Why Gender-Confused Kids Can’t Get Help

The nation’s top lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual advocacy group, the Human Rights Campaign, joined Democrat Hillary Clinton on the campaign trail in Iowa this week to prominently endorse her bid for president.

“We face tremendous challenges ahead,” Chad Griffin, president of Human Rights Campaign, said in Iowa over the weekend. “We need a strong champion for equality who can beat any anti-LGBT challenger in November and lead from day one in the White House.”

The HRC also happily noted that Clinton has made banning reparative therapy for gays and others in the LGBT community “a pillar” of her campaign. LGBT lobbyists now are filing legislation state by state to make reparative therapy illegal in private practice — meaning that therapists who failed to comply could be arrested.

Reparative therapy, say the LGBT lobbyists, is an attempt to change homosexuals into heterosexuals, effectively “turning them straight.” Yet this is hardly the full and accurate picture.

Just What is This Therapy?
“Reparative therapy is so misunderstood,” said David Pickup, a licensed marriage and family therapist with a private practice in California and Texas. He counsels children under age 18 and others who suffer confusion, depression and anxiety about their sexual identity. He is also a recognized national lobbyist for a team that testifies against the bans when legislation is introduced anywhere in the country.

Through court testimonies, Pickup fights against the misrepresentation of the therapy he offers.

“What the reparative therapy ban really means is that if a minor comes to me in anguish because of identity issues and unwanted homosexual feelings, perhaps due to abuse or trauma, I have to say to that suffering child, ‘I cannot help you.’ As a professional and a person, that is horrifying,” Pickup said.

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The future for some kids with sexual confusion is bleak.

“When you are forced by laws or society into the gay ideology, many suffer severe depression and anxiety and can spin out into suicidality,” said Pickup.

“These LGBT advocacy groups with astronomical funding have been very effective at turning what is therapy — talk therapy — into the stuff of nightmares. (They are) producing imagery of torture, really, to advance this ban.”

Pickup said the reality is far different.

“No good therapist would ever pressure anyone, particularly a child, to feel a certain way. I always ask kids who come into my office, ‘Do you want to be here, or did your parents make you come here?’ If they do not want to be there, I don’t treat them — period,” he said. “You will never hear me tell a child he should be straight. This is about alleviating emotional pain. LGBT protesters have thrust a political agenda on that pain.”

Pickup also said that in extreme cases in the past, people may have tried to change someone from gay to straight, but today that technique is widely panned by professionals.

The Truth Behind the Gender Confusion
Kids may have sexual confusion and its resulting anxiety and depression for many reasons.

“Sometimes sexual abuse causes sexual confusion, or any type of past trauma,” said Pickup. “Being subjected to pornography at an early age (is another) example. As a therapist, my job is to help that child who comes in confused, anxious, suicidal and crying out.”

Pickup then asked a common-sense question. “It’s fine to be straight and think you are gay — society supports that. But what about the kid who is living a gay lifestyle but thinks he may be straight? Why is there no support for that child?”

American public schools offer gay clubs and activities, yet student prayer or anything other than progressive thinking is verboten.

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“At school, we are constantly forced to think about gay people’s rights,” one Boston-area high school student told LifeZette. “One day gay kids walked around with their mouths taped shut, I guess to indicate that they aren’t being heard. But that’s all we hear about, so they must be heard!”

LGBT lobbyists intent on stamping out any questioning of sexuality have successfully positioned their fight as one of both civil rights and personal safety.

“In 2015, you’d think that by now, if we’ve got marriage equality we’d at least have a society that’s safe for our kids,” Samantha Ames, a National Center for Lesbian Rights staff attorney and coordinator for the #BornPerfect Campaign, told Yahoo News.

The NCLR website reports that “in the past, some mental health professionals resorted to extreme measures such as institutionalization, castration, and electroconvulsive shock therapy to try to stop people from being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender.”

Conversion therapy has already been banned in California, New Jersey, Illinois, Oregon and Washington, D.C. Since 2012, bills have been introduced by lawmakers in at least 15 other states.

“We’ve defeated 16 of the last 17 proposed bans,” said Pickup. He said that is true “even though the ‘equality’ lobby group, which has offices in every state, has a $300 million budget.”

Dr. Keith Vennum recently testified before the Massachusetts Legislature, where a ban has been proposed.

“It’s not the job of the legislature to micromanage the work of helping professionals,” he said. “If there were multiple incidents of gay-identified teens being harmed at the hands of helping professionals in Massachusetts, each regulatory board would effectively step in and do the job the Legislature has already commissioned them to do, but such harm has not been seen.”

The American Psychological Association has also taken a stance against reparative therapy. It has said, in part, “The American Psychological Association advises parents, guardians, young people, and their families to avoid sexual orientation change efforts …”

“There’s often a lot of irony in this area,” Paul Bloom wrote in an article in The New Yorker called “Is Social Psychology Biased Against Republicans?” Bloom’s research examined left-wing bias in social psychology that included the APA.

“The same people who are exquisitely sensitive to discrimination in other areas are often violently antagonistic when it comes to political ideology, bringing up clichéd arguments they wouldn’t accept in other domains: ‘They aren’t smart enough. They don’t want to be in the field,'” he wrote.