The utter stupidity of trans and gay “conversion therapy”
This article from the Washington Post has some very interesting historical information about how scientists and doctors tried to “cure” gay people:
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.
Just to make this clear: “Conversion therapy” for gay and gender variant people does not work. It never did.
Washington Post: “Why we still haven’t banished conversion therapy in 2018″