The following is a copy of a letter we sent to the editor of Christian Today (not Christianity Today). It was about an article they published by Paul Huxley, the communications manager at Christian Concern. These are both Christian organizations in the UK. Mr. Huxley was wrong in his reading of a study recently published by The Guardian and wrong on multiple issues of fact.
The article is misleading and a good example of when bias and ideology cause one to hastily evaluate new data. Unfortunately, when met with the facts in a twitter exchange, he simply stopped responding. The article is still on their site, though it has dropped from #1 to last place overnight which I find interesting.
Dear Xia-Maria Mackay,
I write in response to Paul Huxley’s article, “The ‘born gay’ myth is dead.” While the piece offers a thought-provoking perspective on sexual identity fluidity, it conflates sexual identity with sexual orientation, which are distinct aspects of sexuality.
Sexual identity, shaped by personal, societal, and cultural influences, refers to how individuals label their own sexuality. It’s not uncommon for this label to change over time as individuals navigate self-discovery.
Conversely, sexual orientation, an enduring pattern of emotional, romantic, and/or sexual attractions, is an ingrained part of one’s personality. It emerges independently of any prior sexual experience and is not a matter of choice nor subject to change.
The article’s conflation of these terms will most certainly lead to misunderstanding. A change in sexual identity does not equate to a change in sexual orientation. Moreover, the fluidity of identity should not be used to argue that sexual orientation can be altered through interventions like conversion therapy, a practice discredited by major medical and psychological organizations due to its potential harm.
For accurate and nuanced discussions on sexuality, it’s crucial to understand and respect these distinctions. Please consider removing, or at least amending, this article as it currently does not represent the facts and will most certainly mislead readers.
I understand that such a provocative subject, particularly in its current errant form, will likely bring you increased traffic, but at what cost to the integrity of your publication?
Sincerely,
I stopped responding to your tweets because you just kept making unevidence/unprovable assertions and I was generally short on time.
You want to drive a great big wedge between self-defined identity and orientation as if they are in no way linked. I agree that the way someone describes how they feel isn’t identical to what they feel. But I would argue they are closely related – otherwise you get nonsense beliefs like people identifying as gay who have no same-sex attraction.
I only have so much time and engaged in what was quite a reasonable and pleasant exchange with you. To go publishing open letters because I stopped responding to your (many) tweets is a bit ridiculous really.
Sexual identity and orientation may be linked, but are clearly distinct, and are not linked in a way that is conducive to ex-gay/conversion therapy narratives. They are linked in the sense that people tend to label their sexual identity in terms related to their sexual orientation (e.g: a person whose sexual orientation is gay – has an enduring experience of same-sex attraction – is likely to label their sexual identity as gay – a modern categorisation and label used to describe the sexual orientation as described above). In that sense sexual orientation has a preceding relation to sexual identity and not the other way round. It is not one’s sexual identity that determines one’s sexual orientation, for sexual orientation is for most people a stable, enduring and ingrained aspect of their being. Rather one’s sexual orientation influences how you label your sexuality and how you identify. Obviously it is not sexual orientation alone that determines one’s sexual identity – the ways we categorise and think about and label those enduring and ingrained experiences (orientation) varies from person to person, culture to culture and time period to time period. But the main point is that we must distinguish orientation and identity, and we cannot use evidence of identity fluidity as evidence or orientation fluidity/change ability.
The situation is analagous to skin colour for example. My skin colour is white, and that is something that is ingrained and broadly unchanging for me as it is for the majority of people (obvs vitiligo exists, but for the sake of the analogy we can set that aside). Now the way I label and describe that skin colour and it’s significance within society is variable socially and over time – that my skin colour leads to certain social experiences, that I describe my skin colour “as white” in contrast to other skin colours, who we consider to fit into the racial category of white is different now than how it is in different countries and compared to the past. But that doesn’t change the amount of melanin in my skin. The way I see it ma change, but the biological facts do not change. The same applies to sexuality. The way I describe my sexuality is different now from how I would have say 100 or 500 years ago. But the basics of sexual orientation, the ingrained enduring experience of attraction to a given sex (or sexes) as differing from people of a different sexual orientation is ingrained and unchanging.
That’s fine, but you were the one who kept making statements that required a response from me. I simply tried to answer. And yes, it was quite a civil exchange as far as it went.
I addressed this when you made the same statement on Twitter. I said “one often coincides with the other, but they are distinct. Many have identified as straight, married a woman, even had kids but were still gay (homosexual orientation).” There are others that are bisexual but may identify as straight at one point and gay another – then bisexual later, yet their orientation didn’t change. This is not controversial.
There have been studies on this before (a better one is here) so it is nothing new that sexual identity can change. Those of us who dealt with ex-gay organizations in one way or another are quite familiar with this. The leaders of what was the largest ex-gay organization (Exodus, before shutting down) in the world first identified as gay, then as straight, then as gay again and did so even though their sexual orientation didn’t change during that period. You can’t get further apart than gay on one end and straight on the other. Oh, and those same leaders were also part of the Jones and Yarhouse study you cited on Twitter, claiming their “change.”
You titled your piece “The Born Gay Myth is Dead” and you use Hu and Denier’s study as evidence, when in fact it does not even address sexual orientation. That is why I reached out to you, and later wrote this letter. There are other ways you could have discussed the study’s results, along with the one I referenced, to write an interesting piece on sexual identity but you chose to make baseless claims. And really, using terminology like “born gay myth” is combative in the first place, especially when you provide no evidence to dispel the “myth.”
The only nonsense here, frankly, is what you wrote – a provocative headline with a false conclusion from a bad interpretation. It should be corrected or removed. Not doing so just demonstrates that you care more about hits and ideology, or perhaps even your own pride than you do the facts and your readers. I’m not sure how else I can put it.
It’s perfectly reasonable for another publication to respond to an article with a counter-article.
To say identity and orientation are ‘closely related’ is vague – certainly too vague on which to hang the assumptions about fundamental orientation change.