Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Conversion Therapy Part 1

Episode Date: June 9, 2017

This week, we're honoring Pride Month and the LGBTQ community with an exploration of the disturbing history of conversion therapy. Trigger Warning: The treatments used in these "therapies" were upsetting, and those sensitive to hearing about them may wish to avoid this episode. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers

Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion. It's for fun. Can't you just have fun for an hour and not try to diagnose your mystery boil? We think you've earned it. Just sit back, relax, and enjoy a moment of distraction from that weird growth. You're worth it. that weird growth. You're worth it. Alright, time is about to books. One, two, one, two, three, four. I'm ready to welcome two solbones, Marlotte, tour of Miss Guy, Adminis and I'm your co-host Justin McRoy and I'm Sydney McRoy Sydney welcome to the program. Well, thank you Justin. It's our show. Yeah, I'm not really terribly welcome to you to it

I guess. How are you doing Justin? I'm well. How are you because you don't look super happy? Well, Justin I'm not gonna lie to you. This is going to be maybe a rough one. OK. OK. So as many of you probably are already aware, it's pride month. Right. And which is a month that we celebrate. Well, we should every month.

But a month to really focus on how we should celebrate the LGBTQ community. And I think that that's a time for a lot of happiness and joy, but it's also important for us to remember the history of the persecution of the LGBTQ community, especially in this country, and to kind of go through as a medical professional, not my personal role in that, but my professions role throughout that history, specifically focusing on kind of the origins and the current incarnation of what we would think of as conversion or reparative therapy. So I think that that merits not just one but two episodes because there's a lot to talk about.

And I think it's important for us to talk about because only by understanding the stuff, are we going to be able to stop it since it's still going on. So if that is something that may be triggering for you this episode and actually the one we'll record next, maybe one, maybe ones that you want to skip we have a wide variety of other offerings. We encourage you to check out our Putting weird holes in your body department stuff stairs but Okay, so I'm ready and I'm gonna have lots of jokes so don't worry

They just probably won't be related to the topic at hand That's fair. You know it it fits into the sob-ones theme of really ridiculous, misguided stuff that was done in medical history. It's just, it's harder since this is also incredibly harmful and horrific and just terrible. And with that said, let's get going. So first of all, thank you to everybody who suggested this topic, Jennifer and Kimberly and Mike and Sarah and us emails.

And then I know we've gotten a lot of tweets and Facebook posts and things suggesting that for a long time that we should do this, but specifically right now. So we should also address at the top, like, and maybe this might have some Thing to do with the the reason we haven't covered the topic before is that Sydney and I are both like straight people and We're I think we had some trepidation about taking on a topic like this because you know, we don't necessarily want to tell Another community story, but we also don't want to not tell it.

So we are doing our best to illustrate people to communicate this. Exactly. We all hope you'll be, um, hope we do our, do justice to it. We'll do our best. We'll do our best. So as we know, sexuality and sexual preference as well as gender for that matter is a spectrum and always has been and Same sex relationships have been observed throughout human history and not just human history in many other facets of the animal kingdom

And we know this and we've known this for a long time and we understood it and accepted it as perfectly fine until we didn't. And then in the second episode, I'll get into more like kind of the religious roots of that. But for now, let's just accept that there was a period of human history where this was fine. And then we decided it wasn't. And what started was kind of the criminalization of the practice. Before we get into the medical aspects, we first just criminalized any kind of sexual intercourse that wasn't basically heterosexual vaginal penetrative sex. All the positions are my superglue, okay?

Depending on where you were. I'm in a state by state, I'm in it. Yeah, yeah, I really, the criminalization of same sex intercourse probably didn't really start until post revolutionary France. Of course it was France, France. Love you France. They, where it was just kind of conveniently left out

like after the Napoleonic era. Just kind of, they didn't talk about it in the law anymore. Napoleonic era. They didn't talk about it in the law anymore. The real interest in the subject of do we need to do anything about same-sex relationships? Is there something to say about it other than what had been said so far, which was just either put these people in jail or in horrible cases? Let's kill these people, what else could we say about it? And this really came into play in the late 19th century, as we were beginning to spend a lot more time talking about mental illness. So this was the first time where we began to understand that maybe sometimes people committed crimes related to an underlying psychiatric illness that would make them unable to

make what we would consider basic right and wrong decisions. So the idea that somebody would be unfit to stand trial is just blossoming. And under that umbrella came, same sex relationships, LGBTQ. This was a good thing in the sense that it is. No, I don't mean this. It's a shock the world. No. No, it's a dog's views. No, I don't mean this.

No, I don't mean this. What I mean is, Shabba's grized to the hall as world shutters at a surprisingly, oh, sorry, I had to. This seemed like a good thing initially, because it moved these relationships out of the realm of the criminal world and into basically into the psychologist's office, right? All of a sudden we have doctors who are saying, well, this isn't, you know, deviant maybe,

this isn't disorder. And so we need to do something about it. There were a lot of many German psychologists, a lot of this thinking came out of Germany, who were kind of setting the idea that maybe what they would, they called it sexual inversion, was some kind of genetic trait, and they would refer to it as some sort of psychosexual hermaphroditism, where it wasn't an anatomical hermaphroditism. It was a psychosexual one, and so you were drawn to express that they considered the opposite gender traits, very stereotypically speaking.

And so then you would display these other sexual tendencies. And there were a lot of progressive thinkers in Germany who were actually saying, you know what, this is probably fine. This is probably just a variant that we're not recognizing like some people do this, other people do the other thing. It's no big deal. It's probably fine. This is probably just a variant that we're not recognizing like some people do this, other people do the other thing. It's no big deal. It's probably fine. Obviously, that was a minority view at the time. And that challenged the predominant belief among a lot of physicians in the 1920s that same sex attraction was some kind of birth defect. That it was just something that, I mean, maybe you could cure medically or maybe you couldn't, but you're just, you were born with, but it was a defect.

Physicians were concerned about it, but they really didn't know what to do about it. And until V&E's endocrinologist, Eugen Steinek attempted a procedure where he took the testicles from a male guinea pig and transplanted them into a female guinea pig. And then he began to record results that the male guinea, or that the female guinea pig began demonstrating some what were thought of as traditionally male characteristics like mounting behavior and things like that. So from that he started to posit the theory that maybe these traditional sexual behaviors and stemming from that gender roles came from

testicles Sure, okay. Yeah, take a shot of the dark. Why not? So Maybe we could fix it with surgery Maybe it was just a boss female guinea pig who knows what she wants You know, I mean? It maybe had nothing, it wasn't even test-cabulated at all. Well, I think you're seeing a lot of assumption that it is simply a testicle that makes a man or simply testosterone that makes a man when obviously we know that things are a lot more

complicated than that. Yeah. Also, please remember that as we judge this person and, and rightly, we should also remember that they had to go home and, uh, look, their spouse are significant other of the face and tell them what they did that day. And a lot of days, I was cut the ball, I had gaming pigs. So that's like their whole and put them in other gaming pigs. And that was like their whole day also. But now okay, back to judging. Now okay, and we and I think it's very fair that we judge him for this. He did a lot of other things in inter-cronology that were actually

really good medical advances. I'm not going to get into that though because what he did next was he partnered with a surgeon to transplant testicles from straight men into game men to try to fix them. You messed up. Like you don't get to be in history anymore. Yeah, so the results were subjective. They basically after it was over the two doctors went, it was a success. It's great. They're very masculine now. They're over there grunting and burping and scratching themselves. Total success. Trust us. Don't talk to them or anything. Yeah. But it was great. I asked them who they'd enjoy having sex with for sure. Because that one we haven't worked out the kings of,

but it seems to be well. Now, actually, this was a, this was not a success, even though initially they thought there was some hope for it. They, they're human body rejects things that aren't tissue compatible. So there was rejection of these testicular transplants and these were huge medical problems and so it was a complete failure and obviously should never have been attempted to begin with. So nobody was convinced by that. Nobody thought that was the way to go. So some like Freud plays a role in this story, Sigmund Freud. I don't know if there's

another Freud that anybody ever refers to is Freud, but there you go began to believe that since it it was a mental illness maybe this is treatable not really by some sort of surgery or medication, but by therapy, you know psychoanalysis especially hypnosis He was a big fan of hypnosis and initially he kind of promoted this idea made it popular among a lot of other psychiatrists and psychologists, which was very harmful, of course, because he was Freud. His ideas were thought to be very grand and influenced many people. But he later changed his mind about it. Oh yeah. Yeah. He later said that he thought, you know what, same sexual attraction, same sex attraction is probably fine.

And generally, most of us are born bisexual anyway. And we really don't develop a defined sexual orientation until puberty. And he did tie same sex attraction to certain, what he would think of as like childhood, traumatic events or repressions or those kinds of things. But he basically said that you can be well adjusted and be gay and it's fine. And he stated that as far back as 1935, he also, he's not only to say it's not a disorder, but he said you shouldn't try to treat it mainly because you can't. There's actually a really

famous letter he wrote to a patient's mother who wrote him first and said, please cure my son. And she described her son and he writes back this letter and says, I take it from your letter that your concern is that your son is gay. He wouldn't have used that word at the time. He would have said, home is sexual. I believe you think your son is homosexual and let me tell you, this is fine, you know, and there's nothing I can do about it.

And there's nothing anybody can do about it. To let it go. Fixed the end. Okay, Freud has spoken, folks. That's going to do it for us here on some. Now, this was not the final word. You know, even his daughter, I don't really talk much about her in here, but even Freud's daughter who was a famous psychoanalyst as well. She actually kind of said, you know what?

We really shouldn't use that letter is what he truly believed because she went on to practice like hypnosis and therapy to try to fix amusing that with air quotes fix gaping. Yeah, we're using a lot of air. Yeah. The fingers are flying here. Yeah. Just to see him. If you think it sounds like we should be using, then we probably are. The, uh, so the conservative American culture that followed World War II changed. Any of this kind of progressive thinking that maybe was starting to happen. Any of these thinkers who were saying, you know, maybe this is fine. Maybe we were wrong to criminalize this.

Maybe we should embrace everybody. Uh, we got this very kind of stereotypical definition of gender roles in this country after the war. The family unit was supposed to be a man and a woman and whenever 2.5 children and a dog and a white ticket fence. You know, traditional gender roles were strictly enforced and society was very rigid. And all of the psychoanalysts and psychiatrists and psychologists and all these people who came of age in this era came into this atmosphere as well and followed the same beliefs and applied them to sexual orientation.

So, many psychiatrists in the 1950s and 1960s felt that any, you know, same sex attraction ran contrary to the natural order of things. And they saw Freud as kind of a pessimist. He just did know how to fix it. So he said it can't be fixed. But not because it isn't a problem, just because he wasn't smart enough to figure it out. They thought they were smart enough to figure it out. They thought they were smart enough to figure it out. So you start to see the psychiatrist one was Samuel Hadden, who was a psychiatrist in Pennsylvania,

who began bringing groups of gay men together who were seeking conversion, people who because of the oppressive society they were living in felt that they were wrong inherently as people. And they began to seek out these doctors to help them and the psychiatrists bring them together, to like share and interpret each other's dreams, talk about their feelings and what he considered their neuroses. And he talked about how over time they would begin

to cast aside their flamboyant clothes and mannerisms and they would get married to women. Done. And there you go. Start with the clothes, day one. Start with the clothes. Well, you're cool clothes that look rad and you all, all of you look fantastic. Please take those off and go get married to a woman.

Go get married to a woman. That's step two. It doesn't matter which woman, guys, that's the way it works every year for straight people. We just pick the first one we see and go for it. There were other psychiatrists who joined this kind of belief that if we just talk to people, we could kind of account for whatever caused them to be gay. That was that thought that something in their past,

something in their psychological history would give you a clue Is to what caused this and then you could you know quote unquote fix it so psychiatrist Socarities and Bieber Not that Bieber a different Bieber. I have no We had just no relatives. I'm no reason to think that. I knew you're gonna say that Get at me bebes. Let's talk it out But they spoke out prominently in the media So these psychiatrists are being interviewed, and this was being published in newspapers and magazines

that same sex attraction is just this maladjustment that's born of childhood drama, and we can correct it. We can fix it. It might take a while, but you send somebody to a psychiatrist, and it takes a long time, but eventually we will fix it. And so you see these people actually read this really emotional count from one man who sought out a psychiatrist to try to help him as a young man.

Because, I mean, he was desperate. He thought that he was broken. He thought he was wrong. And it's this very complex relationship, even now he talks about the psychiatrist who tried to do all this therapy and convert him to a straight man. It never really worked. He was always unhappy. And today, the psychiatrist has apologized and said everything I did was terrible and I'm so sorry and I can't believe I did this harmful thing and I've ruined your life and I'm the worst person on earth and it's this really complex relationship

because this patient says, you know, yeah, it was wrong, but like I asked you to and I wanted you to and society made me think that this and you know, I have this close relationship so I don't hate you for it even though it was this terrible thing that was being done and I don't know, you get all these really complex accounts of this kind of period. Because a lot of this right now is just talking. A lot of what we're talking about at first was just sitting with somebody and talking. And then a lot of, oh, I have to mention that there was a neurologist at this point who said that you could cure it by writing a bicycle for a long time.

Now I don't have to tear that out there. That doesn't make sense. No, I don't know how that worked, but a lot of men wrote a lot of bicycles for a while. And that was it. They got really well developed calves, but a lot of terrible things start happening now as we move away from just talking. Well, normally this is the part where I'd be like, go go on, it's how we more I can't wait to hear more, but I don't actually, but we still have to.

So let's take break real quick. Let's go to the billing department. Bless don't actually, but we still have to. So let's take a break real quick. Let's go to the billing department. Bless the relief of commercialism. Let's go. The medicines, the medicines that ask you lift my car before the mouth. Hi, this is Griffin McRoy. Hi, this is Rachel McRoy.

And we're the host of Rosebuddies. It's a podcast about the bachelor family of products. We watch the bachelor, the bachelor at, and bachelor in Paradise. Yes, it is a garbage television, but we're the king and queen of this garbage pile over the raccoons and charreds around here. So join us on Tuesdays. Because the TV shows on Mondays, and basically we'll recap what we saw,

and we'll just sort of scoop the garbage around us and make a little fort out of it. No viewing required. But it's a good TV show. What are you doing? Ha ha. All right, said before I so rudely interrupt to you, things were about to get worse. That's right. So we move on from this era of, you know,

kind of the classic like Freud, like psychoanalysts with the leather couch and, you know, kind of telling the story of the relationship with your parents and your dreams and whatnot, to some really aggressive approaches in the psychiatry and psychology world. One was called Confrontational Therapy. This was developed by Dr. Berglier. This involved basically the way you would confront your patient was to yell horrible things at them in hopes that they will stop being gay.

So call them names, tell them they're worthless, tell them they should die, tell them everybody hates them, tell them that they're broken and they're sick and disgusting and that the thought was this would foster some shame and guilt and this would motivate you to change. So idiot, I mean, you can't even give these people a passive like, whoa, it was a different time. We didn't shut up because like they people who are doing this were seeking out your treatment. Like, right? I assume. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of these, they must, a lot of people weren't being conscripted into it, right? Like, no. Well, there were, there were people who sought this treatment for sure,

but you have to understand, and I probably should preface with this, there are many of the things I'm going to talk about that were done to children. Adolescence, young, young men and women who whose parents were seeking for it. I felt like points stands that society at the time was already doing a pretty bang up job of this. Right? You know what I'm saying? Yes. The guy sounds like, man, it's giving you a hard time to curl some of this and say, go ahead.

It's almost like, at the time, this specifically, Dr. Berglow was very opposed to the research that had just come out from Dr. Kinsey, who was actually really ahead of his time and progressive when it comes to LGBTQ issues and basically said, this is fine and I don't understand why, why are we trying to fix this? This is not an illness and please everybody stop what you're doing, and which was adding a lot of fuel to the fire of the very beginnings of the gay rights movement. And this really made this burger guy angry and he, I guess, his therapies just got worse and worse. And a lot of other therapists and psychiatrists followed suit and came up with increasingly horrible ways of trying to stop people from being gay. So that could include things like

electric shock therapy, electric convulsive therapy. You could apply shocks to the the hands or the genitals or the head. A lot of this would be accompanied with a accompanied by like having your patient recount a same-sex experience they had or fantasy they had or movie they saw or something like that as a way of trying to apply a negative stimuli so that you would be a verse to it. A version therapy was very popular at this time in general. Castration was attempted. The female genital mutilation was done.

Blatter washings were done. Like a douche? No. Okay. No, that's not a bladder washing. I'm sorry. I'm not a doctor. That's okay No, that's a different orifice. Okay. Oh, okay. Yeah, yeah, you're sorry. Yeah, we're the P is super sorry Yeah, there were a lot of places not just in the US This was actually done in the UK too where you would give e-metics, things that would make you puke after you were exposed to what they would consider like gay materials. So they would show you a picture of a gay couple and then try to induce vomiting to try to connect that reaction to gay behavior. This is obviously disgusting and hugely troubling.

So this whole list has just been the pits. So let's do just a quick sidebar. The way Sydney has that line written in her notes is drugs that would make you puke when exposed to game materials. And I was sitting here freaking out like what pill is this? Are you kidding me? There's a pill that makes you puke and exposes the game materials. That's impossible, Cindy. That doesn't make sense. I was question the authenticity of the entire endeavor. My outline just has enough words in it that I know what it means.

That's all it ever does. That's all right. That's all right. We've talked about it on our lobotomy episode before that lobotomies were done for all kinds of horrible reasons and obviously same-sex attraction was among them. Things like stric-9, cocaine.

They tried to induce insulin shock in some patients, basically give them so much insulin that they became very hypoglycemic and went into shock. There was a drug called metrosol that has since been removed from the market because it gave people these horrible like back breaking spasms when they took it. It was used for other psychiatric illnesses as well, but this too.

And if all that failed, some were advocates of just beating somebody until they agreed not to be gay anymore because that's in any way medical treatment. And have been effective treatment for anything. For anything ever. What helped to turn this tide was really the gay rights movement. I would love to say that these psychiatrists and psychologists in therapists realized what they were doing was absolutely horrific on their own, but it really was outspoken gay rights leaders with the assistance of the minority of social workers and psychiatrists and psychologists who were progressive and forward-thinking, who agreed with them

who began to, you know, write the course of history. Things happened like hadn't the psychiatrist I mentioned earlier who kind of started the talk therapy was invited to speak at a rally that was put on by Janice, which was a huge gay rights organization based out of Philadelphia. And basically, once he got there to start talking, they just eviscerated him, shouted him down, and called him out on everyone of his lies and everyone of his pieces of data that weren't data and everything. Demonstrations like these that were so prominent and newsworthy led to more people in the medical and, you know, psychology world kind of questioning the prevailing wisdom of the day and beginning to think that

maybe we're going about this wrong because we're harming obviously this is causing harm. And if a treatment is doing more harm than good, we need to take a step back and see is this treatment appropriate and why are we doing it and have we made the correct diagnosis. And in this case, there is no diagnosis at all. So they begin, there was a small group that began to wonder, is there a way to do sexual orientation affirming therapy that would have better results

for these patients? How do you mean? Meaning to tell people that it's okay to be gay. Oh, a radical idea. Yeah, that maybe that would be the better way to go. What really helped with this was in 1956, Dr. Evelyn Hooker. So she presented a groundbreaking study that caught the attention of a lot of people in the medical world. She had not set out in her career to kind of stake her claim, make her name, studying issues related to LGBTQ patients,

but early on in her career, she gave a lecture to some of her students where she was working after she had gotten her PhD. And the student came up, one student came up to her after a lecture and said, listen, Dr. Hooker, I am gay. And I want you to study me. I want you to come with me and meet my other friends who are also, you know, part of the gay lesbian community. And I want you to learn about us and talk with us. And if somebody will study us and show that this is not a problem,

that we are happy, healthy, well-adjusted people, just as normal as anyone else, then maybe this will go, maybe this will help. Maybe this, maybe this science could help show people that they're wrong. So she spent a ton of time hanging out with people from a community that by the way she had had like no contact with before. So kind of opening her eyes and interviewing

and assessing her new friends. And then she went and applied for a grant. Said, you know what, all these interviews aren't gonna meet anything. I need science. I need a grant to do a study. I, you know what, all these interviews aren't gonna meet anything. I need science. I need a grant to do a study. I need a real study with hard data to show people. So she applied for a grant.

It was a huge, it was the longest of shots that she was gonna get a grant to do a study to prove that gay people are not maladjusted in some way because that was not the prevailing thought, especially among people in the government who were appro proving grants. But the story is that she was incredibly charming and person and she went for her interview and just charmed the heck out of the guy and he eventually agreed to get with the grant.

So she got it and she set up an experiment with 60 men, half of them were gay and half of them are straight and she subjected them to a series of psychological evaluations, including it was this time a Rorschach test. And in the Rorschach test, by the way, it was supposed to be like the most sensitive to telegay person from a straight person. Yeah, that you could always tell by the Rorschach test. Yeah, Rorschach, you were way, every time. So, after she had gathered her profiles from all these tests, she submitted them anonymously to three other psychologists.

So, she just handed them a stack three other psychologists, so she just handed them a stack of 60 profiles with no names on them. They don't say whether the subjects were gay or straight and said, you need to decide two things. Who's more well-adjusted among all these people and find the gay men? Who's gay and who's straight? They couldn't do any of it. They could tell no difference. Of course, we know this. This is, this is, we know this now. There was no difference between the gay men and straight men. You can't tell by psychological evaluations, it's not a psychological problem. And there is no difference in how adjusted or maladjusted they are because it's not a disorder. It's not an illness. So she presented this in 1956 and this

was explosive. You know what, I had a temptation, I would say fleeting temptation, when we were talking about some of the more monstrous medical practices, to try to couch that in the fact that like it's, you know, it was science following the lead of society. Science that convinced us, oh, this is an issue. Society was convinced it was an issue and it was science trying to find a fix. But I think the reason that that doesn't fly is that this is where the science should have started.

Like this, you can't, it is a failure society aside. It is a failure of science that this did not start with. You know ethnography and and yes this sort of study before. Fixing it with quote unquote again sorry was even part of the equation you're. It's unfortunate because that's not the way science works. Science seeks truth no matter how uncomfortable that truth might be for any given person in any time in history. And that was not how the science started. The science finally got there. Following this study, this led to more grants, more research.

This had a huge impact on the changes to come. And this gave a lot of ammunition when it came to gay rights activists and groups who were able to cite these studies and these findings and say, this is why politicians and lawmakers, this is why this is wrong. This is why this discrimination is evil and wrong. And then of course, in 1969, the Stonewall riots drew national attention to the issue, and the importance of the medical profession standing up and saying, it is not a pathology to be gay, it is not an illness. This was supported by in 1969, the Dorian Society of Seattle founded the Dorian Counseling

Service for Homosexuals, which was the first counseling center to focus on sexual orientation affirming therapy, meaning that you were going to see a therapist who was going to tell you, listen, I know what society says, they're wrong, you're fine, there's nothing wrong with you, you're not broken, you're not sick, this is just who you are, and it's going to take us maybe a while for everybody to get there, and you might need the support of a therapist to help you deal with society, but you are fine. and you might need the support of a therapist to help you deal with society, but you are fine. In 1972, what also helped with this was Dr. John Fryer, who was a psychiatrist who appeared in disguise as Dr. H. Anonymous at the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association,

and set up on a panel in front of all of his fellow doctors and said, I am gay and I am a psychiatrist. He was terrified to reveal his identity. He thought he would come under violence and nobody would ever see him again as a doctor and he would lose his license. But the idea that among their peers were fellow members of the LGBTQ community and they were being persecuted by their fellow doctors for no good reason. This really moved a lot of the other psychiatrists.

So finally, as a result of all this 1973, homosexuality as a diagnosis is removed from the DSM too, which is like the psychology, psychiatry, Bible of diagnoses. It's where they list all the different, you know, kinds of different psychiatric illnesses and diagnoses. But hidden in the somewhat in the diagnosis that they added was ego-distonic homosexuality. So initially in 1973, they take that out. That's a huge landmark moment. But they put in this diagnosis of ego-distonic homosexuality. So initially in 1973 they take that out, that's a huge

landmark moment, but they put in this diagnosis of ego-distonic homosexuality, which means your gay and we're fine with that, we don't have a problem, that's not a problem, but you're really depressed about it. And we think that's a problem. And so we want to diagnose you with this, but this was still like a weapon used against the LGBTQ community because it still put the problem, the diagnosis was on the person instead of society. Well, yeah, because probably it's not diagnosis because probably speaking, you're talking about a country and a time when it was still incredibly hostile to homosexual people. Exactly.

So this is not a real diagnosis. This is, again, putting the blame on the victim instead of on society. this this diagnosis was used as a weapon for a long time in conversion therapy. It was removed from the DSM because of this in 1987. But it does still remain in the World Health Organization, International Classification of Diseases. You can still find this as a diagnosis. In 2013, the DSM-5, the next iteration of this, added gender dysphoria, which still exists. And while that's a whole other topic, not really the topic of this show, this is really similar in regard to gender as ego-distonic homosexuality was to orientation. Because it's basically saying a transgender person who is not happier

comfortable with that, with him being transgender because of society. And so we give them this diagnosis. Instead of saying, no, the problem is that we have a society that discriminates against transgender individuals. And that's still in there. The short story on all of these efforts to convert gay people is that they lead to depression, anxiety, self-destructive behavior, things like drug abuse, homelessness, and suicide. And also they don't work at all. Any of this stuff that I just named, it only had negative consequences and it invariably

does not work. And it is rejected by the medical profession pretty much in mass today. Well, so we're done here. Gosh, I thought this was going to take two weeks, but. Justin, I wish we were done. Okay. Well, that sounds ominous as I'll get out, but. There is another, even as the medical community was finally starting to get its act together,

there was another movement that would raise its ugly head and continue these harmful therapies. And we'll talk about that in part two. All right. Well, folks, thanks for hanging in there with us. Again, I just want to, I'm really concerned about this. I just want to make it clear from my perspective, like I know that I did jokes and stuff because that's the show we do.

And I just really hope we're not experts in this stuff. So we're trying to do our best to say the right things and not do more harm. And we're doing our best. So, um, right. Well, I know that we've said this before. We avoid topics like this sometimes on the show because there are shows supposed to be funny and there's nothing funny about this and we're not we're not pretending that there is, but I do think it's important history. And I think again, if we don't remember and understand where we came from, we are in danger of going back there.

Yeah, and I don't mean to make light of it by doing jokes. Either it's just that or scream at the top of your lungs for a half hour. So, you know, it's kind of up to you. It's your choice. That's going to do it for us. Thank you to our sponsors. Thanks to Maximum maximumfund.org for having us on there. This week, I will recommend a new show called Reading Glasses that was just added to the network. And it's about books,

which I'm, I'm, I'm just gogah about them. I like them too. You fan, you fan? Open them up. So go check out Reading Glasses. The very first episode has Sarah been a cos on it and you can go listen to it. So good good at work for every fine podcaster distributed. Thank you to the tax page for the use of their song medicines is the intro and outro program. And thanks to you for listening. We will see you next week. But until that time, my name is Justin McRoy. I'm Sydney McRoy. And as always, don't drill a hole in your head. Alright!