House Bill 1639 (HB 1639), which severely limits treatment for transgender people, was approved in January by the Florida Select Committee on Health Innovation. If the bill is passed, it will be simpler for insurers to deny providing gender-affirming care, demand that those who cover gender transition also provide policies that do not, and prevent transgender people from updating their driver’s license. Additionally, it requires that insurers offer detransition care to people who wish to return to the gender they were assigned at birth.
In goal, HB 1639 is comparable to the hundreds of Republican-led bills that have recently passed state legislatures, including the override of Governor Mike DeWine’s veto of a similar act in Ohio by GOP lawmakers and the nine that were heard in Missouri in one day. They want to instill a fear of young LGBTQ people having access to healthcare and taking part in activities that could be used for political gain. The “endgame” is banning gender-affirming care for everyone, including adults, as Michigan and Ohio legislators acknowledged during a recent X Space (previously known as a “Twitter Space”).
According to the Florida bill, insurers must pay for “mental health or medical services to address a person’s perception that their sex is incompatible with their sex at birth by affirming the insured’s sex.” In plain English, HB 1639 supports so-called conversion therapy, which is counseling that aims to treat trans people by treating them as a mental illness or religious failing.
Regarding promoting scientific news
If you’re enjoying this content, think about subscribing to support our award-winning media. By signing up for a membership, you can ensure that stories about the discoveries and concepts that are currently influencing our world will continue to be published.
Senate Bill 194, which is essentially a complete ban on gender-affirming care for young transgender people, was proposed by five West Virginia state senator Republicans. It mandates that any therapy must make an effort to “cure” transgender identity and categorizes gender dysphoria as a “sexual deviation” along with pedophilia, exhibitionism, and biastophilic behavior (a compulsion to rape). Medical professionals who support transition rather than pursuing “cure-based recovery” risk losing their licenses and paying up to $10,000 in fines.
The medical history for “cure-based recovery,” also known as “reparative therapy,” is broad, well-documented, and appalling. The potential risks of healing treatments, including depression, anxiety, and self-destructive behavior, are high, according to the American Psychological Association, as therapists’ adherence to societal prejudices against homosexuality may only serve to fuel the patient’s already-existing feelings of homophobia. According to a 2020 study, LGBTQ people who received conversion therapy “had nearly twice as many chances of life suicidal thinking” and 75% higher rates of suicide planning. The practice is not only difficult and dangerous, it does not work, according to one scholar examining the legal standing of conversion therapy.
However, by using a parallel registration system for so-called pastoral counseling, which is unregulated by the specialist organizations that monitor doctors, psychologists, and social workers, healing therapy practitioners have gotten around antiquackery laws. In a flyer, organizations like the National Christian Counselors Association caution that “the express licensed professional counselor in some states is forbidden to pray, read or send to the Holy Scriptures, guidance against things like homosexuality, pregnancy, etc.” For advice might be viewed as unethical by the government.
Instead, moral agricultural guidance may require telling a trans teen that they are doomed to eternal damnation. Sam Andreades, a healing therapist, praises the recently released book Across the Kitchen Tables: Talking about Trans with Your Teen for placing “today’s uncertainty about male and female exactly where it belongs: in the context of our creation, fall, and redemption.”
One of the longest and saddest pages in psychiatry is actually the story of misguided efforts to advance “cure-based treatment” for gay and trans people. Cross-dressing, gender dysphoria, and homosexuality were frequently referred to as “sexual inversion” in the 1930s. The child’s sense of their own sex was secondary to typical aspects of suitable male and female appearance and behavior, so some practitioners would wait for a baby born with ambiguous genitalia to go through puberty before considering surgery. According to Jules Gill-Peterson’s Histories of the Transgender Child, gender reassignment was frequently “an attempt to biologically create and reinforce heterosexuality.”
According to Lawrence Newman, a psychiatrist at the prestigious gender clinic at the University of California, Los Angeles, who is mentioned in Gill-Peterson’s book, in the late 1960s he openly acknowledged that nothing close to this existed. “If we define the effective treatment of transsexualism as one which may make the cross-gender orientation and get comfortable with his real sex…, we must acknowledge that this does not exist.”
However, if psychoanalysis wasn’t up to the task, operant conditioning might be able to. A few
years after Newman’s candid admission, psychologists Ivar Lovaas and another U.C.L.A. physician named Richard Green founded the Feminine Boy Project, an effort to use Skinner-style operant conditioning to “extinguish” gender-inappropriate behavior in children. In an article titled “Screams, Slaps, and Love,” Life magazine praised Lovaas’ exaggerated claims of “curing” autism with a brutal approach at the time. Boys with what Green referred to as “sissy boy syndrome” who played with football helmets, rubber knives, and electric razors were rewarded with blue tokens that could be exchanged for M&Ms or other treats; for playing with dolls and cosmetics they received red tokens that would result in various forms of punishment at home. In a TV interview, Green menacingly uttered the phrase “Acts with Barbie dolls at five, sleeps with men at 25,” in an effort to instill fear in families.
The project’s star success story involved a young man by the name of Kirk Andrew Murphy, who had been caught by his father posing in the kitchen while wearing an extended T-shirt and remarking, “Isn’t my dress pretty?” Kirk was described as “swishing” around the home and office at the age of five by George Rekers and Lovaas in a 1974 research report. “I’m fully dressed for the occasion, with my long dress, hair, nail polish, high screechy voice, and slovenly seductive eyes.” With Rekers’ blessing, Kirk’s father at home exchanged his son’s red tokens for beatings with a belt. To protect Kirk from the abuse, Kirk’s brother Mark finally began hiding the red tokens.
Kirk was deemed to be cured of sissy-boy symptoms after 60 sessions in the facility. The little boy was no more upset when his hair was mussed after the therapy, and the psychologists noted that he was willing to go camping with his parents. Rekers eventually published close to 20 papers on the alleged transformation of his patient, emerging as one of the leading conversion therapy proponents worldwide.
Therefore, in 2003, at the age of 38, Kirk committed suicide following a string of failed relationships with women. On CNN, his girlfriend Maris informed Anderson Cooper that his care at U.C.L.A. “left Kirk really completely stricken with the conviction that he was broken and unique from everyone else,” the author writes.
The Family Research Council (FRC), which was co-founded by Rekers, has been instrumental in creating and advancing the current anti-trans legislation. After an awkward incident in 2010 in which Rekers was seen traveling with a young male sex worker he claimed to have hired from Rentboy.com to “lift his luggage,” his name was removed from the FRC website. However, his toxic legacy is still present in bills like West Virginia’s Senate Bill 194 that demand harmful and ineffective treatments, believe that science hasn’t learned anything from decades of child experimentation, and equate certificates from online credential mills with medical licenses.
Protecting young people from such harmful pseudoscience requires extra vigilance from all of us, especially with some red-state legislators and the far-right partisans of the Supreme Court indicating that they view LGBTQ people as damaged and in need of restoration.
