Hypo: You Are Gay

[Benedictus]

It is the near future. Drug company scientists have developed a once-yearly, pain-free injection that will make you straight. The treatment is expensive, but trollish conservative advocates receiving cartoonish sums of PAC money have successfully invoked the timeless comical liberal tenet that every kind of pharmaceutical concoction must be covered by health insurance (which is, naturally, also mandatory) so the cost-to-end-user is nominal.

 

There are no acute side effects. The drug does not appear to affect non-sexual behavior, so if you are a man, you will still be the sharpest dresser in your office, and if you are a woman, you will still be partial to cutting your own hair in the style of Brian Bosworth. The only change you will experience as a direct result of the shot is that the gender to which you feel a sexual attraction will be reversed.

 

The treatment is too modern for the medical community to be aware of long term side effects, or to fully understand the consequences of stopping treatment after taking it routinely for many years.

 

Describe your reaction.

 

I'd wonder why research time was spent on this rather than something that kills people or makes them suffer, you know, like an illness.  I don't know any drug that doesn't potentially have acute side effects. Not all drugs are covered by health insurance. I also don't believe that identity, or personal construction, can be compartmentalised. So changing sexuality would have a direct impact on other aspects of who that person is. It's not just about what they do or what their incliantions are in isolation. Also, gender and the sexual organs someone is born with (their sex) aren't the same thing. Gender is largely socially constructed.

[93 Phillies]

I'll give a serious answer.

 

I believe that any good Catholic should take the drug, especially if all other aspects of the person would be preserved.  Man and woman are complementary.  Two men or two women -- not so much, although I'll grant a certain degree of complementarity with respect to temperament and even certain aspects of gender.

 

I disagree wholeheartedly.  I'm straight and a woman is more appealing to me.  But I know that a lot of people are not born that way, and that is perfectly fine.  No one should be pressured into changing their sexual orientation.  A good Catholic to me is someone that can has the capacity for empathy such that they will not only be tolerant, but embracing those who are treated poorly by the rest of society.