silence all such discussion.
John
Your answer is interesting, and says a lot about your beliefs and world view. However, you have not answered the question: would you advocate an equal level of tolerance and respect for people who have changed their minds about being heterosexual as you do for those who have changed their minds about being homosexual?
You have asked whether I would would advocate an equal level of tolerance and respect for people who had changed their minds about being heterosexual as I would for those who had changed their minds about being homosexual. My answer naturally depends upon what we agree that the words “tolerance” and “respect” mean, in the context of that question.
There is also an assumption in the question, that people can “be” heterosexual or homosexual, other than as a description of their habitual behaviours, including any statements that they habitually make about their “sexual orientations” (as the cliché goes).
As I have explained, my view is that whereas behaviours can be described as heterosexual or homosexual, I do not think that it is enlightening, wise, scientific or honest, to describe people as heterosexual or homosexual, or to encourage people to limit themselves in that manner. See B*ggers CAN be choosers! on this blog, and/or Gagged Dad’s second guest post here, Homophobia – the hitherto elusive “gay cure”?
Have you also read Je Suis James, my post yesterday?
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