Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker signed a law Monday that bans conversion therapy for minors in the state. Under the new legislation, health care providers licensed in the state are prohibited from promoting or engaging in “sexual orientation and gender identity change efforts with a patient who is less than 18 years of age.”
Conversion therapy is a harmful and discredited method charged with altering an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Changing one’s sexual orientation is akin to changing one’s race or ethnicity — it is simply not possible.
It’s appalling that it took Massachusetts, a notably progressive state, until 2019 to pass a law banning conversion therapy. The myth that conversion therapy works assumes not only that sexual orientation is a choice, but that it is something that needs to be fixed. Until the state passed this law, it indirectly sent a message that it supports this myth.
Conversion “therapists” use methods that shame, emotionally traumatize and physically stimulate their victims. Minors are especially vulnerable to the dangerous consequences of conversion therapy, which includes a higher likelihood of depression, anxiety, drug use, homelessness and suicide.
The Williams Institute, a think tank at the University of California-Los Angeles School of Law, released a study in 2018 that found about 700,000 LGBT adults in the United States have received conversion therapy, about half of whom received this “treatment” as adolescents.
Based on the study’s estimates, 20,000 LGBT youth — which includes adolescentes aged between 13 and 17 — will receive conversion therapy from a licensed healthcare professional before they reach the age of 18.
Even after Massachusetts’ ban, 34 states still lack laws that ban conversion therapy for minors. In the Northeast, only two states — Maine and Pennsylvania — still allow the practice. Currently, 60 percent of the LGBT population lives in states without laws prohibiting conversion therapy for minors.
Much of the current anti-LGBTQ rhetoric exists in the form of the idea that the government should not intervene in the practice of something like conversion therapy. Yet the idea that the government doesn’t have a right or shouldn’t be able to ban a dangerous pseudoscience is ridiculous.
The “personal” freedom to engage in conversion therapy should not exist for parents over their children. It is every government’s job to protect all of its constituents, and protecting LGBTQ minors from parents and guardians who believe their children’s’ identities are “fixable” is incredibly important.
Just as how the U.S. Food and Drug Administration regulates medications, the government must regulate dangerous medical procedures.
