Myth busting
Verdict first, evidence in plain sight. However often you’ve heard a claim, it deserves a fact-check.
Is asexuality just "frigidity"?
No. Asexuality is a sexual orientation, not a dysfunction — modern diagnostic manuals require personal distress before any diagnosis, and explicitly exclude people who identify as asexual.
Do trans people in bathrooms put others in danger?
Research finds no rise in safety incidents under trans-inclusive policies. The people most likely to be harassed in a public bathroom are trans people themselves.
Is bisexuality just a phase?
No. Bisexuality is a stable orientation in its own right, not a waiting room — long-term research finds bisexual identity holds steady over many years.
Are bisexual people more likely to cheat?
No. Orientation describes who you can be attracted to; faithfulness is a choice and a commitment. Bisexual people are exactly as capable of loyalty as anyone else.
Can reading BL or GL (yaoi/yuri) "turn you gay"?
No. Enjoying a certain kind of story is a different thing from your own sexual orientation — fiction can move you and delight you, but there's no evidence it can manufacture or change who you're attracted to.
Can willpower or medication change your sexual orientation?
No. No drug or act of will has ever been shown to change sexual orientation — behavior can be suppressed, but attraction can't, and suppression is paid for in mental health.
Can "conversion therapy" make someone straight?
No. There is no credible evidence that conversion practices work — they sharply raise depression and suicide risk, and Chinese courts have ruled against them too.
Is coming out an act of "unfilial" betrayal?
Filial devotion and sexual orientation are two different things: there are many ways to love your parents, and pretending to be someone else is not one of them. And coming out can always wait — safety comes first.
Are gay people doomed to grow old alone?
No. Whether someone is by your side in old age comes down to the relationships you've actually tended, not to what stamp those relationships carry. Same-sex partners stay together for decades too, and a family can take many shapes.
Can you get HIV from sharing a meal, a hug, or a mosquito bite?
No. HIV is fragile and everyday contact does not transmit it — and a person in effective treatment with an undetectable viral load doesn't transmit it even through sex.
Is HIV/AIDS a "gay disease"?
No. Whether HIV spreads depends on specific behaviors, not on anyone's sexual orientation or identity — it can infect anyone, and anyone can prevent it.
Do women love women because a man hurt them?
No. Orientation is not a trauma symptom, and nobody can be "straightened out." This trope fails scientifically — and it routinely gets used to excuse harassment.
Is it illegal to be gay in China?
No. Since the 1997 criminal law revision, consensual same-sex conduct between adults is not a crime in mainland China — but the flip side matters too: same-sex marriage has no legal recognition there.
Do intersex babies need surgery as early as possible?
No. Outside a handful of genuinely health-critical situations, UN bodies and a growing number of national laws say the same thing — defer non-essential "normalizing" surgery until the child can take part in the decision.
Is being gay a mental illness?
No. The WHO removed homosexuality from its disease classification in 1990, and China's own psychiatric standard followed in 2001 — there is no illness, so there is nothing to treat.
Can marrying someone of the opposite sex "straighten out" a gay person?
No. Marriage doesn't change orientation — it converts one person's struggle into two families' predicament, and China's tongqi ("gay men's wives") know the cost firsthand.
Is "non-binary" a new identity invented on the internet?
No. Only the vocabulary is new. Gender lives outside the male/female boxes appear throughout anthropological and historical records, across cultures and centuries.
Are Pride marches just "showing off" or "making a spectacle"?
It didn't start as showing off — it started as protest. "Pride" only exists after Stonewall in 1969: when a way of being has long been ordered into hiding, showing up as yourself is itself a way of claiming ground.
Are same-sex relationships doomed to be promiscuous and short-lived?
No. Same-sex couples build lasting, committed relationships. What looked like "instability" was mostly what happens to any love that must stay hidden and gets no institutional support.
Do most people regret transitioning?
The opposite, in fact. Long-term follow-up studies consistently find that regret is low among people who complete gender-affirming care after proper assessment; and the few who "go back" mostly do so because of outside pressure and discrimination, not because their identity changed.
Is "rapid-onset gender dysphoria" (ROGD) real?
ROGD is not a recognized diagnosis. It comes from a single parent-survey study that its journal formally corrected, and no major medical body has ever adopted it.
Do children raised by same-sex couples turn out unhealthy — or "turn gay"?
No. Decades of research agree that how a child turns out depends on the quality of their parenting, not the parents' sexual orientation — kids of same-sex parents are no more likely to struggle, and no more likely to end up gay.
Can "masculinity boot camps" fix a "sissy" boy?
No. Gender expression and sexual orientation aren't linked the way these camps claim, and neither can be trained away — the only guaranteed output is a hurt child.
Does talking to kids about gay or trans people "turn" them?
No. Knowing that "such people exist" can't change a child's own orientation or gender identity — it only decides whether that child grows up more respectful of others, or learns to hate themselves sooner.
Is being transgender the same as being gay?
No. Gender identity answers "who I am"; sexual orientation answers "who I'm drawn to." They're independent — trans people can be straight, gay, bi or asexual.
Is being transgender a mental illness?
No. The WHO's ICD-11 — adopted in 2019, in effect since 2022 — moved gender incongruence out of the mental disorders chapter. Being trans is not a mental illness.
Can you really tell who's gay just by looking?
No. Gender expression (masculine or feminine) and sexual orientation (who you're drawn to) are two independent axes — guessing orientation from mannerisms gets it wrong as a rule, not as an exception.
Is homosexuality a "Western import" to China?
It's the other way around. Same-sex love is recorded in Chinese classics going back over two thousand years — what was actually imported from the West is the idea that it's a disease.
What makes someone gay? Was it bad parenting, or too little love?
There's no single "cause," and no one to hold responsible. The evidence points to a tangle of innate and prenatal factors — and specifically not to "bad parenting," "an absent father," or "being led astray."