Apparently, most straight people are born that way.
No amount of “therapy” can change this. No amount of violence or threats can change this. With enough pressure you can get a straight person to stop having straight sex, but you can’t eliminate their other-sex attraction.
The same is true for gay people: Apparently, some people are born gay. And while enough coercion can get them to stop having same-gender sex, you can’t eradicate their same-sex attraction.
And yet therapy to “convert” gay people persists in the marketplace.
For some very religious people, the stakes are quite high. If you felt that your kid had a self-destructive habit that was literally going to land them in hell, you’d move heaven and earth to change that, too.
Any person or modality promising to help you would look like a gift from God, which you’d pursue with a whole heart. And if you’re a religious gay adult, you might pray for a miraculous conversion, and buy any program that promised to help.
Meanwhile, conversion therapy has been widely discredited by major medical, psychological, and psychiatric organizations, which say they are ineffective and harmful.
Twenty-three states now have laws that ban licensed clinicians from providing conversion therapy to minors.
One such provider, Kaley Chiles, has sued the state of Colorado, claiming the law violates her rights to free speech and religious beliefs. When various courts disagreed on how to handle the issue, the Supreme Court of the U.S. (SCOTUS) accepted the case, and last week heard oral arguments.
Perhaps counter-intuitively, the Colorado law being challenged allows treatments that support identity exploration and development…as long as the counseling does not seek to change existing sexual orientation or gender identity. It allows assistance to someone undergoing gender transition (i.e., has a transgender identity). It prohibits interfering with a minor’s trans identity.
So the law permits counseling in only one direction—a counselor may approve of a child’s gender confusion and encourage medical transition, but they may not use any approach that may help that child become comfortable with their birth gender or body. And counselors can’t discuss the possibility that the would-be trans kid is gay or bisexual (although same-sex attracted people are disproportionately represented among those identifying as trans).
Yes, this court case is about whether the government can tell counselors what they may and may not say to trans-identifying minors—but not in the way you might think. Right now, 23 states have their thumb on the scale—licensed therapists can encourage trans kids to transition, but they can’t question the wisdom of their young patients’ childhood demands, nor propose alternatives to transitioning.
CONVERSION & OTHER “THERAPIES”
There is absolutely nothing good to be said about cruel, abusive conversion therapy. On top of everything else, it doesn’t work.
Many right-minded therapists have championed restrictions on conversion therapy. They will be angry when SCOTUS overturns the Colorado law (and presumably the other 22 states’). But demanding restrictions on one kind of therapy invites the question: what other kinds of therapy should be restricted or banned?
Therapists generally don’t like to discuss this. Few therapists want to defend their own clinical orientation, so they’re slow to critique others’. But in an industry with very little outcome data or oversight, in which customers and providers often disagree about the value of the product customers pay for, most therapists keep their hands off other practitioners.
THE GOVERNMENT’S ROLE
I don’t want anyone to do conversion therapy—but we should be careful about what we ban, and what we allow.
Laws that support trans-identity affirmation while prohibiting honest discussion of problems that can lead to trans identities privilege the government’s ideas of appropriate therapy goals. This is explicitly prohibited in other walks of life.
The government can’t tax comedies more than dramas. It can’t prohibit the sale of boots while promoting the sale of sneakers. Millions of people feel it’s unconstitutional (and unconscionable) for the government to ban safe medications like the abortion pill, and safe medical procedures like abortion simply because of government ideology.
And many of us are outraged that 26 states require physicians to discuss alternatives with pregnant women who want an abortion—but not with pregnant women who don’t want an abortion.
IDENTITY
Therapists—and the public—should be leery of laws, like Colorado’s, that attempt to regulate clinical conversations about identity. Identity is fluid, and virtually every human changes over time. Your own identity has probably changed during your lifetime.
Competent therapists address identity issues all the time. For example, we help people change their identities as broken; as insufficiently manly; and as victims of repetitive bad luck.
We also support people who want to maintain their identities despite challenging circumstances: men who want to feel masculine after surgery removes their erectile capacity; women who want to feel feminine after menopause; people who want a sense of worth after losing their job because they’re “too old.”
Giving government the right to prohibit one kind of identity-affirming therapy while disallowing another is simply dangerous.
SELF-REGULATION?
We wouldn’t be at this crossroads if the therapy industry did a better job of regulating itself. As it is, if a therapist doesn’t have sex with the customers or exploit them financially, they can do pretty much whatever they want.
The profession’s laissez-faire attitude has allowed a bizarre range of interventions to flourish, with virtually no discussion. Less than 40 years ago, therapists were treating cases of “satanic abuse,” despite the complete lack of evidence that this ever occurred. Today some therapists are making the same mistake looking for “repressed memories” of abuse. Others are using EMDR (whose mechanism no one claims to understand) in ways for which it was never intended. Still others are using the Enneagram—which, with nine personality categories, is only 75% as detailed as the 12 categories of astrology.
In response to today’s political and social media juggernaut of trans-affirming therapy, virtually no therapist wants to stick their neck out to say “Let’s talk about the mental health challenges of some trans-identifying kids.” This is a shameful dereliction of public trust.
Indeed, for an industry that promotes conversation and self-reflection as essential parts of a healthy life, the therapy industry does very little of either one. The upcoming SCOTUS decision will give the profession a chance to discuss its own attitudes about many things, including trans identities; will it rise to the occasion and do so?
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