Samantha – You are badly misinformed. I have an approach that is at odds with how reparative therapy is conducted. I have been a persistent critic of reparative therapy and am a counselor, not a psychiatrist. I am confident that some therapy will yield changes in aspects of sexuality inasmuch as those aspects are related to emotional issues (Gay psychotherapist Joe Kort believes this as well), but this is not reparative therapy. You did get my name correct, though.

The article focused a great deal on the environmental theories, and the fact is, they really haven’t proven a whole lot. Where I think they agree is on the error of basing an entire therapeutic industry on theories which are not persuasive, with the dogmatic belief that such theories explain homosexuality for everybody. Where they disagree is that Green says the environmental theories are “disproven”; Throckmorton says that their effect sizes are modest at best.

And for the record, I believe that if, in a parallel universe, the ex-gay movement were somehow based as exclusively on biological theories, we’d probably still be talking about the same problem. My own understanding of the “causes” of homosexuality is similar to Throckmorton’s, although I am generally more skeptical of most of the environmental research that focuses on specific parenting characteristics.

It never ceases to amaze me the number of psychiatrists who simply fail to grasp that the Hippocratic Oath isn’t there for impressionable med students; it’s actually there so that doctors like Throckmorton don’t go around hurting their patients.

Green states that there is no evidence for the traditional Freudian theories about close mothers and distant fathers – Throckmorton says that there is some evidence, although ‘only of modest effect statistically speaking’.

Those are two very different claims. The bottom line is that if Throckmorton is correct, Green is at best misinformed.