Refusing to use a child's name is conversion therapy
Dr Helen Webberley on Robby Starbuck: transition and children, Robby Starbuck
If a child says they want to be a different gender, the right response is therapy to correct the belief. That's not conversion therapy, people say, that's just good parenting, making sure the child gets help before anything irreversible happens.
What Robby Starbuck described in that exchange, taking a child who says she wants to be a boy to therapy to treat it as a mental illness, is a textbook definition of conversion therapy. Not a version of it. Not something adjacent to it. The thing itself. I didn't have to argue the point: he made it for me. Conversion therapy does not require a stranger in a room with electrodes. It happens every time a child's identity is treated as a symptom to be cured rather than a truth to be heard. The harm it causes is well documented, and no amount of rebranding it as caution or care changes what it is.
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