Children were abused, physically and emotionally by a taxpayer funded program that apparently had little scientific rigor or standards. “Dr.” Rekers has made quite a nice living for himself promoting this questionable body of work and has been very active with anti-gay groups. He was recently paid $120,000 by the state of Florida to provide “expert” testimony intended to keep gay people from becoming foster parents.

“Dr.” Rekers was recently caught returning from a vacation with a very young gay man. You do the math.

We now know that one of “Dr.” Rekers subjects was a little boy who endured weekly beatings and emotional abuse packaged as therapy. A little boy who attempted suicide as a teenager and ultimately killed himself as an adult.

This therapy seems to have been destructive to the entire family and may have caused a death. UCLA needs to find out where the other children are and how they are doing.

There was simply never any reason to believe that eliminating effeminate behavior would mean the victim wouldn’t be same sex attracted.

Back then, anti-gay bigotry was so ubiquitous that its most ludicrous assumptions often weren’t questioned, even by university trained doctors and psychologists.

Given the failed, earlier therapies (particularly the British shock therapy and hormonal therapy), why did anyone in the field of psychology believe that other therapies might be successful, where the most “forceful” had already failed?

That can partly be explained by the fact that there were many different schools of psychology, just as there are today (For an overview of behavioral therapy, the driving force behind the “forceful” therapy, see Blind Man’s Bluff). Many of behavioral therapy’s strongest critics believed that the methods they used were all wrong because, using a medical metaphor, they thought the therapy was only treating the symptom and not the “problem.” And so they tried different therapies aimed at trying to affect the root of the “problem.”

That’s not to say that they were any more successful, but they believed the theoretical basis for behavioral therapy was all wrong.

And there’s one more thing. Homosexuality was considered a mental illness in 1970. Even if you had therapies that weren’t very effective, treating an illness was considered to be better than not treating an illness.

So yeah, I think when it comes to the mental health profession, it really can be chalked up to being the tenor of the times. But as the times changed and now it’s 2011, we obviously can’t regard today’s ex-gay movement with the same assumption of innocence. Those who practice ex-gay therapy have more than ample evidence to know better, if they only have eyes to see.

After 1970, we weren’t a supine, voiceless presence that could be spoken about as though we weren’t there. Those who spoke against us were no longer able to effortlessly present (or see) themselves as good people who wanted the best for society. After Stonewall, there was a counter-voice standing up time and time against them, sometimes at great cost, to tell respectability-clad authorities that they were hurting real people, that they were doing it out of bigotry, and that they now face opposition.

I’m sure those researchers in the late ’60s and early ’70s felt that it was so important to keep boys from “becoming homosexuals” that they should perservere in their efforts despite other researchers’ demonstrated harms and lack of success.

I have not been through all the material, but this is a question that I have to answer, when I do.

Given the failed, earlier therapies (particularly the British shock therapy and hormonal therapy), why did anyone in the field of psychology believe that other therapies might be successful, where the most “forceful” had already failed?

Can it all be chocked up to the tenor of the times? Or, was there really a kind of giant-sized – even criminal – hubris behind the suggestion that ‘we just need to refine out therapeutic approaches’?

Frankly, I hope stories like this being shared with the public puts an end to the abuses of “experimentation” with gender-identity, and those who practice such quackery have their licenses to practice revoked, for good.

Let these stories be a “testimony” – if I am allowed to use that word here – to the abuses of so-called “experts” and the very REAL consequences of attempting to change gender and psychological make-up of anyone, child OR adult.

Sadly.

I fear Boxturtle will censor this, but I’m not in the mood after seeing this report to pretend anything but fury, rage and a strongly held desire to see the monsters who perpetrated this crime brought to justice.

My justice, preferably, but I’d settle for lifelong penal servitude at hard labor.