My view is that sexual orientation can be changed, but the change is not always voluntary. The evidence that I have for my view comes primarily from the instances where people, especially women, report a change in sexual orientation around mid life (age range 45 to 65 years old). Psychologists Lisa Diamond has compiled the evidence for those changes and talks about some of it in her book, Sexual Fluidity, Understanding Women's Love and Desire. Dr. Diamond comes up with a concept called 'sexual fluidity' and uses that to explain these changes.Can someone change their sexual orientation or is it fixed?
For some people, sexual orientation and desire are not rigid or continuous throughout their lives; rather, they can be fluid and change over time.
Unfortunately, what many communities share in conceptualizing sexual identity, is a belief in its fixed nature. From the “born this way” rhetoric of the mainstream gay rights movement seeking to root gay and lesbian identity as established at birth, or the search for a “gay gene” seeking to legitimate gay and lesbian identity through biology, sexual identity – more colloquially described as ‘sexuality’ – is cast as a characteristic or trait that does not change. Mainstream LGBTQ discourse subscribes to a model of identity formation and development that assumes an early discovery of same-gender attraction, a period of hiding that attraction (being “in the closet”), an explosive coming-out process by which that attraction becomes a publicly held identity, and finally a stabilizing of that identity over the long-term – typically, the remainder of an individual’s lifetime. For some people, sexual orientation and attraction are very fixed; however, this is not the case for all.
This depiction of fixed sexuality is often established in opposition to the conservative argument that sexuality is both “unnatural” and “a choice” – an argument that seeks to delegitimize same-gender relationships and orientations by virtue of them being non-normative, and by virtue of them not fitting into a prescribed perception of “appropriate” human sexuality often informed by religious beliefs. Countering this argument, then, often involves arguing that human same-gender relationships are both “natural” and “not a choice” – through examples of same-sex relationships in animals, same-sex human relationships in history, and the aforementioned framings of sexuality as a biological characteristic established at birth.
Human sexuality, however, is understood currently as more complex than either of these binary depictions typically show it to be. We now often differentiate sexual, romantic and aesthetic attractions and identities from each other, framing each as a constantly-changing characteristic shaped by past and current experiences, other held identities (whether racial, class, gender, ability, religious and/or others) and an individual’s own agentic desire. An individual may, for example, desire to have sexual relationships typically with women, but find themselves romantically attracted to people of all genders and aesthetically attracted to more androgynous forms of gender expression. Many years later, the same individual may find that their sexual, romantic and/or aesthetic attractions and identities have changed –perhaps as a result of living in a different environment and interacting with different communities, personal and/or spiritual exploration, a significant formative sexual or romantic experience, personal choice, some combination of all of these or for a different reason altogether.
I agree that sexual orientation is not a simple feeling but I disagree that it is immutable. Some Christians tend to explain it in terms of a simple behavior because it's easier to bring in moral responsibility ("it's a choice"). Some in the LGBT crowd don't help the situation when they try to go as far as they can to root homosexuality in biology (e.g. "born this way").
Sexual orientation may be immutable for some people, but not for all, especially when it comes to women. There's no evidence that we can voluntarily change our sexual orientation, but that doesn't mean it can't be changed. You can have change without choice.
[emphasis added]Historically, the dominant model of sexual orientation has been a categorical one, positing the existence of two fundamentally different types of people (homosexuals and heterosexuals) characterized by two fundamentally different types of sexual attraction (same-sex versus other-sex). Although this model has been revised to accommodate a third type of individual (bisexuals, possessing both same-sex and other-sex attractions), its core assumptions regarding the fixed and categorical nature of sexual orientation have continued to hold sway. As summarized in a recent Institute of Medicine report (which represents current scientific thinking on the topic), sexual orientation is Ban enduring pattern of or disposition to experience sexual or romantic desires for, and relationships with, people of one’s same sex, the other sex, or both sexes^ [1, p. 27].
This model of sexual orientation ably characterizes the experiences of many men and women, but not all of them. Over the past several decades, researchers have documented numerous cases in which individuals report unexpected changes—sometimes transient and sometimes lasting—in their sexual attractions, identities, and/or behaviors. The capacity for such change is denoted sexual fluidity [reviewed in 2••, 3•], and researchers are actively investigating and debating its prevalence, causes, and implications. One of the most significant unanswered questions regarding sexual fluidity concerns gender differences. Although early studies of sexual fluidity suggested that it was more common in women than in men [4•, 5], recent studies have begun to challenge this view.
Male sexual arousal is category-specific; men show their greatest sexual arousal to the categories of people with whom they prefer to have sex. With respect to sexual orientation, heterosexual men experience much higher genital and subjective arousal to women than to men, whereas homosexual men show an opposite pattern (Freund, 1963).
Our findings suggest that women have a nonspecific pattern of sexual arousal that is quite different from men's category-specific pattern. Heterosexual and lesbian women experienced genital and subjective arousal to both male-male and female-female stimuli.
In this study, the authors investigated the hypothesis that women's sexual orientation and sexual responses in the laboratory correlate less highly than do men's because women respond primarily to the sexual activities performed by actors, whereas men respond primarily to the gender of the actors. The participants were 20 homosexual women, 27 heterosexual women, 17 homosexual men, and 27 heterosexual men. The videotaped stimuli included men and women engaging in same-sex intercourse, solitary masturbation, or nude exercise (no sexual activity); human male-female copulation; and animal (bonobo chimpanzee or Pan paniscus) copulation.
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As predicted, however, actor gender was more important for men than for women, and the level of sexual activity was more important for women than for men. Consistent with this result, women responded genitally to bonobo copulation, whereas men did not.