Pat – Hope you feel better. There are quite a few people whose experience is contrary to your confidence. A few folks I know personally told me just as confidently that they had changed only to tell me a year or more later that they had not changed.

[Byrd on page 157 of Where to Turn]:
…[W]hy all the interest in proving that homosexuality is hardwired…? Perhaps [Simon] LeVay [who did the 1991 studies on the hypothalami of gay men] has the answer. He noted that “people who think that gays and lesbians are ‘born that way’ are more likely to support gay rights.”
LeVay’s conclusion finds support from lesbian psychologist Lisa Diamond, who noted that “it may be for now, the safest route to advocate for lesbian/gay/bisexual rights is to keep propagating a deterministic model: sexual minorities are born that way and can never be otherwise. If this is an easier route to acceptance (which may in fact be the case), is it really so bad that it is inaccurate?”
(Diamond, Sexual Fluidity: Understanding Women’s Love and Desire [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2008]: 257).

Byrd fails to include Diamond’s answer to her own question in her very next sentence in her book:

[I]n the long run, yes [it is bad], particularly because women are systematically disenfranchised by this approach.

The fact that Byrd does not include this answer when it was immediately following is a sign of deliberate misquotation, not simply a “reinterpretation.” To get to people’s points on this thread about “interpretation of data,” science versus values, obviously, as one can see by the statement above, Diamond has strong values regarding the disenfranchisement of women.
Given that Byrd’s research is about eradicating anything but the heterosexual, he cannot possibly find an ally in Diamond. But this is no excuse for leaving out her moralism, for partially quoting her to make her seem duplicitous or morally empty. Byrd points out that “over 50%” of scholars working sexuality research are gay, which he believes leads to bias — which may very well be the case — but his bias is not enough to explain away his behavior here.
Also, worth thinking about is that this is not simply a question about sexuality, but also a discussion about gender, given that Byrd couldn’t follow Diamond to her moralistic ground anyway because of the place of women in LDS culture. “Sexual fluidity” in women, for Byrd, is only a “good” thing if the lesbian becomes hetero: a wife, a mother, with little ecclesiastical power. The accepted lesbian, either celibate or with a partner, puts into question male-only ordination, because the “male-female” pairing as a balance of power would be untenable. I agree with the assessment on this site (not on this thread, but on one of the Mansfield/Byrd posts) that the LDS faith is more bent on “change of orientation” because of its theology of compulsory heterosexuality.
I do not think this gender-sexuality relationship is so strong in other conservative faiths, which offer gay/lesbians an “out” in the form of “a lifetime of celibacy.” Mansfield says Mormonism offers this, too, and LDS leaders have in recent years hinted at gays being “fixed” in the next life, but I don’t think Mansfield recognizes how much damage a bunch of celibates-for-life in Mormon culture does (particularly celibate females). In other words, I can see where Byrd is coming from, his “cultural realism” regarding Mansfield being “cynical” with regard to “the whole,” even as I also see where Mansfield is coming from in terms of “scientific realism” in terms of “the individual.” FYI, the fact that Mansfield is recently engaged [to a woman] might be telling of the cultural pressure in Mormonism to marry, have sex and make babies regardless of individual sexual variation.