It was in 2012, three years before the Supreme Court established same-sex marriage as a national right, that California became the first state to bar licensed mental health professionals from providing therapy aimed at changing the sexual orientation or gender identity of minors.
New Jersey came next, followed by 23 other states and dozens of cities and counties between 2015 and 2024. The bans had bipartisan support: Eight were signed by Republican governors, and every bill was passed with Republican support, according to an analysis by the Trevor Project and the Movement Advancement Project, L.G.B.T.Q. advocacy groups.
“The stories of youth who have endured these so-called therapies are heart-rending,” read a 2019 news release from the office of Gary Herbert, a Republican who was then Utah’s governor. “I’m grateful that we have found a way forward that will ban conversion therapy forever in our state.”
Religious practitioners were exempt from the bans, and they have continued to provide most conversion therapy, according to researchers who track it. But the bans, the legal historian Marie-Amélie George has argued, created “a social norm against conversion therapy writ large,” which influenced even the practitioners not directly regulated by them.
Garrard Conley, whose 2016 memoir recounts his experience as a teenager attending a therapy group that promised to help individuals “overcome” same-sex attractions, said that for many L.G.B.T.Q. adults who underwent conversion therapy as adolescents, the bans served as recognition of their experience.
“I spent many years in kind of a labyrinth, because I felt like the things that I’d come to believe or my instincts were totally wrong,” Mr. Conley said in an interview. “We feel validated by having experts look at this and say, ‘You know what, you’re not crazy. This was harmful for many people.’”
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