Yesterday the author Alexander Chee and nearly 200 other writers signed an open letter to the NYTimes addressing their concerns about how the Times covers trans issues, particularly in regards to discourse debating the propriety of medical care for trans children. The full text of the letter is linked here…but a key point is that the authors express their disappointment in seeing “the New York Times follow the lead of far-right hate groups in presenting gender diversity as a new controversy warranting new, punitive legislation.”
One topic I would like to see explored is what happens to kids forced into the alternative to gender-affirming care, conversion therapy. In December of 2020, I published an article in Dame Magazine exposing what happens to adolescents who are forced to undergo conversion therapy, a controversial form of treatment based on the false premise that LGBTQ identity is a mental illness which seeks to change an individual’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. I wrote this in response to the Atlanta-based 11th Circuit Court of Appeals, which overturned local bans protecting LGBTQ youths from conversion therapy, claiming such protections violate First Amendment rights to free speech. All of the people I spoke with were forced to take part in conversion therapy while they were imprisoned in the unregulated troubled teen industry.
One trans woman known as Cadi, who was sexually assaulted and raped numerous times while in treatment (identifying as LGBTQ+ is often equated with being sexually deviant in troubled teen facilities), recounted she was forced to undress in front of the other kids the day she entered the facility. Staff members restrained her as they shaved off her long, golden locks an experience Cadi found to be humiliating and devastating. “I never heard of anyone being processed that way,” Cadi recalls. “My queerness was constantly the focus with them. The other kids would be like, Get away from me, faggot. It always went back to I’m going to die of AIDS. I’m going to be a hooker because faggots don’t belong in society. There’s no place for it. It’s a sin.“
I spoke to two other survivors of conversion therapy in the piece and discussed my own experience with conversion therapy at Escuela Caribe. Read more over at Dame Magazine.