Viewpoint: ‘Conversion therapy for gay and transgender youth is one of our darkest chapters. We shouldn’t inflict it on today’s kids’

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Credit: APA Services

In January the Florida Select Committee on Health Innovation approved House Bill 1639 (HB 1639), which dramatically restricts treatment for transgender individuals. If the bill becomes law, it will make it easier for insurers to refuse to cover gender-affirming care, will require those that cover gender transition to also offer policies that do not and will bar transgender people from updating their driver’s license. It also mandates that insurers provide detransition care to those who want to revert to the sex they were assigned at birth.

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The Florida bill would require insurers to cover “mental health or therapeutic services to treat a person’s perception that his or her sex … is inconsistent with such person’s sex at birth by affirming the insured’s sex.” In plain language, HB 1639 endorses so-called conversion therapy: counseling aimed at curing someone of being transgender, viewing it as a form of mental disorder or spiritual failing.

Going even further, five West Virginia state senate Republicans proposed Senate Bill 194, essentially a total ban on gender-affirming care for young transgender people.

In reality, the history of misguided attempts to promote “cure-based recovery” for gay and transgender people is one of the longest and darkest chapters in psychiatry.

This is an excerpt. Read the full article here

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