Who exactly is Gay?
This is a reference post about people's delusional claim to be Gay.
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Being Gay is a self-reported identity.
Except in some very few scientific cases where a penile plethysmograph is used, a person is Gay because they said so. (Penile plethysmograph is a medical device used to measure the amount of erection, invented to prevent Czechoslovakians men from evading the draft during Soviet times by saying they were Gay.)
The issue in the 20th century was getting Gay people to acknowledge to even themselves that they were Gay. You would hear people say, “I don’t like labels,” to evade Gay identity. You knew people who claimed they were Bi on the basis of something they did 14 years ago or more with a woman.
Given the hostility towards Gays in the past, a person who decided they were Gay, didn’t make the decision lightly.
The situation now is very different, we have straight women declaring they are transmen and that they are Gay transmen. We have persons who declare they are queer or bi or pansexual to be something. However, these issues are not what I want to discuss.
The fact remains that at the end of 2024, people are Gay because they have decided they are Gay. Excepting, perhaps, in some rare cases where they have been to the doctor for some issue, it is a self-declared identity.
This largely works for the Gay community. We do NOT need to do mass penile plethysmograph measurements.
However, we can’t assume that everyone who thinks they are homosexual actually is and the presumption that they absoutely must be homosexual because they said so, I think can become an issue.
Who might declare they are homosexual but aren’t?
A lot of people have faulty reasoning and might conclude they are homosexual based on one thing or another. It isn’t like there is a guide for self-evaluation generally available. Even if there was, people might not use it and even if they used it there would be people mistakenly assuming they were homosexual.
Some might be actually bisexual and not know of the concept of bisexuality and conclude they are homosexual based on being attracted to someone.
Some people basically are just nonsensical in their thinking and might conclude they are homosexual based on one flawed reasoning or another. Some people might have some need to think they are homosexual.
Further, persons with mental health disorders aren’t rare.
The World Health Organization states that it is one in 300 for adults.
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophrenia
There are people who have delusional disorders. It is possible that some people might have the delusion they are homosexual. The incidence of delusional disorders is 50 to 100 out of 100,000.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK539855/
The National Institute of Mental Health estimates that the number of people with psychosis is between 15 and 100 out of 100,000.
https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/understanding-psychosis
The United States Census states in 2020 that there were 258.3 million adults.
Assuming that there is at least 100,000,000 male adults for ease of calculation, there are somewhere between 15,000 to 100,000 people with psychosis, 50,000 to 100,000 people with delusional disorders, and 300,000 people who are schizophrenic. There are a lot of people suffering from mental disorders.
Another classification is the pathological liar. Whether it is a disorder by itself or a symptom of other disordered is still in discussion. This is a good source on the discussion in the medical profession about the problem, but doesn’t give a frequency of occurence. I couldn’t find a good source online. Even if the frequency is just 1 out of 10,000, that is 10,000 pathological liars in a population of 100,000,000. It would certain supply enough people for a religious group to show them off as ex-Gays.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pathological_lying
This is not to berate those Gays who have mental disorders, it must be tough to live in a world with homophobia and suffer at the same time with a mental disorder.
What I want to point out there are a lot of possible ways where a person might think they are homosexual, because of faulty reaonsing, mental illness, or some other disorded thought process.
Likely there are people telling other people they are Gay but they aren’t.
Why is this important?
In most cases it isn’t important. However, in some cases it can be important.
[1] Psychiatrists and homophobic Christian groups have made claims that they have changed the sexual orientation of homosexuals.
These claims usually fall a part when the person later states they weren’t changed and resume homosexual activities.
What we don’t consider is that maybe they never were homosexual. They had a mistaken idea or delusion that they were homosexual but they weren’t.
It isn’t as if they do a penile plethysmograph measurement prior to check sexual attraction to both men and women to verify a claimed identity.
[2] Claims of being Gay while having sexual relations with a “Gay” transman or that they would date a “Gay” transman.
We generally assume that they are either not Gay and are bi, or are just saying stuff that isn’t true. There is the saying, “Woke in the streets, gender critical in the sheets.”
We don’t think that they might be delusional or disordered in their thinking and think that they are Gay when they aren’t.
Again, it isn’t as if the “Gay” person had been measured with a penile plethysmograph to see what degree of attraction the person had to both men and women. If they are really Bi, does their having sexual relations with a “Gay” tranman really say anything about Gays and being Gay is same gender rather than same sex?
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Whenever someone wants to make an assertion about themselves being Gay and being something or doing something that is incompatible with being Gay, we need to remember, no one has objectively assessed their sexual orientation.
We need to remember that they might sincerely believe they are Gay as some delusion or result of disordered thinking.
In the future as social hostility lessens against Gays, we likely are going to encounter more cases where the person thinks they are Gay, but aren’t. Also, some ideologue or religious person wanting to make a claim about homosexuality and will want to use these deluded people.
We will need to point out that there is no objective measure of their sexual orientation and tell them until they have it, shut up.
Penile Plethysmograph
I wrote a paper in the 1980s about the penile plethysmograph as a way of invasively detecting homosexuality. In Canada they had a thing they stuck in your throat, and if you didn’t gag, they believed you were homosexual. At the time they were developing devices to track how you were viewing an image and they had determined that men and women looked at things differently. I don’t have the paper anymore, I never got any Gay publications to publish it.
The following is from Wikipedia and seems accurate.
In post–World War II Czechoslovakia, Freund was assigned by the communist government the task of identifying among military conscripts men who were falsely declaring themselves to be gay to avoid the draft.[9][10] "Freund (1957) developed the first device, which measured penile volume changes... to distinguish heterosexual and homosexual males for the Czechoslovakian army."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penile_plethysmography
I think sex rather than gender is a better measure of orientation. If you have a male genital preference and you have male genitals, this is gay. I know in the transgender world and in transgender discourse, this is highly controversial. But I would bet it is the most consistent measure of orientation. Cases on the margins may fall within your description of delusional or disordered thought or may just be normal albeit rare variation.
Can these reasonings be applied equally to straight people? Or people who self
identify as straight but perhaps aren’t or think they are straight because they are delusional or mentally ill?