said. “It’s practiced by people who believe LGBT is a condition that must change.” Opponents of the legislation assert that the bill would prevent professionals from discussing sexuality and gender identity with young people altogether. “This bill does not do that,” Isaacson stressed. “We would never want a practitioner to not be able to talk with a kid and help them figure out who they are. We just don’t want them undergoing the abuse of being told that they’re horrible human beings and destined for terrible, sad, lonely, loathsome lives.” “Practitioners of conversion therapy are not helping people figure out what their authentic self is, which is what any good therapist would do,” she explained. “They come in with the predetermined outcome that to be LGBT is bad: it’s sick, it’s an illness, a disease, a sin, and it must be cured.” “And to put a kid through that kind of treatment,” she said, “even if you set aside the religiosity part of it and just focus on telling a kid that their life will be miserable for being who they are, for their
sexuality or their gender identity, is absolutely cruel. It is a form of child abuse.” The evidence from the professional organizations noted above shows that LGBTQ kids who undergo conversion therapy wind up with depression that leads to selfharm, including drug addiction, alcohol abuse and suicide, in addition to the layers of self-doubt and trauma these young people carry into adulthood. “It’s long since time to pass this bill,” Isaacson said.
A hard-fought win For almost eight years, Isaacson and fellow advocates worked tirelessly on Beacon Hill to ban conversion therapy on minors, bringing bills to the floor over four legislative sessions. The bill ran up against a mostly unspoken but implicit sentiment in the state house that only one LGBT-related bill could move forward each year. To no small degree, Isaacson said, the slow march forward is due to the sheer time and effort it takes to move
important progressive legislation. But it’s still frustrating, to say the least. “For this bill, it was rough going at first,” she said. First, they had to convince legislators that it was a legitimately harmful practice, and then they had to prove the practice even existed in the state. Time and again, Isaacson heard, “Oh, it’s a terrible practice, but they don’t do that here, do they?” By then, conversion therapy had become socially unacceptable, she said, and a lot of its therapists had “gone in the closet … sometimes literally,” so they weren’t always easy to find as examples. Finding survivors willing to testify proved equally challenging. “We couldn’t get some to testify because they were so traumatized,” she said. “To talk about it was to relive the pain and the trauma, and they just couldn’t do it.” At the recent house hearing in March, Michael Adam Ferguson, now a postdoctoral researcher in neuroscience at Harvard Medical School who’d previously gone through years of conversion therapy as a young man and struggled to overcome
[CONTINUES 40]
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