A former recipient and opponent of conversion therapy explains how trans mania is the true conversion therapy and homophobic, gives another example of how trans mania took over the gay rights movement (with lies about the author, to boot) and documents another instance of the slippery slope between gay rights and trans mania:
The homophobic folly of banning ‘conversion therapy’ - spiked
"If the goal of legal bans on so-called conversion therapy – or in Britain’s case, a ban on ‘conversion practices’ – is to help end harmful treatments of same-sex attracted people, then these bans are not only failing, they are doing something far worse. They are codifying into law a new form of conversion therapy that medicalises away the same-sex attraction of minors before they have even matured into adult gay people.
I say this with the greatest remorse, because I advocated for these bans for years. I survived six years of psychiatric conversion therapy in the early 1990s. Since the late 1990s I used my story to fight for legal protections for gays and lesbians – and later, I thought, for trans people, too. I helped initiate Canada’s first municipal conversion-therapy ban in Vancouver in 2018 and testified before parliament in support of a national ban (Bill C-4) that became law in 2022. I believed these laws were necessary and just. But now I want to finally set the record straight...
There were early signposts that the movement to end ‘treatments’ of gay people was already heading in a direction I could never have imagined. One of the first occurred in 2006, while I was drafting ‘query letters’ for my memoir. These letters are pitches to publishers, in which writers routinely identify the likely readership for their book. I knew that gay, lesbian, and bisexual readers, among others, would be interested, so I was prepared to use the familiar acronym ‘LGB’. But then I noticed the letter ‘T’ beginning to appear in media and activist acronyms, turning ‘LGB’ into ‘LGBT’. I still understood ‘T’ to primarily mean ‘transexuals’, or those with profound, lifelong dysphoria with their sexed bodies – the sense of having been ‘born in the wrong body’. I knew this had nothing to do with sexual orientation, but with a sense of one’s ‘gender’. Like them, I had lived through a degree of body dysphoria as a child, something common among many who later grow up gay. The broader culture seemed to be conflating the two without much discussion or distinction. My unease with the conflation was personal. I could still recall how my psychiatrist had mistakenly believed that by changing my gender behaviour – what would later be called ‘gender expression’ – by decreasing my femininity and strengthening my masculinity, he could somehow awaken my dormant heterosexuality.
Ultimately, because my focus in 2006 was on ending all conversion treatments, I decided to include the full ‘LGBT’ acronym when naming the potential readership in my pitches. I pushed aside the twinge of discomfort I felt and marched forward with my goal: to use my story to help prevent others from enduring similar abuse.
A decade later, the conflation of sexual orientation and gender accelerated dramatically. In 2015, following the suicide of a 17-year-old ‘transgender youth’ (born male) who had been sent to Christian-based conversion therapy, US president Barack Obama called for an end to conversion therapy for both gay and transgender youth. Backed by the likes of LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, Obama’s intervention helped cement the two issues together in the public mind.
In late 2016, I sold my book to a press in California, with publication scheduled for the following summer. In anticipation, I began reaching out more broadly...
At that time, I still viewed ‘transgender youth’ primarily as kids who did not conform to traditional expectations for their birth sex – what would later be called gender-nonconforming. They were struggling with societal restrictions on expression, the same kind my psychiatrist had tried to ‘correct’. Many of them, I believed, would likely have grown up gay or lesbian if simply left alone.
My book was published on 17 May 2017. A few months later, the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee invited me to present my case at Vancouver City Hall. When the chair asked everyone to introduce themselves with their ‘preferred pronouns’, I was caught off guard. In 1980s dance clubs, nearly everyone bent gender norms, yet no one questioned their birth sex...
Another indication that the movement against conversion therapy was potentially heading down a dangerous path arrived in May 2018. At a library event to promote my book, I had arranged for trans activist Morgane Oger to interview me. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Oger about ‘trans surgeries on minors’. This was the first time I had heard the issue raised publicly. Oger responded that she was ‘not aware’ such surgeries were performed on minors. When the man pressed further, calling it ‘torture’, Oger grew defensive and evasive. The exchange left me confused and chilled. I had never heard of these kinds of treatments on minors. I told myself to stay focussed on my own story as a gay man – and on ending all treatments of anyone, regardless of age...
I travelled to Calgary for a panel discussion on their recently proposed municipal ban on conversion therapy. One of the other panelists was Kristopher Wells, then an associate professor at MacEwan University. Before the event, Wells took a call from community members concerned that the ban might lead to more minors undergoing ‘gender transitions’. On speakerphone in the boardroom, he responded firmly and repeatedly: ‘Minors do not go through gender transitions.’ I believed him.
Bill S-202 did not advance past first reading. However, on 9 March 2020 (the same week Canada began shutting down schools and non-essential businesses due to Covid-19), the federal government introduced Bill C-8, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). The bill would have made it illegal to force someone into conversion therapy, to subject a minor to it, or to advertise or profit from it. But for adults, the only prohibition was ‘forced’ conversion therapy, implying that a competent adult could consent.
It was around this time that media and online coverage of gender identity exploded. Almost overnight, the conversation around gender seemed to shift dramatically. Definitions of sex and gender became increasingly confusing. What I had long understood as ‘trans’ – a condition involving persistent gender dysphoria in adults that might, after careful evaluation, lead to medical transition – was now being reframed as simple self-identification at any age, including for minors.
I had heard the term ‘affirmative care’ before and assumed it simply meant affirming the existence of gay and trans people. Now I understood it meant fast-tracking minors toward ‘gender-affirmative care’ – puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and possible surgeries – with little or no gatekeeping. None of this made any sense to me, especially when self-identification could lead to permanent medical alteration of healthy bodies.
New terms and ideas that contradicted long-accepted scientific facts flooded the discourse. I kept encountering the slogan ‘trans women are real women’ repeated like a mantra, claims that biological sex was a spectrum or ‘assigned’ at birth, and that gender identity superseded biological reality. The more I watched and listened, my disorientation intensified. I wondered if I was missing something or if my own thinking was just faulty...
By late March, writing keynotes for my upcoming ‘LGBTQ’ events had become difficult. I no longer knew how to speak at gatherings that prominently featured the ‘T’. I wanted to remain true to what I had believed, stated and written for decades, but I could not support ‘gender-affirmative care’ for minors or self-identification leading to irreversible medical interventions. I was relieved when, in April 2020, all my speaking engagements were cancelled due to Covid travel restrictions.
The world outside felt like it was coming undone. The lockdowns brought isolation and fear. I worried daily about my 96-year-old mother. On 25 May, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, sparking riots and worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. The only unifying theme amid it all – the rise of gender ideology and the chaos in the streets – was a sense of everything coming apart.
My reading intensified that summer. Prominent voices in major outlets were openly questioning the very existence of a binary biological sex. Among the most cited were Anne Fausto-Sterling’s ‘Why Sex is Not Binary’ in the New York Times, Claire Ainsworth’s ‘Sex Redefined’ in Scientific American, Kim Elsesser’s ‘The Myth of Biological Sex’ in Forbes, and Allison Whitten’s ‘Untangling Gender and Sex in Humans’ in Discover. These pieces argued that thinking of sex as only male and female was overly ‘simplistic’, citing examples like intersex conditions, brain-sex differences, chromosomal variations, gene mutations and hormone irregularities. Claims that sex was a spectrum or merely ‘assigned’ at birth were everywhere. Encountering these arguments from so-called experts left me increasingly disoriented and unsettled...
As 2021 began, I turned to longer reading to understand the rapidly evolving claims around gender and ‘trans’ identities. I had bought Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage when it came out in 2020, but left it on my shelf for months, too nervous to open it. When I finally did early that year, it validated what I had already suspected. Shrier documented the dramatic rise in young people – especially natal females – self-identifying as transgender, sometimes as young as pre-pubescent children. In the UK alone, referrals for gender treatments among girls had risen by over 4,000 per cent between 2009 and 2018. Once labelled trans, minors were entitled to immediate ‘gender-affirmative care’ based solely on self-identification, with no gatekeeping or exploration of underlying issues. Suicide threats were routinely used as leverage against concerned parents. Any kind of questioning or exploratory therapy was now labelled ‘conversion therapy’.
Shrier laid bare the medical reality behind the euphemism: ‘puberty blockers’ chemically castrated minors, with risks including osteoporosis, loss of sexual function and near-certain infertility. Nearly all who started blockers proceeded to cross-sex hormones, which carried lifelong consequences including cardiovascular disease and cancer risks. Surgical interventions – mastectomies on healthy adolescent girls, phalloplasties, vaginoplasties – often resulted in severe complications, chronic pain and multiple revision surgeries. The more I read, the clearer it became that in no other field of medicine were patients, especially minors, allowed to self-diagnose and prescribe their own treatments.
Reading about the scale and speed of medical interventions on young females left me stunned. I wondered whether the sudden surge in girls identifying as trans and seeking to alter their bodies was a new manifestation of a much older pattern of female self-harm. I had engaged in self-harm myself during my youth as a symptom of earlier trauma and deep self-loathing toward my body during puberty. Questions like these led me to Marilee Strong’s 1998 book, A Bright Red Scream, which explored self-mutilation as a language of unbearable inner pain. The young females Shrier described – suddenly identifying as trans and pursuing hormones and various forms of surgical ‘cutting’ (mastectomies on healthy breasts, and in some cases phalloplasties) – seemed to belong on the same continuum as Strong’s ‘needle girls’ (young women in the 1880s who injured themselves by puncturing their flesh with needles) and ‘wrist-slashers’ (sudden waves of young women in the 1960s in Philadelphia and later in Massachusetts who cut their wrists). It seemed to me that behaviour once understood as pathological was now being rebranded as progressive ‘gender-affirmative care’, with surgeons and doctors doing the cutting on behalf of young women.
The same pattern was devastating young males as well. Many gender-nonconforming boys who would likely have grown up gay were being steered toward medical transition, often presenting afterward as ‘heterosexual’ in their declared gender identity. Stories from male detransitioners – including that of Yarden Silveira, who transitioned at 15, underwent vaginoplasty at 19, suffered severe complications, expressed profound regret, and died by suicide at 23 in May 2021 – showed the medicalisation was not limited to natal females.
Reading evolutionary biologists such as Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, and Colin Wright in 2021 finally helped me articulate, even to myself, the simple, binary nature of sex – definable by gametes (small or sperm for males, large or eggs for females). Secondary characteristics and sex-determination systems (such as chromosomes) were consequences of sex, not its definition. Exceptions did not erase the binary. These and other sources confirmed what should have been basic: there are only two sexes; biological sex did not exist on a spectrum. Gender (behaviour, roles, norms) was far more variable, but gender was not the same as sex.
Kathleen Stock’s 2021 book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, helped clarify how the word ‘gender’ itself had shifted over time into four incompatible meanings – from a simple synonym for biological sex to a purely psychological sense of self-identification. The same word was now being used for entirely different concepts, creating widespread confusion. The word ‘trans’ had changed meaning just as dramatically. What I had understood in 2017 or earlier was no longer how it was understood in 2020 and beyond. Even my own earlier public statements supporting ‘trans youth’ could now be misinterpreted.
I began reflecting on my own past in a different light. The similarities between many of today’s ‘trans’-identified youth and the child I had been struck me forcefully. So-called trans healthcare was not just medicalisation, but medicalisation rooted in stereotypes: a feminine boy was now told he was probably a girl; a masculine girl was told she was probably a boy. The endless natural variations of male and female behaviour – including the well-documented link between childhood gender nonconformity and later same-sex attraction – were being pathologised and ‘fixed’ with hormones and surgery. Children with histories of trauma, like my own sexual abuse and body hatred during puberty, were being told their distress was gender dysphoria rather than receiving help for the underlying pain. If I had come of age more recently, I could easily have been labelled trans and set on a path of puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries.
Noah called before summer and asked me to join a small group of advocates working on new provincial legislation to ban conversion therapy in British Columbia. An academic called Florence Ashley, who I had participated with on a panel discussion a few years prior, would be drafting the bill, Noah said. When he sent me the draft, I saw Ashley had redefined sexual orientation as attraction to the ‘same gender’ or ‘opposite gender’, removing biological sex entirely. In meetings I argued that this made no sense for a law intended to protect gay people, whose orientation is based on same-sex attraction.
Between meetings, I called another group member, a gay man in his thirties. He repeated that he didn’t have an issue with the change. I asked if he had any issue dating someone who identified as a ‘trans man’. Without hesitation, he said he had no issue with it. I was stunned. I had always known that ‘trans men’ were still just biological females (and if attracted to men, were then also heterosexual), the same way that I never thought trans women were real women. They were biological males. How could someone be gay while being open to dating and sleeping with a biological female?
When I met continued resistance in the group, I withdrew. I supported bans on conversion therapy, but I had no interest in debating why erasing sexual attraction from the definition of sexual orientation was a bad idea. If they couldn’t see it, I was not going to try to explain it.
As 2021 wore on, my horror at what I was continuing to learn grew tenfold. Many nights I lay awake, ruminating on how children were being sexualised under the banner of ‘trans healthcare’, which to me looked like mutilation straight out of Frankenstein. If minors could consent to surgeries on their sex organs, what would stop arguments for minors consenting to sex with adults? This should have alarmed everyone, not just survivors of childhood sexual abuse. For gender-nonconforming minors who would likely have grown up gay, ‘gender-affirmative care’ was clearly a new form of conversion therapy – medicalising their bodies and appearance to match an internal feeling now called an ‘identity’. This approach felt completely antithetical to the earlier women’s and gay-rights movements, which had fought to free people from rigid sex stereotypes rather than reinforce them through medical intervention.
What I still did not fully see was how even the term ‘conversion therapy’ itself had become part of the problem. When I first began speaking out in the 1990s, I never reduced my experiences to a catch-all phrase. I simply described what had been done to me – drugs, ketamine injections, primal-scream sessions, aversion techniques – and why: to change me from homosexual to heterosexual. Later, when the terms ‘reparative’ and then ‘conversion therapy’ gained widespread use, I adopted them too, although somewhat nervously. Once a single phrase was used to describe these treatments, its meaning expanded dramatically—and so did the bans meant to end them. Those bans shifted from ending treatments aimed at changing sexual orientation to protecting, affirming, and enabling any claimed gender identity. In effect, a term originally intended to stop one form of intervention was stretched and inverted to enable another – ‘gender-affirmative care’.
Following a snap Canadian federal election in September 2021, the government introduced Bill C-4, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). On 1 December 2021, Bill C-4 was fast-tracked and passed unanimously in the House of Commons, which was virtually unheard of. On 7 December, the Senate also passed it unanimously, and on 8 December, it received royal assent and became law. I watched much of the process live, alone in my apartment.
In the days that followed I felt nothing – no excitement, no sense of victory. A few long-time advocates, including Noah, sent brief, polite congratulations. I didn’t reply. By then I sensed what the new law would unleash, but I could not yet fully sort it out in my head. The feeling of dread was palpable.
Beginning in January 2022, the full implications of the new law started to become painfully clear. By including ‘gender identity’ in the protected categories and providing an exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, the legislation effectively criminalised attempts to change sexual orientation while codifying and protecting medical transition for anyone claiming a gender identity. What I had understood for decades as conversion therapy had now been broadened to include any challenge to a person’s belief that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. The law I had fought for had, in practice, legalised what I saw as a new and more invasive form of conversion therapy.
Conversion therapy for sexual orientation historically meant attempts to change same-sex attraction – through lobotomies, drugs, aversion techniques or the kind of psychiatric regime I endured. The goal was to make someone heterosexual, or at least to silence their same-sex attractions.
Conversion therapy for gender identity worked in the opposite direction. By banning challenges to a claimed gender identity, the law effectively removed barriers to ‘gender-affirmative care’ – social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and in some cases surgery. What was called a ban on conversion therapy for gender identity actually increased access to medical treatments that could sterilise, impair sexual function, weaken bones and create lifelong dependence. It facilitated conversion therapy on sexual orientation.
The irony was stark. Youth who might otherwise have grown up gay or lesbian were now being steered toward medical transition, often presenting afterward as ‘heterosexual’ in their declared gender identity. Because biological sex cannot be changed, it would be more accurate to say they had become mutilated homosexuals. Helen Joyce, in her 2021 book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, described these treatments as ‘postmodern gay conversion therapy’. The ban – and others like it that bundled sexual orientation with gender identity – had not ended conversion therapy. It had simply given it a legal sanction under a new name.
This realisation hit harder when I remembered the 2018 Vancouver City Council debate. Across hours of presentations and discussion, the focus was almost entirely on changing homosexuality. There was almost no meaningful reference to ‘gender identity’, even though the final bylaw bundled both together. Most people – including the politicians who passed the law – likely did not foresee how that conflation would play out. I had strongly advocated for these bans to apply to all ages, believing even young adults needed protection. What I did not yet see was how that all-ages language, combined with the bundling and the exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, would ultimately put minors at the greatest risk.
In 2022, Florence Ashley’s Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis was published. It was promoted as the first major legal and policy analysis of ‘trans conversion practices’. The foreword, written by Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on Protection from Violence and Discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, celebrated Canada’s Bill C-4 as a landmark victory, and spoke exclusively about harms to ‘trans and gender diverse persons’. There was no mention of homosexuality, sexual orientation or conversion therapy against gay people – even though the bill had originally been crafted to protect them.
In the first chapter, Ashley defined ‘trans conversion practices’ as any sustained effort to promote gender identities aligned with one’s ‘sex assigned at birth’ or to discourage behaviours associated with a ‘gender other than the one assigned’. Any questioning of a self-declared trans identity, or hesitation around puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries, was labelled a ‘corrective approach’. I was surprised to see my own name in the index. Ashley referenced me alongside a publicly known trans-identified person, suggesting I had experienced a ‘conversion practice’ as a young adult and had ‘ostensibly consented’.
The claim was false on multiple levels. I am gay, not trans. I had always described my experience as gay conversion therapy (or conversion therapy of my sexual orientation). And in numerous interviews, essays and my book, I had explicitly stated that I never consented to my psychiatrist’s treatment. Ashley’s misrepresentation was especially striking given that we had previously appeared together on a panel and she had told me she was familiar with my work.
Early in the book, Ashley discussed ‘gender-creative’ children (whom she also called ‘gender-variant’, ‘gender-expansive’, or ‘gender-diverse’), noting that they ‘may grow up to be transgender’. At no point did she mention that these same children had historically grown up to be gay or lesbian. She framed historical ideas around gender variance entirely through a modern gender-identity lens. Her omission stood in stark contrast to earlier (and some of the first known) advocates for homosexuals like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who in the 19th century argued for the rights of same-sex attracted people – not to medicalise their bodies.
Ashley’s book was so deeply immersed in a worldview built on falsehoods – about biological sex, about notions of gender and gender identity, about who grows up to be trans vs gay – that even attempting to analyse it felt like speaking in a language that was not real. Ashley made painfully clear how thoroughly the language and logic of conversion therapy had been inverted. Where earlier advocates sought to protect same-sex attracted people from coercive change, today’s gender ideology often medicalised the very children the bans were meant to protect. What began as an effort to end harmful attempts to change sexual orientation had, in practice, enabled a new and more invasive form of conversion under the name of ‘gender-affirmative care’.
After stewing over the ban, Ashley’s book and the growing damage I saw gender ideology inflicting on minors, I finally posted my first public statement on the subject in April 2022. I wrote that I struggled with how conversion-therapy bans had conflated sexual orientation with gender identity, and that the two should never have been bundled together because their developmental trajectories are entirely different.
The response was immediate and hostile. Several users called me hateful. Advocates I had worked closely with on the federal ban called me out online. One long-time collaborator responded publicly within minutes, stating that bans on trans-conversion therapy were ‘every bit as important as bans on conversion therapy for sexual orientation’. His tweet felt like a public rebuke.
In another comment posted days later, I explained why I rejected the label ‘cis’, which was now commonly used as the opposite of ‘trans’. The term presupposed that a person had never struggled with gender dysphoria. As a gay man, I was often lumped into the ‘cis’ category, yet I had experienced significant dysphoria as a child. That discomfort later resolved as I matured and accepted my homosexuality. Like many other gay adults who likely experienced similar dysphoria when young, being called ‘cis’ felt factually incorrect and incoherent to me.
Responses from Florence Ashley and others were swift and critical. One former member of the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee tweeted that I was ‘undoing all that good’ and looking for ‘10 minutes of fame’. Her words stung. The last thing I wanted was fame. What I wanted – what I had always wanted – was to prevent further harm and to end what I now saw as a new form of conversion therapy.
In a Quillette essay published early June 2022, I publicly stated for the first time that combining sexual orientation and gender identity in these bans was a mistake. In a second Quillette essay later that year, I laid out my opposition to many of the core tenets of gender ideology. I rejected the idea that a person could be ‘born in the wrong body’, that biological sex was ‘assigned at birth’, or that a person’s sex could be changed through hormones or surgery. I did not believe gender identities could supplant biological sex, nor did I support ‘gender-affirmative care’, especially for minors. These beliefs were incoherent to me and ultimately erased my gay sexuality. I also rejected the label ‘cis’ as meaningless and the term ‘transphobia’ as so broad and elastic that it now equated simple disagreement or appeals to biological reality with hatred. The pieces drew strong reactions, including from some of the advocates I had worked with for so long.
A short time later, I removed pronouns from my social media profiles. I had previously included ‘he / him’, believing it showed support for trans people (under an older understanding of what it meant to be trans). But I now saw that displaying pronouns implicitly endorsed the newer idea that a person could change their sex or that minors should be affirmed in any self-identified gender.
In the wake of my essays, Noah contacted me directly. What began as a conversation quickly became confrontational. He accused me of spreading hatred, warned that my words could fuel violence, dismissed detransitioners as ‘like ex-gays’, and demanded I change my mind. I ended the call.
Several things became clear. First, many of those I had worked with had assumed we were all on the same side simply because we had fought together to end conversion therapy. We were all supposedly ‘on the left’. This was not true. I was on no one’s side. If I had been perceived as being on the left, it was only because the political left had historically fought for gay rights and free speech. With the rise of gender-identity ideology, the meaning of key terms had shifted dramatically. We had all been using similar language to mean very different things.
Second, the casual dismissal of detransitioners as being ‘like ex-gays’ was deeply misguided. Detransitioners had been labelled (or had identified) as trans, often gone through medical transition, and later realised it was a mistake – sometimes a catastrophic one. Their error was believing they could change their birth sex. In contrast, ‘ex-gays’ had started out same-sex attracted and tried to become heterosexual. Their error was believing they could change their sexual orientation. The lie for detransitioners was that they could change sex; the truth was accepting their natal sex. The lie for ex-gays was that they could change their orientation; the truth was accepting their homosexuality. Birth sex and sexual orientation cannot be changed. For those detransitioners who had transitioned partly to escape emerging homosexuality, their experience was, at root, another form of homophobia.
Over the past few years, I have watched with growing distress as detransitioners recount their traumas and women lose their hard-won, sex-based rights to ‘trans women’ (biological males), and are then penalised for even speaking up. Minors, who lack full agency and are easily influenced, have been the primary focus of this new gender ideology. Instead of conversion treatments imposed on adults who are gay or same-sex attracted, legal conversion-therapy bans now effectively force a different kind of change on minors by medicalising their bodies before they’ve had a chance to grow up and explore their sexuality naturally.
I still find it difficult to reflect on how much happened over so many years – decades of relentless effort, hope, crushing disappointment, public testimony, private pain and endless rewriting. Not to mention the psychiatric treatment I experienced, the consequences of which I still live with every day. Then came the slow, grinding realisation that the very thing I had fought so hard for had unintended consequences I could not have foreseen.
I am profoundly disturbed. I survived a brutal, coercive treatment to try to change my sexual orientation that nearly destroyed me. I poured my story into fighting to protect others from similar abuse – only to slowly realise that the very laws I helped champion were being used, in ways I could never have anticipated, to enable a new and medically sanctioned form of ‘conversion therapy’ on a much larger scale. None of this is simply intellectual regret. It is a deep, existential horror. I fought hard to stop one kind of harm. I never intended to enable another.
This reckoning did not arrive suddenly. Since 2023, I have been quietly working through these questions in a much longer manuscript. It was important for me to see everything laid out in one coherent, chronological document before saying anything of substance publicly. My current position is not a change of heart; it is more a statement of recognition about issues that were shifting almost daily, making them difficult to fully understand at the time. Until now, I was also scared – scared of being called transphobic, bigoted, or hateful, scared of losing friends and support. But children’s lives are at stake.
After two decades of fighting what I believed was the right battle, I am convinced that these laws need to be revisited. Legal bans on so-called conversion therapy, if they remain, should never conflate sexual orientation with gender. Any laws that do should be repealed or amended.
Thirty years ago, I began a fight to protect vulnerable young people like the one I once was. Today I am still fighting for them – only now I understand that the greatest threat is not always the one I once feared. Sometimes it wears a white coat and calls itself affirmation."
Clearly, the author is ignorant and doesn't understand how preventing TRAs from sterilising minors will result in gay people being lynched.
Of course, we are still told that minors do not undergo medical transition, despite the boatloads of evidence that they do.
In any event, even if you want to ban the traditional conception of conversion therapy for adults, this still runs up against the left's usual fetish for patient autonomy and non-interference in decisions made between healthcare providers and informed, consenting adult patients.
