Conversion therapy

In 1987, the Medical Journal of Australia published a paper titled Gender-disordered children: does inpatient treatment help? by Robert Kosky, then director of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Services in Western Australia.

It described eight children, all under 12, who were hospitalised at Stubbs Terrace between 1975 and 1980 for what the paper called "gender identity disorder".

The children were separated from their families and treated for months at a time. The paper argued their "cross-gender behaviours" were the result of inappropriate family dynamics — and suggested the hospital program corrected them.

When Anja Ravine, a trans youth health researcher at the Murdoch Children's Research Institute, came across it decades later, she was alarmed.

"It's implicit that they were expecting gender identity to return to what was expected. So that is really within the definition of conversion therapy."

Efforts to suppress or change a person's gender identity or sexuality, often referred to as "conversion therapy", are now illegal in most parts of Australia.

"We know now that people who've been exposed to this actually carry long-term psychological scars. It's very harmful," Dr Ravine said.

Despite being nearly 40 years old, the Kosky paper is regularly cited by opponents of gender-affirming care in submissions to lawmakers, courts and medical regulators around the world.

Even in Australia, the National Association of Practising Psychiatrists, has written a clinical guide on how doctors should care for gender diverse youth that also cites the paper.

Dr Ravine said that the study being used is "deeply troubling".

In a 2015 survey of more than 27,000 trans adults, nearly 1 in 7 said that a professional, such as a therapist, doctor, or religious adviser, had tried to make them not transgender; about half of respondents said they were minors at the time. By applying this rate to population estimates, the Williams Institute at UCLA projects that more than 135,000 trans adults nationwide have experienced some form of conversion therapy.

Despite the data, lawmakers frequently don’t believe that conversion therapy is still happening in their community, says Casey Pick, director of law and policy at the Trevor Project, the LGBTQ suicide prevention group. “We’re constantly running up against this misconception that this is an artifact of the past,” she says. So, five years ago, the Trevor Project began scouring psychologists’ websites and books, records of public testimony, and known conversion therapy referral services, looking for counselors who said they could alter someone’s gender identity or sexual orientation.

As the research stretched on, Pick noticed webpages being revised to reflect changing times. “We saw many folks who seemed to leave the industry entirely,” she says. “But others changed their website, changed their keywords, [from] talking about creating ex-gays to talking about ex-trans.”

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And in Las Vegas, Cretella drew a direct connection between the old work of the Alliance and the new work of gender-exploratory therapists. “It truly is very similar to how the Alliance has always approached unwanted SSA [same-sex attraction],” she told the assembled therapists. “You approach it as ‘change therapy’—or, even less triggering, ‘exploratory therapy.’”

TL;DR: QueerAF has confirmed that leaked guidance seen by the Good Law Project is in use by NHS England. It reveals the 6000+ children currently on the waiting list for the new Children And Young People’s Gender Service are being invited to have their mental health assessed. At these assessments children and their families will be advised to stop gender-affirming treatments, and that if they continue without “appropriate care” they could face safeguarding referrals. It could result in young people being forced to medically detransition.

The project’s star success story was a young man named Kirk Andrew Murphy, who had been caught by his father posing in the kitchen in a long T-shirt saying, “Isn’t my dress pretty?” In a 1974 paper research assistant George Rekers and Lovaas described Kirk at age five as “‘swishing’ around the home and clinic, fully dressed as a woman with a long dress, wig, nail polish, high screechy voice, [and] slovenly seductive eyes.” At home, Kirk’s father exchanged his son’s red tokens for beatings with a belt, with Rekers’s approval. Eventually, Kirk’s brother Mark started hiding the red tokens to save Kirk from the abuse.

After 60 sessions in the lab, Kirk was declared cured of sissy-boy syndrome. The psychologists noted that after the treatment, the little boy was no longer upset when his hair was mussed and was eager to go on camping trips with his father. Rekers eventually published nearly 20 papers on his client’s alleged metamorphosis, becoming one of the world’s leading proponents of conversion therapy in the process.

Then in 2003, at age 38, after a series of unsuccessful relationships with women, Kirk died by suicide. His sister Maris told Anderson Cooper on CNN that his treatment at U.C.L.A. “left Kirk just totally stricken with the belief that he was broken, that he was different from everybody else.”