TAMPA, Fla. — A federal magistrate says the city of Tampa has no right to ban a controversial "conversion therapy" that’s designed to turn gay people straight.
Religious groups, including the Liberty Counsel, are challenging the 2017 ordinance, claiming it violates the free-speech rights of therapists who were performing the practice.
Sometimes called "reparative" or "ex-gay therapy," the practice attempts to change someone’s sexual orientation. Every major medical association, from the American Medical Association to the American Psychological Association, says conversion therapy has no scientific credibility.
The injunction stops the city from banning conversion therapy on minors involving talking — while still allowing the ban to be applied to techniques like electroshock therapy — as the lawsuit makes it way through the courts.
Ann Wynne-Phillips of St. Petersburg endured the therapy and says she believes no one, especially a young person, should be put through it.
“It’s almost a blur,” she said. “I look back today and it feels like somebody else’s life.”
Wynne-Phillips says she lost her sense of self in the nine months she spent in so-called conversion therapy.
“You’re playing with people’s psyches and I was 40-something, so when I think about young people going through that, I feel very alarmed,” she said.
In her 40s and living openly as a gay woman, Wynne-Phillips describes falling into the therapy in her search for faith.
It was a bait-and-switch, as she put it.
“I was looking for that spiritual connection and I found it,” she recalled, as she befriended co-workers who brought her into their church. “But then apparently there’s some fine print in the fundamentalist theology — and exclusion — I couldn’t stay gay and be a Christian.”
By that point, she says the fear of losing her faith was enough, so she stuck with it.
“I was told by my mentor, ‘We can’t be friends anymore because we’re Christians and you can’t claim the name of Christ and you’re dragging the name of Christ through the mud,” Wynne-Phillips said.
“For a person of faith, that felt like a physical pain, like a hot knife.”
The therapy Wynne-Phillips describes was mostly talk, but nearly always abusive.
“Mostly it’s laypeople who are talking and not a lot of listening goes on,” she said. “They have an agenda, they have a perspective.”
Eventually, the student became the teacher.
Wynne-Phillips spent six years leading an ex-gay ministry in Tennessee.
“I kind of became the poster child for the ex-gay movement,” she said. “I graduated and was giving my testimony in churches and was a show puppy.”
But then Wynne-Phillips says she began seeing things differently and questioning what she’d been teaching others.
Things weren’t adding up anymore, she said.
No longer a part of the ex-gay ministries, Wynne-Phillips is a chaplain, married and working in hospice care.
Having experienced both sides of conversion therapy, she now fears what might happen to people knowing the practice of talk therapy can now continue in Tampa.
“Those words are ammo and can do damage,” she said. “You’re playing with peoples’ heads and you’re playing with their hearts and spirits.”
The case now goes to a district judge.
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