In the recent Netflix documentary “Pray Away,” former leaders of Exodus International, once America’s leading conversion therapy organization, express shame over perpetuating efforts to change people’s sexual orientation and gender identity.
The interdenominational Christian organization shuttered in 2013, with then-president Alan Chambers apologizing in a statement “for years of undue suffering and judgment at the hands of the organization and the church as a whole.”
One year earlier, in 2012, California became the first state to ban conversion therapy on minors. Nineteen more have followed suit, most recently Virginia, in 2020. Five additional states have partial bans on the practice, which has been associated with “severe psychological distress.”
LGBTQ adolescents subjected to efforts to change their sexual orientation or gender identity are more than twice as likely to attempt suicide, according to The Trevor Project, an LGBTQ youth suicide prevention and crisis intervention nonprofit.