Chris Csabs started going through so-called “conversion practices” at 16 years old. “I was extremely distressed about being gay and I went … to ask for help,” he said. He was then moved interstate to participate in a conversion course, exorcisms and counselling. But the damage inflicted had started well before that.
“What makes a 16-year-old seek that out?” Csabs said. “It was because I’d been doused in an ideology – that we now know underpins all conversion practices – that told me from a very, very young age that LGBT people are broken and that they are disordered and need to be fixed.”
After seven years, he was left “very, very broken”.
“I wasn’t functioning,” he said.
On Friday, a little over a year after the New South Wales Conversion Practices Ban Act was passed with bipartisan support, the ban comes into effect.
On the eve of the ban, the SOGICE (Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Change Efforts) Survivors co-founder shared his story on a panel at an Anti-Discrimination NSW event at Parliament House.
The feeling in the room was “almost electric”, Csabs told Guardian Australia.
“Everyone is very excited that this has finally happened,” he said. “This has been a long road for a lot of us.”
‘A step in the right direction’
Conversion practices can include psychological or medical interventions, counselling and repeated messages that LGBTQ+ people can change or suppress their sexual orientation or gender identity.
NSW is the latest state to make conversion practices illegal, following Victoria, ACT and South Australia. Queensland has a partial ban on conversion practices in health, including on aversion therapy, psychoanalysis or hypnotherapy, while Western Australia has committed to reform.
Under the NSW legislation, people who deliver or perform conversion practices that cause substantial mental or physical harm face up to five years in jail and taking someone out of NSW to deliver “conversion therapy” carries a jail sentence of up to three years.
The NSW attorney general’s office detailed in a statement that “the ban does not prevent general religious teaching or expressions of religious principles, or parental discussions with their children related to sexual orientation, gender identity, sexual activity or religion”.
“It is targeted at a practice, treatment or sustained effort directed at someone to change their sexual orientation or gender identity.”
Anti-Discrimination NSW can investigate complaints about conversion practices occurring from Friday, attempt conciliation and refer matters to the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal.
“The program launched today by the NSW government is a step in the right direction,” LGBTQ+ advocate and former preacher Anthony Venn-Brown told the event.
“It will help create a safer environment where LGBTQA people and families can thrive, and most importantly, save lives.”
‘Going to make a huge difference’
Huss Hawli came out by accident at 16 years old.
During the distressing years that followed, when he says he also experienced physical violence, he was pressured to see a psychologist who recommended he explore having sex with women.
“Just when you think that you’re going to get that love and support and care … I was told to go on to the ‘straight’ path,” he recalled, speaking on a panel alongside Csabs and a lineup of academics, LGBTQ+ activists and conversion survivors, moderated by the Equality Australia chief executive, Anna Brown.
“This is all happening when I was suicidal … going through the lowest part of my life.”
Eighteen years later, Hawli said he is still processing this trauma.
“These are not just one-off extreme cases,” said fellow panellist Prof Tiffany Jones, a specialist in LGBTQ+ issues in health and education.
Over two-thirds of the LGBTQ+ community have heard conversion messaging – that is, “being told to change or suppress their identity”, Jones said.
Often starting at school, she explained, this messaging has flow-on consequences in a person’s life.
“It harms their attention, their concentration, their attendance and achievement in schools, so we get very high dropout rates. That rolls on to unemployment rates being increased for those who are exposed.
“They have four-and-a-half times the likelihood of experiencing verbal abuse and physical abuse. With this kind of abuse and a schism of your identity formation in play, we’re finding that over 80% consider suicide … Over 60% have attempted self-harm.”
Banning conversion practices will “set a tone on what our societies and cultures want to look like, and what this state wants to be for people,” another panellist – an Equality Australia senior adviser, Teddy Cook – said.
“NSW has made it clear that administering lies to a queer or trans person that they can and should change who they are is against the law,” Cook said in a statement.
Venn-Brown told Guardian Australia the ban is something he could never have imagined happening.
“It is incredible and it is going to make a huge difference.”
“The practice is based on a false ideology that there’s something wrong with same-sex-attracted or gender-diverse people,” the NSW attorney general, Michael Daley, said in his address at the event. “Nothing could be further from the truth.
“You’re not broken. You do not need fixing. You do not need to be saved from who you are and, frankly, no one else needs to be saved from you either.”
Legislation is a critical step, Csabs said. He also urged survivors of conversion practices to continue telling their stories.
“One very important thing is education and equipping and empowering survivors … to get their stories into the right spaces, so they can start to influence those communities where we know that conversion practices and conversion ideology is absolutely rife,” he said.
“Mental health support for survivors is critical, because realistically, survivors of conversion practices spend their entire lives trying to recover.”
• In Australia, the crisis support service Lifeline is 13 11 14. In the UK and Ireland, Samaritans can be contacted on freephone 116 123, or email jo@samaritans.org or jo@samaritans.ie. In the US, you can call or text the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline on 988, chat on 988lifeline.org, or text HOME to 741741 to connect with a crisis counsellor. Other international helplines can be found at befrienders.org
