Ann Widdecombe delivers a speech during a Brexit Party campaign event. (Photo by Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)

Ann Widdecombe, the newly elected Brexit Party MEP, has sparked yet another round of the ācan we cure gay people?ā discussion. Widdecombe was asked on Sky News about a piece she wrote in 2012. Sheād written that people with gender dysphoria will receive medical help and psychological therapy, and so will āthe infertile who desperately want childrenā: āYet the unhappy homosexual should, according to gay activists, be denied any chance whatever to investigate any possibility of seeing if he can be helped to become heterosexual.ā
Widdecombe, when asked about it on Monday, was not enormously successful in her attempts to pour oil on those troubled waters. āThere was a time when we thought it was quite impossible for men to become women and vice versa,ā she said. āThe fact that we think it is now quite impossible for people to switch sexuality doesn’t mean that science may not yet produce an answer at some stage.ā
One way to tackle this is to write it off with a glib headline: āBREAKING NEWS. 71-year-old Catholic conservative has suspect views on homosexuality. More on this story as we get it.ā Widdecombe is fairly advanced in her years, deeply religious and rather mad, so it is not surprising that she has views on LGBT matters that are offensive to younger, more secular, more tolerant people (and you wonder, if the Brexit Party is full of politicians like her, about its survivability as a political force as the older, more homophobic generations die off). But thereās more to it.
First, for all that Widdecombe uses the language of helping unhappy people, as in any other psychotherapy, the history of āgay curesā and āconversion therapyā is troubling. Much of the theory underpinning it comes from really odd post-Freudian psychoanalysis about seeking out an idealised āgood penisā because of some trauma involving the patientās mother; from 1952 to 1973 homosexuality was declared a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM). Until 1988 it still remained in there in the confusing name of āego-dystonic homosexualityā.
And the treatment was often brutal. Some subjects had electric shocks applied to the hands or genitals as aversion therapy while they were shown homoerotic images, for instance. Others underwent electroconvulsive therapy ā not the modern, safe and effective treatment for hard-to-treat depression, but the old kind, barely distinguishable from torture. In rare cases, brain surgery ā lobotomies ā were performed.
This is not ancient history but took place in Widdecombeās lifetime ā in the US, at least as recently as 1951, in West Germany at least as recently as 1969. The more modern ātreatmentsā are less savage and sometimes a bit laughable ā āpraying the gay awayā with a bit of Freudian nonsense thrown in ā but still, you can understand why people would be deeply wary of any moralists coming along talking about āhelpingā āunhappy homosexualsā with therapy.
One reason that gay people might be unhappy is that large parts of society ā including but not limited to many members of the Conservative Party and the Catholic Church āĀ insist that they have need of a ācureā or an āanswerā. You do wonder whether Widdecombe has, as she might claim, no concerns about āhappyā gay people continuing to be gay, or if the language of providing therapeutic options for those who want it just is a mask for bog-standard homophobia.
But, you might ask, does this stuff work? Can you change sexuality? Could I become gay, if I wanted?
There are many difficulties with answering this question. One, how do you define āworkā? Some early therapists, the proponents of lobotomies and electroshock therapy, claimed high levels of success ā one scientist said that 58% of his patients were ācuredā. But as others pointed out, they donāt appear to have changed sexual orientation; the brutal treatment simply made them less capable of sexual arousal of any kind. That doesnāt strike me as a victory worth celebrating.
There have been, as far as I can tell, very few good studies into whether this stuff works. Thatās understandable, because most scientists wouldnāt want to start asking whether you can cure something they donāt think needs curing. But in 2001, Robert Spitzer, one of the psychologists whoād campaigned to get homosexuality removed from the DSM in 1973, published a study which suggested that some of the 200 homosexual people heād interviewed had undergone some change in their sexuality following therapy, albeit not complete change.
That study, however, was heavily critiqued, and in 2012 Spitzer apologised for it, saying that the critiques were largely fair ā the study relied on self-reported behavioural change, and for obvious reasons, people who have undergone voluntary conversion therapy will have an interest in saying that it worked. Another study in 2002 found that 88% of subjects saw no change, and just 4% found that it āshift[ed] their sexual orientationā. The remainder became largely asexual.
I am always wary of treating any single study as definitive, so I wonāt. But it matches other, less formal evidence. For instance, according to the psychologist Richard Isay in his book Being Homosexual, the pioneering sex researcher Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues āfor many years attempted to find patients who had been converted from homosexuality to heterosexuality during therapy, and were surprised that they could not find one whose sexual orientation had been changedā. The ones who claimed they had were āsimply suppressing homosexual behaviourā and āused homosexual fantasies to maintain potency when they attempted intercourseā. One said that, having been homosexual, he had “cut out all of that and don’t even think of men ā except when I masturbate”.
You could also note the large number of prominent anti-gay voices who later turn out to be gay. Thereās a website that counts down the number of days since that last happened. At the time of writing, itās 135 days since, in fact, a Mormon gay conversion therapist came out as wanting to date men, and youād think that if conversion therapy was going to work on anyone, it would be highly motivated people like that. And yet it consistently doesnāt.
Thereās also the point that there is significant evidence that homosexuality is at least partly biologically influenced. For instance, the ratio of the length of your second finger to your fourth finger is linked to your exposure to androgen hormones in the womb, and appears to have a correlation with your sexuality. You canāt pray your fingers longer. You also canāt pray yourself into having fewer older brothers, and yet birth order ā and specifically how many older brothers you have ā seems to be correlated to your likelihood of being homosexual as well. You certainly canāt pray your DNA into different patterns.
As with most aspects of personality, it appears that the āshared environmentā ā all the stuff we have in common with our brothers and sisters, our upbringing and schooling ā has little to no impact on our sexuality. These are fundamental parts of our lives, and yet they donāt make much difference: sexual preference is all about genes, chemicals in the womb ā and sheer randomness.
It is very hard ā if not impossible ā to alter these deep-rooted aspects of who we are. It would certainly take more than a two-week course of therapy and some willpower.
‘We are not broken, and do not need fixing’
Julie Bindel recalls her experience at a gay-conversion centre in the US
In 2014, while researching a bookĀ I went undercoverĀ to a fundamentalist Christian counselling service in Colorado. I posed as an unhappy lesbian desperate to become “normal”, yearning to reunite with my family and with the church. My persona, Joanna, was a classic example of the type of lesbian who would have been fed negative messages about her sexuality all of her life.
I told my counsellor that, at the age of 16, I had been discovered kissing a girl in the kitchen of my home, had been thrown out by my parents, and disowned by the church.
But, rather than tell me about the gay-affirming churches that have been opened in both the US and the UK, attended by happy lesbian and gay Christians, my therapist told me that I was damaged, and needed healing. She tried to pick out examples from my childhood to blame for what might have damaged me even though I insisted I had been happy and loved by my parents.
She then suggested that perhaps I had been sexually abused by a male family member, but had buried the memory. By the end of this therapy, despite having been an out lesbian for almost four decades, and being totally “in character” as Joanna during the sessions, I felt depressed and anxious. It reminded me a little of how I felt as a 15-year-old, realising I was in love with my best friend, and being called a freak by the boys who had decided I was a lesbian because I didn’t want to date them.
I do not believe in the gay gene, but I do believe our sexuality and sexual attraction is pretty deep-rooted from early on in life. The reason I am so against conversion therapy, though, is because we are not broken, and therefore do not need fixing.
I love being a lesbian, and my heart breaks for those young women and men in religious communities that are tortured through this so-called therapeutic method. It should be illegal, and those that practice it should pay the price, not the lesbians and gay men who have to endure it.
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