The Obama Administration is joining the call for an end to so-called “conversion” or “reparative” therapy aimed at changing the sexual orientation of gender identity of LGBT youth.  While social conservatives and some religious groups espouse such therapies, the American Psychiatric Association has condemned them.

Other opponents and LGBT activists label conversion therapy as “torture” that often has deadly results.  Such is the case of 17-year old transgender teen Leelah Alcorn, born a boy but who lived as a girl.  She committed suicide by throwing herself in front of a big rig truck in December.  Her suicide note noted that her strict christian parents had refused to accept her identity and hired therapists to try and convert her into a boy.

“The only way I will rest in peace is if one day transgender people aren't treated the way I was,” Leelah wrote in her suicide note.  “My death needs to mean something.  Fix society.  Please.”

The therapy varies by practitioner, but there’s a reason why critics call it “torture”.  Derided by critics as "pray away the gay therapy", it often employs methods more sinister and cruel than prayer, recalling the movie "A Clockwork Orange".  Homoerotic stimuli is presented with electric shocks to the hands or genitals, or with the administration of nausea-inducing drugs (.pdf link).  That doesn’t produce a heterosexual patient at the outcome, it leaves a victim bullied into self-loathing.  And that has resulted in too many suicides.

Leelah, a blogger, already had a large Internet following. Her death led to a petition on the White House website calling for a total ban on conversion therapy, and it quickly gained more than 120,000 signatures.

Responding to the petition, US President Barack Obama wrote:  “Tonight, somewhere in America, a young person, let's say a young man, will struggle to fall to sleep, wrestling alone with a secret he's held as long as he can remember.  Soon, perhaps, he will decide it’s time to let that secret out.  What happens next depends on him, his family, as well as his friends and his teachers and his community.  But it also depends on us – on the kind of society we engender, the kind of future we build.”

But with the Republican party in control of both houses of congress, it would be next to impossible to get a federal law to ban a vacant practice that the American Psychiatric Association says is a harmful practice (.pdf link, .pdf link, .pdf link), which “ethical practitioners refrain from” attempting (.pdf link).  Instead, Mr. Obama will throw his support behind the efforts to ban the practice at the state level.

Senior White House Advisor Valerie Jarrett said the President had heard about Leelah Alcorn’s suicide, and was moved.  But the problem goes way beyond just one youth.

“It was tragic, but I will tell you, unfortunately, she has a lot of company,” Ms. Jarrett said.  “It’s not the story of one young person.  It is the story of countless young people who have been subjected to this.”

And it has to stop.