After a 52-21 passage through the State Assembly, SB 1172—the bill aimed at banning reparative therapy which seeks to alter the sexual orientation of minors—will now move to Governor Jerry Brown’s desk.
Critics of the legislation claim medical boards, not governments, should dictate therapeutic regulations. Nonetheless, local politicians and psychology professionals seem to be in large support of the ban, which would effectively prohibit psychotherapists from performing sexual orientation change efforts in the absence of informed consent of the patient or to anyone under the age of 18.
“I support the ban,” said Dr. Kenneth Green, chair of the Department of Psychology at California State University, Long Beach. “Biological, psychological, and psychiatric data indicate that gender identity and sexual preference are not typically a matter of choice but rather are the result of hormonal and environmental influences on brain development. There may be people who are upset by their orientation and in that case they can and probably should seek therapy to address the upset. But forcing a person to undergo ‘conversion therapy’—in either direction—should never be done.”
Openly gay vice Mayor Robert Garcia informed the Post, “I applaud the legislature for banning a cruel and medically rejected practice. We need to support all of our kids with love and respect, and allow them to be who they are.”
The history of this therapy is as fascinating as the attempt to lift it out of practice. Considered by some to be the father of modern psychiatry as well as the major architect of the modern classification of mental disorders, Dr. Robert Spitzer was the major psychiatric proponent of conversion therapy.
There is irony to it: it was Spitzer who, after the Stonewall riots and listening to many members of the LGBT community in 1970, realized homosexuality wasn’t a disorder. And in 1973, he helped pull the American Psychiatric Association towards his side, effectively removing homosexuality from the field’s diagnostic listing under “sociopathic personality disturbance.”
In what one may perhaps call an eery mirror of 1970 in reverse reflection, in 1999 Spitzer ran into a group who referred to themselves as “ex-gays,” bothered and perturbed that the therapy they received was not getting formal attention. Spitzer apparently found the bait too tempting to avoid and launched a study that was to be published in 2003 in the highly respected journal Archives of Sexual Behavior.
Attached to the study were commentaries from other psychiatrists and psychologists, many of whom were merciless and intensely vitriolic towards the study, both ethically and scientifically.
Dr. John Bancroft stated, “[P]roviding treatment on that basis is professionally unethical and, according to my value system, immoral. There is a long and disturbing history of medical practitioners imposing their moral values through their professional practice… Someone who believes that homosexuality is wrong is entitled to that opinion, but is not entitled to impose it on others, particularly if those others exercise responsibility in their sexual lives.”
Dr. Kenneth Cohen and Dr. Ritch Savin-Williams attacked the validity and methodology of Spitzer’s study, stating Spitzer selected a group invested in the idea of conversion therapy. “This one fatal flaw,” they stated, “seriously diminished the internal and external validity of his study and necessarily precludes the very conclusion Spitzer offered… [H]e provided no credible evidence that therapy was actually the mechanism of reported changes.”
Ex-gay groups heralded the study and reparative therapy’s largest supporter, the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH), still uses it as the trump card to fight gay rights activists as well as those of the medical and psychological community who decry the therapy as ill-grounded and unscientific.
“The goal of psychotherapy is for an individual to accept whatever his/her sexual orientation may be, not change it,” says Sherry Span, a professor of psychology at CSULB.
However, despite NARTH’s attempt to harness the strength of the study behind science, the major methodological mishap became the study’s major downfall: simply asking people who want to change if they changed has no evidentiary backing of real change. As psychiatry and psychology have proven over and over, people lie—continually. “I’m fine” simply comes out even when one is distressed as a defense mechanism. “I haven’t touched a drop” is a common claim amongst alcoholics who snuck in a drink.
And eleven years later after the initial presentation of the study and nine years after its publication, Spitzer came to a harsh realization as he turned 80: he was immensely wrong.
“I offered several (unconvincing) reasons why it was reasonable to assume that the subject’s reports of change were credible,” he wrote in a short letter. “But the simple fact is that there is no way to determine if the subject’s accounts of change were valid.
“I believe I owe the gay community an apology for my study making unproven claims of the efficacy of reparative therapy. I also apologize to any gay person who wasted time and energy undergoing some form of reparative therapy because they believed that I had proven that reparative therapy works with some ‘highly motivated’ individuals.”
With Spitzer’s renunciation, gay rights supporters hope Brown—who has not stated a position on whether he will sign the bill or not—approves the legislation. It would make California the first state to outlaw such therapy for minors.