Conversion Therapy on Transgender and Gender-Diverse Children
“I’m not a ladybug. I’m just a bug.”
In light of recent developments in the UK, America, and elsewhere, I felt writing this was necessary.
Popular views of Conversion Therapy in media almost exclusively revolve around “ex-gay pastors” — adult gay men who willingly enter such therapy in a fit of delusional self-flagellation. It’s often portrayed as a joke for liberal news reports, a comedic “relic of the past”. Even Wikipedia articles or major media stories say the people mentioned in the following article only tried to cure homosexuality, or were explicitly “Gay Conversion Therapists”, as if it’s the only kind that ever existed.
Conversion Therapy, however, happens and has always happened to children against their will, in an institutionalized way. Most of the leading Conversion Therapists also rarely actually talked about same-sex attraction — almost all of their patients were young children who hadn’t displayed any such attraction at the time, but rather simply expressed “gender variance”. Any form of variance was targeted and violently stamped out, whether they were just a little too unconsciously feminine, explicitly stated they wanted to be the opposite sex, or anything in-between. Homosexuality was just another form of being gender non-conforming, and only differed from “Transsexuality” in degree, not kind. In their eyes, they were both simply varying symptoms of a universal underlying disease.
What follows in this article is 60 years of documented evidence of the existence of trans children, and the institutionally sanctioned violence against those children. The examples laid out here all still happen today — in clinics, in religious institutions utilizing loopholes in the law, and in homes where families do their own “DIY” therapy free of cost. Many of the figures mentioned are still frequently touted as “experts in trans youth” by members of the media and politicians, and are still used to justify laws that further erode trans rights.
Note that this article will overwhelmingly be covering transfeminine cases, due to the therapist’s own bias.
TW: Suicide, Abuse, Self-Harm
Table of Contents
Richard Green
Most standardized Conversion Therapy today can trace its roots back to Richard Green (1936–2019), who worked with John Money and Robert J. Stoller at John Hopkins hospital in Los Angeles, and the UCLA. He was instrumental in writing the original DSM diagnosis of “Gender Identity Disorder” (GID), which pooled together most any form of GNC behavior and labelled it as a dangerous signifier of future homo- or transsexuality — something that had to be prevented at any cost. This provided an excellently wide net in which to cast on countless families, scared senseless that their child wouldn’t grow up “normal”. And thus a career is born.
“Incongruous Gender Role: Nongenital Manifestations in Prepubertal Boys” (1960), Green, Money. https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1961-01995-001
“Group Therapy with Feminine Boys and Their Parents” (1973), Green, Fuller. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00207284.1973.11492209
“Treatment of Boyhood ‘Transsexualism’: An Interim Report of Four Years’ Experience” (1972), Green, Newman, and Stoller. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/article-abstract/490604
The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and The Development of Homosexuality (1987), Green.
Gender Identity Disorders in Childhood and Adolescence, Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality (2006), Hill et al. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1300/J056v17n03_02
Robert J. Stoller
Robert J. Stoller (1924–1991) was a Professor of Psychiatry at UCLA Medical School, and a researcher at the UCLA Gender Identity Clinic. While he only infrequently dealt with trans children himself, he often worked with and published papers concerning such cases with his colleague Richard Green. He holds many Freudian ideas such as “Oedipus Complex”, and explains away transsexualism using such means. One of his theories was that transsexual mothers hold their infant boys for too long, thus transferring her gender disorder onto them through some kind of Freudian osmosis. Stoller was considered one of the leading experts in the field for decades.
“Boyhood Gender Aberrations: Treatment Issues”, Stoller (1978). https://doi.org/10.1177/000306517802600304.
“Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity” (1968), Stoller. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11310951-sex-and-gender
George Rekers (and Ole Ivar Lovaas)
George Rekers (1948) is one of the most well-known Conversion Therapists, largely due to being outed as touring around with a young homosexual prostitute in 2010, despite being a vocal member of Christian Conservative anti-LGBT groups. Rekers got his young start serving under Ole Ivar Lovaas (1927–2010), who pioneered “Applied Behavioral Analysis”, the autistic version of abusive Conversion Therapy, utilizing corporal punishment and electro-shocks on autistic children to “fix” them (more information here).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Rekers
In 1983 Rekers was on the founding board of the Family Research Council, a non-profit Christian lobbying organization, and he is a former officer and scientific advisor of the National Association for Research & Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), an organization offering conversion therapy, a pseudoscientific practice intended to convert homosexuals to heterosexuality. Rekers has testified in court that homosexuality is destructive, and against parenthood by gay and lesbian people in a number of court cases involving organizations and state agencies working with children.[2]
Rekers co-authored four papers with Ole Ivar Lovaas, a psychology professor at the same university, on children with atypical gender behaviors.[61][62][63][64] The subject of the first of these studies, a ‘feminine’ young boy who was homosexual by 4 and a half years old at the inception of treatment, committed suicide as an adult; his family attribute the suicide to this treatment.[61][65][66][67]
In May 2010, Rekers employed a male prostitute as a travel companion for a two-week vacation in Europe.[4][5][6] Rekers denied any inappropriate conduct and suggestions that he was gay. The male escort told CNN he had given Rekers “sexual massages” while traveling together in Europe.[7][8] Rekers subsequently resigned from the board of NARTH.[8]
Reporters find tragic story amid embarrassing scandal, CNN (2011), Penn Bullock and Brandon K. Thorp. http://www.cnn.com/2011/US/06/08/rekers.sissy.boy.experiment/index.html
Kirk Andrew Murphy seemed to have everything to live for. He had a successful 8-year career in the Air Force. After the service, he landed a high profile position with an American finance company in India. But in 2003 at age 38, Kirk Murphy took his own life.
Kirk Murphy was a bright 5-year-old boy, growing up near Los Angeles in the 1970s. “He was just very intelligent, and a sweet, sweet, child.” “Playing with the girls’ toys, and probably picking up little effeminate, well, like stroking the hair, the long hair and stuff. It just bothered me that maybe he was picking up maybe too many feminine traits.” She said it bothered her because she wanted Kirk to grow up and have “a normal life.”
Then Kaytee Murphy saw a psychologist on local television. “He was naming all of these things; ‘If your son is doing five of these 10 things, does he prefer to play with girls’ toys instead of boys’ toys?’ Just things like this,” she said. The doctor was on TV that day, recruiting boys for a government-funded program at the University of California, Los Angeles. “Well, him being the expert, I thought, maybe I should take Kirk in,” said Kaytee Murphy. “In other words, nip it in the bud, before it got started any further.”
He was treated by George A. Rekers, a doctoral student at the time. The study, later published in an academic journal, concludes that after therapy, “Kraig’s” feminine behavior was gone and he became “indistinguishable from any other boy.”
The therapists instructed Kirk’s parents to use poker chips as a system of rewards and punishments. According to Rekers’ case study, blue chips were given for masculine behavior and would bring rewards, such as candy. But the red chips, given for effeminate behavior, resulted in “physical punishment by spanking from the father.” Maris remembers “lots of belt incidents.” She escaped the screaming by going to her bed to “lay in the room with my pillow on my head.” Later, she would go to Kirk’s bedroom and “lay down and hug him and we would just lay there, and the thing that I remember is that he never even showed anger. He was just numb.” During one particularly harsh punishment, their mother recalls, her husband “spanked” Kirk “so hard that he had welts up and down his back and on his buttocks.”
BRIEF AMICUS CURIAE OF SURVIVORS OF SEXUAL ORIENTATION CHANGE EFFORTS, IN SUPPORT OF DEFENDANTS–APPELLANTS URGING REVERSAL (2013) http://cdn.ca9.uscourts.gov/datastore/general/2013/02/04/13-15023_Amicus_brief_by_Survivors_of_Sexual_Orientation_Change_Efforts.pdf
Kirk told Dr. Green that he felt guilty that the SOCE “treatment” he underwent at UCLA had failed to “fix” him, and admitted that he had tried to kill himself because he did not want to be gay.
Kirk was not able to recover from the severe harm that he suffered as the result of being exposed to SOCE at a young age, and ultimately took his own life at the age of 38. Through the painful process of losing her brother and then learning what was done to him under the auspices of government-sanctioned [conversion] “treatment,” [Kirk’ sister] Maris became committed to protecting other minors from being exposed to the dangerous junk science that cost Kirk his life.
Disturbing Behaviors: Ole Ivar Lovaas and the Queer History of Autism Science (2018), Margaret F. Gibson, Patty Douglas. https://catalystjournal.org/index.php/catalyst/article/view/29579/23427
Less commonly recognized is Lovaas’s simultaneous involvement in the Feminine Boy Project during the 1970s, where he catalogued and developed interventions into the gender and sexual non-conforming identities and behaviors of young people. He engaged in the latter project while funding, supervising, and collaborating with his student George Rekers who continues to be a central if controversial advocate for so-called gay and trans “conversion therapies.” In this lesser-known project, Lovaas catalogued and developed interventions into the gender and sexual non-conforming identities and behaviors of young people (Burke, 1997; Dawson, 2008; McGuire, 2016; Yergeau, 2018).
Lovaas’s experiments on autistic children used positive reinforcers for desired/”normal” behaviors, such as giving food, saying “good boy,” and /or giving the child a hug or pat for attending to lessons or using spoken language, looking at, hugging, or kissing the experimenter upon request. They also used violent aversives: slaps, electric shocks and reprimands for undesired/autistic behaviors such as flapping hands, rocking, banging body parts against objects, climbing on furniture, not coming to the experimenter when asked, not hugging the experimenter, or averting their gaze. Unlike psychoanalysis, behavioral views of human learning and sociality are not interested in causes or the psychic interiority of human behavior and cognition. Instead, changes in the external environment result in changes in human cognition and behavior, and possibly even biology.
Electrified floors or prods and detailed measurement devices were used in some instances along with snacks, slaps, and daily monitoring checklists that could be more readily translated outside the experiment room. While initially hesitant about the capacity of parents to replicate the rigor of techniques being innovated in his UCLA laboratory, Lovaas’s experiments on autistic bodies extended the reach of scientific regulation to parents, and particularly mothers, whom he trained to be home therapists.
Children received reinforcements and punishments for as long as their play included the “wrong” wants. A boy stating that he “wanted to be a girl” was an indication of the need for gender training, and predictive of a feared future of transvestism, homosexuality, or transsexuality. The “wants” of individual autistic children in other studies were not explored as explicitly as those in the gender condition; however, the selection of “reinforcers” that each child would “work for” was a key point of interest for the researcher. Children who showed a desire for the approval of the therapist were seen as more “developed” and with an improved prognosis.
In terms of scientific prowess, the authors used moments when their interventions seemed to change what a child “wanted” in an enduring way as testimonials to their own success. For example, one article described: “Upon entering the room, Kraig [Kirk Murphy] said aloud, ‘I wonder which toys I will play with. Oh, these are girls’ toys here, I don’t want to play with them” (Rekers & Lovaas, 1974, p. 184).
Ken Zucker
Ken Zucker (1950) worked in the Clarke Institute in Toronto alongside his colleague and close friend Ray Blanchard, which later became CAMH (The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health). For three decades, he attended to over 1,500 trans children and kids, while making upwards of $125,000 a year in salary in his final years. As CAMH was basically the only major gender youth clinic in most of Canada, if you were a trans kid growing up from the 80s through to the 2010s, you’d have likely been sent to him for “correction”. Zucker was a bit more modern in his later years for saying that, actually, a “homosexual result” for such children is acceptable, but still held fast onto resisting a trans result.
Ken Zucker was fired from his head position at CAMH in 2015–2016, a few years after the “Gender Identity Disorder” diagnosis that he had helped cultivate for decades alongside Richard Green, was finally replaced with a more strict diagnosis. Blanchard himself has made several statements defending Zucker and his practices and methods.
Ken Zucker still works as a private therapist today, and is still touted and cited as an ‘expert on trans youth’ by figures like Jesse Singal, Helen Joyce, and the BBC.
For more information on CAMH, Ken Zucker, and Ray Blanchard, please read DiscoSexology, especially their amazing timeline of the development of Conversion Therapy.
Gender Identity Problems of Children and Adolescents the Establishment of a Special Clinic (1978), Zucker, Bradley, Steiner. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/070674377802300309
“Two Families Grapple with Sons Gender Preferences”, NPR (2008), Alex Spiegel. https://www.npr.org/2008/05/07/90247842/two-families-grapple-with-sons-gender-preferences
He was covered in blood. A gash on his forehead ran deep into his hairline. “What had happened was that two 10-year-old boys had thrown him off some playground equipment across the pavement because he’d been playing with a Barbie doll — and they called him a girl,” Carol says. “If he doesn’t learn to socialize with both males and females he was going to get hurt.”
Zucker, who has worked with this population for close to 30 years, has a very specific method for treating these children. Whenever Zucker encounters a child younger than 10 with gender identity disorder, he tries to make the child comfortable with the sex he or she was born with.
So, to treat Bradley, Zucker explained to Carol that she and her husband would have to radically change their parenting. Bradley would no longer be allowed to spend time with girls. He would no longer be allowed to play with girlish toys or pretend that he was a female character. As his pile of toys dwindled, Carol realized Bradley was hoarding. She would find female action figures stashed between couch pillows. Rainbow unicorns were hidden in the back of Bradley’s closet.
His drawings, however, also proved problematic. Bradley would populate his pictures with the toys and interests he no longer had access to — princesses with long flowing hair, fairies in elaborate dresses, rainbows of pink and purple and pale yellow. So, under Zuckers direction, Carol and her husband sought to change this as well.
“We would ask him, ‘Can you draw a boy for us? Can you draw a boy in that picture?’. And then finally after, I don’t know, a month or two, he just said, ‘Momma, I don’t know how. I don’t know how to draw a boy.’ Carol says she finally sat down and showed him. From then on, Bradley drew boys as directed. Male figures with anemic caps of hair on their heads filled the pages of his sketchbook.
“He was much more emotional. He could be very clingy. He didn’t want to go to school anymore. Just the smallest thing could send him into a major crying fit. And he seemed to feel really heavy and really emotional. He really struggles with the color pink. He’s like, ‘Mommy, don’t take me there! Close my eyes! Cover my eyes! I can’t see that stuff; it’s all pink!’”
“I mean, he tells us now that he doesn’t dream anymore that he’s a girl. So, we’re happy with that. He’s still a bit defensive if we ask him, ‘Do you want to be a girl?’ He’s like ‘No, NO! I’m happy being a boy.’ He gives us that sort of stock answer. I still think we’re at the stage where he feels he’s leading a double life,” she says. “I’m still quite certain that he is with the girls all the time at school, and so he knows to behave one way at school, and then when he comes home, there’s a different set of expectations.”
“A Boy’s Life”, The Atlantic (2008), Rosin. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/a-boys-life/307059/
In his case studies and descriptions of patients, Zucker usually explains gender dysphoria in terms of what he calls “family noise”: neglectful parents who caused a boy to overidentify with his domineering older sisters; a mother who expected a daughter and delayed naming her newborn son for eight weeks. Zucker has compared young children who believe they are meant to live as the other sex to people who want to amputate healthy limbs, or who believe they are cats, or those with something called ethnic-identity disorder.
Younger children are more malleable, he believes. Zucker’s belief is that with enough therapy, such children can be made to feel comfortable in their birth sex. Adolescents are more fixed in their identity. If a parent brings in, say, a 13-year-old who has never been treated and who has severe gender dysphoria, Zucker will generally recommend hormonal treatment.
When he was 4, John had tested at the top of the gender-dysphoria scale. He had bins full of Barbies and Disney princess movies, and he dressed in homemade costumes. Once, he wept, “I don’t want to be a daddy! I want to be a mommy!”.
When they reversed course, they dedicated themselves to the project with a thoroughness most parents would find exhausting and off-putting. They boxed up all of John’s girl-toys and videos and replaced them with neutral ones. Whenever John cried for his girl-toys, they would ask him, “Do you think playing with those would make you feel better about being a boy?” and then would distract him with an offer to ride bikes or take a walk. They turned their house into a 1950s kitchen-sink drama, intended to inculcate respect for patriarchy, in the crudest and simplest terms: “Boys don’t wear pink, they wear blue,” they would tell him, or “Daddy is smarter than Mommy — ask him.” If John called for Mommy in the middle of the night, Daddy went, every time.
When I visited the family, he said he was glad he’d been through the therapy, “because it made me feel happy,” but that’s about all he would say. Recently, John was in the basement watching the Grammys. When Caroline walked downstairs to say good night, she found him draped in a blanket, vamping. He looked up at her, mortified. Her position now is that the treatment is “not a cure; this will always be with him”.
I spoke to the mother of one Zucker patient in her late 20s, who said her daughter was repulsed by the thought of a sex change but was still suffering — she’d become an alcoholic, and was cutting herself. “I’d be surprised if she outlived me,” her mother said.
“Man Who Would Be Queen” (2003), J. Michael Bailey.
More importantly, he has scoffed at the idea that children with GID are unhappy only because they are socially ostracized. He remembers cases in which children were unhappy primarily because they couldn’t become the other sex. For example, he recalls parents of a boy with GID telling him: “Every night before going to bed, he prays to God to turn him into a girl.” Another mother of a six-year old boy with GID told Zucker that the boy cried himself to sleep every night, softly singing, “My dreams will never come true.” These boys are unhappy because they aren’t girls, regardless of whether others call them “sissy.” Zucker thinks that an important goal of treatment is to help the children accept their birth sex and to avoid becoming transsexual. His experience has convinced him that if a boy with GID becomes an adolescent with GID, the chances that he will become an adult with GID and seek a sex change are much higher. And he thinks that the kind of therapy he practices helps reduce this risk.
Zucker emphasizes a three-pronged treatment approach for boys with GID. First, he thinks that family dynamics play a large role in childhood GID — not necessarily in the origins of cross-gendered behavior, but in their persistence. It is the disordered and chaotic family, according to Zucker, that can’t get its act together to present a consistent and sensible reaction to the child, which would be something like the following: “We love you, but you are a boy, not a girl. Wishing to be a girl will only make you unhappy in the long run, and pretending to be a girl will only make your life around others harder.” So the first prong of Zucker’s approach is family therapy. Whatever conflicts or issues that parents have that prevent them from uniting to help their child must be addressed.
The second prong is therapy for the boy, to help him adjust to the idea that he cannot become a girl, and to help teach him how to minimize social ostracism. Zucker does not teach boys how to walk in a manly fashion, but he does give them feedback about the likely consequences of taking a doll to school. The third prong is key. Zucker says simply: “The Barbies have to go.” He has nothing against Barbie dolls, of course. He means something more general. Feminine toys and accoutrements — including Barbie dolls, girls’ shoes, dresses, purses, and princess gowns — are no longer to be tolerated at home, much less bought for the child. Zucker believes that toleration and encouragement of feminine play and dress prevents the child from accepting his maleness. Common sense says that a boy who wants to play with dolls so much that he is willing to risk his father’s wrath and his peers’ scorn is unlikely to change his behavior due to inconsistent feedback, sometimes forbidding, sometimes tolerating, and sometimes even encouraging it. Inconsistent parenting like this is ineffective in stamping out any kind of unwanted behavior.
Compared with the therapy of the right-wingers, Zucker’s therapy is more psychologically focused and less punitive. Although Zucker encourages parents of GID boys to set limits on their sons’ feminine activities, he also encourages parents to discuss their gender concerns openly with their sons. Still, there is no denying that both moderate Zucker and right-winger Rekers think that parents should not just sit back and let their sons express their feminine sides. This view draws the wrath of the left-wingers, who insist that there is nothing wrong with boys who like girls’ things. The central difference between Zucker and his critics on the left is that Zucker believes that most boys who play with girls’ things often enough to earn a diagnosis of GID would become girls if they could. Failure to intervene increases the chances of transsexualism in adulthood, which Zucker considers a bad outcome. For one, sex change surgery is major and permanent, and can have serious side effects. Why put boys at risk for this when they can become gay men happy to be men?
Graphic:
“Want to know a child’s gender? Ask”, SFGate (2016), Schreier, Ehrensaft. https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/Want-to-know-a-child-s-gender-Ask-6843665.php
Charlie was a prodigious child, starting to read at age 2, said his mother, Anne. One night after a bath, he asked his mother in all earnestness when he could have his penis taken off as he was really a girl. At age 3, he began asking to wear nail polish and girl’s clothing, a request his parents periodically granted, allowing Charlie’s hair to grow long as well. A psychologist who was testing Charlie for attention deficit disorder said not to worry about the gender issues, that it was a passing phase. It did not pass.
Charlie’s parents sought advice at Toronto’s Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, where they were enrolled in a two-day evaluation. They were told Charlie had, among many disorders, gender identity disorder. Charlie should spend more time with dad, the specialist recommended, even though both parents said dad was very involved and close to Charlie. And, he should stop playing with girls, spend more time with boys and play with boys’ toys. The psychologist they were referred to recommended the same.
Rather than feeling helped, the parents felt demeaned and concluded they could not follow through with the recommended treatment. They feared it would hurt rather than help. Charlie is now in a fourth-grade class for gifted children, having transitioned as a girl when she entered school, and doing remarkably well.
“The End of the Desistance Myth”(2017), Huffington Post, Brynn Tannehill. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-end-of-the-desistance_b_8903690
That is, until December 2015, when an independent investigation led to Dr. Zucker’s firing and his clinic being closed. The investigation results were highly damning, finding:
• The methods being used were 30 years out of date
• The clinic assumed that all gender variant children need to be clinically “fixed” (i.e. they used coercive behavior modification on queer kids to make them act straight)
• Children were pressured into being photographed without clothing
• The clinic emphasized tests, treatment, methods with no scientific basis in evidence based medicine
• CAMH staff asked pre-pubescent children questions that were highly sexual in nature
• Former patients, parents, and therapists of former patients described the treatment as “disturbing” and “harmful”
• CAMH hid affirming community and medical resources from patients
• Dr. Zucker regarded being cisgender, heterosexual, and gender conforming as the “best” outcome
• Dr. Zucker and his team could not conclusively demonstrate that what they were doing was not reparative therapy
In a 2014 German study, 13 experts in treatment for gender identity were asked if CAMH’s methods were ethical. 11 said no. The two who said yes were Dr. Zucker and another CAMH staffer.
“Trans Kids: Being Gendered in the Twenty-First Century” (2018), Tey Meadow
“Physical attractiveness of boys with gender identity disorder” (1993) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/8435037/
University students blind to group status rated boys with gender identity disorder and clinical control boys regarding their physical attractiveness. Ratings were made of the face and upper torso from photographs taken at the time of clinical assessment (mean age, 8.1 years). On all five adjectives (attractive, beautiful, cute, handsome, and pretty)
“Physical attractiveness of girls with gender identity disorder” (1993), https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02437905
University students, masked to group status, judged the physical attractiveness of girls with gender identity disorder and clinical and normal control girls, whose photographs were taken at the time of assessment (X age, 6.6 years). Each student made ratings for all girls for five traits: attractive, beautiful, cute, pretty, and ugly.
Graphic:
John Money
While his work in Conversion Therapy is hidden among scandals and infamy, John Money’s (1921–2006) most famous research was invasive gender reassignment of intersex children (and, in the case of David Reimer, a non-intersex cis male child). Even today, millions of intersex infants and children are given SRS procedures to “fix” their genitals largely due to Money’s lasting influence, even if there’s no direct health issue concern. Their parents go along with it cluelessly, because they just want a “normal kid”, regardless of what their child may someday want. In most of the Republican bills being passed that bans all HRT and transitioning medicines and procedures for trans youth, they’ve carefully rewritten and edited the laws to clearly include permissions for all related procedures for intersex kids specifically. So even for those who want to ban all gender transitioning for consenting trans people for so-called ethical reasons, they’re perfectly fine allowing the exact same things to be done to intersex kids — even without their consent.
Additionally, right wing reactionaries online often assume Money must be of “Jewish ancestry”, but actually he was a typical English-Welsh WASP born in New Zealand. He’s also incorrectly attributed to many fanciful claims such as being the “inventor of Transgenders” and so on. Money was no fan of trans people, going as far as to call them “devious, demanding and manipulative” and “possibly also incapable of love.”
Money was a Gender Constructivist, who believed everything about one’s own sense as their gender or sex, as a male, female, man, woman, boy, girl, etc., was entirely socially created and mediated. Anyone can be made to identify as a boy or girl depending on how they were raised against their will or knowledge, if you enforce it onto them hard enough. And so, he began his experiments.
“A Boy’s Life”, The Atlantic (2008), Hanna Rosin. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/11/a-boys-life/307059/
“In 1967, Dr. John Money launched an experiment that he thought might confirm some of the more radical ideas emerging in feminist thought, arguing that the whole notion of gender was a social construction, and easy to manipulate. In a 1955 paper, Money had written: “Sexual behavior and orientation as male or female does not have an innate, instinctive basis.” We learn whether we are male or female “in the course of the various experiences of growing up.”
One day, he got a letter from the parents of infant twin boys, one of whom had suffered a botched circumcision that had burned off most of his penis. Money saw the case as a perfect test for his theory. He encouraged the parents to have the boy, David Reimer, fully castrated and then to raise him as a girl. When the child reached puberty, Money told them, doctors could construct a vagina and give him feminizing hormones. Above all, he told them, they must not waver in their decision and must not tell the boy about the accident.
In paper after paper, Money reported on Reimer’s fabulous progress, writing that “she” showed an avid interest in dolls and dollhouses, that she preferred dresses, hair ribbons, and frilly blouses. Money’s description of the child in his book Sexual Signatures prompted one reviewer to describe her as “sailing contentedly through childhood as a genuine girl.” Time magazine concluded that the Reimer case cast doubt on the belief that sex differences are “immutably set by the genes at conception.”
The reality was quite different, as Rolling Stone reporter John Colapinto brilliantly documented in the 2000 best seller As Nature Made Him. Reimer had never adjusted to being a girl at all. He wanted only to build forts and play with his brother’s dump trucks, and insisted that he should pee standing up. He was a social disaster at school, beating up other kids and misbehaving in class. At 14, Reimer became so alienated and depressed that his parents finally told him the truth about his birth, at which point he felt mostly relief, he reported. He eventually underwent phalloplasty, and he married a woman. Then four years ago, at age 38, Reimer shot himself dead in a grocery-store parking lot.
Today, the notion that gender is purely a social construction seems nearly as outmoded as bra-burning or free love. Dr. Milton Diamond, an expert on human sexuality at the University of Hawaii and long the intellectual nemesis of Money, encapsulated this view in an interview on the BBC in 1980, when it was becoming clear that Money’s experiment was failing: “We come to this world with some degree of maleness and femaleness which will transcend whatever the society wants to put into us.”
You can read here for more background info on the Reimer case, as well as Milton Diamond’s paper arguing that Transsexuality as an Intersexual Condition.
Joseph Nicolosi
A relatively new figure, Joseph Nicolosi (1947–2017) still has some infamy in religious and Gender Critical circles, but all he does is rehash everything from the above authors to a new audience. While he calls his practice “Reparative Therapy”, it all follows the exact same methods as everything written by all the previous figures on how to “fix” children with “GID”. He claims he offers a more “gentle approach”, which basically just means he says the same things all the others do, but in a somewhat softer voice. He still removes toys and bans behavior outright without compromise, but at a slightly slower pace.
All variations of labelling Conversion Therapy that these people come up with (Reparative, Explorative, Talk, etc) always have the same universal and uncompromising goal of forbidding a trans outcome, through abuse, manipulation, and shame. These people can also rarely think of any good reason of why a child being gender non-conforming is actually bad or harmful outside of it being socially unacceptable, or leading to “bad results” like being gay or trans.
“A Parent’s Guide to Preventing Homosexuality” (2002), Nicolosi.
One important task of parents is to encourage the boy’s expression of what he is really thinking and feeling. Since we know that he is probably fearful of growing up and of meeting the challenge of a male role, the boy should be encouraged to verbalize these anxieties and to communicate his ideas about gender, which will inevitably be distorted. Parents need to find opportunities to clarify male/female distinctions. Asking questions like “What do you want to be when you grow up?” and “Who do you want to grow up to be like?” will open up a window of opportunity to correct fantasy distortions as well as to offer encouragement.
It will also be necessary for you, as parents, to gradually replace toys, games, and articles of clothing that support your son’s cross-gender fantasy. Some mothers tell me they have secretly dumped certain objects. While understanding their frustration and need to act in a hurry, I suggest a more open approach. You can encourage the boy to participate in the transfer of these items by having him decide which ones to give to which little girls he knows. Some parents have even made a ritual out of disposing of the feminine toys in a ceremonious packing and removing of girl’s stuff to be given away to a needy neighborhood girl or a female cousin.
A “bye-bye ceremony” might be helpful in the case of a toddler. Get a box, put the dolls inside, seal it up, and say “Bye-bye,” all the while acknowledging how hard it must be for the boy to give these toys away. Explain, “Now Daddy is going to take them to a little girl in the neighborhood who doesn’t have any Barbies to play with.” The “bye-bye ceremony” can be difficult, but it should not be traumatic. And your decision to do this should not be impulsive but rather well thought out.”
How aggressive these corrective interventions should be depends on your child’s response. If he becomes withdrawn, depressed, angry, frustrated, or nervous, then you will know that you are moving too quickly. One enthusiastic couple hoped to “fix” their boy all in one week. The result was an anxious, alarmed child. The dramatic, negative change in the boy’s mood indicated that he was not given time to adjust to his parents’ changed expectations. Some parents take the opposite approach: they are hesitant to make the most obvious, common-sense changes. Much of this hesitancy is due to the mixed message from our culture and, as we discussed, the conflicting advice given by child development professionals. These parents look for explicit permission from a professional to say to the boy gently but clearly, “Bobby, no more sissy stuff. You’re too old now for this girlish behavior.” They say they fear discussing the problem with their son lest they hurt his feelings.
Nevertheless, the most effective intervention is for the parental team to convey together, through a gentle but unified and consistent message, “This is not who you are — you’re a boy.” This style of treatment is gentle, caring, loving, and should not happen all at once, yet it is explicit and unambiguous.
One mother summed it up well: “Helping my son overcome effeminate behavior is like growing roses. It doesn’t require a lot of work, but it takes a lot of consistent mindfulness.” The first step in healing begins when parents acknowledge that there is a problem and then decide to work together to correct their child’s difficulty. The second step is conveying to the child that they, as parents, are committed to helping him, and that change is necessary. Once the child realizes that both parents, as a team, will no longer ignore his inappropriate cross-gender behavior, he will begin to adjust.
The Desistance Myth
“The Controversial Research on ‘Desistance’ in Transgender Youth” (2018), KQED, Jon Brooks. https://www.kqed.org/futureofyou/441784/the-controversial-research-on-desistance-in-transgender-youth
This school of thought holds that because the criteria for a diagnosis of gender dysphoria (previously called gender identity disorder) was less stringent in the past, the earlier desistance studies included a large cohort of children who today would not be diagnosed with gender dysphoria, gay boys who may have been experimenting with different ways of expressing gender but who were never really transgender in the first place.
In 2013, Steensma co-authored an oft-cited study that examined 127 adolescents, all of whom had displayed various levels of gender dysphoria as children. The researchers found that 80 of the children had desisted by the ages of 15 and 16. That works out to 63 percent of kids who basically stopped being transgender — a lower rate than in previous studies, but still a majority.
Some clinicians criticize this study, however, on methodological grounds, because the researchers defined anyone who did not return to their clinic as desisting. Fifty-two of the children classified as desisters or their parents did send back questionnaires showing the subjects’ present lack of gender dysphoria. But 28 neither responded nor could be tracked down.
In addition, 38 of the 127 kids were originally designated “subthreshold” for gender identity disorder, meaning they did not fulfill all the criteria for meeting the official diagnosis.
“The End of the Desistance Myth”(2017), Huffington Post, Brynn Tannehill. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-end-of-the-desistance_b_8903690
For starters, the most cited study (Steensma) which alleges a 84 percent desistance rate, did not actually differentiate between children with consistent, persistent and insistent gender dysphoria, kids who socially transitioned, and kids who just acted more masculine or feminine than their birth sex and culture allowed for. In other words, it treated gender non-conformance the same as gender dysphoria. Worse, the study could not locate 45.3 percent of the children for follow up, and made the assumption that all of them were desisters. Indeed, other studies used to support this also suffered from similar methodological flaws.
As a result, the 84 percent desistance figure is meaningless, since both the numerator and denominator are unknown, because you have no idea how many of the kids ended up transitioning (numerator), and no idea how many of them were actually gender dysphoric to begin with (denominator). When Dr. Steensma went back in 2013 and looked at the intensity of dysphoria these children felt as a factor in persistence, it turned out that it was actually a very good predictor of which children would transition.
In other words, the children who actually met the clinical guidelines for gender dysphoria as children generally ended up as transgender adults. Further research has shown that children who meet the clinical guidelines for gender dysphoria are as consistent in their gender identity as the general population.
You’ve likely heard the line “Studies say 80/85/90/95% of trans kids desist! It’s just a phase!” by many people online, coined by headlines they half-remember reading, but can’t quite recall where or when they heard it, or why they even believe it. In fact, most every study concerning this factoid has data pulled from only 2 sources — Ken Zucker’s Conversion Therapy clinic at CAMH, and a Netherlands clinic which was following Zucker’s methodology. Other much older studies are always by Green, or Rekers, or others mentioned in this article.
To conversion therapists, any form of GNC behavior is “latent dysphoria” that can “evolve into” transgenderism spontaneously and unpredictably, and thus every GNC child who doesn’t transition is a “desister”. The incredibly flimsy GID diagnosis was written directly by and for conversion therapists who wanted a wider net to be able to “fix” more kids — to get concerned parents into their offices, not to accurately diagnose real gender dysphoria.
One such study admitted how flawed their methodology was themselves:
“We also found that both boys and girls with more extreme gender dysphoria were more likely to develop adolescent/adult GID, whereas children with less extreme gender dysphoria seemed to have overcome their gender dysphoria.”
(Take note how often Green, Money, Zucker, and the rest all show up in the citations of this paper, and in all anti-trans research papers, over and over again. Underneath every rock of anti-trans activism is one of these names, and more.)
This behavior of “assuming the best” is nothing new to this field, such as in this example:
Gender Identity Disorder and Psychosexual Problems in Children and Adolescents (1995), Zucker, Bradley.
The fact that so many people believe the myth that most trans kids desist, despite all of their sources having the explicit goal of trying to cause that result, is shocking. Many of the so-called “less feminine” children may have simply been cowed into repression. The flaws of their diagnostic criteria and intended goals make this near impossible to determine. Why would any child tell the truth or show their true selves to others again?
Another myth commonly bandied around is that “Transitioning is being used to convert gay kids.” As Bailey said in his book describing the motives behind Zucker’s therapy practices, “Why put boys at risk for this when they can become gay men happy to be men?”. Being trans was and still is universally seen as more extreme and radical than being “just gay”. Transgender youth are sent to Conversion Therapy clinics at twice the rate of LGBQ youth due to this.
National Survey on LGBTQ Youth Mental Health 2021, The Trevor Project. https://www.thetrevorproject.org/survey-2021/?section=ConversionTherapy
Anti-Trans activists, both the outright reactionaries and the more Gender Critical types, also constantly accuse transgender people and allies of “Forcibly converting children whenever they touch a Barbie, or are just a little tomboyish”, when every clinician they support did exactly that. Many claim that what trans youth really needs is “real therapy” or “talk therapy”, without ever specifying what magic words they want their hypothetical Trans-Curing therapist to say that will make their child’s dysphoria instantly go away, or how it differs from what Green did in any way, or whether it’s been shown to actually work or not.
Many critics of trans youth also misunderstand that the “Most trans ‘kids’ desist!” line was never about adolescents, teenagers, but rather literal children under 9-10 years old or so that these researchers usually had as patients, who were merely diagnosed with the flimsy “GID” criteria. This misunderstanding leads to them hoping and praying that their own fervently dysphoric 14 or 15 year old adolescent has as much chance to “desist” as a 6 year old incorrectly diagnosed child. They then proceed to full-throatedly protest to ban transition for anyone under 18, or 19, or 21, or 25, in the hopes that just one more year of forcing them to suffer from pubertal changes without treatment will be the year they finally give up.
In fact, even the Conversion Therapists explicitly said this was extremely unlikely, over and over again, for decades. The very first excerpt posted in this document says as much:
“There are some cases in which the condition is so firmly entrenched by middle childhood that is cannot reasonably be expected to disappear. Possibly there is a critical period in the earlier years in which effective intervention is possible.” (Green, Money).
Even in the minds of the most fervent Conversion Therapist whose entire career was founded on them selling Cures for Problem Children, they viewed adolescent dysphorics — starting from the onset of puberty, ages 10–13 — to be essentially past the point of no return, ‘untreatable’. One does not need to finish the entirety puberty, to wait until 18, or 19, or 21, or 25, to “be sure”. This line of thinking was an invention of anti-trans activism and a game of telephone.
Here’s Conversion Therapy apologist Stephen B. Levine admitting there’s no working evidence of the practice working for adolescents outside of “internet anecdotes”:
EXHIBIT B Expert Affidavit of Dr. Stephen B. Levine, M.D. (2020) https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/field_document/levine_declaration.pdf
And Zucker admitting the same:
Children with gender identity disorder: Is there a best practice?https://isiarticles.com/bundles/Article/pre/pdf/35983.pdf
And Rekers:
Atypical Gender Development and Psychosocial Adjustment (1977), http://neurodiversity.com/library_rekers_1977.html
More debunking of the “Desistance” factoid can be found here.
A brand new study showing effective persistence rates for trans children fall in line with expectations that most of them simply do not “change their minds”, or that it’s “just a phase”:
Gender Identity 5 Years After Social Transition (2022), Kristina R. Olson, PhD, Lily Durwood, MS, Rachel Horton, BS, Natalie M. Gallagher, PhD, Aaron Devor, PhD. https://publications.aap.org/pediatrics/article/doi/10.1542/peds.2021-056082/186992/Gender-Identity-5-Years-After-Social-Transition
The present study examined the rate of retransition and current gender identities of 317 initially-transgender youth (208 transgender girls, 109 transgender boys; M=8.1 years at start of study) participating in a longitudinal study. At the end of this period, most youth identified as binary transgender youth (94%), including 1.3% who retransitioned to another identity before returning to their binary transgender identity. 2.5% of youth identified as cisgender and 3.5% as nonbinary.
The following article was written ten years ago in 2012, and reports basically the same frequency of persistence at one of the earliest clinics that offered medical transition to trans youth:
“Transgender children getting more drug, hormone treatments”, The Associated Press, 2012
https://www.cbc.ca/news/health/transgender-children-getting-more-drug-hormone-treatments-1.1294699
The drugs used by the clinics are approved for delaying puberty in kids who start maturing too soon. The idea is to give these children time to mature emotionally and make sure they want to proceed with a permanent sex change. Only 1 of the 97 opted out of permanent treatment, Spack said.
Conversion Therapy Doesn’t Work. Period.
Association Between Recalled Exposure to Gender Identity Conversion Efforts and Psychological Distress and Suicide Attempts Among Transgender Adults (2019), Turban. https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2749479
Findings: 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.
Meaning: The findings suggest that lifetime and childhood exposure to gender identity conversion efforts are associated with adverse mental health outcomes.
Graphic:
At best, Conversion Therapy simply teaches children how to lie, how to hate themselves, and how to fear their parents and the world around them. Even the star patients the therapists would routinely champion around like notches in their belts, are sad to read and full of blatant performative lying to avoid getting punished, as well as outright self-hatred, shame, and even suicide:
“He’s like ‘No, NO! I’m happy being a boy.’ He gives us that sort of stock answer. I still think we’re at the stage where he feels he’s leading a double life.”
“Upon entering the room, Kraig [Kirk Murphy] said aloud, ‘I wonder which toys I will play with. Oh, these are girls’ toys here, I don’t want to play with them”… Kirk [later] admitted that he had tried to kill himself because he did not want to be gay.”
“When the boys, encouraged and taught to be masculine, began preferring that mode, neurotic behavior, physical attacks on mother, and nightmares and phobias, appears for the first time. We look at such manifestations as evidence that such treatment is successful.”
“All I had to do was to look at him while he was doing it, and he would realize that that was what I meant and he stopped doing it.”
“I’d be surprised if she outlived me,” her mother said.
“I think that the main thing that I took away from my years at Green’s gender clinic at UCLA was a kind of self-hatred and a loss of a sense of who I really was. I learned to hide myself, to make myself invisible, even to myself. I learned that who I was, was wrong.”
Sadly, most Conversion Therapy just codifies what most regular parents and peers already do — enforce strict masculine and feminine norms on their children, with punishment and reward systems, through the use of shame and threats of harm, to “prevent bad results”. One can easily imagine that most trans youth who get abused from conversion practices need never be sent to an actual clinic to experience it— the family and society often performs the same work themselves all on their own.
Many people wish Conversion Therapy worked. Because of the shame and struggle involved, even who suffer from gender dysphoria themselves often pray for “another way”. Panicked parents bed for some “cure” they can give their kids instead of having to call them a different name, running instead to charlatans and snake-oil salesmen. Who also, eventually, admit they can’t do anything either. Detractors will often cry, “They’re secretly shutting down the real research that can cure transgenders! It’s out there somewhere!” — and yet, after decades of open and institutionally endorsed abuse, manipulation, torture, psychoanalysis, “gentle talk therapy”, and everything else under the sun, none of these alternative methods ever seemed to actually do anything beneficial for the patient, outside of transitioning.
But it doesn’t mean they won’t keep trying.
Gender Critical Conversion Therapy
Throughout all of these example, you might have noticed how often Conversion Therapy targets the parents of these gender variant children too, not just the child themselves. Indeed, the parents were the real active clients in these transactions. From manipulative TV ads, to telling them to quit their jobs or change their marriages, to giving them special counselling to help them deal with the “emotional loss of their child”, to being trained to be able to perform the corrective therapy themselves at home, they were just as much a part of the conversion process as the child was, sometimes even more so.
They had to be convinced that their child, whom they might have actually initially accepted and were just a little concerned over, was actually abnormal and mentally diseased, and would grow up to become a social outcast, a failure, a freak, and that it was all their fault. Countless arguments such as “If they grow up that way, they’ll get bullied and mistreated” are used all the time to protest against supporting trans youth, with the solution being to become the bully themselves and make the trans child their inescapable target, to directly cause the undue harm they say they’re protecting them from. Such as in the NPR story, one child was brutally assaulted by other kids for playing with feminine toys — and the mother’s first instinct was to “fix” her own child, rather than change the bully’s behavior. To fix a child, the parent must become one with the enemy, and the child recognizes and internalizes that.
Some parents, however, gladly take up arms against their children with far cheaper propaganda.
“Desist, Detrans, Detox” (2021), Maria Keffler.
Caelan Conrad went in-depth into Gender Critical Conversion Therapy guides, that parents can do in the comfort of their own home. Parents will frequently bemoan how some therapists seem to be “affirming”, or complain at how they need to avoid Child Protective Services with some of the things they do to their children. One of the books shared amongst their groups is shown to be Nicolosi’s “Preventing Homosexuality” as covered previously.
As most of this article covered transfeminine Conversion Therapy, Gender Criticals naturally tend to focus more on transmasculine youth, while still defending and upholding all the practices and views of their forebears (sometimes unknowingly, sometimes deliberately). The main villain they they accuse of causing transgenderism is… society itself, and their environments, much like every other Conversion Therapist. Their solution, however, is a bit more extreme than even Green’s or Zucker’s —they wish to remove society from the youth, and the youth from society, entirely and completely.
Abigail Shrier recommends these methods to cure a wayward trans child to her Gender Critical readers, in her 2021 book “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters”:
You’re the parent for a reason. Don’t be afraid to push back; your adolescent can handle it. You don’t have to go along with everything she comes up with (even claims about sexuality or identity).
The trajectory of the life of Chiara, whose story I mentioned in the previous chapter, changed after her mother arranged for her to live on a horse farm that had no internet. Brie from Chapter Five quit her job to travel with her daughter and then moved across the country. Another family pulled up stakes and moved from a progressive city to an immigrant community that shared their values, as you will see in the Afterword.
If you find your daughter steeping in a tea of gender ideology with all of her peers, do what it takes to lift her out and take her away. If she is still living with you, a move seems incredibly effective, especially if it’s early in her trans identification. If she is already at college, bring her home.
The highly-shared Gender Critical article from the Daily Signal in 2021, “What I’ve Learned Rescuing My Daughter From Her Transgender Fantasy”, shares Shrier’s exact same sentiments and methods:
I went nuclear. I took the phone and stripped it of all social media — YouTube, Instagram, Discord, Reddit, Pinterest, Twitter. I even blocked her ability to get to the internet. I deleted all of her contacts and changed her phone number.
We pulled the plug on all social media and her access to anyone other than those persons we vetted. I forced my daughter to listen to specific podcasts on the subject while driving her to school. I printed out stories about female detransitioners and left them throughout the house. I left all of my research out in plain view, including “Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters” by Abigail Shrier, “Gender Dysphoria: A Therapeutic Model for Working With Children, Adolescents, and Young Adults” by Susan Evans, and other books. I followed the advice of Parents for Ethical Care’s podcasts and the book “Desist, Detrans & Detox: Getting Your Child Out of the Gender Cult” by Maria Keffler.
Gender Criticals do not only routinely suggest cutting their child off from all contact to the outside world, but also routinely try to rehabilitate the old Conversion Therapist grandfathers as well. Helen Joyce spent much of her 2021 book “Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality” repeatedly defending and whitewashing Richard Green’s actual therapy practices, despite him insistently urging parents to have a zero-tolerance policy on any GNC behavior multiple times in all of his reports (somehow, Richard Dawkins missed this when he declared the book as “thoroughly researched”):
She also spent a whole page defending Ken Zucker, without ever covering his actual therapy practices even once, instead painting him as some brave warrior of a culture war:
Joyce also recently used a term “pre-gay”, which is strikingly lifted from conversion therapy lingo which we’d already covered previously:
To judge more general reactions, here’s some responses from an Ovarit thread discussing the UK’s recent failure to ban Trans Conversion Therapy:
That is the best possible outcome. Anyone who says they are “trans” has already been subject to the conversion therapy of TCult propaganda and indoctrination. Getting them in therapy to undo the damage is not conversion therapy at all. It is appropriate care.
Oh hey! this is definitely a strong turn back towards sanity! Just so we’re clear here, this means the government won’t persecute anybody — therapists or parents — for initiating supportive talk therapy (or other non-invasive, non-medicalization approaches) that’s aimed at boosting SELF-awareness, introspection and SELF-confidence.
As a British lesbian all I can say is, finally sanity prevailing! Hopefully a step away from gender affirmative care as a one and only treatment plan and a step away from lgb with the t.
There is some overlap with Autism and other neurodivergencies (I think alot of them are being manipulated by the Trans community) and Gender Dysphoria, they need to get help too. Let’s hope more LGB people start dropping the T and Q. The T and Q don’t give af about anyone except themselves.
The use of Autism as a disqualifier is common among many Gender Criticals, where even responsible grown adults are permanently incompetent — or, as Green and Money would say, are “chronically handicapped” — and have “holes in their brains”. Some commenters even suggested taking Guardianship of her grown adult child, who’s a medical school student.
Inside a Cult — Gender Critical (Part Two — Conversion Therapy), Caelan Conrad. https://youtu.be/nBbOw_K6K5Q?t=4777
When you see more and more people use the “Autism” clause, take note of Rekers and Lovaas and the dark history behind this connection.
The goal of all Gender Critical parents and organizations is to prevent all attempts at transitioning, by any means necessary, without compromise, without exception. As they say themselves:
Submission of Evidence to the Nuffield Council on Bioethics by Our Duty, 2021. https://ourduty.group/wp-content/uploads/2021/05/Nuffield-Bioethics-Submission.pdf
Conclusions
- Trans people aren’t “grooming” cis children to be trans — anti-trans society is “grooming” trans and gender-variant children to be cis and normative, and is proud of it.
- Trans people aren’t reinforcing strict gender roles or “converting” children for displaying gender variant behavior — anti-trans society instead ramps up gender policing to try and “cure” trans people, and aggressively targets and stifles variant behavior themselves in fear they “may end up trans”.
- There is no difference in practice between Gay and Trans Conversion Therapy, or even Autism Conversion Therapy.
- Conversion Therapy is not always physically violent, but it is always abusive — often utilizing emotional manipulation and shaming tactics, forcing the child to learn that their parents’ supposed love for them is, in fact, strictly conditional on how masculine or feminine they behave.
- Conversion Therapy is not always religiously driven or exclusively about consenting homosexual adults, but is often secular and usually targets children who have no choice in the matter.
- Conversion Therapy is not a ‘relic of the past’ — it still happens every day in the modern age, whether at a clinic or at home.
- Trans youth are not some radical new phenomenon, an invention of the past few years, but have actually been documented in clinical reports for over half a century, from ages as young as 3 or 4. Before any Internet, LGBT media, or remotely trans-accepting families or societies could have possibly “brainwashed” them. Now is the first time in history they’ve been able to get the treatment they need that actually benefits their well-being, and that’s why people are so angry about it.
- Countless alternatives to HRT and transitioning as treatments for gender dysphoria have been attempted for decades, with mass institutional funding and widespread social support — and they’ve all roundly, soundly failed. “Talk Therapy”, “Exploratory Therapy”, reinforcing gender roles, “boosting self-confidence” in their birth sex — none of these cure dysphoria. Nothing else but transitioning has been proven to have any beneficial effect on trans youth or trans adults.
Mental Health Outcomes in Transgender and Nonbinary Youths Receiving Gender-Affirming Care (2022)
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2789423
In this prospective cohort of 104 TNB youths aged 13 to 20 years, receipt of gender-affirming care, including puberty blockers and gender-affirming hormones, was associated with 60% lower odds of moderate or severe depression and 73% lower odds of suicidality compared with youths who had not, over a 12-month follow-up.
Young Adult Psychological Outcome After Puberty Suppression and Gender Reassignment (2014)
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/content/134/4/696
METHODS: A total of 55 young transgender adults (22 transwomen and 33 transmen) who had received puberty suppression during adolescence were assessed 3 times: before the start of puberty suppression (mean age, 13.6 years), when cross-sex hormones were introduced (mean age, 16.7 years), and at least 1 year after gender reassignment surgery (mean age, 20.7 years).
RESULTS: After gender reassignment, in young adulthood, the GD was alleviated and psychological functioning had steadily improved. Well-being was similar to or better than same-age young adults from the general population. Improvements in psychological functioning were positively correlated with postsurgical subjective well-being.
CONCLUSIONS: A clinical protocol of a multidisciplinary team with mental health professionals, physicians, and surgeons, including puberty suppression, followed by cross-sex hormones and gender reassignment surgery, provides gender dysphoric youth who seek gender reassignment from early puberty, the opportunity to develop into well-functioning young adults.
Intervenable factors associated with suicide risk in transgender persons (2015)
Social support, reduced transphobia, and having any personal identification documents changed were associated with large relative and absolute reductions in suicide risk, as was completing a medical transition through hormones and/or surgeries (when needed). Parental support for gender identity was associated with reduced ideation. Among those who desired medical transition, those on hormone therapy were about half as likely to have seriously considered suicide (RR=0.52; 95 % CI: 0.37, 0.75).
Impacts of Strong Parental Support for Trans Youth (2012), TransPULSE. https://transpulseproject.ca/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/Impacts-of-Strong-Parental-Support-for-Trans-Youth-vFINAL.pdf
The more that Conversion Therapy gets whitewashed or covered up into oblivion, the more that their practitioners get rehabilitated and defended without anyone providing any counterpoint, and the more people keep inventing new euphemisms for the exact same set of practices that have been tried and failed for decades now, then the more that the current situation will never change and never get better. Even in countries where it’s officially banned, the practice still carries on through secretive loopholes and different labels, or just base parental abuse. And the most targeted victims tend to be the very ones who are powerless to escape, children. Trans and nonbinary youth are twice as likely to be subjected to such treatment than other LGBQ youth, and until more countries — and parents — take a stand against it and what it represents, it won’t get any lower. The widespread erasure of the pain trans children have suffered through for so long cannot continue.
“We come to this world with some degree of maleness and femaleness which will transcend whatever the society wants to put into us.” — Milton Diamond
Extras
An example of shock therapy being done on gay and trans adults: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/003591576806100827
Chrysalis Quarterly, an example of Gatekeeping done by the Clarke Institute, later CAMH: https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net/files/h989r3203
Images used for The XX Factor video on Ken Zucker, CAMH, and the dark history of transgender diagnosis in the DSM:
Please copy and repost any and all this content and spread it around however you wish, as much as you can. If you’re a content creator, please use anything posted here to make your own videos or other media exposing this practice to the world.
Many thanks to Christa Peterson for her deep dive into all of these figure’s old reports, which sparked my own interest in covering them further. Some pictures are directly from her.
