Ky Schevers

I've been thinking a lot about anti-trans conversion practices and gender identity change efforts and how they include conversion therapy but also include so many other more informal interactions between trans people and other people who try to get us to change who we are.

How many trans people have encountered people who tried to discourage them from being trans and/or encouraged them to try being something else? It's so common. It's also abusive and harmful and we shouldn't have to deal with that.

If a parent, friend, partner, people in your community, etc make an effort to make you not be trans, encourage you to be a (cis) gay/lesbian instead, try to get you to see your transness as a result of trauma, mental illness or internalized sexism, that's a conversion practice.

I never saw a therapist, I never went through formal conversion therapy but I experienced conversion practices through a transphobic partner, friends and from belonging to a transphobic feminist subculture and it was very traumatic and harmful.

My experiences may be different from formal conversion therapy but they still fucked me up. I'm still healing from what happened. The person promoting/enacting conversion practices doesn't have to be a therapist or other professional for their actions to be harmful.

Conversion practices are abuse. They're harmful. They're harmful even if a trans person is "consenting" to them. We live in a culture where anti-trans conversion practices are normalized, where being trans is seen as acceptable only after all other options are exhausted, if then.

We live in a culture where more people coming out as trans is seen as "a crisis", "an emergency", "an epidemic". We need to resist not only anti-trans conversion therapy but conversion practices more broadly and the culture that normalizes them, makes them seem "commonsense".