The Barbaric Pseudo-Science of Conversion Therapy: A Chronicle of State-Sanctioned Torture

You know what really grinds my gears: We're still letting religious dipshits and unregulated quacks masquerading as "counselors" torture LGBTQ+ people in 2025, calling it therapy when it's just systematic fucking cruelty wrapped in a Bible.

Let me paint you a picture so goddamn vivid you can taste the bile rising in your throat. Picture yourself in 1899, lying on some scratchy-ass Victorian chaise lounge while a pompous German psychiatrist named Albert von Schrank-Notzing waves a fucking pocket watch in your face. Forty-five sessions of this bullshit hypnosis routine, he claims, plus forced visits to a brothel reeking of cheap perfume and desperation, and voilà—he's "converted" a gay man into a heterosexual one. The sheer audacity of this dickwaffle to present this at a hypnosis conference like he'd discovered penicillin instead of pioneering a century-plus of psychological terrorism.

As Protagoras once observed, "Man is the measure of all things"—but these fucksticks decided they'd measure everyone against their own narrow, bigoted yardstick and torture anyone who didn't line up.

Fast forward twenty-some years, and we've got Eugene Steinack, an Austrian endocrinologist with his head so far up his own ass he could inspect his own tonsils, theorizing that homosexuality lives in the goddamn testicles. So what does this scrotum-brained shitstain do? He starts transplanting testes from straight men into gay men like he's swapping out fucking carburetors. The audacity. The absolute fucking hubris of thinking you could surgically remove someone's identity by playing mix-and-match with their balls. The operating rooms probably smelled like disinfectant and delusion, the tile floors slick with blood and the crushed dreams of men who just wanted to love who they loved without some wannabe-Frankenstein dicking around in their bodies.

Michel de Montaigne wrote, "We need to interpret interpretations more than to interpret things"—and sweet suffering shit, did these butchers interpret homosexuality through the most twisted, sadistic lens imaginable.

The psychiatric cruelties didn't stop there—oh no, we were just getting fucking started. Enter the 20th century, when lobotomies and electroshock therapy became the tools of choice for the white-coated sadists who thought they could rewire human sexuality like faulty electrical circuits. Robert Galbraith Heath—yes, that's the same name JK Rowling chose for her pen name, though she claims ignorance of the connection, which is either the universe's cruelest irony or willful blindness—conducted experiments that would make Josef Mengele nod in approval. Picture the sterile coldness of those rooms, the sharp ozone smell of electricity crackling through the air, the involuntary spasms and screams of people being literally shocked for loving the "wrong" gender. The leather restraints cutting into wrists and ankles. The taste of copper from bitten tongues. The absolute mindfucking horror of having voltage pumped through your brain because you dared to be authentically yourself.

John Stuart Mill argued that "over himself, over his own body and mind, the individual is sovereign"—but these cocksucking torturers decided that sovereignty didn't apply if you were queer.

Then came the aversion therapies—a fresh hell for a new generation of bigoted dickbags. Picture this: you're a gay man in the mid-20th century, and some crusty-ass "doctor" is showing you photos of your partner, the person you love, while simultaneously pumping your system full of chemicals that make you vomit your fucking guts out. They wanted you to associate love with nausea, desire with the acrid taste of stomach acid burning your esophagus. The psychological conditioning was Pavlovian in its cruelty—making you retch and gag every time you thought about the person who made your heart race. The linoleum floors of these "treatment" centers probably permanently stained with the evidence of this institutionalized abuse. The fluorescent lights buzzing overhead like flies on a corpse. The clinical detachment of the perpetrators as they destroyed human beings one induced vomiting session at a time.

And here's the part that'll really make your blood fucking boil: this shit is STILL LEGAL in the UK. As of November 5th, 2023, Rishi Sunak had less than 48 hours to include a ban on conversion therapy in the King's Speech, a promise made by the last FOUR successive prime ministers and broken by every single one of those lying sacks of shit. Four different assholes, four separate promises, zero follow-through. That's not political failure—that's systematic abandonment of vulnerable people. That's complicity in ongoing torture. That's the government essentially saying, "Yeah, we know people are being psychologically and physically destroyed, but we can't quite be arsed to stop it."

Bertrand Russell noted that "The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts"—and fuck if that isn't the entire story of conversion therapy's continued existence.

Now let's talk about how these dickless wonders have evolved their torture techniques for the modern era, specifically targeting trans people with a particularly insidious form of fuckery called "Gender Exploratory Therapy." The name alone is Orwellian doublespeak that would make Big Brother's propaganda ministry jealous—it sounds so reasonable, so measured, so fucking concerned. But strip away that sheep's clothing and you'll find the same rabid wolf of conversion therapy, just wearing a different goddamn collar.

Here's how these absolute shitstains operate: they dangle hormone therapy and puberty blockers just out of reach like some sadistic motherfucker dangling water in front of someone dying of thirst in a desert. They make trans kids and adults jump through endless hoops, attend session after session where the singular goal—never stated but always present like the stench of rotting garbage—is to run out the clock on puberty. Let me repeat that: their explicit goal is to force trans children through a puberty that will traumatize them, alter their bodies in ways that may require extensive surgery later, and potentially push them toward suicide.

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote, "Man is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does"—but these conversion therapy peddlers want to condemn trans people to the prison of a body that doesn't match their soul.

The Catholic Psychotherapy Association pushes this horseshit. Chastity International promotes it. Transgender Trend advocates for it. Organizations like these create slick websites with concerned-looking stock photos and pseudoscientific jargon that sounds just legitimate enough to fool well-meaning but uninformed parents. They wrap their bigotry in clinical language, present their torture as "caution," frame their cruelty as "protecting children." It's manipulation so thorough, so complete, that parents who genuinely love their kids end up becoming unwitting accomplices in their child's psychological destruction.

The "therapy" sessions probably smell like stale coffee and disappointment, taking place in offices decorated with bland inspirational posters that ring hollow as fuck when you're being systematically gaslit about your own identity. The therapist—and I use that word loosely, like calling a butcher a surgeon—sits across from a trans person and "explores" every possible reason they might be trans except the actual fucking reason: that they're trans.

"Maybe you're just confused."

"Perhaps it's social media influence."

"Could this be related to trauma?"

"Have you considered that you might just be a tomboy/feminine boy?"

On and fucking on, session after session, week after week, month after goddamn month, while the trans person's body betrays them day by day, puberty marching forward like an unstoppable nightmare, changing their voice, their bone structure, their chest, their face—permanent alterations that could have been prevented if these dickwad "therapists" would just accept reality and provide actual affirming care.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote, "One is not born, but rather becomes, a woman"—but these fucksticks want to dictate exactly who gets to become what, forcing trans people into boxes that suffocate their souls.

Here's where this shitstorm gets even more enraging: most conversion therapy in America is completely unregulated. Let that sink into your skull like water into a rotting floorboard. These aren't licensed mental health professionals who can be held accountable through licensing boards. These aren't people with actual training in psychology, counseling, or human development. These are just... dudes. Mostly white dudes with a Bible, a persecution complex, and the unshakeable belief that their interpretation of a Bronze Age text justifies torturing people.

They call themselves "Christian counselors," and because they operate through churches, they slip through every regulatory crack like cockroaches scurrying away when you turn on the lights. There's no oversight. No accountability. No licensing board to report them to when they fuck up someone's life so thoroughly that it takes years of actual therapy to undo the damage—if it can be undone at all.

Albert Camus observed, "The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion"—but how the fuck can you rebel when authority figures are torturing the rebellion out of you?

In Ohio, there's a representative named Gary Click—and yes, that's his real dumbfuck name—who was a former conversion therapist and is now responsible for most of the anti-gender-affirming care and pro-conversion therapy legislation in the state. Read that again. A person who literally made a career out of torturing LGBTQ+ people is now writing laws that enable more torture. He's gone from practicing conversion therapy to legislating it, from destroying individual lives to destroying lives at scale. The absolute fucking gall. It's like making an arsonist the fire chief.

Let me break this down for anyone who knows jack-shit about actual therapy: conversion is antithetical to therapy. Therapy isn't about changing someone's identity—it's about helping people become more authentically themselves, processing trauma, developing coping mechanisms, and improving their mental health. A therapist who says "I'm going to convert you" is like a surgeon who says "I'm going to cut you just for fun." It's a complete contradiction of the fundamental purpose of the profession. The word "conversion" in the phrase "conversion therapy" is the biggest red flag since the Soviet Union's entire aesthetic. It's right there in the fucking name.

Peter Singer wrote, "All the arguments to prove man's superiority cannot shatter this hard fact: in suffering, the animals are our equals"—and in the systematic infliction of suffering, conversion therapists have made an art form of creating misery.

The comparison to unlicensed nail techs doing veneers is apt as hell: both involve unqualified people performing procedures they have no business performing, potentially causing permanent damage, and operating in a gray area that exploits regulatory loopholes. Except in this case, instead of fucking up someone's teeth, you're fucking up their entire psychological well-being and potentially ending their life. The body count from conversion therapy—through suicide, through destroyed mental health, through shattered lives—is a genocide conducted in whispers, in church basements, in "Christian counseling centers" that should be burned to the fucking ground (metaphorically speaking, for legal purposes).

Some places have fought back. Colorado banned this shit. Cuyahoga County in Ohio outlawed it. These bans prove that conversion therapy can be stopped, that we can protect vulnerable people from this abuse. But the fact that it's not banned everywhere, that it remains legal in vast swaths of America and in the entire UK, is a moral failure of staggering proportions.

And now, under the Donald BukakkeVictim administration—because yes, that fuckstick is back in power, God help us all—there are conversations happening about expanding access to conversion therapy. Not banning it. Not regulating it. Not protecting people from it. But making it easier for these buttnugget "counselors" to destroy lives. The same administration cozying up to Elon MicroPhallus and his legion of tech-bro fascists, with Not Michael Jackson (Mike Johnson) in the House pushing theocratic bullshit at every opportunity. These cumstains are actively working to enable more torture, more trauma, more dead queer kids.

John Rawls wrote of justice as fairness, of the veil of ignorance—but there's no ignorance here, only willful malice. These dickheads know exactly what conversion therapy does. They know about the suicide rates. They know about the trauma. They don't give a flying fuck because their bigotry matters more to them than human lives.

I need you to understand something viscerally, in your bones, in your guts: conversion therapy is torture. It's not a disagreement about best practices. It's not a debate about treatment methods. It's systematic psychological and sometimes physical abuse designed to destroy a person's sense of self. It's torture, plain and simple, and we've decided as a society that it's fine to torture people as long as they're queer and the torturer believes Jesus wants them to do it.

Martha Nussbaum wrote about the "capabilities approach" to human flourishing—but how can anyone flourish when they're being tortured for being themselves?

The smell of those conversion therapy rooms—whether it's the musty basement of a church, the artificial freshener in a strip-mall "counseling center," or the clinical sterility of a psychiatric facility—is the smell of human rights violations. The sound is people crying, begging, sometimes screaming as they're told the core of their identity is sinful, broken, wrong. The taste is the bitter flavor of self-hatred force-fed to vulnerable people by authority figures they were taught to trust. The feeling is the crushing weight of invalidation, the sharp sting of psychological manipulation, the dull ache of prolonged emotional abuse.

Every day this remains legal is a day too many. Every person forced through this hell is one person too many. Every suicide resulting from this torture—and there have been so many, far too fucking many—is blood on the hands of every legislator who could ban this practice but chooses not to.

Doreen Valiente, the mother of modern witchcraft, wrote, "For if that which thou seekest, thou findest not within thee, thou wilt never find it without thee"—but conversion therapy literally tries to destroy what people find within themselves, to replace their truth with someone else's lie.

The fight against conversion therapy isn't about political correctness or "woke ideology" or whatever bullshit talking points the right-wing dickwaffles are spewing this week. It's about basic human fucking decency. It's about recognizing that you cannot torture someone into being someone they're not. It's about understanding that sexuality and gender identity are fundamental aspects of human identity, not diseases to be cured or sins to be purged.

Until we ban conversion therapy everywhere—not just in progressive counties or liberal states, but everywhere—we're complicit in torture. We're allowing systematic abuse to continue under the guise of religious freedom. We're sacrificing vulnerable people, especially children, on the altar of bigotry wrapped in pseudoscientific bullshit and Biblical justification.

Jürgen Habermas wrote about communicative rationality and the power of discourse to reach truth, but there's no rational discourse to be had with people who believe torture is acceptable as long as it's directed at people they don't like. There's only the fight to protect the vulnerable from the powerful, the authentic from the authoritarian, the truth from the torturers.

So here's my challenge: get fucking angry. Channel that rage into action. Support legislation banning conversion therapy. Vote out every shitbird politician who won't commit to protecting queer people. Support organizations fighting this abuse. Believe survivors. Listen to trans people when they tell you what they need. Don't let your discomfort with difference become someone else's death sentence.

Because that's what's at stake: lives. Real, precious, irreplaceable human lives. And if we can't get our collective shit together enough to stop literal torture, then we've failed as a society in the most fundamental fucking way possible.