ABSTRACT
The decision, recorded in the article by Spitzer, for people who have a well established history of sex with persons of the same gender to seek professional help and religious encouragement to start a life of having sex with persons of the other gender, becomes remarkable only in particular political and scientific circumstances. I will not discuss the methodology or substance of the article in any detail. This will undoubtedly be the topic of a number of other commentaries. My concern is how the political and scientific contexts shape the way in which individual changes in gender preference in erotic relationships are understood. Only two comments about the changers—the folks who made the change seem to have done so for reasons that have to do with becoming more conventional in their social performances rather than for a more satisfying “sexual,” in the narrow sense, life. And it may well be that the amount of “sturm and drang” involved is a function of the moral condition (which is a consequence of its political status) of their prior sexual lives—sinners always proclaim the difficulty of giving up their sins as they return to the moral community, in this case the moral community of straightness.
