Outlawing Conversion Therapy

Love is love. This statement has caused a lot of controversy over the basic rights of people who are simply being themselves. LGBTQ+ people simply exist; it is not a choice, it is just a part of who they are. Many hateful people are unaccepting of the fact that people are not always what society considers normal and oppose the protection of the LGBTQ+ community. People deserve to have the right to love who they love and be who they want to be regardless of gender, sexuality, or orientation. Within the general discrimination and hate against LGBTQ+ people, there is an organized and truly terrible practice that continues to be legal: reparative therapy, which is most often known as conversion therapy. Conversion therapy mainly targets minors and youth who identify as a part of the LGBTQ+ community and its’s extremely harmful, ineffective, and inhumane. The right to live and be with another person peacefully is something that everyone deserves, no matter race, gender, sexuality, etc. To deny this right would be immoral and unjust.

Conversion therapy is essential to try and convert or change people who are homosexual, bisexual, transgender, or identify as a part of the LGBTQ+ community to be straight or cisgender (cisgender means identifying with a person’s sex they were assigned at birth). Those who support this awful practice believe that someone who is not cis and straight has something fundamentally wrong with them and needs to be fixed or helped, so they can be acceptable again. This is a lie, people with non-cisgender identities and different sexualities are just as valid as cis straight people. Conversion therapy employs many harmful, damaging, and traumatizing methods of trying to repair the people they see as unacceptable and broken. These organized attempts to change a person’s identity have been around since the early 20th century, and this horrible practice is long overdue from being illegal and outlawed completely in America. According to lgbtmap.org, only 20 states protect youth and minors from conversion therapy completely. Living in one of these states does not secure safety for young LGBTQ+ people, as they could be sent to camps, houses, and schools that practice conversion therapy in bordering or near states. There is no good thing to do except protecting all the LGBTQ+ people in our country from conversion therapy by making it nationally illegal.

Conversion or reparative therapy has been discredited by many health and respectable organizations, supporting that someone’s sexuality, gender identity, etc is completely valid and will most likely not change with harmful therapy if it would even change at all. There are over 20 well-respected organizations that discredit conversion therapy, most of which affirm that homosexuality among other sexualities, gender identities, and other things deemed unnatural by people that are against the LGBTQ+ community. According to a collection of statistics, resources, and quotes on glaad.org, nearly 700,000 adults have gone through conversion therapy, roughly 20,000 youth will be subjected to conversion therapy from licensed health practitioners in states that don’t have any legislation against it, and across all states, roughly 57,000 youth will receive reparative therapy from religious officials, all before they reach the age of 18. Conversion therapy harms a huge amount of people yearly and will continue to do so until national protection legislatures are passed against this despicable practice and all its different forms.

Along with the massive amount of lives conversion therapy has impacted and continues to harm today, there are tons of proven negative, lasting, damaging effects to being a victim of conversion therapy. Conversion therapy is essentially a form of mental torture and abuse to try and change a part of a person that makes them who they are. Attempts to change a person’s sexuality, gender orientation, or other parts of them deemed broken have been proven to cause depression, PTSD, anxiety, and eventually, the buildup of damage done by reparative therapy could lead to someone taking their own life. Besides the negative effects of conversion therapy, the generally hostile environment LGBTQ+ people often find themselves in is also proven to have lasting damage and effects on the people subjected to societal and familial rejection of who they are. This environment and societal prejudice against LGBTQ+ people allow conversion therapy to continue to exist, thrive, and remain legal despite its proven damaging effects, ineffectiveness, and immoral nature. In statistics reported by The Human Rights Campaign, LGBTQ+ people highly and damagingly rejected by their family and caregivers as compared to people supported or mildly rejected were more than 8 times as likely to attempt suicide, nearly 6 times as likely to report having depression, and more than 3 times as likely to turn to substance abuse. Conversion therapy continues to be legal in many states and areas due to the often hateful environment towards the LGBTQ+ community. Outlawing reparative therapy in all of its many forms and protecting LGBTQ+ people across the nation is a necessary step to create a more positive, welcoming, inclusive, and safe environment for the LGBTQ+ community.

Conversion therapy is a consistent, persisting method of attacking and hurting the LGBTQ+ community and it has to stop. Legislation to protect the victims and potential victims of this horrible practice need to be enacted. There is an array of proof stacked against its effectiveness, and the damage it does to those it is used on. LGBTQ+ people across the nation deserve the right to live, come out, and exist without the fear of being mentally abused and tortured through so-called therapy. Victims of and people that are at risk of being victims of conversion therapy deserve protection for this horrible thing, laws need to get passed that secure that protection for them. The attempts to convert LGBTQ+ people’s identities into what is considered more likable or acceptable are damaging, immoral, wrong, and extremely cruel. Conversion therapy is mental torture and should be made illegal across the United States in order to take a positive step towards creating a safer country for LGBTQ+ people. Love is love and the right to live and be with another person peacefully is something that everyone deserves no matter race, gender, sexuality, etc; to deny that would be immoral and unjust.

Edited by: Khushi Patel and Austen Wyche

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