There’s a reason why, in the mid-2000s, my first blogging gig was for The Ex-Gay Watch. My parents made it a requirement for me to live in their house that I go to a Christian therapist to “treat” me for my “transvetism.” My parents and I were Pentecostals, and I wanted to be cured of my “sin” so I could feel loved by my parents. I knew I was loved, but the love felt very conditional on me being “normal.” I believed the Pentecostal line that I was sick – my Dad made it a point to use the term “sick” when he talked to me about my dressing in women’s clothing.
Reparative therapy (also called conversion therapy) really does teach self-loathing of one’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity. After my own “treatment,” identified as an ex-transvestite – think of it as the ex-trans equivalent of ex-gay – I loathed myself.
The suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a 17-year-old trans youth from Ohio, has been in recent news cycles. Leelah left a suicide note on her Tumblr page, and in it she talked about coming out to parents who didn’t believe transgender people really existed; she talked about receiving reparative therapy; she talked about her being isolated by her parents from her friends on social media and in the brick-and-mortar world. In the end Leelah angrily blamed her socially conservative Christian parents for her suicide.
When I think about Leelah and her socially conservative Christian parents, Leelah’s therapeutic and medical treatment was completely contextualized by the faith of her parents. Leelah wasn’t going to go to see a therapist that might have affirmed her female gender identity because her parents were never going to select that kind of therapist for her.
Parents who want to use reparative therapy to attempt to align gender to sex assigned at birth have Dr. Kenneth Zucker, the chair of the American Psychiatric Association’s Committee on Sexual and Gender Identity Disorders, on their side. His work has been often cited by the National Association For Research And Therapy Of Homosexuality (NARTH) to justify reparative therapy. Reparative therapy doesn’t exist in a vacuum.
“Compassion” for Leelah was reparative therapy; therapy that apparently deepened her depression about not being able to live and express her female gender identity.
But, assuming for a moment that Leelah’s parents had a change of heart and were open to hiring a therapist who may affirm for them that their child was transgender, the parents’ peer conservative Christian parents would’ve deemed their child Leelah as a potential bathroom predator.
So in the minds of socially conservative Christians, Leelah was a degenerate. All trans girls, all trans women, in this world view are degenerates who are both self-deluded and publicly deceptive. All trans females are the perceived enemy found in schoolgirls’ and women’s bathrooms, as well as their locker rooms, ready to prey on cisgender girls and women.
“The Lord does not look at the things people look at,” states the Bible in 1 Samuel 16:7, “People look at the outward appearance, but the Lord looks at the heart.”
What’s lost to many socially conservative Christian parents of trans female youth are who these youth are in their hearts – and who they are includes a gender identity that isn’t in alignment with their assigned gender at birth.
Thanks for your great article and testimony, Autumn. As a survivor of “ex-gay” therapy, this story is heartbreaking and troubling. I spent over a decade wholeheartedly committed to “reparative therapy” that almost destroyed me. If only the parents had erred on the side of love, Leelah would still be with us. I hope her death inspires the demise of “conversion therapy” once and for all and leads to fruitful discussion, not based on ideology, but on our common humanity.
Bryan Christopher Author, ‘Hiding from Myself: A Memoir”