Do your parents love you? Is love sending you off to a place where you’re stripped of your self worth and traumatized for life?

Picture this. Your parent tells you they’ve found a summer camp that you’ll not only love to go to, but you’ll be an even better person when you come out of it. Doesn’t sound too terrible. You get there and maybe you see only other girls or only other boys. You’ll go through the normal camp procedures; rules, where everything is, where you’ll sleep, and so on. Maybe you play some camp games. And there’s therapy. Therapy that makes you feel worthless. Stripping away who you are as a person, completely wiping out your personality, with the promise of rebuilding you as someone better. Before you know it, one of your cabin mates has killed themselves. Now you’re having your hands tied down, they’re putting ice or heating coils on them or maybe they’re jabbing little needles into your hands and electrocuting them, all while you’re forced to sit and look at pictures of men being intimate. Your parents tell you that you went through all that because they loved you. They think you’re a better person because God will accept you now that you’re straight.

In California, Vermont, New Jersey, Illinois, and Oregon, the use of conversion therapy for sexual orientation on lesbian, gay, and bisexual minors is banned. Conversion therapy for transgender minors is only banned in Vermont. This means that it’s still legal in 45 states for a parent to force their child into conversion therapy.

Too many LGBT kids and teens have been through this. How many more have to die because their parents thought that making them straight like this would be good for them? Gay conversion therapy is an industry that profits off the harm, and often times death, of kids. Sending your child to conversion therapy is basically sending them off to die.

Parents that do this seem to think that they’re doing their child a favor. They think that if their child is tortured like this, that God will accept them, and the trauma they’ve experienced won’t matter in the end. But it’s not their fault. Most parents aren’t educated on what really goes on in conversion therapy, and what kind of trauma the child comes out with. What happens in those camps needs to be made public. These parents need to be informed.

If you know someone who’s planning on sending their kids to conversion therapy, or who has already sent their kids, please educate them. Tell them the risks of sending their children to conversion therapy. We can’t continue to let people think these camps are okay. It’s so important that LGBT kids are safe, and can grow up embracing who they are, rather than trying to shove it down and change. Please spread the word.

Katie McElvain, Bothell