When I finally dropped out of conversion therapy, I walked away carrying anxiety, depression, religious trauma, and a substance abuse problem I had to fight my way out of.
I know that idea well. In conversion therapy, I was taught that my sexual orientation was evidence of something wounded inside me, and that if I did enough work, I could heal it.
To be clear, CHANGED was not seeking APA accreditation for its own programs. The APA’s commission was seeking continued federal recognition (which drives licensure and funding) as an accreditor and an expansion of that recognition to master’s programs. Woning urged the committee to withhold the expansion. After hearing a range of complaints, including allegations of antisemitism in APA-accredited programs, the committee recommended suspending the commission’s federal recognition for one year. The Department of Education has yet to make a final decision. CHANGED did not drive that outcome, but claimed victory for it.
Major medical and mental-health associations, including the APA, have rejected efforts to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity as ineffective and harmful. Peer-reviewed research published in the American Journal of Public Health found that LGBTQ+ young people subjected to conversion therapy were more than twice as likely to report attempting suicide as those who had not. The ideology Woning promotes creates the very wounds it claims to heal.
Much of the world is moving in the opposite direction. Canada, Germany, France, Mexico, New Zealand, and Brazil have adopted bans or restrictions on conversion practices, with several imposing criminal penalties. The U.K. is moving toward banning the practice nationwide, which Woning decried in July.
CHANGED and groups like it don’t need government permission to run their programs in churches. It does seem, based on Woning’s testimony, that they are looking for that practice to be legitimized and for it to be billable by insurance and removed from the APA’s list of harmful practices.
And they’re now welcomed into powerful rooms. In April, the pair were invited to Washington for America Reads the Bible, a weeklong public Scripture reading marking the nation’s 250th birthday, whose promotional lineup included Sen. Ted Cruz and evangelical leader Franklin Graham. In a social media post announcing their participation, CHANGED wrote, “At the same time, we’ll be engaging directly with legislators on some of the most pressing issues of our time. We believe moments like this matter. We believe presence matters. We believe truth spoken in the right rooms matters.”
When I was in conversion therapy, groups like Exodus International promised that “change is possible.” Then, in 2012, Exodus’s own president, Alan Chambers, acknowledged that “99.9%” of the people he’d met had not experienced a change in their orientation. A year later, Exodus shut down.
Groups like CHANGED kept the idea and changed the language. Parents, clinicians, and anyone who cares about LGBTQ+ young people should be paying attention. I spent years in the church basements where this ideology used to thrive. It is clear to me that it has now moved into courtrooms and federal hearing rooms, where its promoters are attacking the organizations that protect the vulnerable from it. The next room they are knocking on: the therapist’s office.
Hence then, the article about the new fight to legitimize conversion therapy was published today ( ) and is available on Time ( Middle East ) The editorial team at PressBee has edited and verified it, and it may have been modified, fully republished, or quoted. You can read and follow the updates of this news or article from its original source.
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