President Obama has responded to a petition started after the suicide of Leelah Alcorn, a transgender teen who said in her suicide note that she'd been subjected to conversion therapy, in which a therapist pressured her to change her gender identity.
In the statement responding to the petition, which calls for a ban on conversion therapy, Obama says:
Tonight, somewhere in America, a young person, let's say a young man, will struggle to fall to sleep, wrestling alone with a secret he's held as long as he can remember. Soon, perhaps, he will decide it's time to let that secret out. What happens next depends on him, his family, as well as his friends and his teachers and his community. But it also depends on us -- on the kind of society we engender, the kind of future we build.
The White House response notes that "The overwhelming scientific evidence demonstrates that conversion therapy, especially when it is practiced on young people, is neither medically nor ethically appropriate and can cause substantial harm." But
what to do about it?
Mr. Obama will not explicitly call for a federal law banning therapists from using such therapies on their patients, but he is open to conversations with lawmakers in both parties, White House officials said on Wednesday. Instead, he will throw his support behind the efforts to ban the practice at the state level.
At the state level, California, New Jersey, and the District of Columbia have banned conversion therapy, and other states including Illinois, Iowa, Nevada, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Texas, Arizona, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Minnesota, Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, and Vermont are considering bans. But conversion therapy bans have recently failed in Colorado, Hawaii, Maryland, and Virginia. There's work to be done, in other words, to drive out this abusive practice cloaked as health care—and, as we've seen recently, Republicans are
still looking for ways to keep discrimination legal.
