Are You My Conversion Therapist?

I'm here, I'm queer, and weirdly, no one will try to brainwash me out of it. Cosmo explores a discredited realm in flux.

- By Erin Quinlan

I think I'd like to try adult conversion therapy. It was during a romantic after-dinner walk with my new wife that the scheme bobbed to the surface, putrid and captivating. Let us test the powers of this gay love, went my thoughts, a deranged cackle rising in my chest. Let us observe whether a counselor can awaken me to the wonders of a cishet existence. I squeezed Nat's hand in silent apology for the unhinged experiment to come, another Cosmo story idea too ridiculous, too wrong to resist. This could be it, our final moonlit stroll before the whole marriage vanished in a puff of straight pride.

Mind you, no kind of conversion therapy-the pseudoscience of trying to forcibly alter a person's sexual orientation and/ or gender identity-has ever "worked" on anyone, despite countless extreme tactics: Attempts to eradicate queerness throughout time have included coercion, electroshock, psychedelic drugs, institutionalization, hypnosis, and lobotomy, meted out by faith-based and secular practitioners alike with zero credible evidence of efficacy and overwhelming evidence of harm. Informed by the harrowing accounts of survivors, who today number an estimated 700,000 adults in the U.S., virtually every major medical or scientific organization has denounced the entire concept of conversion therapy (indeed, even the phrase "conversion therapy") as bunk. Twenty states and counting now ban licensed mental health practitioners from attempting such quackery on kids. But religious groups remain largely exempt from state bans, and for adults, conversion "counseling," even in accredited mental health care settings, is still legal in all 50 states.