#ex gay therapy

[ohyoufool]

Come one, come all It's happening again The empathetic hunger descends We'll tell no one Except all of our friends But I still don't know How did it end?

How Did It End? - Taylor Swift x OMG Check Please

[melbournetwink]

Want to see how we ended up? 🫧

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[antiphan]

not the divorce ad under that post

Guys we are so in danger something is in the internet air the algorithm knows

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Ryan Adamczeski at The Advocate:

Putting children through the harmful and discredited practice of conversion therapy has officially been outlawed in Kentucky after Democratic Gov. Andy Beshear signed an executive order Wednesday. Beshear signed the order after similar legislation repeatedly failed in the Republican-dominated state legislature earlier this year. The measure prohibits minors from being subjected to the "therapy," and prevents state or federal funds from being used to bankroll the so-called care for youth.

“Let’s be clear: conversion therapy has no basis in medicine or science, and it has been shown to increase rates of suicide and depression,” Beshear said in a statement. "This is about doing what is right and protecting our children. Hate is not who we are as Kentuckians.” "Conversion therapy," also known as “reparative therapy,” is a debunked practice that attempts to forcefully change the gender identity or sexual orientation of the patient, which has often been compared to "torture" by its recipients and health care providers alike. Every major medical organization has denounced the practice, yet it has only been outlawed in 23 other states, according to the Movement Advancement Project. One state, Indiana, explicitly bans local ordinances outlawing the practice, and three others currently prevent the enforcement of bans.

[...] Kentucky Republicans could still overturn the executive order with their supermajorities in both the state House of Representatives and Senate. Lawmakers banned gender-affirming care for minors as well as public school instruction on sexual orientation and gender identity at all grade levels in 2023 after overriding Beshear's veto on what's been called one of the worst anti-LGBTQ+ laws in the United States.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) signs an executive order to ban the medically discredited practice of ex-gay conversion therapy and anti-trans gender exploratory therapy.

[unamused-kookaburra]

My understanding of iwtv before the influx of posts on my dash: gay vampires

My understanding of iwtv now: toxic gay vampire theatre company

[1unpunishable1]

My therapist has officially told me im not allowed to interact with religion until in stable

[gxlden-angels]

Your girl calling me Abraham the way I stay sacrificing my children to her

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Brendan O'Neill

Published: Feb 19, 2023

On the face of it, Munroe Bergdorf and Milo Yiannopoulos don’t seem to have much in common. Bergdorf is the hyper-woke transgender model and activist who has supped so much of the identity-politics Kool-Aid that he even thinks homeless people enjoy ‘white privilege’. (Literally. ‘You can be homeless and still have white privilege’, Bergdorf said back in 2017. Make sure you tell the next white beggar who asks you for a couple of quid what an entitled life he leads.) Yiannopoulos, in contrast, is the one-time ‘alt-right’ blowhard who loved nothing more than making fun of fat feminists and riling right-on students. Where Bergdorf sashays with the politically correct establishment, Milo was a star in the dark, weird, ostentatiously un-PC catacombs of the world wide web. Also, Munroe’s star rises, Milo’s has faded (give or take his recent shortlived dalliance with Ye).

And yet, reading Transitional, Bergdorf’s memoir of transgender life, it struck me that there might just be one thing that binds Munroe and Milo: both, essentially, are ‘ex-gay’. Both have liberated themselves from homosexuality. Sure, Yiannopoulos did it in a religious fashion – he was recently reduced to selling Virgin Mary figurines on a Christian YouTube channel – while Bergdorf has done it with impeccable correct-speak, gabbing about embracing ‘sexual fluidity’ over the binary idea that there is ‘[nothing] else other than straight or gay’. But both have moved on, or claim to have moved on, from gay. Is Munroe a woke Milo? It’s worth considering. Certainly we should talk about how the trans ideology more broadly seems to have rehabilitated gay shame and given rise to a twisted new take on ‘gay liberation’. Now it’s less about liberating gays from oppression than liberating oneself from gayness.

Bergdorf’s book is a strange mix of memoir and self-help. Ostensibly it’s about the ‘fluidity of identity and relationships’ – ‘in one way or another, we all transition’, it says on the cover. Really it’s about Bergdorf’s life, from his privileged childhood in Stansted Mountfitchet (‘a picturesque, upper-middle-class, Norman town’) to his sexual and gender agonising in early adulthood to his stardom as a transwoman model for the likes of L’Oréal and British Vogue. It’s mostly your average memoir-as-therapy, the usual Oprah-lite fare that weighs down the shelves of every bookshop these days. (The dedication page goes on about ‘The love that I deserve… The love that I owe to myself.’ Get a room, Munroe and Munroe!) But then there’s the stuff on homosexuality. These sections feel genuinely disconcerting. Squint and in parts it reads like the memoir of a Christian converted out of his homosexuality. Only where those ex-gays saw the light of God’s love, the young gay Bergdorf saw the light of ‘gender transition’, which seemingly revealed to him that he wasn’t gay after all – he was a woman.

The book is riddled with talk of gay shame. Bergdorf seems to have spent much of his early life consumed by shame: ‘I felt ashamed of my identity, my heritage, my skin.’ Shame of his homosexuality – which is how he understood his identity in his teen years – was a particular problem. ‘[Even] though I knew I was gay and even though I understood that being gay was not a thing to be shamed for, I was still ashamed.’ When he was called homophobic names on account of his being ‘effeminate… camp’, he says ‘a part of me believed in their slurs’. He says he dreaded becoming a ‘monster’ if he ‘pursued’ his homosexual urges. He so often heard the idea that ‘being a gay man and being a sexual predator were synonymous’ that he became ‘absolutely terrified that I’d become a monster [too]’. What’s more, his parents didn’t handle his coming out well at all. ‘It’s just a phase’, his mum said. He was forbidden from doing ballet, because boys don’t do that. It was all ‘guilt and fear and negative feelings’, he writes of his gay years.

Then, one day, he discovers that he might not be gay after all. He might be female. The language he uses to describe his journey away from gay might be flawlessly politically correct, but it’s no less alarming for that. Maybe, he says, society had conditioned him to think of himself as gay. ‘I assumed that I must have been male and I assumed that I must have been gay because I was assigned male at birth, because I’m in this body that everybody refers to as male and because I find men’s bodies sexually attractive’, he writes. ‘But’ – but! – perhaps he was being hemmed in by those nasty old sexual binaries that say we’re all either male or female, gay or straight. ‘I didn’t know there was anything else other than straight or gay’, he writes. ‘I didn’t have the reach or understanding or language beyond being gay.’ (My emphasis.) He finally went beyond gay, though, when he started to transition into ‘womanhood’. Finally he found ‘a version of myself that I could be proud of’. Coming out as trans was ‘the beginning of transitioning out of shame’, he says. He was ‘transitioning out of shame and into pride’.

This is sad, no? Picture it another way. Picture a memoir by someone less hip and less starry than Bergdorf, someone who ‘transitions out of shame’ by converting from male homosexuality to male heterosexuality. That would be considered a tragic tale, right? Some woke activists might even agitate for the banning of such a book on the basis that positive depictions of ‘conversion therapy’ could have a negative, esteem-whacking impact on young gay people. So why is Bergdorf’s tale of transitioning away from the shame that consumed him as a gay teen into the pride that came with his intensive surgical transformation into a ‘woman’ considered acceptable, wonderful even? Here’s my sincerely held if possibly controversial take: Bergdorf’s is a story of conversion therapy, too. Only it wasn’t a religious ideology that lifted Bergdorf out of the shame-inducing doldrums of homosexuality – it was the trans ideology.

This is not to suggest Bergdorf is homophobic or politically anti-gay. Indeed, unlike queen turned Bible-basher Milo Yiannopoulos, Bergdorf remains ardently pro-‘queer’. ‘I am… queer as fuck and proudly so’, he writes at one point. (There is, of course, an entire PhD to be written on the intersection, to use woke parlance, between new ‘queer’ ideologies and the rehabilitation of gay shame. Between showy, blue-haired ‘queerness’ on one hand, and the demonisation of same-sex – shudder – relations on the other. But that’s for another time.) And yet one cannot just let slide the fact that, here, we have a memoir by a man who writes at length about his ‘internalised shame’ over his homosexuality, his inability to understand how ‘anyone could be proud to be gay’, who then discovers that, mercifully, there is something beyond gay – transwomanhood; the reordering of the body so that it might better accord with one’s inner feelings. Bergdorf’s great dread was to remain trapped in the ‘purgatory between the hand I was dealt at birth and the outward lie that appeased those around me’. That is, between his seeming maleness – gay maleness at that – and his feeling of womanhood. ‘Liberation’ from this purgatory could only come through transition – including incredibly intrusive forms of bodily and facial surgery – so that Bergdorf’s flesh might become a better representation of his soul.

We need to start being honest about what a regressive idea this is – this idea that an individual’s feelings of shame and self-disgust might be fixed by gender transition. This is an idea feverishly cleaved to not only by woke ideologues like Bergdorf, but also by ruthlessly homophobic regimes like the one in Iran. A 2014 report published by Justice for Iran – Diagnosing Identities, Wounding Bodies – captured well the Iranian regime’s belief that shameful homosexuals can only become proud citizens by being surgically corrected. The theocratic rulers of Iran believe, it said, that if people display ‘a marked aversion to the normative mannerisms of the gender they have been assigned at birth’, then they should ‘undergo sex-reassignment surgeries in order to successfully uncover the truth about their sex and make it agree with their “true gender”’. Going back even further, to the pathologisation of homosexuality in the 19th century, we find the insulting belief pushed by psychologists that homosexuality was a case of a ‘female soul inhabit[ing] a male body’. Anyone else feel uncomfortable that the old homophobic view that male gayness is trapped femaleness seems to be making a comeback?

It seems increasingly clear that homophobia – whether of the old-fashioned, the woke or the ‘internalised’ variety – is a key component of trans thinking. Whistleblowers at gender clinics for children have described trans interventions as ‘conversion therapy for kids’. For her new book on the rise and fall of the Tavistock Clinic – Time To Think – Hannah Barnes spoke to gender clinicians who became concerned that some kids were transitioning after experiencing homophobic bullying and shame. A couple of years ago, a former gender clinician said of the kids being treated: ‘We heard a lot of homophobia… A lot of the girls would come in and say, “I’m not a lesbian. I fell in love with my best girl friend but then I went online and realised I’m not a lesbian, I’m a boy. Phew.”’ And now we have a memoir by one of the best-known transgender figures in the UK talking about his gender transition as a ‘transitioning out of shame and into pride’. What’s going on here?

Bergdorf’s ‘transitioning’ involved adopting the mannerisms of womanhood. It has always struck me as highly odd that the woke bemoan so-called cultural appropriation and yet are perfectly fine with men appropriating the language and ‘look’ of womanhood. He writes about starting to ‘look more and more like society’s idea of a woman’. He even seems to welcome the downsides of womanhood, such as being pestered by men. When he finds himself being sexually objectified, he feels relieved that people ‘found me desirable’. These were ‘breadcrumbs of validation… being fetishised felt like genuine affection’. Before long he’s a bona fide oppressed woman, to the extent that he starts to ‘internalise… misogynistic narrative[s]’. ‘I am a woman’, he says. And to the ‘TERFs’ who say otherwise, who insist that if you’re born male you’ll always be male, he says they just ‘fear liberation for everyone, as if a trans woman being treated like a human being somehow negates their own sense of oppression as women’. Daft TERFs – what do you mere women know about the world, about suffering?

Bergdorf’s rather arrogant adoption of ‘womanhood’ confirms just how many social groups lose out as a consequence of the trans hysteria. Gays, who are implicitly told that greater pride might lie in the surgical correction of their physical constitutions, and women, whose experiences are co-opted by born males. It seems to me that Bergdorf is using the language of ‘liberation’ to describe what other people more honestly refer to as ‘conversion’. Show me the difference between his ‘liberation’ from his feelings of gay shame and someone else’s ‘conversion’ from their shameful homosexuality. Indeed, if anything the trans ideology’s enticement of young gay men and lesbians into the shady sphere of surgical correction is worse than religious-style conversion therapy. There is always a way back for the young homosexual who believes that he has been converted to heterosexuality. There’s no way back for Munroe Bergdorf. He’s gone too far. He will never be a gay man again. That is tragic, in my view; a testament to how the ideal of gay liberation has been so thoroughly warped that it now means its opposite.

==

This is not to suggest Bergdorf is homophobic or politically anti-gay.

Reminder that Munroe Bergdorf posted that "even I'd like to gay bash him!" regarding the character Kurt from Glee.

https://archive.is/n7n6V

The DJ from London wrote that a character on the American TV show Glee was so “annoying” that “even I’d like to gay bash him!” [..] “Aren’t you meant to be crying over the fact that your womb is broken you hairy barren lesbian.” Another tweet referred to a follower as a “saggy ol dyke”.

Yeah, that doesn't say "anti-gay, homophobic self-hating gay man" at all. /s

[thedreadvampy]

I fucking love my friend!!!!!!!

[justinspoliticalcorner]

Eliel Cruz for Teen Vogue:

When I was a teenager in the early aughts, conversion therapists reigned supreme in evangelical Christian spaces, spewing pseudo-scientific techniques as a supposed “remedy” for LGBTQ identities. Growing up in the Seventh-day Adventist church and school system, LGBTQ identities were vilified and demonized at the pulpit and in our classrooms. The answer to our sexualities, according to the church, was to deny ourselves love or a partner, stay celibate, or to work on “changing” our sexuality so that we were no longer queer. There were groups and conferences with self-proclaimed “ex-gay” speakers providing testimonies about how they “overcame” their sexuality and therapists eager to “help” others pursue the same path.

According to a Williams Institute report, 7% of LGB adults ages 18 to 59 in the United States have undergone conversion therapy. About 81% of those individuals were in “therapy” with religious leaders, which heightened suicidal thoughts and ideation in comparison to LGB people who have not gone through conversion “therapy” practices. Across the globe, these numbers fluctuate between 2% all the way up to 34% of LGBTQ+ people having undergone conversion practices. By the mid-2010s, these groups and their influence began to dwindle as national organizations like Exodus International, one of the longest-running and largest ex-gay organizations, shuttered its doors after 37 years, admitting that not only did conversion or reparative therapy not work, it was harmful to the LGBTQ people subjected to it. Former Exodus International President Alan Chambers said: "I am sorry for the pain and hurt many of you have experienced. I am sorry that some of you spent years working through the shame and guilt you felt when your attractions didn't change,” admitting his own attractions to men had not gone away, despite being married to a woman and having children.

The closing of Exodus International signaled the end of a decades-long push for ex-gay therapy, or so it would seem. But in recent years, as legislation has passed across the country to ban conversion therapy for youth, a new push for so-called “change therapy” has re-emerged with the same flawed premise and tactics of the ex-gays of old. A group called Changed Movement, formed in response to legislation banning conversion therapy in California, is one such group using new language to promote the same-old conversion therapy. Conversion or reparative therapy, loosely defined, is any attempt to influence and change someone’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Often, these counselors blame trauma or violence, family dynamics, or your upbringing as the root of the deviant sexuality or gender identity. Changed Movement shares stories of individuals blaming these roots as the cause of their sexuality or gender. This assertion is false and only serves to shame the individual, often for reasons beyond their control. Importantly, ex-gay groups like the Changed Movement do not seem to reckon with the fluidity of sexuality and gender and, as proponents of this ideology typically do, seemingly view things as either gay or straight, trans or cisgender.

[...] In a report by the Trevor Project, researchers found at least 1,320 conversion therapy practitioners in almost all 50 states, including states with active conversion therapy bans for minors. Almost half of those counselors are unlicensed, and most are attached to some sort of religious ministry. While couching their language and pretending to be there to help LGBTQ people, the danger of these groups and practitioners cannot be understated.

Recently, an ex-gay group called Coming Out Ministries bought a building across from my alma mater, Andrews University, a Seventh-day Adventist University, intending to “work closely” with the university on LGBTQ issues “from a redemptive perspective.” Groups like Changed Movement and Coming Out Ministries see LGBTQ young people’s identities as “confusion” instead of who they are intrinsically. Their ideology stems from a theological understanding of sexuality that does not take into account science or the world as it exists around them. Anti-LGBTQ theology fuels conversion therapy, and it’s not only flawed but also inherently harmful and violent. As a queer person of faith, I reject theology and religious practices that cause harm, as it is not from God. The history and devastating impacts of ex-gay practices are clear in the irreparable damage it has caused to large swathes of the LGBTQ community raised in religious settings.

Eliel Cruz writes in Teen Vogue the changing history of anti-LGBTQ+/anti-trans medical pseudoscience practice of conversion therapy.

[munamania]

now that i’m thinking about it. why do girls just say weird shit to me.

[xandromedovna]

(CW conversion therapy)

What frustrates me about media representations of conversion therapy is that it rarely captures how mundane it is. They often play up the hypocrisy or the abusiveness for drama or laughs (which is 1000% valid I’m not knocking the classics), but I have yet to see something that treats it like an everyday part of the character’s life. The queer character is nearly always sent off to a camp to be fixed where sadistic and repressed counselors run them through every stereotype in the book. And I get that educating people about how fucked up this is is important, because it’s still legal in many places and a lot of people still don’t think it’s that big a deal, but escaping is often framed as this heroic, I’m-free-now-and-proud-and-everything’s-fine romanticized notion of what surviving conversion therapy is. These stories of overcoming are important but they aren’t mine. Conversion therapy is also increasingly portrayed as an anachronism, as something that’s over, something no one seriously believes or does any more, something that makes any story a period piece of a less tolerant time.

I didn’t have to go to a camp or a hospital, the conversion therapy came to me, to my everyday world. It wasn’t this like emergency that required tearful pleas and strict punishment, it was just “my struggle”. My dad subscribed me to LIFE (Living in Freedom Eternally), and every month they would send me newsletters about ex-gays who overcame their sinful attractions and live normal healthy lives (according to a cishet worldview). I had weekly meetings with my Pastors to check on my progress working through the materials and my devotionals. I was handed a binder filled with the latest (in the 90s, it was conveniently outdated and cherrypicked) scientific research on the origins of homosexuality, which ironically convinced me even more that I was queer. I was given a handy summary of all the mistranslated Bible verses where my very existence is a sin, but it’s okay, as long as I go against my nature at every turn and do what comes naturally to my cishet counterparts. I’M the one that’s unnatural.

This was the late 2000s, by the way.

And this was just casually accepted. My Christian friends acted as my Accountability Partners to make sure I was still wrestling with my attractions and making progress in ignoring them, and I wanted them to. I wanted them all to help me because I genuinely believed I was doomed. I thoroughly believed all of this to my core. They didn’t need to send me away to convert me because it was all around me, and in fact they knew that sending me away would actually ensure the treatment wouldn’t work. When my parents discovered I was queer in 9th grade, I was grounded for two years. But this became increasingly unenforceable as time dragged on and they “trusted” me to be straight. They had already written it off as a colossal failure, and by the time I went off to college, it became clear I had made my decision to live as openly queer.

Except it wasn’t a failure. To this day I am still weeding through the trauma this caused. Yeah I’m queer and trans and proud and I have three-dimensional experiences outside of this, but I couldn’t just reject those teachings and be done with it, I constantly go through periods where I have to slog through it all again. Because it’s not actually about whether you “end up” queer or not, it’s about whether they’ve sewn enough doubt in your brain that you continually struggle with it long after you are under their direct influence. It’s about leaving that door open so that we always have the option to come crawling back when we see the error of our ways. They didn’t need fancy machines or a whole camp for a resounding success, they didn’t even need me to ‘turn’ cishet-- the suffering is the point.

And until I see that piece, what Hannah Arendt called the “banality of evil”, fictional conversion therapy stories will always seem historically inaccurate to me.

(she/her please)

[noticedandannoyed]

What Are They Trying to Hide

So I don't think I ever want someone to go through what I went through regarding the gay conversion/reparative therapy I went through in the 1990s. It's not successful... for many reasons. But I've noticed a new movement in recent years and it's from a new batch of people that did not (to my knowledge) have any ties to the other group (Exodus International).

These individuals had been gay and lived the gay lifestyle for quite some time before surrendering their life to Jesus Christ. Then, (those that are publicly pronouncing their conversion) they have said that it was Christ that led them out of the sin of same-sex attractions. It may seem similar to the movement from the 1990s, but it's not. This movement is quite different and has been fighting to help the contemporary church realize that modern beliefs (often called Side-B Christianity) have no place in a religion that is based on the Bible and the biblical truths that are found within It's pages.

However, I am annoyed that while they have solid beliefs and scripture to affirm their beliefs, they are not addressing the arguments that the modern gay Christians are promoting. Or maybe they are (correct me if I am wrong by messaging me)?

I hope that I can see a good honest debate of the scriptures from these two sides. I am not sure which I completely believe at this point. I might actually have to study/learn ancient Hebrew and Greek in order to fully understand what might be actually written in the scripture. So I guess I will just have to wait until I get to heaven when "all will be revealed."

[sunkern-plus]

i love amvs but i don't think we should bring back skillet "monster" amvs due to. erm. the lead singer's growing involvement in christian nationalism and his diehard fanbase of white christian conservatives who would probably kill someone like me if given the chance

[intomybubble]

I haven’t read lost in the cloud since somewhere in the school festival arc but i checked out the most recent translated chapter and

His dad is neglectful as hell and is never there for his son. He usually sides with his (many) wives, and his son tries to scare them all away so that his dad can experience the same feeling of abandonment he has. He’s also usually stuck at home with a new mom so his only source of safety is his dog.

One of his mom’s threw out basically everything in the house to be replaced, including his bedroom, after getting permission from his dad. This included throwing out anything he had that reminded him of his birth mom. The current wife fucked his dad in his bed and tried to throw out his dog to some random shelter (i’m not 100% on the details on that since its been a long time)