The Inhumane History of Conversion Therapy

TW: This article discusses sensitive topics such as homophobia and conversion therapy.

Conversion or reparative therapy is a dangerous practice that tries to make members of the LGBTQ+ community to change their personality, sexuality or gender identity. And it’s still being used all over the world.

I’ve been blissfully unaware of this situation until just a few years ago. I didn’t even know conversion therapy even was a thing that happened until a few years ago. The fact made me mad, just like it should. And the fact that it is still legal in a big part of the world terrifies me.

Conversion therapy has its origin in 1899 when scientist Albert von Schrenck-Notzing claimed to have ‘‘turned a gay man straight’’ with the help of “45 hypnosis sessions and a few trips to a brothel”. Schrench-Notzing claimed to have manipulated the man’s sexual impulses, diverting them from men to women. 

As time went on, the ‘‘treatments’’ were being used more often to a larger scale of people. In an article with the Huffington Post, TC, a 19-year-old gay man talked about his experience with conversion therapy. He said that the first step – that usually lasts for six months – is where they deconstruct the patient as a person. 

‘‘Their goal was to get us to hate ourselves for being LGBTQ, and they knew what they were doing’’, TC told the Huffington Post.

The second step of the conversion therapy program tried to ‘‘rebuild the patients in their image”. Instead of being unique individuals, by the end of the program, the patients had been made into a ‘walking, talking robot for Jesus’’. 

Conversion therapy has not only affected people who are homosexual but anyone who does not identify as straight or cis-gendered. TC said in his interview that, although most of the people in his group were gay, ‘‘but the entire spectrum was represented’’.

“Just banning the therapy itself will not be enough to protect people of the LGBTQ+ community.”

Even though the World Health Organisation (WHO) declassified homosexuality as a disease in 1990, the road to full acceptation is far from over. In fact, it still has a long way to go. In the United States, conversion therapy has been banned for minors in 20 states, and partially banned in another. This means that there are still 29 states that don’t have any laws against the forced use of conversion therapy for minors. So far, over 700,000 LGBTQ+ people have been subjected by conversion therapy, and an estimated 80,000 more will be in the upcoming years. Although most youths are being sent to conversion therapy by well-intended but misinformed parents that just want the best for their children, the fact that they are still being sent to these ‘therapies’ means that we still have a lot more people to inform and teach about the LGBTQ+ community and what it stands for.

But just banning the therapy itself will not be enough to protect people of the LGBTQ+ community. But according to Ryan Thoreson, ‘‘it is not enough to punish the practitioners’’. Instead, he thinks that the new laws should focus on helping the people who are or have been harmed by them. We should also focus on educating those who still believe that different LGBTQ+ identities are illnesses and ‘‘the wrong way to be’’.

Alice Sjöberg

Tweet to @alicesjoberg98

Featured image courtesy of Sharon McCutcheon on Pexels. Image licence found here. No changes were made to this image.