Should Sexual Reorientation Therapy Be Criminalized? 

In America, therapists can provide nonjudgmental help for psychological distress due to divorce, adultery, prostitution, promiscuity, polyamory, pornography, pedophilia, and many other issues related to sexual choices and behavior. If you want to amend your behavior—for example, to stop viewing pornography or acting promiscuously—talking with a trained therapist can often help bring personal insight and strength to do so.

You can get such help for every problem, that is, except two: in a growing number of places in America, if a young person struggles with same-sex attraction or a desire to be the other sex, it is illegal for a therapist to help him try to reduce or avoid acting on either of those desires. In these jurisdictions, the therapist is required, by law, to affirm that internal gender identity or same-sex attraction is unchangeable and that the hormonal or surgical alteration of sex characteristics is “natural” and “healthy.” Currently, twenty-nine states and several dozen cities or counties have fully or partially banned therapies that may take a different approach. Violators are subject to hefty fines, typically five figures per violation.

The LGBT activists, psychologists, and legislators who support this therapeutic restriction denounce the alternative as “conversion therapy,” claiming that it attempts to forcibly cure innate and unalterable sexual desires or identity, often through aversive or painful techniques. In their view, such efforts cannot succeed and must therefore be deemed psychologically harmful. In fact, efforts  to “cure” homosexuality by associating homosexual impulses with painful electric shocks or bitter drugs have not been made since the decline of behaviorism in the 1970s. Before then, they were the mainstream standard for psychological treatment.

Today’s therapy for those troubled by same-sex desire or other-sex gender identity typically addresses, by voluntary benign talk therapy, possible related conditions such as early childhood trauma or poor parental relationships. Because resolving such distress can often (though not always) reduce same-sex desire or gender-identity confusion, proponents and practitioners refer to such therapy as “change-allowing therapy.” The Reintegrative Therapy Association, the largest network of change-allowing therapists, describes its practice as “interventions designed to resolve traumas and develop greater attachment security,” in which “changes in sexuality are a byproduct rather than a goal of the therapy.”

Client accounts of change-allowing therapy and similar interventions report them to be highly effective and psychologically beneficial. More than 85 percent of young people struggling with gender identity confusion who receive psychological support to remain in their natal sex chose not to become transgender. About two in three non-heterosexual people who engage in change-allowing therapy experience reduced same-sex attraction and increased heterosexual attraction; one in six describe themselves as possessing fully heterosexual attractions following therapy. The overwhelming majority also report reduced, not increased, depression, anxiety, and suicidality.

Whatever else one might say about the therapy bans in question, they undeniably burden the free exercise of religion for same-sex-attracted or gender-confused persons who seek not to identify with or live according to those conditions. For most who undergo it, the journey away from homosexual or transgender identity is a journey from a life organized around the self to one centered on God. Change-allowing therapy clients are overwhelmingly religiously serious Catholics, evangelical Protestants, Mormons, or Muslims. Repeated survey samples reveal that former LGB-identified persons are far more religious than current LGB-identified persons, who are in turn far less religious than the average American. Weekly church attendance, for example, is reported by 33 percent of all Americans, only 9 percent of LGB persons, but a whopping 88 percent of former LGB persons following change-allowing therapy. By contrast, 69 percent of LGB persons reported never or seldom attending church, compared to only 2 percent of change-allowing therapy clients. Clearly, those same-sex-attracted persons who change sexual orientation are more deeply engaged in religion than those who do not do so.

Change-allowing-therapy ban advocates, who argue that sexual orientation must be affirmed because it is at the core of identity, do not seem to understand that this is not true for most individuals who seek change-allowing therapy. An academic guide to “affirmative therapy” with religious persons observes, “Many of these individuals [seeking change-oriented therapy] do not identify with their sexual orientation at all but rather highlight their values and their religious beliefs as their primary identity.” Psychologist Lee Beckstead’s study of fifty same-sex-attracted persons seeking sexual-reorientation therapy reported that all of them “were willing to give up their sexual identities in return for religious and societal rewards because, as they stated, they felt their sexual identities were peripheral to their religious identities.” Due to their strong religious commitments, these study participants “felt that ‘being gay’ was not a valid choice for them.”

Nonetheless, many advocates of therapy bans, themselves not very religious, advise therapists to challenge the “non-affirming” religious beliefs of those troubled by same-sex attraction. For them, the problem is that the client has the wrong religious convictions. The “affirmative therapy” guide cited above advises:

[Sexual orientation conflict] may result from an understanding of religious scripture . . . which identifies same-sex attractions as immoral, sinful, perverse, and repugnant. The underlying source of conflict then is not their attractions, but rather the oppressive beliefs.

The guide further states: “Failure to confront and challenge these negative ideas may perpetuate them and bring harm to the client or others.”

This dismissal of religious conviction as something oppressive and easily changed goes a long way toward explaining the need for religiously respectful change-allowing therapy. One member of Beckstead’s sample explained: “People think . . . we can change our beliefs. . . . I don’t have the desire, and I really don’t know that I would have much of the ability to change some of my basic fundamental beliefs . . . because of the way they give my life coherence.”

Another recounted his disappointment with his gay-affirmative therapist: “I tried to explain the conflict to her between religion, my personal values, [and my same-sex attractions] . . . and she just kind of said, ‘Well, I don’t see what your problem is. Just pick one.’ She didn’t seem much help. She just didn’t quite get it.” Beckstead commented that this exchange “seems to articulate the frustrations expressed by all participants.” Before beginning change-oriented therapy, faced with the prospect of “being gay”—that is, having to affirm an identity or lifestyle of same-sex behavior that they believed would bar them from eternal blessedness—“[a]ttempting suicide was seen as the only solution for 8 participants. Dan, for example, wrote, ‘I felt like I couldn’t continue to live in such pain. My alternatives seemed to be either to end my life or to straighten my life out.’” For these clients, banning access to sexual reorientation therapy will undeniably prove harmful.

Promoters of so-called “conversion therapy” bans consider religious freedom laws to be regressive obstacles to their goal of prohibiting these therapeutic conversations they disagree with. The Movement Advancement Project, which tracks the progress of gay normalization efforts including the spread of “conversion therapy” bans, reports with concern the existence in many states of religious freedom laws that allow people “exemptions from state laws that they say burden their religious beliefs.” Characterizing such “anti-LGBTQ laws” as granting a “license to discriminate,” the agency gives “religious exemption laws” a negative score in computing a state’s LGBTQ “equality profile.”

Therapy ban advocates also expose their anti-religious premises when they argue that change-allowing therapy bans will not restrict unlicensed religious counselors, thereby clarifying that state-licensed counselors will not be permitted to hold certain religious opinions, or even tolerate them in their clients. Only exclusive commitment to the correct set of ideas will establish legitimacy.

If those seeking to ban sexual reorientation therapy have their way, change-allowing therapy will be criminalized. Therapists who believe that clients with gender dysphoria or same-sex attraction must therefore transition to the other gender or adopt a gay or lesbian lifestyle can help them pursue that therapeutic goal without hindrance. But those who believe that such young Americans should also be free to live according to religious teachings that do not approve of same-sex behavior will find themselves silenced by the coercive power of the state.

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