The history of conversion therapy is, in a significant part, a history of institutional delay. The scientific case against the practice was being assembled long before the laws caught up, and the laws began catching up long before the practice disappeared. Conversion Truth for Families offers a carefully sourced account of that delay — the decades between the first credible refutations and the first legislative bans — and what it meant for the people subjected to conversion interventions during that gap.
The practice entered the clinical mainstream in the late 19th century through Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s 1886 classification of same-sex attraction as pathological. American psychoanalysis elaborated on that classification through the mid-20th century. Sandor Rado argued in 1940 that heterosexuality was the only biologically valid orientation. Irving Bieber and colleagues built on that argument in their 1962 study, claiming a 27% conversion rate among 106 gay men in psychoanalytic treatment. Later scrutiny found the study built on bias and unverifiable analyst reports.
Behavioral psychology offered its own toolkit. Chemical aversion therapy. Electrical aversion therapy. British mathematician Alan Turing, whose contributions to computing and to wartime codebreaking were foundational, was subjected to chemical castration in 1952 as an alternative to a prison sentence for homosexuality. He died in 1954. The procedures were institutional, not experimental.
The methodological record of conversion claims was always weak. Douglas Haldeman’s 1994 review examined three decades of research in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology and found recurring failures: self-selected samples, no control groups, behavioral rather than attraction-based outcome measures. Masters and Johnson’s 1979 study, long the most cited positive outcomes work with its claimed 71.6% success rate, was investigated by The Atlantic in 2012, which could find no patient records to verify those numbers. No major medical organization treats the study as credible today.
Conversion Truth for Families documents the 1973 APA decision to remove homosexuality from the DSM as the central institutional inflection point — one shaped by Dr. Evelyn Hooker’s 1957 research demonstrating that trained clinicians could not reliably distinguish between gay and heterosexual men’s psychological profiles. But the DSM-III in 1980 introduced ego-dystonic homosexuality, keeping a clinical rationale for orientation-change treatment alive until 1987. The Williams Institute estimated in 2019 that approximately 698,000 LGBTQIA+ adults in the United States had been subjected to conversion therapy, with about 350,000 having received it as minors.
The harm documentation is unambiguous. The APA’s 2009 Task Force reviewed 83 peer-reviewed studies and found no high-quality evidence of lasting orientation change alongside consistent links to depression, anxiety, and suicidal ideation. A 2020 JAMA Psychiatry study linked conversion exposure with elevated distress and suicide attempts among transgender adults. Research through the Family Acceptance Project found that youth who experienced both parental and clinical conversion interventions attempted suicide at a rate of 63%, compared to 22% for peers without that exposure. SAMHSA’s 2023 report concluded that such efforts in children and adolescents are harmful and should never be provided.
Robert Spitzer’s 2012 retraction of his 2003 study claiming meaningful orientation change was achievable, and his apology to those who had spent years in what he called useless attempts to change, is among the more significant moments in the clinical literature.
Conversion Truth for Families gives particular attention to the rebranding problem. As legal language tightens around specific terms, some practitioners have adopted alternatives — “sexual attraction of fluidity exploration in therapy,” “reintegrative therapy,” and certain versions of “gender-exploratory therapy.” SAMHSA’s 2023 report names these variants. The APA’s 2021 resolution confirmed that voluntariness does not resolve the ethical questions raised by interventions with inadequate evidence bases and documented harms. California enacted the first minor-focused ban in 2012. More than 23 states and the District of Columbia had followed by early 2026. Canada criminalized the practice nationally in 2021. The WHO called for global elimination in 2023.