As a teenager, Julie Rodgers attended Tuesday night group therapy sessions in which young people confessed their same-sex transgressions: anal sex, fondling, masturbation, reaching out to an ex or watching “The L Word,” a television show about lesbians.
What followed was a kind of psychological analysis, in which participants looked for reasons for their lapses. Maybe they had slipped because of a painful conversation with a parent, or a failure at school or work. Understanding those circuits, the group leader told them, would allow them to reprogram their brains and live as heterosexuals.
Ms. Rodgers’s support group promoted conversion therapy, a practice that uses a range of techniques in an attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. The practice surged in popularity among evangelical Christian communities in the 1980s and 1990s. It typically involves talk therapy and cognitive behavioral approaches, which seek to reshape habitual thought patterns.
“I felt like I had to tell Ricky everything, every sexual attraction or feeling or crush that I might have,” Ms. Rodgers, now an out lesbian, told the producers of “Pray Away,” a documentary from 2021. “I felt the need to report if I had a lesbian boss or lesbian customers that came in at the restaurant where I worked. Let’s say I had acted out sexually with someone — I would definitely have to confess that.”
A 2019 study by the Williams Institute at the U.C.L.A. School of Law estimated that roughly 698,000 adults in the United States had received some kind of conversion therapy, around half of them as adolescents. In the late 1990s, medical organizations began to speak out against the practice, citing a growing body of research that showed it was ineffective and potentially harmful. A number of states went on to ban the practice, beginning with California in 2012.
The Supreme Court will hear a challenge on Tuesday to Colorado’s ban, with implications for more than 20 states with similar laws.
There is some evidence that the practice continues despite the bans. In 2023, researchers for the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization focused on suicide prevention among young L.G.B.T.Q. people, identified 1,320 counselors whose professional profiles showed they offered conversion therapy, sometimes using language like “sexual addiction.” About half of them held professional licenses, while the other half were ministers or pastors.
“Unfortunately, there is rarely any evidence to indicate that these providers have recanted their belief in the ability to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity, or are no longer willing to try,” the report said.
In earlier decades, psychiatrists tested so-called aversive therapies, such as delivering electric shocks or nausea-inducing drugs to people experiencing sexual arousal, in an effort to train them to avoid thoughts of same-sex attraction. But medical organizations had largely rejected those harsher approaches by 1973, when the American Psychiatric Association declared that it would no longer consider homosexuality itself a mental disorder.
Ellen Barry is a reporter covering mental health for The Times.
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