What Happens When You Talk to Your Enemies?

It was my honor to speak with Lee Beckstead, a gender-affirming therapist in Utah who has worked with a heterodox group of therapists—who formerly considered themselves in opposition to each other—to produce a document: Clinical Common Ground for Gender, Sexual, and Faith Diversity.

Lee and I talked about his own experience of reparative therapy, why people are so afraid to change their minds, and what nobody knows about minority stress. We mention Leelah Alcorn, and Obama’s call for conversion therapy bans.

Bio: Lee Beckstead, PhD, is a psychologist in private practice in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is white-Peruvian, gay, cisgender, and currently nondisabled. He conducted a qualitative study from 1998 to 2001 with 50 individuals who tried to change their sexual orientation through psychotherapy. Half reported benefits, half reported harms, and many reported mixed results. Since 2005, he has co-facilitated weekend retreats for male survivors of sexual abuse (https://menhealing.org). He served on the 2009 American Psychological Association task force, making recommendations for those seeking therapy to change their sexual orientation (https://www.apa.org/pi/lgbt/resources/therapeutic-response.pdf). In 2012, he initiated the LGBTQ-affirmative Psychotherapist Guild of Utah to file ethical complaints against Utah clinicians providing sexual orientation change efforts (SOCE). In 2013, he shifted focus and organized a workshop to foster dialogue and understanding with these individuals. Since then, he’s been meeting twice per month with therapists and educators holding differing views on sexual orientation, gender, and religion to reduce harm and find common ground on clinical standards (https://reconciliationandgrowth.org). He testified as an expert witness in a 2015 New Jersey legal case against a Jewish organization accused of consumer fraud due to offering SOCE. Since 2016, he’s been part of a diverse ideological research team studying the health and satisfaction of individuals who are single and celibate or noncelibate or in a same-gender/queer or mixed-orientation relationship (https://www.4optionssurvey.com). These experiences led him to organize the LGBTQIA+ Peacebuilding Book Project in September 2017 (https://lgbtqiapeacebuilding.com).