Definitions: Conversion Practices and Change Efforts
“Before I found the link to the survey from this project, I didn’t even know that what I went through could be considered this at all. And I didn’t know how to think about or explain those experiences. And it was really, really, hard finding anybody who could relate or understand me.”
Conversion practices include a wide range of formal and structured psychological, behavioural, physical, and faith-based practices, treatments, or services that attempt to change a person’s
- sexual orientation to heterosexual
- gender identity to cisgender
- gender expression to match their assigned sex at birth
These efforts include claims that there are “causes to people becoming” queer, trans, or Two-Spirit, all based on an assumption that being heterosexual is the only normal way to express sexuality, and that a person’s gender identity matches their assigned sex at birth.
‘Conversion therapy’ is not considered a reputable form of therapy and has been widely condemned by professional organizations in Canada and around the world. This is why we use the term conversion practices instead. (see Supports & Resources for a list of organizations who oppose conversion practices)
What is NOT a Conversion Practice?
Conversion practices do not include a practice, treatment or service that: explores or develops a person’s integrated personal identity, such as helping someone with their gender transition, and does not assume one sexual orientation, gender identity or gender expression is preferred over another.
Conversion practices also do not include casual, impromptu conversations. However, if the conversation is part of a formal intervention, such as a counselling session, then it may be conversion practice if it is based on an assumption that being heterosexual or cisgender is preferred or superior to a non-heterosexual sexual orientation or non-cisgender identity or expression.
Definition: SOGIECE / Change Efforts
Change efforts that fall outside the legal definition of conversion practices
There are other ways in which people are pressured to change, deny, or suppress their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. These subtle or blatant pressures or messages–which can be just as harmful as conversion practices–are known as SOGIECE (sexual orientation and gender identity or expression change efforts).
Many 2S/LGBTQIA+ people who do not identify as a survivor of conversion practices, will have experienced these types of change efforts throughout their lives. Social and health policy responses should account for the overt, covert, and insidious ways that SOGIECE operates in order to effectively promote safety, equity, and health for sexually diverse and gender-diverse people (Kinitz, Goodyear, and Salway, 2021).
For additional information about SOGIECE see the Research section.
Impacts and Harms of Conversion Practices
Conversion practices and change efforts affect people’s sense of self at their very core and promote a harmful or traumatic self-image. Long-term impacts include minority stress/multiple minority stress (see glossary for definitions), shame, depression, anxiety, social phobias, substance use disorders, homelessness, suicidality, complex trauma (PTSD), developmental trauma, religious trauma, sexual and relationship problems, low self-esteem or worth, fear of rejection or abandonment, and much more.
“As a trans person you can walk away from religion and still have your physical, mental, and spiritual needs met, but you cannot walk away from the medical or mental health system and have your physical and mental needs met.”
“Chemically, my brain has developed neural pathways towards shame, towards self-contempt, and towards connecting my sexual desire with sin… After years of repressing, suppressing, and confessing… I have a hard time with intimacy.”
Survivors face multiple stresses and barriers and are directly impacted by the people and systems that surround them, which are amplified for survivors who experience intersectional stigma (multiple factors of advantage and disadvantage e.g., race ethnicity, religion, etc.) that accrues over time, resulting in long-term health deficits.
Trans, non-binary, and gender diverse people often do not consider their negative experiences with medical or mental healthcare practitioners to be conversion practices.
Young people are most susceptible as they seek to develop their sense of self, influenced heavily by family, peers, or other authority figures.
As the United Nations and others have concluded, conversion practices are a confirmed form of degrading treatment and can amount to torture.
For more information on impacts and harms, see the Research Section.
For more information on trauma, see Supports and Resources.
How to Identify Conversion Practices
As opinions and laws change and opposition to conversion practices grows, practitioners have rebranded themselves and may continue to find new ways of describing what they do. When trying to assess whether a practice amounts to a conversion practice, it is therefore important to focus on the objectives of the activity under consideration rather than how a practitioner describes it.
“My conversion therapy was to stop me from being trans. Getting sex reassignment surgery was a procedure that my [psychiatrist] denied to me… if he had gone ahead and done his job, then I would look quite significantly different today. Living in a body that I feel comfortable in and that doesn’t feel like a prison would be huge.”
“I had no idea that I was a part of conversion practices, because when your family’s all Christian fundamentalists and your friends, and your church and everybody, so you’re just in this bubble, so you don’t even know that you’re experiencing this.”
Characteristics that suggest a practice, treatment, or service shares the ideology of conversion “therapy” practices:
- Promotes being straight or acting like your “birth sex” as the preferred way to exist
- Is based largely on testimonies of supposedly “changed” individuals
- Uses language such as: God’s divine design for human beings, sexual healing, sexual purity, or sexual addictions teach that being queer, trans, or Two-Spirit is irreconcilable with your faith or religious beliefs
- Teaches that being queer, trans, or Two-Spirit is caused by spiritual problems (e.g., sin, temptation, demonic) and/or, are due to trauma or abuse (e.g., gender exploratory therapy, Freudian psychoanalysis of parental relationships)
- Is based on assumptions that being queer, trans, or Two-Spirit is caused by spiritual problems (e.g., sin, temptation, demonic) and/or, is due to trauma or abuse (as claimed by gender exploratory therapy and Freudian psychoanalysis of parental relationships).
- Denies gender affirming care or refuses to refer trans patients to a gender affirming doctor.
- Describe trans identities using a “social contagion” framework, or treat trans identity as a sexual fetish behaviour as opposed to an identity.
- Considers being queer, trans or Two-Spirit as a mental illness.
- Teaches that there are only two sex and gender roles (male and female being – the gender binary).
- Teaches that gender-diverse individuals must learn to accept or love the body that they were given, without an understanding of gender dysphoria.
When & Where
Conversion practices continue to take place in Canada today. This section includes statistics on the prevalence of conversion practices, and where queer and trans people experience them.
Why & Who
Learn about the internal motivations and external factors that lead people to engage in conversion practices. Read statements from survivors themselves and link to stories about their experiences.
Supports & Resources
Find downloadable resources and links to more information for practitioners and service providers, family and friends, survivors, and for people struggling or currently engaged in conversion practices, or believing they need to change.