Questioning Unspoken Suppositions

Dear Editor

The responses to the letters from James Taylor and me about Harold Bourne's article ‘A homosexual turns to women’ (BJP 19(4), June 2003) have included the assertion that we wish to censor debate. But actually, seeking to question unspoken suppositions is of the essence of honest discussion. In our letters, we contested the bases of Bourne's writing, and, in particular, the apparent assumption that lesbian and gay sexual identity is inherently a sign of pathology. It is notable that the responses to our letters have not significantly addressed this issue.

The assertion that a particular identity is pathological has substantial implications for the lives of the individuals concerned, which makes it reasonable to want to know the grounds for the assertion. For lesbians and gay men, apart from the reinforcement of general social homophobia, there are the historically well-evidenced issues of questionable medical and psychotherapeutic treatment, of a tradition of exclusion from the psychotherapy profession, and of the reinforcement of negative self-esteem by introjecting the psychotherapist's beliefs, amongst other things. If the attitudes and beliefs of psychotherapists concerning same-sex orientation turn out to rest on no sustainable evidential base, then psychotherapy has much to answer for. It's ironic that what ought to be the most self-examined of professions is sometimes very reluctant indeed to look at its own assumptions.

The principle that only heterosexual identity is healthy usually turns out, on examination, to consist in little more than the assertion that it is ‘natural’. Such a proposition is unavoidably circular. It says that something is natural because it is natural. It provides no ground for believing it other than its own authority, sidesteps all need to justify itself, and doesn't allow that reality might be more complicated.

Actually, it's those who think thus who turn out to be undertaking whatever censorship may be going on. The overwhel