Why don't we expand your thought experiment? What if said pill also cured homosexuality? If it made bisexual people straight? This treatment would instantly become highly valued for all sorts of religious groups and families. And if they're perfectly happy after the treatment, what's the problem? Why don't you want people to live as 'nature' intends?
What your arguing for in your thought experiment is, effectively, treatment designed to radically change someone's sense of identity without side effects. It's a thought experiment that falls apart once you expand it to other things that were once commonly thought of as mental illness.
> treatment designed to radically change someone's sense of identity without side effects
To what extent is "sense of identity" innate, and to what extent is it culturally shaped?
For example, "homosexuality" and "heterosexuality" were not something common before the late 19th century. While people still engage in sexual acts with the same and/or opposite sex, such acts did not play a role in their identity.
This is evident as far back as ancient Rome.[0]
> Homosexuality in ancient Rome often differs markedly from the contemporary West. Latin lacks words that would precisely translate "homosexual" and "heterosexual". The primary dichotomy of ancient Roman sexuality was active/dominant/masculine and passive/submissive/feminine.
To the ancient Romans, sexual acts with someone of the same sex wasn't viewed like we do today. They wouldn't have spoken about themselves as "gay" or "straight." Rather, they would have spoken about themselves as "dominant" or "submissive."
This concept runs counter to the way we think about sexual identity today, but it demonstrates that there is far more nurture in the mix than we often like to admit.
And, please note, this is not a judgment on people who identify as homosexual or heterosexual. It is also not a claim that we can "change" someone's orientation. It's simply pointing out that sexual identity is not necessarily something which is purely innate (nature). This is something we tend to take for granted and without much thought in contemporary Western society.
The base reality ("I am only sexually attracted to other men") has existed since time immemorial, the cultural conditions for expressing that reality change as the ages change.
This is no different to now, it was only in 2007 that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed there were no gays in Iran. In various nations you can survey the populace and find wildly varying amounts of homosexuality, all correlating closely with LGBT acceptance. Even now I have muslim friends who are gay and openly tell me that they intend on suppressing their desires for their entire life so as to provide a family and not disappoint their parents.
> The base reality ("I am only sexually attracted to other men") has existed since time immemorial, the cultural conditions for expressing that reality change as the ages change.
Would your answer to the original question then be that the "sense of identity" is the result of or predominately from nurture? That is, one who sees as "gay" or "straight" sees themselves as such because of culture? Or to put it in a more generic manner, culture determines identity?
Culture determines your publicly expressed outward identity, I have no doubt that people have assumed a gay/trans/etc identity privately for far longer than we've had terms or tolerance for them.
Some of the most common observations by our very small trans elderly is that they "found a way to describe" or "finally found the words" for who they are, ie the identity was always there but no terms to identify with.
I think by and large it's nature (fraternal birth order effect, twin studies etc) modulated to the extreme by societal rejection. You dont see gay men in the streets of countries where homosexuality earns the death penalty, you instead see extremely depressed "straight" men :)
It's simple. Being bisexual or homosexual doesn't intrinsically cause any physical or mental anguish for people in that state.
People with BIID and Gender dysphoria will kill themselves if they don't receive treatment, and will otherwise ha e poor life outcomes due to the adjacent side effects like depression and self harm that comes.
The only negatives that being bisexual and homosexual have come from external sources as you state.
In other words bisexual and homsexuao people are in a state of homeostasis while people with BIID and Gender dysphoria are not.
I mean as a bisexual male, I can definitely state I've had my fair share of mental anguish over having a thing for men in the past so I don't exactly buy your post about being in 'homeostasis' as you've described. That feels more like post-hoc rationalization for a terrible thought experiment than anything else. Especially since people that suffer from gender dysphoria tend to have worse outcomes due to external sources and lack of validation, much like what would happen to severely repressed gay people in religious communities.
And to further play the devils advocate there were plenty of people at the time that believed gay people were a blight on society for multiple reasons. Hence why conversion camps were a thing.
but is the source of the mental anguish that you've experienced internal or external?
Like if you were born in a society where religious zealots who espoused bisexual bigotry just didnt exist, toxic masculinity wasnt a thing and there was a bunch of bisexual representation in media would you have had that anguish? very unlikely.
People with gender dysphoria face the same negative external influences as you do, arguably worse (lets be real, much much worse) but if it would be removed and they lived in a world without it they would still be discontent with their state, to the point of depression which would result in a poor quality of life and for many suicide.
Thats the hallmark of the disorder. thats what gender dysphoria is.
Lets do another thought experiment, what if we lived in a society where gender reassignment surgery was impossible. like lets ssay we just didnt have the advancements in surgical techniques necessary, but we had much better pharamcuticals. If surgery was impossible, but giving someone a pill like I described in the first thiufht experiment was possible that would be the morally correct thing to do as opposed to doing nothing, right?
To address your final thought experiment: In a vacuum? Maybe. But there's a simple and easy response to your second thought experiment that completely blows it apart, and that's lobotomies.
Lobotomies were used as a cure for all kinds of different things. If you knew something was a problem and lobotomy was the only thing that seemed to cure it, is it morally correct to do so as opposed to doing nothing? That's why these simplistic thought experiments are bad because there are examples of what happens when you take it to their logical (and often sadly real) conclusion.
Is your issue with lobotomies is that they are a crude, irreversible surgery that doesn't always work?
Now you understand the reticence towards gender reassignment surgery and why someone would be looking for much lower risk pharmaceutical treatments for gender dysphoria, which is exactly what we ended up doing with brain disorders?
It's worth noting that we still do brain surgery on people, and that we're even moving towards using implants to modulate how the brain functions, as opposed to the crude technique of severing parts their brain with rods jammed into their noses or holes drilled into their heads.
I have a feeling that we'll look back on this time when we cut off penises and inverted them into crude vagina like canals, jammed silicon bags full of salt water into chests and pumped people full of hormones as barbaric as the lobotomy era.
They're things that we do out of convenience because they're the best that we have, not because it's what we want to do.
What your arguing for in your thought experiment is, effectively, treatment designed to radically change someone's sense of identity without side effects. It's a thought experiment that falls apart once you expand it to other things that were once commonly thought of as mental illness.