Lynn Gazis-Sax of Noli Irritare Leones, reflecting on Hugo Schwyzer’s recent post endorsing the idea that orientation might be somewhat plastic after all raises a really important distinction.

Mutable and malleable aren’t the same thing. One of the reasons that the APA removed homosexuality from its list of mental illnesses was that reparative therapy, despite repeated efforts, really did have a super lousy track record (the other reason was, of course, that psychiatrists became less willing to believe that homosexuality was particularly broken). It still does. But people do sometimes shift along the Kinsey scale. Not generally from one end to the complete opposite, but still enough to be significant. Sexual orientation is sometimes mutable, but does not appear to be as malleable as it is mutable; no one has found a way of consciously changing it that works with any regularity at all. And those people who do experience shifts appear to experience them in unpredictable ways, that you can’t bottle up and use to get the same result in someone else.

She said it here.

That’s the distinction I was missing in, this post about the absurdity of people worrying about “protecting” heterosexuality, for instance, when trying to explain my conviction that orientation is innate.

Since I think orientation is a lot more complex than we’re led to believe I’m perfectly comfortable with it’s being mutable — that who we’re attracted to can shift over time. I’m not comfortable, however, with the idea that orientation is malleable — that one can externally influence another to change what they desire unless they’re ready at that point in their life to be disposed to that influence in the first place.