Can willpower or medication change your sexual orientation?

Understanding this comes down to one distinction: behavior can be suppressed; attraction takes no orders. A person can force themselves not to love and perform a life that “looks normal.” What changes isn’t the direction of their attraction — it’s their sleep, their mood, and how they feel about themselves. Orientation is not a habit you can grind away with discipline: it wasn’t chosen, so it can’t be un-chosen; it isn’t a hormone imbalance, so there’s nothing to “correct” with a pill.

Decades of attempts, and none of them worked

• The willpower route. The American Psychological Association’s 2009 review of decades of “sexual orientation change efforts” — prayer, shame-based training, sheer “trying to be straight” — was blunt: none was shown to work, and there is evidence they cause harm. What participants commonly reported wasn’t heterosexuality but deepened depression, anxiety and self-loathing.
• The medication route. History already ran this experiment, cruelly. In 1952 the mathematician Alan Turing was convicted in Britain and forced to choose between prison and hormone treatment — so-called chemical castration. The drugs caused him severe physical and psychological suffering, and left his orientation untouched. No medication anywhere today lists “changing sexual orientation” as an indication — there is no disease to treat, and no drug that could.
• The professional consensus. The World Psychiatric Association said it plainly in 2016: there is no sound scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.

One honest caveat: some people do experience their orientation as fluid over time. That’s real — but natural fluidity and deliberate change are different things. Fluidity answers to no one’s command, including your own.

The clinics that promise a “fix”

China’s own diagnostic standard, CCMD-3, stopped classifying homosexuality as a disorder back in 2001 (see Is being gay a mental illness?). And clinics promising to “adjust” orientation with medication or training have already lost in Chinese courts — we cover those rulings in our piece on conversion practices.

If you’ve been trying to change

• If you’ve been quietly fighting yourself for years, retire the scoreboard first: failing to change isn’t a lack of effort. This was never within willpower’s jurisdiction.
• Redirecting that energy from changing yourself to understanding yourself is often where things turn. Our orientation basics explainer is a good place to start.
• Long suppression is exhausting. If you’re running on empty right now, support resources are here — you don’t have to become someone else to deserve a good life.