At least seven per cent of LGBQ people and 12 per cent of transgender people in the UK have been offered or undergone conversion therapy as a means to “cure” their sexual or gender identity. This often takes place in a religious context but conversion practises can also be carried out by therapists, counsellors, doctors or psychiatrists.
In 2018, former Prime Minister Theresa May promised that the government would ban this practice. This week government sources confirmed that Rishi Sunak intends to push ahead with this long-delayed ban, introducing a draft bill in the king’s speech. Here, Jayne Ozanne, a conversion therapy survivor, campaigner and director of the Ozanne Foundation, shares her experience.
It’s difficult for me to even talk about. I’ve been speaking publicly about conversion therapy for years, but still, it’s triggering.
I grew up in quite a conservative Christian community in Guernsey. As a child, I didn’t know women could be gay. It wasn’t talked about at school. I knew that gay men existed: there were some role models on TV, but there was nothing that helped me understand that gay people like me existed.
Looking back, I was very closed off as a teenager. I always knew I was slightly different; I didn’t have much in common with my classmates. They all swooned over boys, which I thought was completely ridiculous.
It wasn’t until my twenties that I realised. I found myself falling head over heels for a woman I was working with. It took her best friend to point this out to me. I was just utterly horrified. In my Christian Evangelical world, this was an absolute terrible sin. It was an abomination to me that I could possibly love someone of the same sex. I could not understand.
For the next 20 years, this confusion would be a theme in my life. Why would God choose to make me with a capacity and a desire to love and be loved, but for the object of that love to be seen as evil? The level of self-hate and internalised homophobia was huge. I spent many years privately grappling with this confusion. I begged God to take it away. I was bargaining, fasting, and pleading.
I didn’t dare to tell a soul. If I did admit it, I believed I would be seen as “unsound” or “unsafe”. This is what I call my “silent hell” phase.
There are three phases that I believe that most survivors of conversion therapy go through. The first is that really lonely, silent hell. Most people never come out of this phase easily. Normally something happens. In my case, my body just cracked under the strain and the pressure. I had a breakdown, but some other victims get outed by a sibling or somebody at school.
This will take you into phase two: speaking with your religious community about what you are experiencing. This is usually when the healing prayer begins. I submitted myself willingly. We are not talking just a quick two-minute prayer at the end of a service. There were hours of prayer. This involved making myself really vulnerable in front of complete strangers about everything and anything that I had gone through in the vain hope that we would find something in my lived experience that would help me.
Conversion therapy isn’t always an intensive programme or anything particularly dramatic. Conversion therapy can simply involve religious leaders joining you in prayer, perhaps once a week for an hour, in order to ‘pray the gay away’. In my community, there was a genuine belief there must have been a reason I was gay. Something must have happened to me. Perhaps it was an abusive relationship with a parent or with a friend. They wanted to look for the key that could heal me.
Deep down, I knew the conversion therapy wasn’t working. The feeling that my faith wasn’t strong enough; that I wasn’t being open enough, was awful. If you live with that minute by minute, hour by hour, day by day, night by night, it’s a horrendous internal war. The pressure was too much.
I believe this is spiritual abuse. Conversion therapy survivors are told they are not strong enough if they can’t cope with being alone, without love. “Other people are single and celibate,” you are told. “Why can’t you be?” You have forced celibacy pushed on you. For a teenager, being told that they will never love or be loved is a death sentence in itself. It is similar for my trans friends, who have yearned to be accepted for who they are but are constantly told that who they are is wrong. They must reject themselves.
By my late twenties, I was a senior evangelical on the Archbishop’s Council. I was speaking in meetings around the world, and inviting all sorts of senior evangelicals to pray with me and for me. Eventually, I looked for more extreme healing.
This normally involves paying for exorcism or deliverance ministry. There are also Christian counsellors and I spent thousands trying to get myself healed. There were times when I thought it had worked. Looking back, I think I was just completely closed down. The level of self-hate was awful.
Eventually, I met a woman who I fell madly in love with, and I realised that those 20 years of prayer therapy hadn’t worked. I completely cracked and ended up in hospital for a second time. Consultants tried to work out why I was in so much pain. It was an experience I hope most people never have.
At this point, my Church didn’t know what to do with me. They had turned their back on me. None of their prayers seemed to be working. It is the fear of rejection by their church, family and friends that keeps so many people caught in this hell. I was an adult going through this but the research shows that over half of the survivors are children. Two-thirds are young adults under 24. These people are trapped in their environment. They are trapped in cultural communities that believe that it is wrong to be gay. The impact on young LGBT people is huge. The level of attempted suicide, and completed suicide, is extremely high.
How did I get through this? I suppose I had to change my understanding of who God is and how God works. I had to go back to scripture and try and look again at what I’d originally believed. I realised that I was viewing scripture with a very warped, homophobic view. God creates us to be uniquely diverse and yet loves us unconditionally for who we are. I had to rediscover that.
I am, like many campaigners, weary. Weary of demanding the protections that we should have had years ago. It is difficult for me to talk about but I know I must talk about it. I don’t want anybody to go through the hell that I did.