--- title: LGBTQ Conversion Therapy Harms Us All description: If the Supreme Court strikes down state bans on conversion therapy in Chiles v. Salazar, all Americans will be worse off, write Garrard Conley and Tim Schraeder Rodriguez. canonical: https://time.com/article/2026/03/18/lgbtq-conversion-therapy-harms-us-all/ author: Garrard Conley article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2026-03-18T21:23:24.124Z article:modified_time: 2026-03-18T21:23:44.055Z article:section: Ideas og:title: LGBTQ Conversion Therapy Harms Us All og:description: If the Supreme Court strikes down state bans on conversion therapy in Chiles v. Salazar, all Americans will be worse off, write Garrard Conley and Tim Schraeder Rodriguez. og:url: https://time.com/article/2026/03/18/lgbtq-conversion-therapy-harms-us-all/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7394fc2cf6d088dd/69bb132057de7cf89817eab0/conversion-therapy-art-v2.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 2400 og:image:height: 1600 og:image:alt: conversion-therapy-art-v2.jpg og:type: article twitter:card: summary twitter:title: LGBTQ Conversion Therapy Harms Us All twitter:description: If the Supreme Court strikes down state bans on conversion therapy in Chiles v. Salazar, all Americans will be worse off, write Garrard Conley and Tim Schraeder Rodriguez. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blt7394fc2cf6d088dd/69bb132057de7cf89817eab0/conversion-therapy-art-v2.jpg?branch=production ---  # LGBTQ Conversion Therapy Harms Us All by [Garrard Conley](https://time.com/author/garrard-conley/) and [Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez](https://time.com/author/timothy-schraeder-rodriguez/) Garrard Conley is the author of Boy Erased and a producer of the podcast Unerased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America. Tim Schraeder Rodriguez is the author of Conversion Therapy Dropout. Mar 18, 2026 9:23 PM UTC  Photo-Illustration by Chloe Dowling for TIME (Source Images: Andrew Caballero-Reynolds—AFP/Getty Images (2); Courtesy of Tim Schraeder Rodriguez; Courtesy of Garrard Conley) by [Garrard Conley](https://time.com/author/garrard-conley/) and [Timothy Schraeder Rodriguez](https://time.com/author/timothy-schraeder-rodriguez/) Garrard Conley is the author of Boy Erased and a producer of the podcast Unerased: The History of Conversion Therapy in America. Tim Schraeder Rodriguez is the author of Conversion Therapy Dropout. Mar 18, 2026 9:23 PM UTC Twenty-seven states have enacted bans that protect Americans from LGBTQ conversion therapy. But soon, the Supreme Court will issue a ruling in the case of [_Chiles v. Salazar_](https://time.com/7324188/conversion-therapy-supreme-court-case-scotus/). If the Court strikes down these bans, it will put many people in danger. The petitioner has [framed the issue](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/24-539) as one of [religious liberty](https://www.supremecourt.gov/docket/docketfiles/html/public/24-539.html) and [freedom of speech](https://www.americanbar.org/groups/public%5Feducation/publications/preview%5Fhome/chiles-v-united-states/). We would like to tell you why bans on conversion therapy are necessary, and how LGBTQ conversion therapy is harmful even for straight people. Between us, we spent nearly a decade in conversion therapy. One of us was given an ultimatum by his family and taken to a program in Memphis. The other worked at the heart of evangelical Christianity’s most powerful institutions, trying in secret to fix what his faith told him was broken. We came to conversion therapy through different doors. We did not leave as the men we were promised we would become. ## My mother “has called sending me to conversion therapy the biggest mistake of her life.” — Garrard Conley In the decade since I published [_Boy Erased_](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/316194/boy-erased-by-garrard-conley/), a memoir about being sent, at age 19, to a conversion therapy program designed to make me straight, the fight to end the practice has resulted in legislation I never thought possible in my lifetime. When I first began writing the book in 2013, two years before the [Supreme Court legalized same-sex marriage](https://time.com/3937244/supreme-court-gay-marriage-decision/), only two states—[California and New Jersey](https://time.com/2940790/california-ban-on-gay-conversion-therapy-stands/)—had enacted bans on conversion therapy for minors. By the time my book became [a film](https://www.focusfeatures.com/boy-erased) in 2018, that number was increasing. Now, thanks to one of the fastest-growing civil rights campaigns, 27 states have banned the practice for minors. The Supreme Court may soon erase this progress. My mother, who has called sending me to conversion therapy the biggest mistake of her life, taught me what these bans actually protect against. When I entered conversion therapy in Tennessee, I was 19, legally an adult, though the choice didn’t feel like one. My parents gave me an ultimatum: attend a conversion therapy program called Love in Action in Memphis, or lose my family, friends, and the only community I had ever known. My mother drove me the hour there from our home in Arkansas. She watched her only son come home speechless and afraid, unable to meet her eyes.  Garrard Conley during the time that he was in LGBTQ conversion therapy in Arkansas in 2004. Courtesy of Garrard Conley She has told me since that if she had searched online in 2004 and found a single dissenting voice against conversion therapy, a warning, a survivor’s account, even a negative review, she might have made a different choice. A ban doesn't just stop a licensed counselor from practicing conversion therapy. It changes what a frightened parent finds at midnight when they don't know what else to do. Since the book was published, my inbox has never gone quiet. Survivors write to me from countries like Pakistan, where no ban exists, from states like New York, where one does, and from towns, mostly in the South, where the practice has simply changed its name. Most of these survivors will never tell their stories publicly. Most of them say they cannot live normal lives. They have trouble connecting intimately with other people. They do not know how to live in a world where the religion they once relied upon is used as a weapon against them. The volume of these messages, the sheer accumulation of people writing in the dark, is something I could not have anticipated, and it tells me something the official numbers can’t: The harm is far wider than anyone knows. Silence is still the condition most survivors live in. The Supreme Court case at the center of this debate frames the issue as one of religious liberty, specifically the right of a [licensed professional counselor](https://www.oyez.org/cases/2025/24-539) to speak freely and to practice their faith freely, without government interference. I understand that argument because I grew up around it. My parents were not cruel people. They were believers acting from fear, guided by a practice that told them it could fix what their faith said was broken in their son. They were doing their best with the resources they had. But religious liberty protects belief; it does not sanction harmful conduct. A licensed counselor may believe what they wish about human sexuality and gender identity. What they should not be able to do is administer a treatment—one that [29 professional medical and psychological associations](https://www.apaservices.org/advocacy/news/opposing-conversion-therapy) representing more than 1.3 million health care providers in the U.S. have condemned as ineffective and damaging—to a patient who came to them for help. During my time at Love in Action, I was placed in a chair and instructed to scream hatred at my father until I had purged what they said he had failed to give me: enough affection, enough masculinity, enough of what they believed had made me this way. This was one exercise among many that produced the same result: a person so ashamed of who they are that they try to become someone else. I left closer to suicide than I had ever been in my life, and further from the God I loved and the family I believed had supported me. That is not a question of faith. It is a question of harm. My mother drove me to Memphis as an act of love, guided by people who told her that love required it. She has spent the years since reckoning with what that guidance cost us as a family, and with the fact that her faith—the real thing grounded in the words of Jesus, the part of it she has carried her whole life—never actually demanded it. A distorted practice told her it did. What conversion therapy demanded of me, in concrete terms, was compliance, not just with a particular theology, but with a particular idea of what a man was supposed to look and act like.  Members of Concerned Women for America pray as the U.S. Supreme Court hears oral arguments in Chiles v. Salazar on Oct. 7, 2025. Andrew Caballero-Reynolds—AFP/Getty Images Trans and gender nonconforming people have long been impacted by conversion therapy. But for years, the practice was publicly discussed only in terms of sexual orientation. Inside those sessions, gender was policed as carefully as desire. If you sat or spoke in a way that was deemed insufficiently masculine (crossing your legs too tightly, placing a hand on your hip, saying something in a melodic voice), participants were encouraged to report to a counselor who would then correct your behavior, often physically. It was never only about making people straight. It was about making us conform to rigid ideas about gender. That ideology did not end with the programs that practiced it. It is the same belief system now driving legislation that targets trans youth across the country, the same certainty that gender nonconformity is a problem to be corrected, the same conviction that correction is an act of love. The targets have changed, but the thinking has not. If the Supreme Court strikes down these bans, it will not simply return us to a legal gray area. It will send a signal to practitioners, to parents, to frightened kids in towns where the church is the only institution that matters, that this is acceptable again. My mother found no warning when she searched for information in 2004\. Today, bans on conversion therapy don’t just prohibit a practice, they legitimize the survivors, the researchers, the doctors who have been saying for years that it caused harm. Remove the bans, and that legitimacy is at risk. I know what the world without that legitimacy produced. It produced a version of me that was quieter, smaller, and in pain—and it produced the people who still write to me from the dark. The Supreme Court should know that, too. ## “The way God created us is not a trauma to be healed, but a life to be celebrated.” — Tim Schraeder Rodriguez I picked up a copy of Garrard’s book, _Boy Erased_, in 2016, and was moved to read a story that so closely resembled my own. I had dropped out of conversion therapy in 2010, and was untangling myself from the harmful beliefs I’d been subjected to [for more than eight years](https://time.com/7324188/conversion-therapy-supreme-court-case-scotus/). I had opted into the “treatment” at age 19 because my evangelical upbringing provided enough evidence to know that the alternative, choosing to embrace my sexuality, would mean rejection from my family, friends, and faith community. In the years since I left conversion therapy and [Exodus International](https://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/21/us/group-that-promoted-curing-gays-ceases-operations.html), the [largest organization](https://theconversation.com/gay-cure-renounced-by-worlds-largest-ex-gay-group-8456) that promoted conversion therapy, [shuttered in 2013](https://www.hrc.org/press-releases/hrc-statement-on-the-closing-of-exodus-international), the industry has undergone a sophisticated rebranding.  Tim Schraeder Rodriguez with the president of Exodus International, Alan Chambers, in Marion, Ind., in 2006. Photo-Illustration by Chloe Dowling for TIME (Source Image: Courtesy of Tim Schraeder Rodriguez) **Read more:** [I Spent Eight Years in Conversion Therapy Mistaking Shame for Faith](https://time.com/7324188/conversion-therapy-supreme-court-case-scotus/) While I was building a career as a closeted gay man in the creative suites of America’s most influential evangelical megachurches, I watched from the sidelines as the movement that harmed me began to use the same high-level communication tools and tactics to reach a new generation with the age-old tropes, [optimized for social media feeds](https://changedmovement.com/). What most people fail to understand is that even with conversion therapy bans protecting LGBTQ youth in clinical spaces, the practice has thrived and grown in the shadows and in church basements. In 2023, there were more than [1,320 conversion therapy practitioners](https://storage.googleapis.com/trevor-web-public/2023/12/FINAL%5FIts-Still-Happening-Report.pdf) active in 48 states. And according to 2025 research from The Trevor Project, the number of LGBTQ youth exposed to conversion practices grew from [9% to 15% in the past year](https://www.thetrevorproject.org/project-spark-interim-report-a-longitudinal-study-results-changes-in-risk-factors-over-time/#ConversionTherapy). Practitioners and spiritual leaders continue to offer pseudoscientific treatment plans of behavior modification and spiritual disciplines as a pathway to “healing.” Many of the most prominent organizations now even instruct their leaders to shy away from promising people they can change their sexual orientation, and instead sell a calling to celibacy and “wholeness.” Conversion therapy is presented as a higher path or as a compassionate alternative to what one organization describes as “the [pain, rejection, and despair](https://www.changedmovement.com/changed-book) that often accompany the homosexual experience.” The harm of this approach is extensively documented. People who have experienced conversion therapy are [more than twice as likely to attempt suicide](https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305701). Survivors commonly struggle with high rates of anxiety, depression, and substance abuse. Rigid gender stereotypes don’t just harm LGBTQ people. At one of the retreats I attended, men were taught how to play football by a local high school coach while the girls got makeovers from a Mary Kay Consultant. Men were encouraged to dress like men (we couldn't wear Abercrombie or Calvin Klein), to listen to music with a male lead singer, to cut out any media that celebrated the gay lifestyle, and to adopt a deeper voice. Women were told to dress and act like women, to don a pair of earrings and a pearl necklace, to wear makeup, and to stop playing softball. No short haircuts. They were taught to exhibit stereotypical, passive feminine roles, and to soften themselves up.  Tim Schraeder Rodriguez with other LGBTQ conversion therapy participants attending the Exodus Freedom Conference in Asheville, N.C. in 2005. Photo-Illustration by Chloe Dowling for TIME (Source Image: Courtesy of Tim Schraeder Rodriguez) When we tell men to lose their softness and women to lose their edge, we stifle the freedom of every person, straight or queer, to be themselves. That is a true threat to someone’s First Amendment rights. Regardless of the Supreme Court’s decision, freedom of religion and free speech are being used as a shield for a shadow industry that thrives on the slow disintegration of the soul. The branding may change from a “cure” to a “calling,” but the result is the same: a generation of LGBTQ youth being taught that the way God created them is a trauma to be healed rather than a life to be celebrated. The Bible says that all people are created in God’s image. And as we have both come to realize, true healing and freedom are found in being who we were divinely created to be. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"OpinionNewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/18/lgbtq-conversion-therapy-harms-us-all/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/article/2026/03/18/lgbtq-conversion-therapy-harms-us-all/"},"headline":"LGBTQ Conversion Therapy Harms Us All","datePublished":"2026-03-18T21:23:24.124Z","dateModified":"2026-03-18T21:23:44.055Z","description":"If the Supreme Court strikes down state bans on conversion therapy in Chiles v. 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