What it feels like to talk to conversion therapy advocates

Content warning: I discuss sexual assault, parental abuse/neglect, self harm, disordered eating, and street violence here

Talking to people who promote conversion therapy is traumatic. I’m going to try and see if I can commit to not doing it any more, for my own good. But I’m going to talk about why it’s traumatic for me.

I didn’t go through anything which could formally be described as a conversion therapy. But from the point I came out about being trans, I did go through many active efforts from my family and my community to force me to stop being trans. There were people who were violent and people who tried persuasion. Everyone with any power in my life in my youth until I left home simply agreed I should not be allowed to be trans. They only disagreed on the degree and type of coercion they considered appropriate to stop me.

Talking to people who think it’s okay to try to stop trans people being trans brings back a variety of extremely vivid and painful youth memories for me which I am going to lay out here. I am continuously told by advocates of gender identity change efforts that stopping kids being trans is possible, desirable and beneficial to them, and I know this isn’t the case because I lived through a wide variety of such efforts.

One of them happened because I was wearing skirts to school. I had already been told by my mum that she wouldn’t have me being trans under her roof — I took that to mean that if she caught me I would be made homeless so I used money from my night job from age 16 to buy clothes and makeup and stash them. I would change at school in secret. I told other kids at school about my new name and some of them used it. This was in the year 99/00, there were no protections in place, section 28 was still in full force and doing this put me constantly at odds with homophobic and transphobic teachers and school administrators. Some of them would demand I go home and change on sight so I would move between classes hiding from those I knew would take offence at me being dressed that way or just skip their classes for a term. I struggled to gain any sort of an education and my A level results were far below what was expected. The clothes I wore while not wearing "girls clothes" were a mix of gothy and flamboyant but it was wearing skirts or makeup which really opened me to serious continued violence. I would get attacked on the way to or from school regularly, sometimes on lunch break trips to the corner shop with friends too. A few times I had to go to hospital after attacks, sometimes taking myself, in some serious cases being driven there by my mum. One day a bunch of students from the boys school next to mine decided they had enough and decided to chase me up the street throwing rocks, tens of them. Numerous incidents like this happened. Another one I had a tooth knocked out. I kept being told by both parents throughout these incidents that it was my fault, that I needed to be less flamboyant and attention seeking. What did I think was going to happen dressing like that? After all the only reason I could possibly have for wearing makeup or “women’s clothing" was to attract negative attention from boys, and conversely if I didn’t like being targeted for violence why did I keep doing it?

My dad would explain that all children go through this process of trying to find themselves and differentiate themselves from the herd and that it was a phase, that I need to just get over it. He would tell me that he knew some transvestites and gay folks in the 80s and they lived sad desperate lives and if I was not careful would try to make me like them. When I originally came out as trans at 15, I got taken to a shrink, but because he didn’t have a way to make me normal I didn’t get any further counseling support. My mum worried that maybe the Marilyn Manson poster on my wall was confusing me. Or maybe the reason for my gender non conforming behaviour was that I was being influenced badly by Goth kids at school, or because I’d been misled by people online like the (then very new) support groups like Mermaids or GIRES who published copies of research studies showing that kids like me existed and could find support and be happy if their parents supported them. As a side note, because my parents were set against supporting me as a trans child, officially organised support like Mermaids turned me away too and I turned instead to a variety of online spaces from ones full of the sort of groomer creeps who would pester queer youngsters like me for cybersex to those run by the handful on online trans youth looking out for each others safety and keeping out anyone cis or no longer youth.

I asked my mum years later when she finally accepted I was not going to stop being trans (it took nearly a decade) and she told me she could see it was dangerous for me, getting beaten up all the time, being depressed, terrorised, in and out of the A&E department to get fixed up, and she didn’t want me to suffer. So to her the necessary thing was to teach me the lesson that the only thing being trans could bring me was more suffering. That was the reasoning she had for refusing to even sympathise with me when I came home after being attacked time and time again.

In one of my more vivid memories when I had just recently turned 18. I woke up, my pillow covered in hair, my head sore and the hair still on my head matted with blood. Three boys the night before had picked on my boyfriend walking me home from a date watching From Hell at the cinema. I pleaded with them to leave him alone thinking that being the smaller and more effeminate of us and less threatening I might be able to side step their macho shit. They turned away from him, surrounded me, punched me to the ground and smashed by head into the paving over and over holding on to my hair to do it until I let my body go limp, closed my eyes and pretended to be dead or unconscious while my boyfriend got to a safe distance and waited for them to stop. I woke up the next day with clumps of my hair falling out. My parents told me again it’s my fault and that I need to stop attention seeking (being gender non conforming). I’d gotten dolled up for this guy who stood back and let me get the shit kicked out of my and it was my fault.

The other memory that comes back is of sitting next to my dad in my bedroom that I shared with my brother after the first time I was groped and threatened in the street by a strange man in broad daylight, and telling him about what happened because I didn’t have anyone else I really could tell. He didn’t sympathise. He told me he didn’t believe me because I would always be his son and a man to him. He just couldn’t see it happening. This thing had happened and it was treated as if I had just made it up.

I had stopped going to the police about abuse by this point. They had never done anything useful anyway and I spent a good year of repeat attacks just sitting, shaken, sore and bored in various South London police stations waiting for their one officer trained to deal with queer bashings to be sensitive and extremely friendly about taking a statement before doing telling me that the gang of lads who had kicked the shit out of me say that I started on them so there’s nothing they can do about it.

During those years from 15–20 I started self harming and became anorexic. Both of these are bad, I don’t want anything I say here to be taken as glamorising them, but both also helped me survive by helping annihilate any connection I had to my feelings. Instead I would take time out from feeling anything at all by getting light headed and dissociating from reality which otherwise would have been unbearable. I lost 3 stone in one particularly bad month. I self harmed so bad that put me in extra trips to A&E. Noone ever took me to get counseling other than that one time, I think because they knew after I had come out as trans and seen that one guy who wasn’t supportive or unsupportive there was a risk I might find someone supportive. I picked up the courage at 17 to tell my GP that I needed help and that I was trans and I showed him my scars and he laughed and sent me on my way. That’s how things were back at the turn of the millennium. With my experiences of struggling to get support it seems ridiculous to me that people now see the number of young people being referred for support as a problem, or try to talk about how “new” the phenomenon of trans and nonbinary teens is. It might have been new back in the late 90s, but even those who like myself never got into the official trans support programmes as young people were living trans lives by any means possible back then.

It’s painfully ironic to me that nowadays the cutting edge of conversion therapy theory for trans people is that being trans is like affirming anorexia — for me I had so little control over my life and so much pain, I spent so much time being more visible to people who wanted to hurt me than I could cope with and at the same time wanting people to see me for my trans self that starving myself had a sick logic to it. I couldn’t do anything about the ravages of puberty on my body so the next best option was giving it as little as possible to grow with.

I’m fat now, I haven’t self harmed in over a decade. It’s transition and a long time healing from the pain of all the abuse, violence and isolation I went through which enabled me to stop self harming and starving myself, to reconnect with my body and my feelings. There’s an essay written by Elena Rose called “The Seam Of Skin And Scales" where she lays out how I think a lot of trans women who went through similar violence feel about it. Riffing on the “trapped in a man’s body" trope we’ve so often been lumbered with and it’s connection to both externalised and internalised violence which produces that trope, she said:

This body is mine, and I claim it and its bruises, and it is not a man’s, and I am not trapped here. I have looked leaving my body in the eye and I have said, in the end, hell no…

Keep kicking: a thousand, thousand slimy things lived on. And so. Did. I.

Recognising what these memories and experiences mean makes me furious. The way they come rushing back when I hear people say “but actually if you don’t affirm trans youth or allow them to socially transition, some of them desist". I remember what non-affirmation entails. I remember viscerally the long list of betrayals it involved back when I needed anyone with power in my life to recognise that I exist and have a stake in my own life that others have no right to crush. It’s written on my skin, and in my broken and healed bones.

None of these experiences are about defining what a woman is or how I measure myself up to gender stereotypes or whether gender identity is innate — all these pointless philosophical debates people who style themselves as gender abolitionists but really mean “trans abolitionists" want to make it about. These experiences were about violence and dehumanisation done to me, done to most other young trans people of my generation, in the name of producing a normative cisgender heterosexual subject, and they’re about the time in my life when almost everyone in my family and my wider community was complicit in that violence.

Being present with the rage those memories bring up for me and how commonsense it was to people that I needed to just be taught that being trans isn’t an option so I could get over it, when I never could get over it is a really important thing now I have distance from the people who did that to me and am not dependent on people who saw an opportunity in my pain to try and use it as leverage to persuade me not to be trans.

I lived through depending on people who didn’t care if the real me existed so long as they could keep their imaginary me and I’m here to tell the tale. Knowing that I did that is power.

On some level it seems absurd that I’m still holding on to that knowledge, that the fear and hatred still sits in my brain accessible at a moment’s notice. I’m 37. These things happened 20 years ago. Like the scars on the surface of my skin though, this knowledge is a lesson and I don’t want anyone to forget it. There is nothing that can or ever should be done to try and stop gender non conforming kids from expressing themselves and being taken seriously. Me and the others are living proof.

We all need to be able to live our lives. Children aren’t miniature representations of yourself to be controlled and moulded. They’re thinking living vulnerable beings who need support to find out what they want out of life and to learn how to get it. Suppression and discipline isn’t a mode of teaching, it’s a mode of constraint and that constraint leaves people in arrested development, surviving what they are going through rather than thriving while they’re not able to live as they ought.

Most trans people I know, at least those who transitioned young enough to be dependent on adults in their lives still, have faced something a lot similar at some points in our lives. The conversations we have about conversion therapy happen against a background of trauma, physical violence and sexual abuse in many cases. We then see conversion therapists also frequently seek to exploit those traumas by reversing cause and effect and blaming the trauma which was inflicted on us because we were trans as the cause underlying our transness.

As an end note, even if people were made trans through violence (and if I couldn’t be forcibly detransed by violence and peer pressure I’m not massively inclined to believe others can really be made trans through violence or peer pressure) it would not be justification for exploiting physical, psychological or sexual violence to try and detrans us.

I wasn’t subjected to formal conversion therapy but I can’t rest while people are still harming trans children to make them less trans and neither should you.