This paper by Professor David Pilgrim, Department of Psychology at University of Southampton, is a timely examination of the history of two distinct current clinical positions, that could help us understand and contextualise concerns about legislation to include gender identity in a ban on “conversion therapy”.
The first is from those advocating an ‘affirmative approach’ to the treatment of gender non-conforming children and the second from gender critical clinicians, who advocate caution and exploration. The first uses the term ‘conversion therapy’ in a misleading and over-inclusive sense. This deliberately conflates ‘gender identity’ with ‘sexuality’ and it requires a distortion of historical facts.
The use of chemical or electrical aversion therapy was an experimental approach in the 1960s and 1970s to adult homosexuality, which became defunct by 1980. Today transgender activists deliberately invoke this scenario from the past, to imply that exploratory psychotherapy with children is a form of ‘conversion therapy’.
‘Affirmative therapy’ now reflects a form of mission creep from the sympathetic approach to transsexualism advocated by the sexologist Harry Benjamin in the 1960s. This has culminated in today’s ideologically loaded WPATH guidelines.