That’s long been the aim of so-called “conversion therapy” pushed by some hardline US Protestant sects such as led by Jerry Falwell and handful of other prominent Christian evangelists. Sometimes called “Pray The Gay Away”, the idea was that same-sex attraction was all in the mind and could be changed.

The Iranian Islamists have a different approach, in that they simply force homosexual men and woman to undergo medical procedures to ‘cure’ gays and lesbians who, the Mullahs insists, are ‘normal’ people but ‘trapped in the wrong bodies’. The alternative is death via flying from 10 story buildings without wings or parachute.

That sounds familiar. It certainly did to Ben Appel, a gay man who grew up in a Fundamentalist Christian community and suffered all the usual struggles of homosexuals in such an environment. He didn’t think he was “one of them”, and although his community saw that he was “different” they felt that as long as he loved Jesus it was all good. A secular high school was actually the crucible where he got taunted and tried not to dress gay or act effeminate and pretended his crushes on boys were just friendships – and hit the booze and drugs. But he survived and thrived.

He got to university at the tender age of 33 (labeled “cis” he didn’t know what that meant, which is kind of funny) and began to encounter the strange world of Queer Theory:

Queer theorists appropriate French philosopher Michel Foucault’s ideas about the power of language in constructing reality. They argue that homosexuality didn’t exist prior to the late 19th century, when the word ‘homosexual’ first appeared in medical discourse. Queer theorists proselytise a liberation that supposedly results from challenging the concepts of empirical reality and ‘normativity’. But their converts instead often end up adrift in a sea of nihilism. Queer theory, which has become the predominant method of discussing and analysing gender and sexuality in universities, seemed to me to be more ideological than truthful.
…
All I knew was that they called me ‘cis’ in the same cadence that the seventh graders had called me ‘fag

Heh! Well Foucault’s theory has been applied to de-construct everything, not just homosexuals. And of course when you challenge reality itself you get some pretty strange outcomes:

I met straight people whose ‘trans / nonbinary’ identities seemed to be defined by their haircuts, outfits and inchoate politics. I met straight women with Grindr accounts, and listened to them complain about the ‘transphobic’ gay men who didn’t want to have sex with women.

It was also where he began to see the parallels years between Iran and the Trans movement in the West, as he describes bluntly in his Spiked article, Homophobia in drag:

Sylvester, an androgynous disco icon of the 1970s and 1980s, was once asked what gay liberation meant to him. He answered, ‘I could be the queen that I really was without having a sex change or being on hormones’. Perhaps I belong in an earlier era, when newly liberated gays and lesbians rebelled against the medical and psychiatric experiments they had long been subjected to. 
…
Then, I learned about what was happening to gender-nonconforming kids – that they were being prescribed off-label drugs to halt their natural development, so that they’d have time to decide if they were really transgender. If so, they would then be more successful at passing as the opposite sex in adulthood. Even worse, I learned that these practices were being touted by LGBT-rights organisations as ‘life-saving medical care’. It felt like I was living in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

An episode pushed even further into that zone as he encounters when a “progressive” friend asks him whether he wouldn’t have been happier as a trans-woman:

Her question left me speechless. I couldn’t find the words to state the obvious: that I am a gay man, not a transwoman; that statistics tell me my medical transition may not have been successful; and that I would suffer severe medical complications. In any case, if I had transitioned, I wouldn’t be living an authentic life. After all, isn’t that what this is supposed to be about? Living authentically?

Meh. Orwell world. War is Peace, Fake is Authentic. And the irony gets richer:

For voicing my concerns about gender-affirming care for minors, I have been called a transphobic bigot. If that’s what speaking out against the medicalisation of homosexuality makes me, then so be it.

Aside from language and reality, this article, Gender Ideology’s Shaky Twin Pillars, by an evolutionary biologist, explains that there is also a basic flaw at the heart of it:

Put another way, the belief in the sex spectrum provides the assurance of the ability to materially change one’s sex, while the belief in an innate and fixed gender identity that can be “mismatched” from one’s sex (i.e., a person can be “born in the wrong body”) provides the ethical justification or even obligation for hormonal or surgical intervention.

Both must be true at the same time. It goes on to list the medical studies demonstrating how flawed that is.

Meantime a more famous homosexual man, Andrew Sullivan, is noticing the same thing, including that this bullshit started with Queer Theory and that “Queers” have taken over what was once the Gay Rights movement:

The core belief of critical queer theorists is that homosexuality is not a part of human nature because there is no such thing as human nature; and that everything is socially constructed, even the body…. To be queer is inherently to exist on the margins; to be odd, peculiar, weird, queer, hated, oppressed, and in revolt and rebellion. To be queer is to be dedicated to subversion, to mock conventions, to deconstruct language, to dismantle the human body, to defy “nature” and, above all, to liberate humankind from the prison of gender.

Homosexuals are pretty boring compared to that. Sullivan goes into detail about how the Queers took over, starting with language changes, and where this has led to:

There are fewer and fewer exclusively gay male spaces left. Lesbian bars? Almost gone entirely. Lesbians themselves? On their way out. Dylan Mulvaney is exemplary of the new queer order: a femme gay man who had to take female hormones to stay relevant.

And he also see the problem with Transing kids:

Then the queers upped the ante and did something we gays never did: they targeted children. If they could get into kids’ minds, bodies and souls from the very beginning of their lives, they could abolish the sex binary from the ground up. And so they got a pliant, woke educational establishment to re-program children from the very start, telling toddlers that any single one of them could be living in the wrong body, before they could even spell.

Remember this the next time people tell you that it’s all just a Right Wing Conspiracy Theory and yet another fake Culture War by the Right. Sullivan also notes how this Foucaultian denial of reality and the destruction of all norms and prohibitions is leading to arguments that children can legitimately consent to sex with adults: legal pedophilia.

Like Appel, Sullivan sees no alternative but to fight:

But we have to be insistent that the gay experience is distinct and different and not intrinsically connected to either queer ideology or the trans experience. We have to demand that children’s bodies — gay, straight, trans, gender-conforming and gender-nonconforming — be left alone. And we must do all we can to make sure that the trans-queer revolution does not result in what it seems to be moving toward: the eradication of homosexuality from public life.