What The Hell America!

Iowa and South Carolina’s attorney generals are leading a coalition composed of representatives of 11 states seeking to overturn Michigan’s ban on conversion therapy for minors. This past Friday, the coalition filed an amicus brief in the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals requesting a reversal of a decision issued in January—a decision denying a request to reverse Michigan’s conversion therapy ban. 

It may seem impossible, much less improbable, to legalize conversion therapy for minors in this day and age, but at the end of March, the Kentucky House and Senate—both Republican controlled—voted to override Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear’s veto of House Bill 495. Conversion therapy—the widely debunked practice that tries to change a person’s sexual orientation—was banned in Kentucky in September 2024 when Governor Beshear signed an executive order banning the practice on minors. 

But while House Bill 495 was originally intended just to overturn Beshear’s ban, the bill also restricts the use of Medicaid funds for gender affirming care for adults—and with its added emergency clause, it took effect immediately. 

The very next day, Governor Beshear posted a video on X sharing testimony from experts and survivors about the dangers and ineffectiveness of conversion therapy. Despite many medical and psychological research institutions indicating that conversion therapy is not effective and highly dangerous, the Kentucky legislature decided to move forward with overturning Behear’s ban. The decision will surely lead to harm, and further restricting access to gender affirming care disrupts vital suicide prevention. 

Conversion therapy: an ineffective and harmful practice

In their study of 47 peer-reviewed studies about conversion therapy’s effectiveness in altering sexual orientation without causing harm, Cornell University’s What We Know Project found that 12 concluded that conversion therapy is either ineffective and/or harmful, linking it to depression, suicide, anxiety and social isolation. 

Similarly, a 2020 report released by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that lesbian, gay and bisexual people who have experienced conversion therapy were almost twice as likely to consider and attempt suicide compared to others who have not experienced conversion therapy. Another study with more than 4,000 participants led by Stanford Medicine found that conversion therapy programs are also linked to PTSD, depression and suicide. 

This increased risk of dying by suicide makes sense as another study published in 2020 found that men who have experienced conversion therapy were more likely to have internalized homophobia. These programs reinforce an internal hatred and rebuke of the self—only one study found by the What We Know Project concluded that conversion therapy was effective for only a minority of participants, but as Cornell University indicated, the study was deeply flawed. 

As these studies, and a review of 46 studies published between 200 and 2020 conducted by the U.K. Government found, there is no robust evidence that conversion therapy is effective in changing a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. But as the results above indicate, it does cause real, long-term psychological and physical damage to participants. 

The Kentucky’s legislature’s actions last week affirm the dangerous precedent that this sets not only for LGBTQ+ people but also for cis, straight women. As the National Sexual Violence Resource Center indicates, conversion therapy is a form of sexual violence—some of its most extreme forms involve “corrective” sexual abuse, and conversion therapy has historically used medical techniques that were historically also used to “correct” women’s behavior. 

Medical violence affects everyone

Conversion therapy largely takes its name from the medical violence committed against and perpetrated on disabled women, women with mental illnesses, lesbian, bisexual and queer women and women of color—groups who were historically institutionalized on a massive scale for straying outside of what was considered “acceptable” behavior for women.

Women who defied domestic control, read novels, or experienced “uterine derangement” (“period-related madness”) found themselves confined in asylums and facing violent medical interventions like lobotomies, hard labor and shock therapy up through the 19th and 20th centuries. Kate Moore’s book The Woman They Could Not Silence (2021) delves into one woman’s own struggle within institutionalized systems. 

Moore explores the story of Elizabeth Packaged, an Illinois housewife and mother of six, who was committed to the Illinois State Hospital in Jacksonville, Ill. because of her intellect and independence. As Moore shares, Packard’s fight for freedom and survival shows how systems of institutionalization and medical abuse were used to silence her and make her submit to patriarchal systems of control.

This is not unlike conversion therapy, which historically used some of the same medical techniques to try to “turn” young people and adults alike straight. Up until the 1990s, according to the Minnesota Department of Health, conversion therapy included lobotomy and aversive conditioning, including electric shock, burning with metal coils and ice baths. 

As Lucas Wilson documents in his new book Shame-Sex Attraction (2025), “coercive conversion and proselytizing are predicated upon superiority—the desire for a homogenous Christian world.” “For some Christians, this superiority entitles them to mold others in their image—sometimes through violent means—to behave or act like straight, White Christian followers,” Lucas shared in an interview for Religion Dispatches. It’s no surprise that the U.K. Government’s study found that most conversion therapy programs are run by faith organizations or have some element of spirituality or religion. 

While more recent iterations of conversion therapy utilize talk therapy, and organizations still running this program attempt to distance themselves from the term “conversion therapy” because of its harmful connotations, it does not deny connections to physically harmful conversion therapies, nor does it deny that talk therapies that make up the majority of conversion therapy programs across the country are still deeply harmful. 

While these political campaigns are mostly targeting queer and trans children and adults for now, they reinforce how all medical violence—including prohibiting access to reproductive care—is interconnected. It’s no coincidence that the push to legalize conversion therapy for minors is led by the same far-right actors that pushed for the overturn of Roe v. Wade and access to reproductive care, another vital form of gender affirming care.

Conversion therapy originated from medical violence against women who did not conform to gender-based norms, arguably the same reason that Christian conversion therapy practitioners today target LGBTQ+ people who do not conform to heteronormative, cisgender norms. It sets a dangerous precedent for what other kinds of medical violence can be leveraged to reinforce far-right gender normative ideals.