Not a big fan of this comparison. Just because it was true of left-handedness doesn't mean it's true for other things. It also shows that hitting left-handed kids in schools was actually working, whereas it's not possible to "cure" depression or sexual orientation this way.
Actually sexual orientation is fluid and can be adjusted through acclimatization, it's how pedophilia is treated, it just doesn't work on unwilling participants. People who are straight occasionally do become bi or gay, and vice versa.
It depends what you mean by sexual orientation. For example, I don't think adult pedophiles ever stop being sexually aroused by children. They just learn not to act on their urges.
> People who are straight occasionally do become bi or gay, and vice versa.
Past puberty? Do they really change sexual orientation or do they realize they were X all along? And is it really the result of acclimatization or the result something else, like a biological process? I admit I didn't know that was a thing. Also, a problem is that most of this research is based on self-reporting, which is notoriously unreliable. Ideally researchers would find ways to measure sexual arousal directly, but I guess it would be more difficult to find participants and setup experiments.
>I don't think adult pedophiles ever stop being sexually aroused by children. They just learn not to act on their urges.
Adult pedophiles can stop being sexually aroused by children, because there's still a cognitive component to it. In the same way that you might for example, stop being attracted to your partner if you start associating them with a negative memory, a softcore pedophile might lose their attraction to children if they begin to associate it with a negative emotional response from the child.
>Past puberty? Do they really change sexual orientation or do they realize they were X all along?
They quite literally change sexual orientation. The same way you might stop liking sugary foods if you go off them for a while, or how you might develop a taste for leafy greens if you give them a go enough times.
Sources would improve your claims. Aversion conditioning is understood to change behavior more than desire. And many people do not develop a taste for leafy greens or heterosexuality after decades.
As far as general sexuality, the keyword you can look for is 'sexual fluidity', and as far as pedophiles are concerned, Mashall's "Are pedophiles treatable?" covers current approaches that seem to be successful in attenuating or replacing attraction to children.
>Aversion conditioning is understood to change behavior more than desire
Behavior and desire have a complex relationship, it's not necessarily the case that behavior follows from desire.
>And many people do not develop a taste for leafy greens or heterosexuality after decades.
Many people don't, but some do, and my comment concerns the 'some', hence my saying 'occasionally'.
It's debatable whether that is true for everyone. I know I've tried to make myself like men on several occasions. I was definitely willing and not doing it out of self-hatred.
I'm the opposite, I found that certain mental tools I'd developed in order to overcome my fear of heights and such, had inadvertently also allowed me to adopt just about any sort of sexuality (save for things involving sharp incongruity because my adhd pulls me out of it) with about two weeks to a month of conditioning. I did this a couple of years ago to increase the number of races I'm attracted to, in order to increase my potential dating pool.
Have you tried with acts you don't like or just physical characteristics? I found that I could see attractiveness in men, but I could never engage in PIV intercourse or give them oral. (Which pretty much rules dating them out because that's a shitty thing to do). I can condition myself into most things, but men seem to be one of my sharp incongruities.
I'd bet that a substantial portion of humans are naturally bi and shaped by their environment but there are some humans that really are Kinsey 0s or 6s. We're just rarer. I'd also guess the reputation that conversion therapy has for not working is because anybody in such a hostile environment with even a smidge of opposite-sex attraction is going to act 'straight' and the only people sent off to the conversion camps are the people for whom it wouldn't work.
