After the Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Tuesday about a Colorado law prohibiting state-licensed therapists from offering conversion therapy to LGBTQ clients, there is one area in which the left and right can agree: A lot of LGBTQ youth struggle with feelings of shame, fear and even an urge to self-harm. But it was clear there was fierce disagreement about the source of these feelings.
The left shares the view of the American Psychological Association, which argued in an amicus brief that this form of psychological distress in queer people, especially minors, is a result of “minority stress and stigma” and “systemic barriers to mental, physical, relational, and sexual flourishing.” This is a jargon-y way of saying that being raised to think your very identity is wrong can make a person feel bad about themselves. The treatment, then, is to counteract hateful messages with “affirming” therapy that holds that “variances in human sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression are normal.”
In her world, and presumably those of her attorney and the conservative justices, Lady Gaga’s queer anthem “Born This Way” shouldn’t be about LGBTQ identities, but about the wish of a person to “fix” whatever makes the different.
But to Kaley Chiles, a Christian evangelical therapist who sued the state to be able to offer conversion therapy, internalized queerphobia is an inborn quality. In her world, and presumably those of her attorney and the conservative justices, Lady Gaga’s queer anthem “Born This Way” shouldn’t be about LGBTQ identities, but about the wish of a person to “fix” whatever makes the different.
Throughout the morning, both the conservative lawyers and justices pointedly ignored the influence of church and parental pressure on struggling queer youth. Instead, they treated the desire to straight-ify themselves as something that kids are coming up with all on their own.
This fundamental mischaracterization of conversion therapy — which neither converts nor therapizes those subjected to it — was built into the case from the get-go. According to Chiles’ complaint, which was filed by the Christian right group Alliance Defending Freedom, she wants to counsel minor patients that they can “reduce or eliminate unwanted sexual attractions, change sexual behaviors, or grow in the experience of harmony with [their] physical body” to better live according the way she, as an evangelical Christian, interprets the Bible.
Chiles depicts her clients as fully autonomous, seeking to un-queer themselves on their own. According to the brief, “[Her] clients are also Christian and specifically seek her help because of their shared faith-based convictions and biblical worldview.” Their “internal conflict, depression, and anxiety” is ascribed solely to urges “inconsistent with their faith or values.” The children are described as “voluntary” clients 13 times in the document. Not once does Chiles acknowledge that parents may have pressured or even forced children to pursue this course. To read this brief, one would assume parents are barely involved in the process of getting a referral, setting up an appointment or deciding why therapy is even needed to begin with.
This erasure of parental influence continued throughout the oral arguments. At one point, Justice Samuel Alito posed a question to Shannon Stevenson, Colorado’s state solicitor general. “Suppose an adolescent male comes to a licensed therapist and says he’s attracted to other males, but feels uneasy and guilty about those feelings, and he wants to end or lessen them and asks for the therapist’s help in doing so?” Alito’s question presumes that teenage boys routinely visit church-linked therapists of their own accord. The justice was not happy when Stevenson said a therapist is permitted to help a client “cope with their feelings,” but that telling the kid he could un-gay his thoughts was banned.
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As it should be, of course. Even many of the most prominent leaders of the original conversion therapy movement have come to admit that the whole thing was a pile of bunk. A group of the “architects, leaders, and most vocal advocates” of the “ex-gay” movement filed an amicus brief making it clear that “conversion therapy is fundamentally ineffective” and “99.9% of participants do not experience orientation change.” But, they added, “these practices cause documented psychological harm, including increased suicide risk.” Justice Sonia Sotomayor compared it to telling a patient with an eating disorder that she needed to starve herself more. Stevenson likened it to a doctor giving a kid steroids so he could be better at football.
The ex-ex-gay leaders also noted something that Alito evaded: The role of parents in all of this. One of the hard-won lessons they learned is that “conversion therapy undermines rather than strengthens families by creating conflict and damaging parent-child relationships.” In this, they acknowledged what should be obvious, but that the conservatives conveniently forgot: Kids don’t end up in conversion therapy because of some deep, internal drive to be straight, a message sent to their heart by God himself. It’s usually because their parents and evangelical culture are pressuring, coercing and often forcing them to cure innate feelings that don’t need changed in the first place.
This oversight is interesting. Alito and the other conservative justices are well aware that right-wing parents want to impose straightness on kids in the name of religion. Last summer, Alito authored a decision arguing that parents had an expansive right to block children from accessing books in public schools that conflict with the their anti-LGBTQ beliefs. But when it comes to a queer kid being told “therapy” can change them, suddenly the parental roles disappear from the conversation.
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Common sense alone tells us that conversion therapy is being driven more by parents than kids themselves, because homophobia is a learned and not in-born attitude. Research from San Francisco State University backs this up. In a revealing study, researchers found that religious leaders, right-leaning therapists and parents are the primary sources of pressure on kids to change themselves. Their findings were clear. Regardless of who initiates a conversation about sexual orientation or gender identity, “parents serve as gatekeepers to both engage in and take their LGBT children for external conversion interventions.” Even if conversion therapy is well-intended — and it very often is not — it’s experienced by children as a form of parental rejection. Unsurprisingly, suicide attempts skyrocket among queer youth whose parents insist conversion is possible.
The erasure of parents from the oral arguments had a clear, cynical purpose: To hide the fact that, ultimately, conversion therapy is a form of child abuse. Its proponents want to recast it as “help” that kids seek out themselves. In reality, it’s mostly driven by parents and religious leaders who want to force children to conform to what the adults in their lives want them to be. Parental erasure also serves to appropriate the real world stories of queer people, inverting them into a bizarre right-wing narrative. The young person trying to live an authentic life in the face of oppressive forces is a compelling narrative, one that the LGBTQ rights movement has deservedly and effectively used in persuading people to support their cause. So it’s not a surprise that the right would want to hijack it for themselves.
It just happens to be a lie.
