When I was twenty-seven years old, I attended a conversion therapy program in the Black church. I had recently broken off my engagement to a man and sought counsel from my minister, who recommended a program to me called “Jesus Heals.” He insisted it would clear up what he called the sexuality “confusion” that had resulted from my four years at the all-women’s Wellesley College.
Participants remained in the program for as long as it was believed necessary to “overcome” our same-sex attraction. I was there for four months with twenty-five other individuals who came from Black churches throughout all five boroughs of New York City. After enduring a litany of do’s and don’t’s, repeatedly hearing Saint Augustine’s famous admonition to “love the sinner, hate the sin,” and being told to take all my worries to Jesus and the altar in prayer, I emerged from the program with my first love—another attendee who was the lead female soloist from another church. The irony? Today, we’re both ordained ministers.
This was decades ago, before conversion therapy—a form of psychotherapy which purports to help LGBTQ+ people become heterosexual and cisgender—was widely renounced. I hoped these programs would stay in the past. In reality, they’ve continued to operate—and enjoy support from some of our highest levels of government, despite overwhelming evidence discrediting the practice as ineffective and harmful pseudoscience. Most of us who attended programs like Jesus Heals were isolated, confused and scared about our sexuality—and these programs unintentionally helped us form friendships, community, and in cases like mine, a romantic relationship.
In March, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Chiles v. Salazar that a therapist’s speech is protected under the First Amendment. The plaintiff, Kaley Chiles—an evangelical Christian and licensed therapist—argued in a prior appellate case that a Colorado law banning conversion therapy violated her free speech rights when working with young people “who have same-sex attractions or gender identity confusion” and who seek to “live a life consistent with their faith.” The ruling effectively upheld conversion therapy as a legally protected practice.
Progressive religious groups were quick to condemn the ruling. Marianne Duddy-Burke, executive director of a pro-LGBTQ+ Catholic organization called DignityUSA, minced no words in her statement released on the same day as the Chiles decision. “Throughout our more than fifty-seven years of ministry, we have worked with hundreds of LGBTQ+ people who have undergone conversion therapy,” she said. “Every one of them described it as a dehumanizing, horrific experience. Not only was it ineffective at changing their sexual orientation or gender identity, but it resulted in deep shame that many tried to treat with alcohol, drugs, or even suicide attempts. It took years to recover, in most cases.”
The truth is that conversion therapy is hardly new, and has long been inextricably tied to religious institutions. Modern conversion therapy—also known as reparative therapy—is rooted in the Christian ex-gay movement that was popular in the 1980s and 1990s, during which Christian institutions and media promoted the stories of activists who claimed to live heterosexual lives after “praying the gay away.” In 1997, more than two decades after removing homosexuality from its Diagnostic Statistical Manual as a classification of mental disorder, the American Psychological Association issued a position statement affirming that “homosexuality per se is a normal and positive variation of human sexual orientation.” Three years later, in 2000, the association took a formal position against conversion therapy.
In spite of rebuke from medical and mental health organizations, the conversion therapy industry continued to move with force in the 2000s. Methods of attempted treatment ranged from talk therapy to aversion treatments—including the administration of electric shocks and the induction of nausea or vomiting. In 2009, a task force from the American Psychological Association found little evidence that these practices had any impact whatsoever on sexual orientation.
To date, twenty-three states and Washington, D.C. have fully banned conversion therapy treatment for minors, and 56 percent of U.S. adults believe conversion therapy should be banned. Before 2025, the U.S. Supreme Court had declined to hear several cases involving bans on conversion therapy. But with support from the Trump Administration, anti-LGBTQ+ group Alliance Defending Freedom successfully argued for Kaley Chiles in favor of the practice.
The emotional and psychological harms associated with these programs are profound. They are linked to high rates of depression, anxiety, avoidance of intimacy, loss of faith, suicide, and the deepening of internalized self-hatred, among other damaging outcomes.
Conservative and anti-trans religious groups attempt to justify the practice by portraying LGBTQ+ people as disordered—a claim that is eerily reminiscent of the racist and sexist pseudoscience once used to deem Black people and women morally inferior based on supposed genetic deficiencies.
When it became clear that conversion therapy could not “pray the gay away,” as high-profile ex-gay activists recanted their support for conversion therapy and revealed that, in many cases, they had never changed their own sexual orientation, fear-mongering and pseudoscience alone became less effective tools for justifying discrimination against LGBTQ+ Americans. Now, religious proponents of the practice are reframing these efforts as “pastoral” or “biblical” counseling and protected under the banner of free speech.
The truth remains: Conversion therapies have an estimated failure rate of 90 percent. Numerous “ex-gay” organizations have shut down after their leaders publicly acknowledged their own sexual orientation or gender identity. And many prominent figures within the movement, who have labeled homosexuality as a disease for which they can provide a cure and claimed non-existent statistics of success, have since been exposed as fraudulent. In March 2011, Alan Chambers, then president of the renowned conversion therapy enterprise Exodus International, spoke about his sure-fire remedy for us LGBTQ+ prodigal children, and how his organization can help us reconcile our faith, mend our sinful lives, and finally walk away from our supposedly wrong-headed “lifestyle” choice. Chambers was a married man with two adopted children, and a purported ex-gay man himself.
But in 2013, in a public mea culpa about conversion therapy, Chambers wrote:
“For quite some time we’ve been imprisoned in a worldview that’s neither honoring toward our fellow human beings, nor biblical . . . . I am sorry that when I celebrated a person coming to Christ and surrendering their sexuality to Him that I callously celebrated the end of relationships that broke your heart. I am sorry that I have communicated that you and your families are less than me and mine.”
In 2013, Exodus International closed its doors. That same year, John Paulk—once a nationally recognized ex-gay figure—renounced the ex-gay movement and expressed remorse for the harm he caused. He stated, “I no longer support the ex-gay movement or efforts to attempt to change individuals—especially teens who already feel insecure and alienated. I feel great sorrow over the pain that has been caused.”
In confronting the cisgender, heteropatriarchal culture that persists in many conservative churches, Christian schools, and faith-based organizations where I am invited to speak, I often remind my homophobic and transphobic church-going brothers and sisters—seminarians, pastors, and professors alike—of three essential truths. First, as queer people, we are not children of a lesser God. Second, queer people can love Jesus as much as straight, cisgender people. And third, our existence is testimony that our lives are sacred, holy, and sanctified, too.
The practice of conversion therapy, no matter who imposes it, does not honor the beautiful tapestry of human diversity. It either attempts to fix us or erase us. That didn’t work for me, and it hasn’t for so many others.
A previous version of this article appeared in LGBTQ Nation.