U.N. Puts So-Called Conversion Therapies In Spotlight as Human Rights Issue

Drescher stressed to the audience that the meeting was not arranged as a forum for debating the validity of conversion therapy. While its advocates may frame the issues involved as if they are debatable, he said, there is no real debate going on in the medical or mental health communities—the so-called therapies have been shown to be ineffective. The debate has largely moved to cultural issues that have an impact on efforts to force people to change their sexual orientation. He also reviewed the history of how same-sex attraction has been viewed by the mental health field, including APA’s 1973 decision to remove homosexuality from its diagnostic manual, which dramatically shifted the ground supporting the notion that homosexuality was a mental illness.

“One reason for the international interest is the decline in such interest in the ex-gay movement in the United States,” after an absence of evidence that it works, Drescher told Psychiatric News. In addition, “some of the people who tried to change their orientation have been hurt by these interventions, and there is a growing number of individuals who are publicly coming forward and organizing themselves as ‘ex-gay’ survivors with warnings about the harm done by efforts to change sexual orientation,” he pointed out.

One feature of the session was a showing of a film about Uganda’s policy on sexual orientation and a bill in its legislature that would impose extremely harsh penalties on those who engage in homosexual behavior, including death for “serial homosexuals.” The feature-length film, “God Loves Uganda,” explores “the role [that] Western Evangelicals play in spreading hate and intolerance” in that country and focuses on speakers from the United States and other countries who preach the message that “being gay is something that should be ‘cured.’ ” The Unitarian Universalist U.N. Office said the film shows how “treating homosexuality like a treatable disease can lead to international human-rights violations.”

The belief driving conversion-therapy practitioners is “the idea that gay people are somehow broken, that we need to be fixed,” Wolfe said during the panel discussion. He identified himself as a “survivor” of such therapies.

“Since human rights are central to the mission of the United Nations, drawing attention to the misuses of ex-gay propaganda is an important step forward in protecting the rights of gay people in the U.S. and overseas,” Drescher said. ■