Junior Josh Deese’s life changed in 2010 when the man he was dating at the time, Kyle, committed suicide after being forced to undergo conversion therapy to change his sexual orientation.
The Human Rights Campaign, a national advocacy organization that pushes for LGBT rights, is supporting one Washington bill trying to prevent incidents like this from happening — the Conversion Therapy for Minors Prohibition Amendment Act of 2013.
Conversion therapy, which the HRC defines as “a range of dangerous and discredited practices aimed at changing one’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or expression,” is highly controversial among the LGBT community, according to an HRC news release.
The HRC and the National Center for Lesbian Rights have been leaders in supporting the bill, which would ban licensed health care providers in Washington from conducting conversion therapy on patients under 18 years old. The bill would not affect religious or nonlicensed counseling.
The bill is expected to move to the Committee of the Whole in early November, according to the release.
Deese said Kyle underwent extreme treatments including hearing negative verbal statements, taking naked ice baths and undergoing electroshock therapy on his genitalia when stimulation was sensed while watching homoerotic material.
Luke Jensen, the LGBT Equity Center director, said he has known about a few university students who had to undergo conversion therapy treatments.
“Of the few students I have known here on-campus whose parents subjected them to such practices, they experienced difficulty along their path to graduation,” he said. “In one case, the student had to drop out of school completely to get his life together.”
Senior sociology major Richard Stevens Jr., who is gay, said this treatment to minors “adds stress to an already stressful situation.”
“Here you have this kid who is already dealing with a host of prejudices and doubts and insecurities and challenges with the fact that they are LGBT, and then they choose to come out with that to someone that’s close to them,” he said. “The reaction that they get is ‘Not only are you wrong for being LGBT or are you wrong for choosing this lifestyle … but, we’re going to correct your wrongness.’”
Both Deese and Jensen said this therapy not only negatively harms participants emotionally, but it also is not medically sound. While some might view this as a private issue, it’s still a concern — for those who endure the therapy, the treatment does more harm than good, Stevens said.
“It either forces people to suppress themselves in some way, or it drives people actually crazy,” Stevens said. “It makes the perceived problem that much worse for them to deal with.”
Del. Jon Cardin (D-Baltimore County) introduced a similar bill in this state’s General Assembly earlier this year but later withdrew it.
“We don’t want there to even be one person in the state of Maryland that has been negatively impacted from these kinds of treatments,” Cardin said.
He received a lot of pressure to withdraw the bill, he said. Equality Maryland, the state’s largest LGBT civil rights nonprofit organization, wanted him to withdraw it because they did not want it to interfere with the passing of its transgender bill. The International Healing Foundation, a gay conversion nonprofit, also wrote him a letter expressing concern with the bill.
Cardin replied with an open letter that received a great deal of media attention. The state Health Department, the Board of Physician Quality Assurance and many other medical regulatory boards in the state met with Cardin shortly after and agreed to put the policy in place without going through the legislative process, he said, which would have cost the state roughly $100,000.
The boards then issued a public statement to confirm that conversion therapy procedures are not within the standard of care of licensed practitioners.
“This basically means that if somebody tries to do that [conversion therapy], they will lose their license,” he said. “For all intents and purposes, we got the bill done, and we were able to do it without having to go through the legislative process.”
Cardin, who said he has since met some people who underwent such therapy, said the treatments can cause severe psychological damage among participants and introducing this kind of policy in any other area would be beneficial.
“I believe that you can create a lifetime of psychological and emotional damage unnecessarily in people if you try to change who they are,” he said. “These are developing minds, and they deserve to be treated with great care.”
