The overlap of treatment and punishment in the sex offense legal regime is a part of a process critics refer to as medicalization: the reconception of differences or problems as medical or psychiatric disorders — frequently constructed as biologically caused — that need to be prevented, diagnosed, or treated. Marginalized sexual desires or acts considered immoral at a given time, like homosexuality, are often subject to medicalization, turning “badness to sickness,” as sociologists Peter Conrad and Joseph Schneider write in their 1980 classic Deviance and Medicalization. But the slippage is not just between nature and culture; it is also between the moral and the legal. Asked how she defined sexual deviance, the therapist in Dallas replied, “Deviance is anything that’s against the law.”