This is not a related study, but thought I woudl ask here. I think I asked about this elsewhere on your blog, but I will ask again becuase I don’t think you got to reply.

Do you have any explanation for the Hershberger triplet study, that one of the triplets turned out gay, and showed gender non conforming behaviour from a very very young age, and the other 2 who didn’t turn out gay, did not?

Ivan.

You used that typo to try to catch up with me, didn’t you? 🙂

You caught me on a day when I left my jump drive at home, so I can’t look the 1975 article up. The abstract is unclear to me, and my notes are ambiguous as well. Jeesh!

Also, the 1981 abstract merely says “was no consistent trend for one therapy to be more effective than the other”. It looks like it will take some digging further into that art icle as well to understand exactly what responses they observed. “No more effective” doesn’t tell me much if he’s claiming success in covert sensitization as well.

But I did recently look at the discussion in the 1981 article to learn McConaghy’s ethical thoughts on aversion therapy. Since he defended it as behavioral therapy rather than sexual reorientation therapy, that argument falls in line with what you said.

sorry

It looks like he said that after aversion therapy gay men self reported less feelings and behavior but that the physical response as measured by penile volume. In other words, behavior and identity may have changed but (to paraphrase badly) the penis wants what the penis wants.

And I don’t know why that second hyperlink is messed up.

Nathaniel McConaghy is famous (some would say notorious) for having been very heavily involved with efforts to change sexual orientation in the 1960’s through the early ’70s. Some of his efforts involved electric shock and apomorphine injections (which induces extreme nausea). He finally concluded in a paper published in 1975 that none of those treatments were successful.

And yet, he continued his research, publishing another paper in 1980 in which he presents the findings of 20 subjects who were treated by electric shock therapy. In the paper, he did acknowledge some of the ethical issues surrounding electric shock therapy. But he nevertheless defended it, not as a means of changing orientation, but for changing behavior — in his words, “behavior therapy”.

Given his career in trying to forcefully change gay men’s behavior (and not women’s, that I know of), I have no doubt that his preference would lean toward social factors.

This is the first paper I’ve seen in which he tries to examine factors influencing sexual orientation. And it’s likely to be the last. McConaghy passed away in 2005.

Maybe when I get to Dallas over Christmas I can drop in at a library there.