Members of the new parliament must take a stand and ensure conversion therapies are banned
John Sam Jones
Below is an open letter to the members of the new parliament in Westminster concerning Conversion Therapy.
It will be half a century in January since I underwent ‘conversion therapy’ as an eighteen year old – and whilst the form of therapy I experienced had long been abandoned, forms of conversion therapy are still being practised which the previous government said it would ban and then reneged on the promise.
Dear Members of the new UK Parliament
I write just days after the July election, filled with hope for the country I feel let me down so badly, and with some confidence in the new Prime Minister’s pledge that service to the people of the four nations comes before party fervour.
Next January (2025) it will be fifty years since I, as a frightened and ashamed eighteen-year-old, sought to have myself cured of homosexuality. The disgust at being homosexual, absorbed from centuries of opprobrium handed down in whispered tones and sometimes shouted in verbal abuse and preached against from fire-and-brimstone pulpits had brought me to a chasm of self-hatred.
Depressed and thinking about suicide, I sought the advice of our family doctor – a family friend. Alarmed, concerned and deeply caring, he arranged for me to see a psychiatrist the next day!
Dinosaur asylums
The North Wales Hospital in Denbigh was one of those dinosaur asylums from the Victorian Age. The psychiatrist, Dr Dafydd Alun Jones, spoke reassuringly with me both in English and in Welsh and offered a treatment that would cure me – if I committed myself fully to the goal of becoming normal… and a part of that commitment was to become an inpatient. I agreed.
Electric Shock Aversion Therapy – for an hour a day – for many weeks. A wrist band with electrodes shocking me when my body responded to visual homosexual images. As an eighteen-year-old from the mid-Wales coast, any access to same-sex pornography had been non-existent, but in the treatment room of the old asylum I was exposed to explicit gay porn and shocked repeatedly if my penis so much as twitched.
The cocktail of tranquilising and antidepressant drugs clouded the judgement of an already confused and anguished mind, but I did come to realize that this aversion therapy was abusive… though I felt trapped within a mental health system that believed homosexuality was a form of mental illness that could – and should – be cured.
So, the pornography and eclectic shocks continued – until one afternoon a simple thought emerged from the chaos in my head: Convince them that the treatment has been successful.
Traumatized
Just days after my discharge from The North Wales Hospital – still a homosexual, but now additionally burdened by the knowledge that the electric shock aversion therapy had been abusive and had traumatized me in ways I could not yet imagine or articulate, I took a massive overdose.
I’m pleased to say that Electric Shock Aversion Therapy is no longer practised in the NHS in the UK – though many, like me, who endured it and survived, still await an apology. Conversion Therapy, however, has still not been outlawed despite previous government promises.
Young people, insecure in their sexual identity and feeling the pressures from faith and cultural traditions that still hold negative views on homosexuality, experience ‘talking therapies’ that are no less abusive than the electric shocks I endured. My simple plea, then, is to have legislation drafted to have these abhorrent conversion therapies made illegal.
Yes. I survived my suicide attempt… and in some strange way… and over many months, I was radicalised by my experience in that old Victorian Asylum, and I came to understand that I had a responsibility – even an obligation to become the best gay man I could be.
For almost a decade after those first months of 1975, the traumatization of my psyche caused by Dr D A Jones’s Electric Shock Aversion Therapy emerged and became a daily reality. All sexual thoughts, desires and situations brought vivid flashbacks of electric shocks – I was a young man who had effectively been rendered unable to have any kind of sexual relationship… and this caused me deep distress.
But life can take some interesting and unexpected turns and an opportunity arose to pursue a post-graduate education in Berkeley, California through a scholarship from the World Council of Churches.
Gay-positive therapy
This also proffered the opportunity to seek ‘gay-positive therapy’ in San Francisco. Despite the considerable financial burden of this therapy for an overseas graduate student who had to work more than twenty hours a week on top of a full academic timetable to make ends meet, I was encouraged and enabled to unlearn the negative narrative of homosexuality so prevalent in my cultural and religious background, and I was able to become reconciled to the abusive treatment I’d received… and so the healing began.
I’m sorry if you’ve found this letter overly long. My purpose was not just to highlight the absurd notion that someone’s sexual orientation needs to be changed or can be changed by abusive therapies, but also to help you appreciate the lasting trauma such abuse can cause.
I do hope you’ve been distressed by what you’ve read… distressed enough to take a stand and ensure conversion therapies are banned.
Thank you.
Yours sincerely,
John Sam Jones
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Perhaps the religious belief imposed was also a form of abuse and counselling without aversion might have been kinder. Know thyself.
Pay careful attention the fact that so-called ‘gender identity’ is being smuggled in with this legislation. It’s a madcap hypothesis that is scientifically baseless yet treated as if it were established fact. Canada and Australia have adopted a ban on ‘conversion therapy’ that ropes in gender identity: parents can be, and have been, criminalised for refusing to blindly affirm their child’s claim to be ‘born in the wrong body’.
If trying to help a young boy who thinks he’s a young girl trapped in the ‘wrong body’ understand that he’s not, is considered conversion therapy than No conversion therapy should not be banned.
The motivation behind the call for a ban is highly suspect, and a ban should not be waved through, in the name of #BeKind, without considerable thought by our politicians. Which means in Wales the politicians will have to do more than ‘Note’ the Cass Report they’ll have to read it and implement it.
Have you not thought that this young person may be right in what they believe themselves to be?
Isn’t it wrong to conflate sexual orientation with gender self-id?
They are different mental and emotional processes, with different natural timescales, and very different prevalencies.
JSJ’s abusers tried to medicalize his natural sexual development. Aren’t the supporters of self-id also applying a technology to an emotion?
Yes, I agree with you.
It is physically impossible to be born in the ‘wrong body’, it is physically impossible for a human to change sex. Telling a confused child lies isn’t therapy, it’s just flat out lying.
Sex and gender are not one and the same, a young boy or girl who have leanings towards the ‘traits’ that the opposite ‘gender’ supposedly display doesn’t make them the opposite sex. The evidence suggests that if nature is left to take its course, they will most likely grow up to be same sex attracted adults.
Clearly you don’t understand the complex interaction of hormones in the development of a foetus which can sometimes lead to intersexed babies being born. Have you read Jan Morris’s book Conundrum.?
Intersex has nothing to do with the concept of gender identity, and it is harmful to confuse them. Conundrum by Jan Morris is interesting for all sorts of reasons – not just the conviction about the ‘wrongness’ of the sexed body, but all the assumptions – stereotypical assumptions – about the differences between men and women Morris makes. Morris wanted to be treated ‘as a woman’, feeling unable to be ‘soft’ or ‘feminine’ as a man. Would we want to believe that now? Moreover, Morris, as what was then called ‘transexual’ did not espouse modern ideas of transgenderism. Many of… Read more »
Your letter is very moving, and you went through horrendous, homophobic, abuse in the name of therapy. But no, a 5 year old who says they want to be the opposite sex should not be taken at face value. A traumatised 13 year old girl with an eating disorder and a history of self harm should not be taken at face value, or understood to ‘know who they are’ when they say they should be a boy. The cohort of trans identifying children and young people have a much higher proportion of children with autism, children who have experienced the… Read more »
Mae’n flin gen i glywed hwn John. Ces i’m fagu mewn capel llym hefyd ac wi o hyd yn teimlo’n grac i’r diwrnod hwn am y ffordd cafodd Cristnogaeth ei bregethu atom ni bobl ifanc. Roedd rhywioldeb, full stop, yn rhywbeth brwnt anc roeddem ni’n cael ein gwneud i deimlo’n brwnt am ein teimladau a’n natur dynol. Rwy’n deall e nawr fel lot o dogma a rwtsh pur. Serch ‘ny, fe wnaeth e gymaint o niwed i ganoedd o bobl ifanc yn tyfu lan heb mynd mewn i fanylion. Rwy’n drist bod rhai nawr yn rhieni a dal yng nglwm… Read more »
Not convinced. Banning gays did not get rid of them. Equally banning conversion therapy will not get rid of it. It will drive conversion therapy underground where it will be more dangerous. The hidden issue here is certain fundamentalist religions which support conversion therapy – when any state tackles fundamental religion then that religion wins. And a further thought – if one bans conversion therapy would not the conversion therapists merely repackage themselves as pro-heterosexual therapists? I suspect they would – try and draft a law which bans pro-heterosexuality. That would be interesting. Overall I see banning conversion therapy being… Read more »