CONVERSION THERAPY: Is it really necessary?

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In the past, some mental health professionals resorted to using extreme measures such as institutionalization, castration, and electroconvulsive shock therapy to try to stop people from being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender (LGBT). Today, while some counselors still use p

If you hysical treatments like aversive conditioning, the techniques most commonly used include a variety of behavioral, cognitive, psychoanalytic, and other practices that try to change or reduce same-sex attraction or alter a person’s gender identity. While these contemporary versions of conversion therapy are less shocking and extreme than some of those more frequently used in the past, they are equally devoid of scientific validity and pose serious dangers to patients—especially to minors, who are often forced to undergo them by their parents or legal guardians, and who are at especially high risk of being harmed.

Peter Gajdics is the Vancouver-based author of The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir, which documents his six-year journey through, and eventually out of, a form of “conversion therapy.” I will quote some of what he said in his memoir.

“In 1988, when I was 23 years old, I told my parents I was gay. We had never talked openly about an incident from my childhood when a stranger sexually abused me at a church bazaar, but after I came out to my parents, they told me that a “dirty old pervert” had “seduced” me into becoming a homosexual, and that my now “deviant lifestyle” was “immoral.” They rejected my homosexuality, and forbade me to talk about any of it with them again. Finally, after months of arguments, I fled my hometown of Vancouver the next year and left my family behind”.

“Soon I was feeling isolated and deeply depressed. I knew I needed to talk to someone, so my physician referred me on to a psychiatrist for counselling. Trying to “change” my sexuality had never been a consideration, but then my new psychiatrist told me something new; that my history of childhood sexual abuse had “created” my erroneous belief that I was homosexual. With my parents, I had tried my best to refute any correlation between the abuse and my homosexuality, but with the doctor, I could not since he was the “expert,” and I had nowhere else to turn. Very quickly, therapy meant to help me overcome past trauma had turned into a form of “conversion therapy” meant to “correct the error” of my homosexuality—those were the doctor’s words.”

“Over the next six years, the doctor prescribed near fatal dosages of various concurrent psychiatric medications. He directed me to “release my pain” and to “feel my rage” during prolonged sessions of primal scream therapy; he injected me weekly with ketamine hydrochloride, an animal anesthetic, before “re-parenting” sessions where I would lie in his lap like a newborn baby so he could nurture me as my new “daddy.” He even used aversion therapy—exposing me to a stimulus while simultaneously subjecting me to some form of discomfort—all in an effort to help me ‘flip over to the other side’ to my supposed “innate heterosexuality.”

“Today, of course, I understand that sexual abuse does not make a person homosexual any more than abuse of any kind makes a person heterosexual, and that shaming anyone about their sexuality, regardless of its orientation, will never help “change them into something that they’re not; all it will do is increase their shame about who they are already. When I met this doctor, however, I would have believed anything he told me. I was young, and my vision was clouded by years of trauma. All I wanted was to not be in pain. I had trusted him.” Unquote

Virtually every leading health organization has denounced efforts to “change” sexual orientation, and reaffirmed that attempts to do so could result in serious health risks. The World Health Organization, for instance, wrote in a 2012 position statement that “‘reparative’ or ‘conversion therapies’ have no medical indication and represent a severe threat to the health and human rights of the affected persons. They constitute unjustifiable practices that should be denounced and subject to adequate sanctions and penalties.” But while 34 U.S. cities and counties, as well as 12 states and D.C., have all legally banned “conversion therapy” in the last six years, only the provinces of Ontario and Manitoba—by legal statute and health regulation, respectively—have made any effort to ban these forms of institutionalized torture in Canada.

That might now be changing. On June 6^th, Vancouver city council approved a motion to ban “conversion therapy” for youth and adults within the city limits. I had approached the city’s LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee about this issue in early 2017, and proposed that they recommend that the city make some kind of public statement denouncing these “therapies” for all LGBTQ people. Instead,

“I was delighted when the committee informed me in late 2017 that they’d be doing more than just recommending a public statement: after months of consultations, they submitted a motion, which I helped them draft, recommending the city legally ban the discredited practice of trying to “change” sexual orientation or gender identity. Vancouver has now become the first city in Canada with such a ban.” Unquote

This kind of legislative intervention is important, not simply because it attempts to prevent the recurrence of these kinds of treatments, but because it thrusts an otherwise furtive practice—commonly known as “conversion therapy,” but also “reparative therapy,” “ex-gay” therapy, even “sexual orientation change efforts”—out into public scrutiny. At times like these, it is important to remember that any government-funded “helping professional” attempting to practice a form of conversion therapy today would never actually bill an insurer for anything even remotely called “conversion therapy.” According to all government billing guides, in fact, no such practice exists, making it that much harder to track and report. Instead, practitioners would bill for “depression” (as my own psychiatrist did to the Medical Services Commission of British Columbia over a period of six years), or perhaps for any other number of “mental disorders,” as categorized in The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. 

No law is foolproof; people commit acts of inhumanity all the time, no matter what the law. But legislative intervention banning the practice of conversion therapy (or whatever you want to call it) will help—not guarantee, mind you, but at least help—dissuade a therapist from telling their patient that “we can change your sexuality” (or some version of that lie).

Bans like the one just approved in Vancouver—and which have also already been enforced in numerous other U.S. jurisdictions—destabilize a belief system, an ideology, still held by too many people that says gay or trans people are inherently “broken,” by virtue of their homosexuality or trans identity, and must, therefore, be “fixed” (or “corrected,” as Peter Gajdics’s own psychiatrist would have told him).

Bans like these tell all people everywhere that there is nothing wrong with being gay or trans. They set the limits of a just and tolerant society. They place the onus on the practice of the therapist, not the sexuality or gender of the patient. They say that we, as LGBTQ citizens, are valued and protected by our government. They even tell queers that when they struggle with feelings of rejection because of familial ostracism or religious persecution, that their very alienation is not, and has never been, a result of their true nature but the consequence of shame—of being subjected to voices of hatred and intolerance, even, in times past, to being criminalized, pathologized, and institutionalized; This is even done still to this day as a result of trying to “change” themselves, through extraordinarily brutal and counterintuitive measures, into something they are not and  that is to live a lie.

The truth of the matter is that practitioners of conversion therapies—whether religious-based or, as in my case, secular—prey on the vulnerable and those in need of relief from suffering by turning the desire to belong into a desire to change one’s sexuality. Sexuality and gender are complex issues deserving of serious consideration in any healthy therapeutic situation, but conversion therapy is not even therapy. Therapy, in its purest intent, seeks to help and to heal; “first do no harm.” Conversion therapy, I now know, is nothing more than sexuality abuse: the locus of attention no longer remains on the lies and hatred of the helping professional, but on the person whose sexuality is now under direct attack. In truth, so-called conversion therapy is soul-crushing torture that ends up not even being about “changing” sexual orientation as it is about eradicating homosexuality, silencing it from the bodies of people who are gay. Legislative intervention helps prevent torture.

But the fight is not over. In addition to creating laws that ban these kinds of treatments from continuing, we need to change hearts; unless the heart is changed, the mind will always find some new way to oppress. And we can change hearts, and help change the world a little bit at a time, by telling the truth of our lives—by remembering as a form of healing, and then by speaking up and sharing our truth about what Peter Gajdic and others like him have  lived through and what they’ve learned.

“Nearly six years to the day that I first met my psychiatrist, I discontinued “treatment.” For the first two post-therapy years I recall roaming the city streets, shell-shocked, not so much wanting to kill myself as feeling as if I were already dead. Slowly, I recovered, withdrew from the last of the psychiatric medications, and then reported the doctor to the College of Physicians and Surgeons of British Columbia. Two years later, after the College’s investigation into the doctor’s practice concluded, I also sued him for medical malpractice on the grounds, among others, that he had treated my sexuality orientation as a disease. I spent the next many years writing a book about the whole ordeal for many reasons—but mainly to resist the silencing effects of shame brought on not only from the childhood sexual abuse I suffered and the lie that it had ever “made” me gay, but especially from the injustice of this “therapy” and the doctor’s actions. I wrote it to speak the truth. I applaud my hometown of Vancouver by becoming the first city in Canada to take a firm position against these treatments of torture by legally banning conversion therapy. I hope the rest of Canada soon follows its lead. Unquote

That statement by Peter Gajdics is increditably direct when it comes to explaining the dangers of conversion therapy.

The desire to turn gay people straight goes way back. In 1920, Sigmund Freud wrote of a lesbian patient whose father wanted to see her converted to heterosexuality. Freud echoed modern psychologists by responding that changing sexual orientation was difficult and unlikely. He offered to see the woman anyway, but later broke off the therapy due to her hostility. In 1935, Freud went even further, writing to a woman who wanted her homosexual son converted that homosexuality "is nothing to be ashamed of, no vice, no degradation; it cannot be classified as an illness."

Other psychologists throughout the early mid-1900s believed homosexuality could be changed and recommended a variety of treatments. One of the stranger attempts was an effort by Viennese endocrinologist Eugen Steinach to transplant testicles from straight men into the scrotums of gay men in an attempt to rid them of same-sex desires. It didn’t work obviously. Transplanting their brains may have worked but the consequences could be disastrous.

Gay conversion therapy, as it is known, supposedly helps gay people overcome same-sex attractions, however, mainstream psychologists say the therapy is ineffective, unethical and often harmful, exacerbating anxiety and self-hatred among those treated for what is not a mental disorder.

In 2013, two cases involving the therapy to convert gay people into heterosexuals hit the courts, with one seeking to sue counselors who offer the therapy and the others seeking to defend them.

Here are five things you need to know about the therapy and the current lawsuits.

Why psychologists say conversion therapy doesn't work

Homosexuality is not considered a mental disorder, so the American Psychological Association (APA) does not recommend "curing" same-sex attraction under any circumstances. Instead, societal ignorance, prejudice and pressure to conform to heterosexual desires are the real dangers to gay people's mental health, according to a 1997 statement on "conversion" or "reparative" therapy by the APA.

A 2009 APA task force found that conversion therapies, despite being touted by religious organizations, have little evidence to back them up. A review of studies from 1960 to 2007 found only 83 on the topic, the vast majority of which did not have the experimental muscle to show whether the therapies achieved their stated goals. Many of the people studied in the early years were court-mandated to take the therapies, adding a coercive element to those outcomes.

The best-quality studies were more recent and qualitative. The APA task force found, meaning they focused not on the statistical effectiveness of treatment, but of the subjective experience.

These studies show that enduring change to an individual's sexual orientation is uncommon which the task force wrote in their 2009 report. The participants continued to report same-sex attractions after the conversion therapy, and were not significantly more attracted to the opposite gender.

These studies did find that conversion therapy could be harmful, however. Negative effects included "loss of sexual feeling, depression, suicidality and anxiety."

What happens in conversion therapy?

One of the most prominent advocates of conversion therapy in the 1940s and 50s was Edmund Bergler, who saw homosexuality as a perversion and believed he could "cure" gay people with a punishment-based, confrontational therapy style.

Because conversion therapy is not a mainstream psychological treatment, there are no professional standards or guidelines for how it is conducted. Early treatments in the 1960s and 70s included aversion therapy, such as shocking patients or giving them nausea-inducing drugs while showing them same-sex erotica, according to a 2004 article in the British Medical Journal.

Attempts to change sex offender’s sexual arousal patterns by associating aversive experiences (electric shock, for instance) with deviant sexual behaviors, while at the same time rewarding and therefore encouraging more socially acceptable behaviors. Specific thoughts and behaviors associated with an individual’s particular offense are targeted in this way. This methodology has proven to be only minimally effective, and the efficacy diminishes over time. In other words, the further away the offender is from the aversive experience, the less effect the treatment will have.

Psychodynamic Psychotherapy

It is obvious that using electric shocks etc isn’t effective in diminishing homosexual desires.

Once the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, conversion therapies lost support. But religious-right organizations such as Exodus International and Focus on the Family's Love took up the charge, promoting their own "ex-gay" therapies. A small group of psychologists, splitting with their peers, continue to promote the therapies, founding the conversion therapy organization NARTH, or the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. The group has religious links; for example, one of its founders and former president, psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, is a one-time spokesman for Focus on the Family.

Groups that promote conversion therapy often point to a single study to support their work. In 2003, famed psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's mental disorder list in 1973, reported in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior that interviews with conversion therapy patients suggested that some people could change their sexual orientation.

                 

Once the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying homosexuality as a mental disorder in 1973, conversion therapies lost support. But religious-right organizations such as Exodus International and Focus on the Family's Love Won Out took up the charge, promoting their own "ex-gay" therapies. A small group of psychologists, splitting with their peers, continue to promote the therapies, founding the conversion therapy organization NARTH, or the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality. The group has religious links; for example, one of its founders and former president, psychologist Joseph Nicolosi, is a one-time spokesman for Focus on the Family.

Groups that promote conversion therapy often point to a single study to support their work. In 2003, famed psychiatrist Robert Spitzer, who spearheaded the removal of homosexuality from the American Psychiatric Association's mental disorder list in 1973, reported in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior that interviews with conversion therapy patients suggested that some people could change their sexual orientation.

The paper was incendiary and highly criticized, given that it relied on interviews with patients instead of measurable benchmarks of same-sex desires. Conservative groups were delighted to have support from Spitzer, who wasn't tainted with religious bias or anti-gay ideology; gay organizations felt betrayed.

In the end, however, Spitzer came to agree with his critics. There was no way to confirm that what his interviewees said was true, he wrote in 2012 to the editor of the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior. The study, he said, was fatally flawed.

After calls to take a leadership role when it comes to setting the standard for what has become a cross-Canada patchwork of policies around LGBTQ conversion therapy, the federal government is now urging all provinces and territories to ban the “shameful” and “cruel” practice.

According to letters sent to provincial and territorial ministers of health and justice across the country in late June, the federal Liberals say they are also considering Criminal Code reforms to better crack down on the traumatic programs.

Conversion therapy seeks to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, often through religious counselling. The practice has been widely discredited and disparaged, but the federal government believes that these therapies are still being offered in Canada.

“We are concerned about the harmful effect of the message that someone’s sexual orientation is abnormal, and that it can and should be changed,” reads a copy of the letter, signed by Justice Minister David Lametti, Health Minister Ginette Petitpas Taylor, and special advisor to the prime minister on LGBTQ issues, Randy Boissonnault. “The provincial, territorial, municipal and federal governments all have roles to play to protect Canadians from the harms associated with this practice.”

Specifically, the federal government is considering national reforms through the Criminal Code, Currently, some offences like kidnapping, forcible confinement, assault or even fraud may apply to those conducting these conversion sessions.

“However, existing Criminal Code offences may not capture the full range of circumstances in which conversion therapy occurs. For this reason, we are actively examining potential Criminal Code reforms to better prevent, punish, and deter this discredited and dangerous practice,” the letter states.

city councillors in St. Albert, Alberta voted to ban conversion therapy. The community’s ban includes a $10,000 bylaw fine on anyone advertising or performing the therapy on minors within the city.

As  you can see from his article, conversion therapy to change the ex-orientation of minors and adults is a sham operated by quacks.

There is a point I want to bring to your attention. Being gay is not a direct result of being inherited.  My late father was a rapist, Neither I nor my brother ended up being rapists.

There’s “no differences” in the outcomes for children based solely on whether they were raised by same-sex, heterosexual, or single parents.

Are children brought up by gay parents more likely to turn out being gay themselves?

There is no evidence to say that it is more likely. Sure there are psychosocial factors to sexuality as well as strong biological ones but there is no exact science to prove that this occurring.

Irrespective of Gay parents or Straight parents, every child of them needs outside influences and that is more likely where most psychosocial factors will come from. There is still no significant proof that I have ever heard of and certainly not as much as genetic studies having been uncovered. 

The chances are that a child of gay parents will be influenced by what he learns from other children who were never gay. Their friend’s influences will in all likelihood influence the child of gay parents to grow up as a straight child rather than a gay child unless of course, their friends are all gay themselves. It is impossible to show where such a child’s sexual interests will derive from.  I am not even going to make a suggestion since it would be mere speculation and speculation is risky at best.   

As to those persons who are bisexual, I haven’t the faintest idea where to begin explaining how they became bisexual.  I won’t even make the effort because trying to answer that question is about a futile as attempting to fly across the country by only using your arms.