Gender Justice League’s Danni Askini discusses gay conversion therapy and the success her organization has had in bringing about change in Washington
Danni Askini, executive director of the Gender Justice League, doesn’t stop moving. Press conferences, city council meetings, training, event planning, office work and then a work trip to Canada?
“That’s just how my life is,” she laughed as she tried to simultaneously park and set up a photo to accompany this article.
But on Aug. 3, she got to take a quick breath and enjoy the result of her efforts when Mayor Ed Murray signed into law a bill championed by Councilmember Lorena Gonzalez on an issue near to Askini’s heart.
The bill prohibits licensed medical professionals from practicing gay conversion therapy — alternatively known as Sexual Orientation Conversion Effort (SOCE) or reparative therapy — on minors in Seattle. Conversion therapy uses a number of techniques including talk therapy and aversion therapy to attempt to change a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity.
The objective is to make people conform to traditional ideas of gender and sexuality, but the practice is discredited by mental health professionals and considered harmful to young people within the LGBTQ community.
Violators of the city’s new ordinance will pay $500 for a first offense and $1,000 for each one after. Those who advertise conversion therapy can get hit with a misdemeanor charge under laws prohibiting false advertising.
It’s the first step in what Askini hopes will be a wider movement at the state and national level to put a stop to conversion therapy and show every LGBTQ young person that they were #BornPerfect. She took some time to catch up with Real Change to talk about the effort.
In the most basic terms, what is conversion therapy or reparative therapy, and why do you see it as harmful?
Conversion therapy or reparative therapy, we also call it Sexual Orientation Change Effort. I think that’s a more apt description for people. It involves many different methodologies like talk therapy, what’s called aversion therapy, which is like electroshock or ice baths or heat treatment or using other forms of basically physical punishment or psychological punishment to convince people not to be gay or to change their sexual orientation. It can take place in a number of different settings, and we see less extreme versions of it nowadays, but there’s talk therapy to try to change a person’s sexual orientation. Every major medical body has said that you cannot change a person’s sexual orientation through any known therapeutic methodology — it’s just not possible. Sexual orientation is innate, it’s inborn. It’s just not something you can talk away, or pray away.
At the City Council you said this is something that you have gone through. What was your experience?
I was in middle school, and it was right around the time that I had started to realize that I was trans and that I was also attracted to boys. This was in the mid-’90s and my parents went to get help and the guidance counselor at my school sent me to a psychologist who truly believed that they could toughen me up and make me more of a man, or whatever. Which was hysterical and ridiculous. I was subjected to 10 months of weekly therapy visits where I was critiqued on everything from the way I dressed, the way I talked, the way I presented, the way I gesticulated with my hands. All of those things. I was shamed for the fact that I had friends who were girls. That was something that boys were not supposed to do. It was ridiculous.
Months of that until I was incredibly depressed and suicidal. My parents saw the situation as getting worse, not better, and put a stop to it. They said that this was not helping our kid. They completely reversed course and decided to embrace the fact that I was trans, and found a supportive therapist who helped me transition.
That ultimately led to my happiness, which I think was “the proof was in the pudding” for my parents who were like, these practices made me suicidal and made me feel incredibly anxious all the time. I developed a panic disorder because I was so anxious about my gender presentation in public settings that I developed routine and repetitive panic attacks. I had such a hyper-focus on my presentation that it was all that I could think about in a public setting. Which is one of the side effects of these kinds of therapies. People develop other mental health issues related to the stigma that a medical professional is hoisting upon you. It was very damaging, and it took many, many years to undo that damage. I still have an anxiety disorder to this day, and I was not an anxious person before I underwent that treatment. I don’t know to what degree it’s contributed to my anxiety disorder, but it was the first point in my life where I felt anxious around other people.
What does the medical community have to say about conversion therapy?
What I do know is that every major body that’s looked at the evidence has seen that it has been demonstrably proven through research that these methodologies do not work — they always fail — and that you cannot change people’s gender identity. I think that the ramifications are very well known. One in three LGBTQ young people have been treated with this kind of therapy, and the rate of suicide attempts and suicidality in people who have undergone these types of treatments are astronomically high.
To what degree is conversion therapy practiced in Seattle?
I think Ingersoll Gender Center, which supports transgender and gender nonconforming people in support groups, they have seen a lot of people who have experienced conversion therapy in and around Seattle, so I think that it is a big problem here. You know, it’s hard for us to know the extent to which it’s being practiced, but I have heard about the experiences of young people who have been forced into this kind of therapy. So it’s definitely happening. I wish we had statistics, but we don’t even know how many LGBTQ people there are, much less what their experiences are.
Is it possible that a bill like this will push these practices underground? Will it make it less visible than it already is?
The fact that there is a mechanism for survivors to come forward and get justice and put an end to these unscientific and harmful practices is the most important thing. Whether it gets pushed down or not, I don’t think having a law against something necessarily pushes something underground. I think it’s important for survivors to have a way to feel protected. The scope of the ban is limited — religious practitioners can still practice these kinds of therapeutic methods and that will still be a problem, a societal problem rather than a legal problem for us to work on. But I think that it sends an important message that these practices are discredited and that, in and of itself, serves a vital public service. It’s in the best public interest to have strong laws that send strong messages that these practices are discredited.
You can see the response of people who are so surprised by the ban itself, that it’s a problem in Seattle, demonstrates to me that people don’t understand how much of a problem it is.
Seattle has a view of itself as a very progressive city and people like that view a lot.
Sometimes people have a little bit of a hard time wrapping their head around the fact that we are progressive in some regards, but that what’s happening in the rest of the country is also happening here.
How do you combat those issues in a place that is having difficulty seeing them?
Part of it is to work with progressive legislators to build strong coalitions. We’ve had three really strong coalitions — Washington Won’t Discriminate, which opposed 1515; The Washington State Alliance, which was working to protect state nondiscrimination law; and the coalition for inclusive health care, through which we helped expand health care coverage. So I think our main strategic method is to build strong coalitions to increase visibility and educate the public about the issues that face LGBTQ people and why they should care about them. I think we’ve been really effective at reaching a broader audience and really elevating the fact that while we are a progressive state, we have some serious challenges.
Why is it important to work on these issues at multiple levels of government?
Mental health care providers who are licensed are licensed by the state Board of Health. Statewide legislation is really vital so that practitioners can’t just cross over the border from Seattle into another town. President [Barack] Obama and many elected officials nationally have come out in support of these bans because they recognize that these practices, which are incredibly discredited and unscientific, are harmful to LGBTQ young people. It’s really important that we send a strong signal at all levels of government that LGBTQ young people are perfect just the way they are, and that they don’t need to change their sexual orientation or gender identity to be loved and accepted by their community.
What message does this send to pass this legislation in the city of Seattle, and does it help your work at the state and federal level?
I think it sends a very resounding message that the city has evaluated and come to the conclusion that these practices are unscientific, discredited and harmful to LGBTQ young people. It sends a signal that the city of Seattle embraces LGBTQ young people. I do think that, given the amount of influence in terms of lobbying the Legislature that the city has, that passing this ban will help us move forward an agenda at the state level and hopefully — as we did with the anti-transgender bathroom bill — win over some Republican supporters who recognize that these practices are very harmful to the mental health of the LGBTQ young people.
You mentioned Republican supporters. Isn’t gay conversion therapy on the Republican Party’s national platform?
I’ve heard that it is. I haven’t read their platform, but I heard they passed a pro-reparative therapy platform for the Republican Party. I think that there are a lot of moderate Republicans who do believe that mental health providers and medical practitioners should only be providing mental health care that is science-based and proven correct. Just like other discredited practices that we no longer allow like electroshock treatment for hysteria in women — obviously a discredited practice that has been barred. I think it’s a pretty bipartisan issue that medical and mental health practitioners licensed by the state should be practicing evidence-based care.
When you’re doing this work, you’re putting yourself out there in front of cameras. What is that like to have to put yourself and your identity out there so visibly all the time?
That’s a really difficult question to answer. It’s incredibly difficult to do that work, but it’s also incredibly necessary and vital.
I’ve experienced a lot of backlash, but at the same time we’ve experienced a lot of progress, so in the end it’s been a really amazing blessing in some ways to be able to do that work.