Redirecting sexual orientation: Techniques and justifications

This essay reviews efforts to alter sexual orientation using behavioral, psychodynamic, hormonal, pharmaceutical and surgical methods. The essay also examines various justifications offered for such therapy and shows how these have changed as a pathological interpretation of homoeroticism has been abandoned. While such therapy was once justified in language of psychopathology, some current justifications for conversion therapy now treat the matter of therapy as a matter of personal choice and do not invoke the language of pathology at all. That a formal medical rejection of a psychopathological categorization of homoeroticism has not altogether eliminated efforts to redirect sexual orientation suggests that it is ultimately a moral and not medical devaluation of homoeroticism that at bottom drives continuing efforts to control and redirect sexual orientation.