About sexual disorders¶

I suggest that the Church should review her usage of the word “disorder” when speaking about queer people.

I suggest the following definitions:

disorder¶: Something that is out of order and disturbs your social life.
extraordinarity¶: Something that is out of order and does not disturb your social life.

Queer people have an extraordinary sexual orientation or identity. Something with your sexual orientation or identity is out of order, it is extraordinary. We can say that being queer means that you are “out of order”: Your sexual orientation developed into the wrong direction, it makes you choose a partner of the wrong sex. Where wrong means different from the reason why nature developed sexual drive. It is a form of impotence or disability because you aren’t able to have biological children (unless you somehow manage to have at least a short moment of sex with a “real” partner).

None of above means that being queer hurts other people or that it disturbs your social life.

An extraordinary sexuality can become a disorder only if you fail to integrate into your environment. In a homophobe society, homosexual people can develop a disorder. Homophobia hurts innocent people. That’s why homophobia is a sin.

Note that pedophilia, unlike queerness, is a disorder (see e.g. Pedophilia Is a Mental Health Issue. It’s Still Not Treated as One Shayla Love, vice.com, August 2020). Unlike queerness it can lead humans to hurt other humans. There were cultures where pedophilia was considered normal: Pedophilia in Ancient Greece and Rome

There is no valid reason to feel guilty about being queer, and there is no valid reason to reject queer people from society. Homosexuality is an exception to the rule and an exciting phenomena at social, ethic and scientific level and an enrichment for humanity.

Living as a homosexual has sometimes been difficult because many human civilizations were afraid of the phenomenon. Homosexuality is a challenge because it confronts our society with the question “What to do with those who are different?”. It is only a few generations ago that humankind started to understand that homosexuality is actually a gift to us all because it helps us to realize the miracle of sexuality.

The UN are working hard on this. Article 16 of the UDHR was written in a time when most people didn’t worry about homosexual people. I guess that one upon a time they will optimize the formulation to make things clear. This process takes time because not yet all nations are ready to embrace homosexual people as a gift. But we are on our way. In November 2018, the UN Human Rights Office launched a special series of articles to commemorate the 70th anniversary of the UDHR where it addresses the issue:

https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=23927&LangID=E

They are deviations from norm that fails to satisfy the original biological purpose of sexuality.
They are not by themselves a source of negative psychological or social effects.
There is no valid reason to feel guilty about being homosexual or transgender, and there is no valid reason to reject disordered humans from society.
They are exceptions to the rule and a valuable phenomena at social, ethic and scientific level and an enrichment for humanity.

There are enough known cases of homosexual individuals who managed to marry a human of opposite sex, had biological children and were happy ever thereafter until the end of their life.

There are cases where a homosexual orientation could successfully be changed at least partly into a heterosexual orientation.

Another way to manage homosexuality is to live a celibate life. Becket Cook, in his book Change of Affection: A Gay Man’s Incredible Story of Redemption (2019), shares his experience as a gay who became Christian. This didn’t make him heterosexual but helped him to find a meaningful way of life. See also Thursday, December 10, 2020.

Homosexual humans sometimes refrain from openly identifying as such due to homophobia.

Homosexual behaviour has also been documented and can be observed in non-human animal species.

In 2017 there were still humans who seriously considered suicide as the only solution for their sexual disorder.

In 2017 there were still humans of moral authority who publicly declared that homosexuality is a sin.

A sin is