Tag Archives: Conversion therapy

Gender and Sexuality, Politics

The latest dishonesty of Maggie Gallagher

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[Content Note:  Homophobia, Sexual Orientation Change Efforts, Infertility]

This morning, Maggie Gallagher used her column at the National Review to chime in on the law New Jersey governor Chris Christie recently signed that prohibits licensed therapists from offering “conversion therapy” to minors.  Of course, Maggie is dead set opposed to the new law and considers this the latest example of Christian persecution and infringement on (Christian) religious liberties.

Of course, in decrying this law, she fails to exercise her religious liberty to be honest, something that I’m fairly certain is supposed to be pretty central to the Christian faith.  She starts out by decrying a press release that someone wrongly slapped her name on it, offering the following criticism:

I dislike using language that portrays gay people as “homosexuals” who are “tormented” by same-sex desires.

Um, since when?  Let’s go to Gallagher’s own words:

Please note, this is different from saying that homosexuals are mentally ill. In a simple biological framework, abstracted from all religion and morality, homosexuality is like infertility. It is a sexual disability, preventing certain individuals from participating in the normal reproductive patterns of the human species.

While Maggie can technically argue that she’s not saying gay people are mentally ill the above statement, I’m not sure that calling them “disabled” is any better.  And no, my being gay is not the same as my being infertile (and I am deeply sympathetic and sorry to anyone who is infertile and hurt by Gallagher’s choice to appropriate what may be a painful reality for them).  To the best of my knowledge, I am perfectly capable of sexually reproducing, either by having sex with a fertile woman or via sperm donation.  My being gay simply means I am not inclined to engage in sexual or romantic relations with women.  There’s a whole world of difference between the two things she’s comparison and the comparison strikes me as insulting and demeaning to everyone caught by it.

So yeah, for her to say that she “dislikes” it when gay people are portrayed as “homosexuals” who are “tormented” by their desires when she has much said things just as horrible?  Completely dishonest.

Of course, her continuing statement in today’s column suggests she’s not really opposed to saying that gay men (and note how she’s now going to erase all the lesbians in addition to the bisexuals she’s already been erasing) are “tormented” by their sexual desires so much as she’d in support of portraying all men as so tormented:

Among other things, as far as I can see for most men, of whatever orientation or state in life, being tormented by sexual desire is pretty much the human condition for long stretches of life, rather than an unbearable cause for condescending pity.

I don’t know what men Gallagher is hanging out with.  I certainly don’t feel tormented by my sexual desires.  I don’t get the impression that most of the men — regardless of sexual orientation — I know feel particularly tormented, either.

Of the bill itself, Gallagher makes the following claim:

Governor Christie just endorsed a law that thus excludes many gay teens who wish to live in accordance with Bible-based values from the circle of care; he has outright banned chastity as a goal of counseling.

Now having looked at the text of the bill, I admit that it’s a bit confusing, and it’s not immediately clear to me what qualifies as “attempts to change behavior” as mentioned in the bill.  However, I will note what Dr. Warren Throckmorton said back in May concerning the bill and the Sexual Identiy Therapy Framework he promotes:

I believe SITF would be safe if this bill passes. I have discussed this issue with some of the bill proponents and they agree. In any case, since we do not attempt to change orientation, we are not doing anything covered by the bill. I do not attempt to reduce attractions since I don’t think it is possible in any psychological manner. I think people succeed in handling their attractions in such a way as to better comport with their beliefs. Avoiding situations and practicing religious disciplines may help give a sense that attractions are being reduced but I don’t think this is what the NJ bill is aiming at. If ever it is, I will be more vocal in opposition.

Note that Throckmorton actually talked to the bill’s proponents about his questions regarding the law and SITF, which does consider helping a client remain celibate a valid course if the client decides it’s the best choice for hir life.  I’m inclined to take his interpretation of the law and how it will be applied compared over Gallagher’s who admits that she hadn’t even looked into the law before yesterday.  I sincerely doubt she contacted any of the bill’s backers for clarification.

Acknowledgements:

  • I found out about Maggie’s commentary on the bill via The New Civil Rights Movement.
  • I gleaned the link to the bill’s text from Dr. Throckmorton’s blog.
  • I found the link to Gallagher’s quote comparing homosexuality to infertility through GLAAD’s Commentator Accountability Project page for her.

 

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Samuel Brinton is an incredible young man

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Check out the video he did, telling about his experiences with his family and his attempt to change his sexual orientation.  (TRIGGER WARNING:  Attempted suicide, extreme “conversion therapy” methods, physical and emotional abuse.)

Fortunately, many of us do not have experiences as severe or extreme as Samuel’s.  However, some of themes are the familiar:
  • The sense of hopelessness
  • The feeling that we have to change to earn the love of those around us
  • The confusion turning into shame
According to BTB (where I found the video), Sam is currently a college student.  This means that his story is something that happened in the past two decades, quite possibly since the year 2000.  This is not a story from the 1950’s or even the 1970’s.  So remember this whenever someone says QUILTBAG people aren’t treated horribly today.

Gender and Sexuality

Examining Conversion Therapy: Sessions with David

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In this post, I continue my examination of Patrick Strudwick’s article where he describes his first-hand investigation into the world of conversion therapy.  Just as my last post focused on Patrick’s sessions with Lynne, this post will explore the sessions that he had with David.

Patrick starts this section of the article by indicating that he and David are conducting these therapy sessions using Skype and webcams.  Just as I noted the strangeness of Lynn holding a scheduled therapy session over the phone, I find the idea of holding therapy sessions over the Internet to be highly questionable.  Once again, I fin myself wondering how well a therapist can handle a situation from a distance if something particular difficult or traumatic comes up during the session.

David starts the sessions by giving Patrick a highly positive prognosis.  In fact, David indicates that one third of people seeking reparative therapy face complete change, while another third experience significant change (a phrase that is rather vague).  The problem with David’s claims here is that there is no evidence to substantiate them.  There are no comprehensive studies on the success rates of conversion therapy.  In fact, the only recent study on the topic doesn’t match up to David’s claims, despite the fact that some have heavily criticized that study.  So here we have a therapist who is making promise based on claims that are not backed up by evidence.  Again, this is nothing less than playing into a client’s insecurities, and is rather unethical.

David then moves into the same talk about both religion and masculinity.  Apparently, conversion therapists are still trapped in this notion that homosexuality and not being “masculine” are somehow inextricably linked.  This demonstrates a lack of understanding of both sexual orientation and masculinity.  Part of David’s therapy involves Patrick examining himself in the mirror while affirming and touching his own body.  I find this a very strange practice and don’t see any psychological model that would explain how this would affect one’s same-sex attractions.

David’s approach to conversion therapy is odd in that he asks Patrick to reinterpret all of his actions and feelings.  David suggests that there must be some hidden meaning behind every attraction and emotional experience he has.  He interprets everything as a manifestation of some hidden wound.  Again, I find this a strange practice rather than simply accepting one’s feelings and attractions for what they are until a reason to look for another interpretation arises.  I certainly find his idea of “homosexuality as cannibalism” a rather weird notion, and seems to say more about conversion therapists’ needs to pathologize something as natural as desire and love.

Like Lynne, David looks to Patrick’s relationship with his parents as possible cause for his homosexuality.  Unlike Lynne, David does seem to pay attention to what Patrick says and tries to mold his theories to Patrick’s life rather than trying to rewrite the client’s history to fit the model.  Particularly, David suggests that Patrick over-identified with his mother due to the fact that he was creative and extroverted like her and under-identification with his father.  David suggests that this pattern led to a lack of masculine identity in Patrick, which he then sought to compensate by latching onto strong men in a sexual relationship.  Again, we find ourselves circling the conversion therapists’ inability to separate their notions of masculinity from sexual orientation.  It is perfectly possible for a gay man to be masculine, and I have known more than one heterosexual man who didn’t meet such rigid notions of masculinity.  (In fact, such heterosexual men are often the biggest critics of such narrow concepts of masculinity.)
In the next session, Patrick indicates that he’s had sexual feelings for David.  David seems rather unphased by this admission.  David — a self-identified ex-gay himself — also acknowledges that he still has “echoes” of sexual feelings towards men.  This makes the next part of Patrick’s therapy session particularly shocking — as if what happens next isn’t shocking in its own right.

“Close your eyes and focus on that arousal you’re feeling down in your genitals,” he says. “I want you to hear, as a man, as I look at your body, I see strong shoulders and a strong chest, I see a man who has an attractive body and I want you just to notice the arousal you feel as you hear me talking about that. Imagine an energy and picture that energy as a colour, and make the brightness of the colour relate to the intensity of the sexual feeling, so you might be starting to get a bit of a hard on, you might be starting to feel an erection and that sexual energy, but I want you to just picture that as a coloured light. What colour would it be?”

This kind of talk strikes me as very intimate and sexualized.  It certainly is not the kind of conversation I’d want to be having on a webcam session with my therapist during my second therapy session with him.  And I certainly would not want to be going through this with a therapist who in one breath claims to be “cured” of homosexuality and admits he still has the occasional sexual thoughts about men in the next.  David’s entire approach to therapy seems highly sexualized and even voyeuristic.  That alone strikes me as disturbing.

I suppose it comes as little surprise that David reveals that his supervisor is associated in some way with Richard Cohen.  Patrick notes in his article that Cohen was expelled from the American Counseling Association.  He doesn’t note that many ex-gay ministries and conversion therapists distanced themselves from Cohen for a while when Cohen’s disturbing “holding therapy” got strong media attention.  Cohen’s approach to therapy seemed inappropriately sexualized and intimate, so it’s unsurprising that other therapists associated with him would have equally problematic practices.

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Gender and Sexuality

Examining Conversion Therapy: Sessions with Lynne

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Today, while browsing the latest entries on Box Turtle Bulletin, I ran across a post that examined an Independent article.  The Independent article, written by Patrick Strudwick, discusses reparative therapy.  For the article, Strudwick had therapy sessions with two reparative therapists, Lynne and David.  The bulk of the article describes what he was told in those therapy sessions.

After reading the article, I felt that these therapy sessions deserved careful consideration and analysis.  The things that Strudwick was told by both Lynne and David are very telling about the whole conversion therapy process and the problems it poses.  To that end, I want to take a close look at the therapy sessions with Lynne in this entry.  I hope to do the same with the sessions with David in a future entry.

Lynne starts out the first therapy session by affirming that she believes homosexuality to be a mental illness, an addiction, and an anti-religion phenomenon.  Bear in mind that the first two classifications are in direct contradiction to the position of every psychological and psychotherapy association out there (with the exception of NARTH, which was created specifically to peddle the notion that homosexuality is a mental illness) and all peer-reviewed research.  This is important, because Lynne and other conversion therapists are already on shaky ground because they are seeking to treat something which doesn’t apparently need to be treated.  However, such therapists rely on the fact that their clients (or worse, their clients’ families) are willing to believe their sexual orientation is an illness in need of correcting.  In effect, they are playing off of their clients’ own insecurities to sell an unnecessary (let alone ineffective) therapy.  This willing to play to their clients’ insecurities is highly unethical, and will play a bigger part in these therapies as we consider Lynne’s investigation into the “causes” of Patrick’s homosexuality.

Lynne then opens the session with prayer, the first sign that her therapy is going to be intermingled with a lot of religious material.  This is evident when she asks Patrick if he is lustful about his same-sex attractions.  That word gets thown around a lot in conservative religious circles, and I tend to think it’s abused.  Truth be told, there should be a certain amount of sexual desire in any romantic relationship.  However, things get worse when Patrick also points out that he also felt what he considered sincere love in some of his relationships.  Lynne dismisses this out of love, referring to it as “darkness.”  The conversion therapist’s willingness to discount any feeling simply because it doesn’t fit their model is unconscionable.

As is common among conversion therapists, Lynne starts asking about Patrick’s family.  Those familiar with the theories of Joseph Nicolosi will recognize that Lynne is trying to establish the distant father and overbearing mother that is so often given as a major cause of homosexuality.  (I’ve always found this theory silly, since I have yet to meet any teenager who doesn’t consider his mother overbearing at one time or another.)  Patrick indicates that he had a loving family life.  However, Lynne is not willing to let this particular theory go yet:

“Well, there was something happening within your family dynamics that led to your depression,” she says.

The depression that Lynne is referring to is the depression that Patrick indicated that he was depressed as a teenager.  What is notable about this, however, is that Patrick already stated the reason for this depression:

I tell her that I was depressed as a teenager because I feared I would face prejudice for the rest of my life.

Fearing that one will face prejudice for the rest of one’s life is a perfectly legitimate reason to be depressed.  However, Lynne discounts Patrick’s explanation for his depression and inserts her own, based on nothing more than her desire to make Patrick’s psychological profile fit her predefined notions about how homosexuality forms.  This is questionable at best and downright unethical at worst.  Again, bear in mind that most of Lynne’s patients are coming to her in an emotionally vulnerable state.  By disregarding the explanations they give her and inserting her own, she is pushing her own theories and views on them.  In effect, she has ceased to be a therapist at all, but has become something much uglier.  This desire to push her clients in the direction her theories say they should go will appear uglier later on.

After exploring rather curious theories about difficult births, neonatal intensive care, and the “spiritual effects” of Freemasonry (I’d love to see an attempt at peer-reviewed research on that last one!), Lynne begins asking about sexual abuse.  Patrick indicates that he’s never been abused.  Once again, Lynne is unwilling to accept Patrick’s analysis of his own life:

“I think it will be there,” she replies, dropping her voice to a concerned tone. “It
does need to come to the surface.”

And so, she prays for me again. “Father, we give you permission to bring to the surface some of the things that have happened over the years. Father, enable your love to pour into that place of isolation in that little boy, whatever age, we give you permission to go there, with your healing power and your light, go into those parts, open all the doors, and access each one with your light.”

She looks up. I ask her again about this abuse. “I think there is something there,” she says. “You’ve allowed things to be done to u.” In the next session I ask if she thinks the abuse would have taken place within my family, because I can’t remember it. “Yes, very likely,” she replies.

Once again, the therapist is trying to force her client to fit some predefined model rather than observing the real life story he presents and analyzing it honestly.  And this is where her clients’ emotional vulnerability come in.  By pushing this idea that her client must have been abused, she is setting up the perfect situation for creating false memories.  False memories have ruined lives — both the lives of the supposed abusers and those of the victims.  False memories also end up hurting those who really have experienced abuse and have forgotten or repressed, as it makes professionals more cautious about accepting even valid recovered memories.  In short, Lynne is hurting a huge number of people simply for the sake of making a client’s history fit her preconceived notions of what it should look like.

Patrick indicates that his next session with Lynne is over the phone.  This single sentence makes my head spin.  While I can certainly understand why a therapist might need to deal with an unexpected crisis with a client over the phone, I cannot imagine holding a planned therapy session over the phone.  It strikes me as inefficient, and potentially risky.  If any powerful or troubling emotions arise, Lynne is not present to handle the situation.  It seems to me that it would make more sense to postpone or reschedule the session to a time when it can be held face-to-face.  The fact that Lynne chose not to do so leads me to wonder if Lynne is the kind of person who puts conferences and lectures over the well-being of her clients.  If so, then I hope someone will encourage her to leave clinical practice.

Lynne’s first two suggestions during this session is that Patrick should (1) distance himself from his gay friends and (2) take up a sport, possibly rugby.  First, I find it strange that any therapist would presume to have the kind of authority to make such suggestions.  I understand that being critical of a clients’ friendships and other relationships is not uncommon, especially if the relationships and friendships are unhealthy or promote unhealthy behavior.  However, it’s also my understanding that a therapist generally points out how they’re unhealthy and/or promote unhealthy behavior and then allows the client to make their own choice.  To actually suggest a course of action like Lynne has strikes me as assuming too much control.

Of course, there’s also the fact that it’s questionable whether Patrick’s gay friends are promoting unhealthy behavior.  Nothing in the article suggests that Patrick has given Lynne any reason to believe such a thing.  It again strikes me as Lynne making assumptions rather than analyzing the person and relationships at hand.

The suggestion about taking up a sport always makes me laugh.  Conversion therapists seem to have strange beliefs about the relationship between homosexuality and masculine stereotypes.  Truth be told, they’re two different subjects.  Locally, we have a large number of gay men who are into volleyball and other sports.  Many gay men are into body-building and other “masculine” activities.  Others of us don’t care for such activities, but it has nothing to do with our sexual orientation.

Lynne’s idea of therapy involves trying to force her client’s life stories into her preconceived models, throwing out a lot of religious jargon, and playing with irrelevant notions of masculinity and sexuality.  And she’s doing this with emotionally vulnerable clients.  And we’re supposed to consider this valid therapy?

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