On Conversion Therapy: A Perspective
The idea that a person can “change” their sexual orientation has been steeped in controversy for generations. Historically, treatments aimed at trying to change a person from homosexual to heterosexual—often called “reparative” or “conversion therapy”—rose in prominence primarily as a religious and socio-political counter-movement against the gay rights movement of the 20th century. Academics later coined the term “sexual orientation change efforts,” or SOCE. By the late 20th century, virtually every leading worldwide psychological and psychiatric organization denounced SOCE, and its traumatic effects were well documented.
On May 17, 2012 the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO), a regional office of the World Health Organization, issued a Position Statement: “Therapies to change sexual orientation lack medical justification and threaten health.” Noting the long-term effects of such therapies as “feelings of guilt and shame, depression, anxiety, and even suicide,” the PAHO added that practitioners of these therapies should be “subject to sanctions and penalties under national legislation. These supposed conversion therapies constitute a violation of the ethical principles of health care and violate human rights that are protected by international and regional agreements.”
More recently in the United States, dozens of jurisdictions passed laws banning forms of conversion therapy. After years of advocacy, in 2018, I helped initiate Canada’s first municipal ban on conversion therapy in my home city of Vancouver, British Columbia. Several provinces and local municipalities in Canada also enacted laws or regulations banning these discredited treatments. In December 2020, I provided testimony before The Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights, one of the Committees of Canada's House of Commons, in support of a federal ban. In December 2021, the national ban on conversion therapy passed into Canadian criminal law.
The overall problem with many of these laws is that they do not take into account experiences such as the one I described in The Inheritance of Shame: A Memoir. I was not in any kind of formal conversion therapy. Instead, I was simply under the care of a licensed psychiatrist who took it upon himself to try to “correct” my sexual orientation. He prescribed extreme doses of psychiatric medication, used aversive techniques, and contextualized my entire therapeutic treatment and life history in an effort to convince me that I was really heterosexual. In other words, changing laws does not necessarily change hearts. As long as the belief systems of those who treat gay people have not radically changed, there will always be someone “out there” who thinks that gay people would be much happier if they could only “change.”