Archive for April, 2012

When the author of a study that is your sole example to make a scientific claim in a court case repudiates his own work, what does that leave you with? Not much. That is now the case with the federal trial revolving around California’s Proposition 8. Sure, the trial was a mockery in and of itself, with the Pro Prop 8 site offering virtually nothing in the way of testimony to demonstrate why gays should be discriminated against. They did go after a legal argument though, whether homosexuality was an immutable condition. In other words, can you change, or are you born that way?

That is a legal argument that does little to explain why gays should be discriminated against, and goes more towards the argument that they should be discriminated against because they chose to be gay. It is their own fault. They could change if they wanted to. How can they be a protected class if it is a class of their own choosing? With that same reasoning, though, you could also argue for discrimination against people based on their religion.

Virtually the entire scientific community rejects the hypothesis that you can simply change your sexual identity. There is an exception. His name is Dr. Robert Spitzer, and his peer reviewed study arguing that homosexuals can change and become heterosexuals was published in the October 2003 issue of the Archives of Sexual Behavior.

Spitzer himself is a highly respected researcher. He was a leading voice in the early 1970s to declassify homosexuality as a mental disorder in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) of the American Psychiatric Association.

His work was cited in the Prop 8 case- it is pretty much the only work of its type to be available to cite. It has been cited by virtually every anti-gay organization. Now, though, Dr. Spitzer admits that his work was flawed. And wrong.

Spitzer even apologized to the gay community for the harm that his flawed research caused, writing, “I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some ‘highly motivated’ individuals.”

The problem with this and any similar studies is that it negates the entire concept of bisexuality. If I am bisexual with a predominant interest in men, but still have some interest in women, then marrying a woman because my religion and society tells me that is the only acceptable choice is not such a big deal. It is a big deal, though, if I were at the far end of the Kinsey scale with no sexual interest in women at all. Until you eliminate this factor from the study and only look at men with no interest in women who were converted to a new found sexual attraction to women, then your study is meaningless.

We can see problems right away with Spitzer’s study. It was self selecting for men and women who were Christian with religious beliefs that told them that homosexuality was sinful. That was true for 80 percent of the respondents. They were motivated by their religion to change. Did they lose their same sex attraction? Only 11% of the men claimed that they did.

The real flaw of the study was noted in the letter by Spitzer to the editor of the Archives of Sexual Behavior. He wrote: “” The Fatal Flaw in the Study –- There was no way to judge the credibility of subject reports of change in sexual orientation. I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible and not self-deception or outright lying. But the simple fact is that there was no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.”

It was self-reporting by people who were highly motivated by their religion to make others believe that homosexuality could be cured- even if they themselves in actuality did not find a cure for themselves. As Spitzer pointed out, it answered the question of what people who had undergone reparative therapy and claimed it was successful had to say about it, without looking more deeply at what really happened to them. It did nothing to screen out those who had failed changing their orientation, but were motivated to lie about it by their religion to offer others hope that they could change.

There is no question these people were highly motivated to change. Their religion made them absolutely miserable about being gay. Over a third had seriously contemplated suicide over it. What the study failed to ascertain is whether anyone had experienced any real change. It was a bad study. It answered no interesting or even relevant questions.

Spitzer wrote in the conclusion of his original study, “the mental health professionals should stop moving in the direction of banning therapy that has, as a goal, a change in sexual orientation. Many patients, provided with informed consent about the possibility that they will be disappointed if the therapy does not succeed, can make a rational choice to work toward developing their heterosexual potential and minimizing their unwanted homosexual attractions.” He was the only mainstream psychologist making that claim, a claim he now retracts.

That leaves the anti-gay movement with no serious peer reviewed research to cite. Not that they will stop citing his original study, despite being repudiated by the author. His retraction of the study is important, because it pulls away the last vestige of scientific respectability to the reparative therapy movement.

Sexual orientation is not something that can be changed through therapy. Spitzer’s retraction puts the final nail in the coffin of one of the cruelest scams ever to be perpetrated on the desperate- men and women who were made desperate by the hate filled rhetoric of their fellow believer, the very same people who were pushing this sham therapy on them.