Homosexuality Cured?

One of the major refrains I remember from my libertarian days was that homosexuals do not choose to be gay.  “Why would someone choose to be a member of an oppressed group” they would say?  Well, that argument seemed to go out the window once you had women like Rachel Dolezal and Martina Big pretending to be black.  After all, if blacks are an oppressed group, why would a white woman pretend to be one?

In any event, the argument against homosexuality being a choice was that instead it was a set of environmental, genetic, or some combination of both factors which led to a person being gay.  This seemed to have even more support when one observes the statistics that most pedophiles were themselves molested (though tests with polygraphs indicate those statistics are untrue).  Still, the suspicion remained: is homosexuality because of some physiological phenomenon?

Well, some researchers have done experiments on rodents which indicate that both yes, it is and yes it can be cured.  It’s a decently long article with a bunch of scientific jargon and I’m no more a scientist than Bill Nye, but I’ll share some key lines and my takes.  One of the earliest lines is that the experiments in animals and humans “suggest that sexual orientation is determined during early development as a result of the genetic background and factors which influence the interaction between sex hormones and the developing brain before birth (Bao and Swaab, 2010, 2011).”  These studies indicate that there is a relation between sexual orientation and genes involved in the regulation of neurotransmitters.  To test this, scientists messed with the receptors for dopamine, serotonin, and other chemicals to elicit different behavior. 

I’m going to summarize briefly what this says in a nutshell: 1) there are likely measurable physiological reasons why people become homosexual or heterosexual, 2) giving the right chemicals to a person during early development can lead to them having a psychological disorder or different sexual preference than they otherwise would have had, and 3) pregnant women on medications can cause serious problems in their offspring.  The last line of the article is perhaps the most important: “Since a high proportion of fetuses are exposed to chemical compounds acting on neurotransmitters, this is of great clinical importance.” 

One study depleted serotonin in rats and this caused more homosexual behavior, suggesting “that an absent serotonergic transmission underlies a male–male sex-preference” (Liu et al., 2011).  Other studies indicated that it wasn’t due precisely to a particular part of the brain, but rather to the various pharmacological agents used in the study.  In any event, both studies indicate these chemical imbalances cause this behavior. 

Another interesting takeaway was that Fluoxetine, a commonly prescribed antidepressant, had different impacts on homosexual than heterosexual men, further indicating real physiological differences between heterosexuals and homosexuals (Kinnunen et al., 2004). The idea that homosexual and heterosexual brains respond differently to the same chemicals/medications is a very strong indicator that the brains are different, and that homosexual attraction is not a conscious choice but rather there is a physiological explanation for it. I also want to be clear, that doesn’t excuse homosexual behavior any more so than heterosexual desire excuses fornication.  The point is just that the underlying issue has a material cause.

Dopamine receptors having problems also can lead to more gay behavior and fixing it relieves it (Chen et al., 2012).  Similar starting and stopping of gay behavior happened with a schizoid person who was prescribed a medication to treat his disorder, developing homosexual hypersexuality, and then upon no longer having the medication, returning to heterosexuality (Mete et al., 2016).

I’m reminded of one of the things an old friend of mine told me about his clubbing days.  He said that MDMA releases so much serotonin that it depletes your supply and that it’s important not to do it too frequently because of this natural depletion. This is backed up by scientists who say “by releasing large amounts of serotonin, MDMA causes the brain to become significantly depleted of this important neurotransmitter, contributing to the negative psychological aftereffects that people may experience for several days after taking MDMA.” 

Now, it may be a chicken and egg scenario, but homosexuality and the drug scene go together like peanut butter and jelly.  I don’t wish to go down that rabbit hole for this article, but it is likely that many homosexuals began as heterosexual clubbers who later just got so into that culture that they became long-term practicing homosexuals.  While that sounds like idle speculation, recall the infamous Tiger King who married two men (who had never previously had sexual encounters with men) by plying them with drugs constantly.

The article also pointed out that more evidence indicates that people who aren’t straight are more likely to have some sort of other mental disorder. People that aren’t straight have a far higher risk of different disorders.  Homosexuals had 1.5-2.6 X higher risk for depression and anxiety than heterosexuals, as well as schizophrenia and other disorders (King et al., 2008; Petterson et al., 2017), (Bostwick et al., 2010), (Semlyen et al., 2016; Scott et al., 2017).  The suspicion is that both homosexuality and these other disorders are due to abnormalities in the regulation of neurotransmitters during development (Iovino et al., 2018; Bernstein et al., 2019; Peedicayil, 2019).

While some may want to blame social stigma for the higher prevalence, one study indicated genetic factors accounted for a majority (60%) of the correlation between sexual orientation and depression and another revealed that this connection between abnormal sexual preference and other mental disorders was even found in gay-friendly Netherlands (Zietsch et al., 2012; Sandfort et al., 2001).

The studies do indicate that permanently changing the sexual attraction for adults is not really feasible (LeVay, 2011; Balthazart, 2012).  It can be done temporarily with chemical changes (as the schizoid person temporarily becoming homosexual indicates), but that means that a current homosexual would need to regularly be prescribed a medication to cease being gay. 

The idea that problems with neurotransmitters cause not only homosexuality but other disorders indicates that if we could fix these issues in the womb, we could eliminate many unfortunate disorders from our society.

One concern is that apparently a quarter of pregnant women last year have a psychiatric disorder and 10% of those women (so 2.5% of all the pregnant women last year) were prescribed psychotropic drugs during pregnancy.  SSRIs during pregnancy increase the risk of the offspring having autism or other disorders.  Even more concerning, anti-epileptic medications given to pregnant women correlate with high prevalence of gender dysphoria in children and nicotine during pregnancy increases lesbianism in the daughters (Dessens et al., 1999, Ellis and Cole-Harding, 2001). This shouldn’t surprise anyone.  If women aren’t supposed to drink alcohol during their pregnancy or eat too much fish, who thought it would be alright to give them SSRIs?

We live in an overly medicated society.  Women take so much birth control medication that it has caused hermaphroditism in frogs (as per Alex Jones’ refrain of “they’re turning the frogs gay”).  Is it any shock that pregnant women taking medications that have unintended side effects on themselves will have drastic side effects on their children?  Is the solution simply to stop giving pregnant women SSRIs?  A knee jerk reaction is “yes,” but then there’s the concern that this would lead to the women getting suicidal and killing themselves and the child.

Perhaps a different approach, treating depression with therapy and dietary changes when possible, would be a better alternative.  Regardless, the research is clear that once again, the pharmaceutical industry is ruining the world in strange and drastic ways.