The American Medical Association (AMA), America’s largest association of physicians, announced last week that it officially opposed “conversion therapy” for members of the LGBTQ community and urged the federal government to ban such procedures nationwide.
“It is clear to the AMA that the conversion therapy needs to end in the United States given the risk of deliberate harm to LGBTQ people,” Dr. William Kobler, a member of the AMA board, said in a statement. “Conversion therapy has no foundation as scientifically valid medical care and lacks credible evidence to support its efficacy or safety.”
The Norwegian Labour Party has proposed a new law against conversion therapy aimed at LGBTI people. For some reason a local lesbian trans-exclusionary “radical feminist” (TERF), Tonje Gjevjon, thinks this is a bad idea.
There should be nothing controversial about this. After all, we know how much harm this kind of treatment has caused gay, lesbian, bisexual, intersex and transgender people.
The use of electric shock, nausea inducing drugs, physical punishment and intense indoctrination and social pressure is never good for anyone’s psyche. It is torture, plain and simple.And it does not work.
So why would a lesbian contest a policy that bans such practices? You guessed it: She wants to use conversion therapy against transgender children and trans adults. She wants to use the kind of torture that has been used to force lesbians like herself back into the closet, against other members of the rainbow community.
To be honest with you, I find this much more offensive than the arguments made by the right wing religious fundamentalists. Because she knows what kind of harm this treatment does. She knows that these are the kind of tactics traditionalists have used for ages to control marginalized groups. The religious fanatics may fool themselves into thinking that they are actually helping. She cannot.
Three of the parties in the Norwegian government – The Conservatives, The right wing populist Progess Party and the Liberals – are supporting a ban. They do so against the will of the fourth party in the cabinet: The Christian Populist Party. So you can say that the only party in Norway supporting Gjevjon’s stand is the one of the Conservative Christians.
And that is exactly the kind of company trans-exclusionary radical feminists are keeping these days. They are in bed with their own enemy. Bizarre and tragic!
Brynn Tannehill writes that a new study has found that conversion therapy on transgender people greatly increases the risk of suicide attempts over the course of their lives.
The study, by Dr. Jack Turban, found that of the 27,000 transgender respondents to the survey, 13.5% had been subjected to conversion therapy. Those who had undergone conversion therapy were twice as likely as the rest of the cohort to have attempted suicide. For adults who had been exposed to conversion therapy before the age of 10, the risk of suicide attempts was four times higher.
Turban’s analysis of the data also found that two-thirds of the transgender people reporting exposure to conversion received it from psychological professionals, and about a third received it from religious figures like priests or pastors. The increase in suicide attempts held true regardless of whether the therapy came from secular or religious sources.
A study in JAMA Psychiatry is one of the first to highlight the psychological impact of efforts to change a trans person’s gender identity, NBC reports.
Dr. Alex Keuroghlian, director of the National LGBT Health Education Center at The Fenway Institute and the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychiatry Gender Identity Program says that the study shows that transgender people who are exposed to conversion efforts anytime in their lives have more than double the odds of attempting suicide compared with those who have never experienced efforts by professionals to convert their gender identity.
“Often people assume that the damaging effects somehow are associated with the religious nature of the effort,” Keuroghlian says to The Washington Post.
“It’s a major finding that it’s not the religious component that’s dangerous in our results — it’s any effort to change someone’s gender identity from transgender to cisgender.”
In a cross-sectional study of 27 715 US transgender adults, recalled exposure to gender identity conversion efforts was significantly associated with increased odds of severe psychological distress during the previous month and lifetime suicide attempts compared with transgender adults who had discussed gender identity with a professional but who were not exposed to conversion efforts. For transgender adults who recalled gender identity conversion efforts before age 10 years, exposure was significantly associated with an increase in the lifetime odds of suicide attempts.
McKrae Game founded the Hope for Wholeness Network, a Christian faith-based conversion therapy program that seeks to rid people of their LGBTQ identities.
Conversion therapy is based on the misconception that being gay, bisexual or trans is some kind of mental disease that can be cured, or a willed sin that can be repented. The fact is that you do not chose your sexual orientation or your gender identity.
I know that creating the organization that still lives was in a large way causing harm. Creating a catchy slogan that put out a very misleading idea of “Freedom from homosexuality through Jesus Christ” was definitely harmful.
Promoting the triadic model that blamed parents and conversion or prayer therapy, that made many people believe that their orientation was wrong, bad, sinful, evil, and worse that they could change was absolutely harmful.
People reported to attempt suicide because of me and these teachings and ideals. I told people they were going to Hell if they didn’t stop, and these were professing Christians! This was probably my worse wrongful act.
At one time I was working with so many youth that I had a weekly youth group, where they’d share why they were there, and I would guide them in how to not be gay. What a sad commentary of my past verses today, or a bad joke as many may see it.
Florence Ashley says this about the international organization for transgender health electing a transphobic person, Dr. Baudewijntje Kreukel, to the position of treasurer of WPATH.
WPATH, the largest and most well-recognized professional organization on transgender health, elected someone as treasurer who argued that the Standards of Care should reverse its opposition to trans conversion therapy when it comes to consenting adults.
That same Dr. Kreukels who argued just two years ago that practitioners should revive the now-defunct notion of autogynephilia and transvestic fetishism. In other words, she thinks there is a place in our psychological world for the view that queer trans women are misguided heterosexual men who are trans primarily because of their sexual attraction to the image of themselves as women.
I thought that, too, had been laid to rest by the tireless work of Julia Serano, Talie Mae Bettcher, and Charles Moser. Two theorists, one scientist, criticizing the theory from panoptical angles.
Besides castration or implants, doctors sometimes recommended “bladder washing” and “rectal massage” as other forms of treatment. Bladder washing involved the doctor inserting a catheter to flush out the bladder with nitrate or silver solution, while rectal massage involved a doctor inserting a small device into the rectum to massage the prostate. One doctor hypothesized that rectal massage could “kill the homosexual cells” in the prostate so that “heterosexual cells” could take their place. However, by 1913, some doctors began questioning the efficacy of these procedures.
You might think that these doctors were complete imbeciles, but this and similar procedure were actually quite common. They also tried to cure “hysteria” in women (often caused by sexual frustration) by massaging their genitals. The release this caused led them to believe they had helped the uterus find a proper place in their bodies. The female patients, for some reason, failed to cure them of this misconception.
Sigmund Freud didn’t think you could cure homosexuals, nor did he think it was necessary. His followers, however, were not that tolerant.
The American Psychiatric Association officially defined homosexuality as a mental disorder in the first edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM), published in 1952. By the late 1950s, conversion therapy entered what psychiatrist Jack Drescher called its “gilded age.” Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts such as Sandor Rado, Irving Bieber, Lionel Ovesey and Charles Socarides proffered new theories and possibilities for therapeutic cures, which in addition to talk therapy sometimes included electroshock therapy and transorbital lobotomies.
This research was a reflection of what was considered social and political “problems”:
The state puzzled over what to do as sexual and gender variations become more visible during the early part of the 20th century. By World War II, the state had begun to enact explicit regulatory measures that linked heterosexuality with claims to citizenship and the benefits that came with it: access to welfare, government loans, the ability to serve in the military and the right to assemble, all of which the state increasingly denied to LGBTQ people. At the same time, legislatures began passing what came to be known as sexual-psychopath laws that were often used to target LGBTQ people. If convicted, they were sent to prison or mental institutions.
And that, my friends, is why so many gay and transgender people till this day struggle with suppression, self-contempt and denial.
Almost 50 bills have been introduced in 24 states targeting conversion therapy, which has been discredited by dozens of medical associations and child-welfare institutions. On Tuesday, 11 of them — including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Counseling Association — released a letter urging states to make such bills a priority.
“Being LGBTQ is not an illness,” said Xavier Persad, legislative counsel for the Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ rights advocacy group. “It is false that being LGBTQ is wrong and a disorder.”
Over at The New York Times Sam Brinton tells the horrible story about being forced into so-called “conversion therapy” for being gay:
For over two years, I sat on a couch and endured emotionally painful sessions with a counselor. I was told that my faith community rejected my sexuality; that I was the abomination we had heard about in Sunday school; that I was the only gay person in the world; that it was inevitable I would get H.I.V. and AIDS.
But it didn’t stop with these hurtful talk-therapy sessions. The therapist ordered me bound to a table to have ice, heat and electricity applied to my body. I was forced to watch clips on a television of gay men holding hands, hugging and having sex. I was supposed to associate those images with the pain I was feeling to once and for all turn into a straight boy. In the end it didn’t work. I would say that it did, just to make the pain go away.
Of course it didn’t work. It never works. Homosexuality (as well as being transgender) is most likely inborn and even if it isn’t, it is not something you can cure or use your willpower to overcome.
All serious doctors. And all LGBTQA people can tell you this. And you know: Gay, bisexual and transgender people actually know something about this.
Tens of thousands of LGBTQ youth currently between the ages of 13 and 17 will undergo gay “conversion therapy” from a licensed health care professional, religious adviser or spiritual leader before they turn 18, according to a new report from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.
The study’s estimates are based on the Generations survey, a national probability study of lesbian, gay and bisexual individuals, and the U.S. Transgender Survey, the largest survey devoted to understanding the lives and experiences of transgender people.
If anyone tries to get you to go to “conversion therapy” or “reparative therapy” (or “Christian therapy” as some call it – even if it is Satanic in nature), hold your ground and seek help. It is extremely destructive and dangerous.
If you are gay, you are OK! If you are lesbian, you are OK! If you are transgender, you are OK! If you are nonbinary, you are OK!
