Thread by @jlsmilges

This is Laurie Haynes, a psychologist who testified in MO last week that the ban on gender-affirming care should include adults.

She is also a member of the NARTH Institute, the most vocal advocacy organization for conversion therapy in the world.

This is a BIG deal. 🧵

I address the history of conversion efforts and NARTH in particular at great length in #QueerSilence, but it’s worth emphasizing here that conversion therapy has *always* instrumentalized ideas about children in order to discipline adults.

Typically by speculating on the effects of child trauma on sexual/gender development, conversion therapists often invoke the specter of children in order to diagnose adults as mentally ill—a kind of mentally ill that is circuitously cited to justify withholding care from kids.

It’s notable, for instance, that both the anti-trans legislation in Missouri—called the Save Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act—and NARTH’s anti-gay clinical practice—referred to as Sexual Attraction Fluidity Efforts in Therapy (SAFE-T) use basically the same acronym.

Both pieces of rhetoric trade in the language of safety, each relying on pathological figurations of adults or children to justify violence toward the other.

Either the adult is sick because of previously unresolved trauma, or the child is at risk of inheriting the sickness of adult “groomers.”

That adults are also targets for conversion ideology is often forgotten because of the overwhelming public focus on children. But queer and trans adults are necessary interlocutors for conversion efforts because they can offer anecdotal evidence that the efforts are successful.

Unlike the alleged groomers who are openly queer and trans people, testimonies from ex-gays and people who have detransitioned dominate conversion therapy research, and they are frequently cited in clinical spaces to persuade vulnerable children that change is possible.

Indeed, “Change is Possible” was once the motto for the largest ex-gay organization in the world. The “change” imagined by clinicians and practitioners, however, is not necessarily gay->straight or trans->cis, though these trajectories are certainly considered ideal.

🚨Instead, “change” refers to a shift in definition, where the feelings typically associated with queer sexual desire or trans embodiment are rhetorically reimagined as symptoms of mental illness.🚨

Transmogrifying a sexual/gender identity into a disability identity is the singular most important step in conversion therapy because it replaces in homo-/transphobic disgust with ableist pity in evangelical and conservative circles.

Disability can be tolerated as a kind of deficit or loss in some communities who do not extend such tolerance to sexual and gender minorities. Conversion therapy invents the diagnoses necessary to reconfigure queer and trans people as disabled ones.

The process of diagnosis is convoluted, but it adheres to the norms of white supremacy and capitalism by rehabilitating queer and trans people into hetero-ability. The surest sign of “success” in conversion therapy is not becoming straight/cis but entering heterosexual marriage.

By entering cis-hetero marriage, ex-gays and detransitioned folks can reproduce and, as such, resume their assigned roles as (re)productive consumers. Further, their gender nonconformance is domesticated in a way that no longer threatens the fragile stability of whiteness.

Binary gender is, after all, a tool to regulate the racial division of labor in such a way that protects the supremacy of whiteness, especially white masculinity.

Conversion therapists are the troops on the ground, working individually with clients, and their ideologies are incredibly dangerous, especially as they seep their way into legislation.

What we’re seeing in Missouri, Texas, Florida, and a host of other states is not merely LGBTQ discrimination but a series of fascistic efforts to channel ableism toward queer and trans immiseration.

Rhetorically reconfiguring trans children and adults as mentally ill is not only to pathologize them but also to buttress the stigma of mental disability. This is a stigma that underpins so much of conversion therapy, TERF discourse, and right-wing politics.

It’s a stigma that deems disability not only undesirable but also an existential threat to humanity. Sexual and gender deviance are characterized as expressions of a much deeper sickness plaguing children, the Left, academia, etc.

And this sickness never needs to be defined so long as the fear surrounding it remains uncontested. This is why anti-ableism is such an important piece of queer and trans liberation.

Conversion therapy is where ableism meets homo-/transphobia. People like Laurie Haynes are working to institutionalize conversion ideologies through legislation, channeling the stigma of disability as an implicit assumption among legislators and voters.

You wanna stop people like Laurie Haynes? Then start talking about the full picture of conversion therapy—not only its explicit homo-/transphobia but also its far more fundamental ableism.